In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken.
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari
April 12, 2009 "Huffington Post"
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22399.htm
Brenda, Brenda, Brenda
ReplyDeleteFrom time immemorial we have embraced the outlaw as hero 'taking from the rich and giving to the poor'. Ireland has Finn MacCool, England has Robin Hood, the U.S. has Jesse James and God help us John Dillinger. And the whole English speaking world has Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. As people Down Under have Ned Kelly.
But pretty much without exception most of the booty stuck to the outlaws leaving very little to trickle down to the people.
I get the fact that the Somali pirates are driven to their life of crime by dire poverty. I also get the fact that they seem to use their gains to buy SUVs and live in lavish (by Somali standards) mansions.
Look Pablo Escobar was known as a huge benefactor of the poor in Medellin. But he was also known as a stone cold killer that indulged himself with a 3700 acre ranch complete with a private zoo including Hippos and Zebras.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hacienda-napoles-at-home-with-pablo-escobar-the-drug-baron-who-lived-in-a-zoo-766829.html
I am a bleeding heart liberal who understands that most crime is the result of people being driven by poverty to take the only way they see out. On the other hand a lot of the people who make this particular choice are sociopaths. Life sucks, life is unfair and the Capitalist Masters of the Universe really do have the game rigged. Which doesn't justify sticking an AK-47 in the back of a guy just trying to earn a living.
The way this world works the lumpenproletariat make almost all their living stealing from the proletariat while claiming they are sticking it to 'The Man'.
Yes the world and particularly the Capitalist component has not done right by Somalia, as the United States and Australia have not done right by various minority and indigenous populations. Which doesn't mean those populations have a right to point a gun in my face and take my wallet. Even if they were using the proceeds for redistribution, which by all accounts they are not.
Yes it is not right that people use Somali waters to dump nuclear waste. Nor is it right for other countries to exploit Somali fisheries. But then again before about 30 years ago none of that would even count as being a crime, outside of three miles (and then twelve) were no rules at all. But piracy has always been a crime subject to capital punishment and that is not particularly mitigated by free elections of pirate captains (even if those elections were free from influence from people with cutlasses)..
I am not a moral absolutist but somewhere you got to draw a line. Because otherwise you end up working your way to excusing abortion doctor killing Eric Rudolph on the right to Hollywood killing Manson on the left. Sharon Tate may have been a symbol of capitalism run amok, but she didn't deserve being killed along with her fetus with a knife.
So yeah I wish that society was arranged in a way that teenagers were not driven to a life of piracy. But I am not going to weep that three of them got their brains blown out by snipers.
embargo lemons
ReplyDeleteBruce, Bruce, Bruce, errrgh you could be right. Don't know. But I do know that I wasn't informed about the other forms of 'piracy' and/or 'theft', whatever you call it, that were going on.
ReplyDeleteNice to know about that, finally.
Who are the individuals being named as 'pirates' by the way? What is their actual background.
Their motives, as reported in this article:
ReplyDelete"some are clearly just gangsters"
Some are tryint "to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them."
and
"to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters.."
Research found 70 percent of Somalis "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters."
This is vital information; it was left out of government and commercial media reports in Australia.
An article at the globalresearch website reveals the following:
- "the current crisis in security, food deficits and internal displacement largely results from the U.S.-backed and coordinated invasion and occupation that utilized the government of Ethiopia."
- "Somalia itself contains a number of important minerals and other resources that Western interests seek to control. titanium, uranium, oil, atomic minerals, bauxite, marble ...exploration concessions ...held by various multinational firms including the British Burma Oil Company, Elf-Somalie, the former Federal Germany and Gulf Oil going back to the 1970s.