Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

I thought about posting this on the existing pirate thread - but that's getting quite long.

Why We Love to Hate Pirates

[blade]

[Gopher]

But how do they choose to simply "go after wealth?" How is that acceptable?

I am reading an account right now on Latin America's Revolutionary Coordinating Council (JCR), the group that succeeded Che Guevara in attempting to transform South America into "one, two, three Vietnams" in order to bring/force world revolution there.

How did JCR secure its operating funds? kidnapping and extortion (backed by death threats) of business executives. bank robberies -- violent, armed robberies. The author, another leftist, goes to great pains to explain that these guerrillas were nice to their kidnap victims, played chess with them every day -- and they usually let them win, too! When the guerrillas threatened to cut off the executives' ears and mail them to their corporations if said corporations did not pay the ransom, well, that was just talk, come on.

I will never understand this kind of apologia.

[bacasper]

I think this article is better posted here as well.

You are being lied to about pirates

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Monday, 5 January 2009

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 labelling as "one of the great menaces 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 Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved 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.

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, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked often, 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 � 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, without torture. 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 romantic heroes, 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-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since � and 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 Mr 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."

more at link

[Leslie Cheswyck]

[Big_Bird]

[ManintheMiddle]

Big Bird lamented:

[Gopher]

Big_Bird: swarming into the high seas, seizing merchant ships, and holding human beings prisoner, hostage, against their will, through force, is not the same thing as mere theft, as you seem to want to establish here.

And yes, there was a time in America, and in some places it still exists, when we shot armed bankrobbers and horse thieves on sight.

[bacasper]

[Gopher]

[RJjr]

[bacasper]

[bacasper]

[Big_Bird]

[Big_Bird]