From: swaneagle harijan
Date: Monday, April 13, 2009, 9:06 PM
It is important to know that these "pirates" were 17 to 19 years old, 3
killed by highly trained US Navy Seal assassins. The survivor faces life
in a US prison. The entire circumstances facing Somalis, the massacres by
US troops in the '90's, the starvation and other repercussions of
corporate globalization are similar wherever such greed bullies the
peoples it enslaves and pillages. Obama needs educating. His email will
not accept my emails for some reason. They have declared both my email
addresses "invalid".
Saddest of all my nephew, who is a perfect example of the poverty draft,
is a gofer for the Navy Seals. I wrote to him about the destruction of
the Somali fisheries, but he did not respond. I told him it was my prayer
that no one was killed. sigh.
We must stay educated about anywhere the US has it's killing fingers in
the pies of desperately poor, exploited peoples. Mexico, Palestine, Fuji,
etc.....
Peace and Justice,
swaneagle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are Being Lied to About Pirates
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a
new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by
the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is
sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as
parrot-on-the- shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting
Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the
most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of
this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are
labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary
story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of
piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless,
savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a
great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false:
pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why?
What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the
historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you
became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's
East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You
worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off
for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine
Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at
the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied
against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working
on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and
made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in
what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition
of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even
took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates
showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be
run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the
Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive
thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called
William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he
was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep
me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." 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. At first
they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the
2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on
shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300
died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody
is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals
such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back
to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the
Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what
European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing.
There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of
their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by
over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m
worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every
year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas.
The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are
starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south
of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much
fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have
emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at
first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at
least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard
of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone
interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was
"to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider
ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally
fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in
our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are
clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food
Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the
local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site
WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis
are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a
form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the
revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding
fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they
had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is
this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches,
paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in
restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes -
but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the
transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to
shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to
stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root
out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate,
who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought
to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping
possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean
by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am
called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called
emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is
the robber?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his
articles, click here. or here.
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic
dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't
this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast,
stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any
coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on
California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different
places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and
stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html
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The real pirates exist in corporate America, in the halls of Congress, and the US Military which has the biggest budget of any other country in the world. I have witnessed the callous destruction and genocide of the American military in Hawaii and all over the Pacific. What makes us think that this same kind of thing doesn't take place in Somalia or all over the world for that matter. The toxic dumping of nuclear waste has been going in our waters for decades. Nuclear testing has been ongoing since the early 60's. Indigenous peoples always the intended victims.
" The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
This phrase sound similar to what has happened to kanaka maoli in Hawaii! Imagine that, it has been going on for centuries! Very interesting to read.
Very good piece! We are often shown pics and hear stories about small time criminals while the Big Criminals get away with crimes against earth and humanity. Main stream media never gives the whole truth...thanks for taking us deeper into the truth.
Bless!
Replies
Thank You for this well written and very informative article.
eiyah
This phrase sound similar to what has happened to kanaka maoli in Hawaii! Imagine that, it has been going on for centuries! Very interesting to read.
Bless!