When Pirates Become Heroes and Idiots Have Pens

If you have a drug problem in your neighborhood, and you decide to solve that problem by kidnapping and ransoming the daughter of say, the owner of a local convenience store, and as a result are subsequently shot very dead, you could at the very least, take heart that someone at the Huffington Post would rise up to defend your course of action as reasonable, predictable, and utterly explicable as a really being someone else's fault. 

That at least, is what Johann Hari of the London Independent blogged over at Huffpo regarding the Somali pirates who were sent, as a sort of Easter offering I suppose, off to their great reward by three shots from those very competent men in black our government employs for things of that nature.  

To summarize:

• Pirates, the classical version, were the democratic sort, split their booty in an “egalitarian” manner, liked black people before it was cool, and were really fighting The Man. Hari does  shortchange the pirates, failing entirely to mention their accomplishments in murder, rape and maiming. 

• Europe is trading nuclear and toxic waste for fish off the Somali coastline, which is killing Somalis and preventing them from exploiting those marine resources themselves. 

• Somali pirates used to be ad-hoc coast guard units formed to prevent the above mentioned types of incidents, but are now…well, pirates. 

• The pirates, including the previously mentioned Easter Three, are hijacking ships, as well as ransoming oil, heavy armor, and at least 100 Filipinos, as a result, convoluted and tenuous as it may be, of Europe’s crimes. 

• Isn’t it really Europe’s fault, and isn’t Europe really the bad guy?

It’s a fairly common theme amongst what you and I might call the progressive set.  And here’s what kills:  there seems to be no disconnect whatsoever between those coast guard militias and the current pirate clans.   The fact, that these groups started as a way to fight injustice, does nothing to mitigate what they’re doing now.

Let’s put it another way.  Hitler started as a baby.  As the overwhelming majority if people will attest, babies are great.  That Hitler was once a baby too, does not mitigate the 6 million Jews, ‘Mos, Gypsies and other oddballs he had murdered.  Or anything else he did for that matter.

Hari, and other folks, have also made a big deal that no one was really paying attention when the problem was just a local crime issue, that it took them disrupting the world’s shipping lines for anybody to care about Somalia.

I would respectfully disagree.  The world, or at least the U.S. did pay attention for a while, one of those humanitarian missions no one gives us credit for pursuing, as they complain we don’t undertake enough humanitarian missions.  The end results were a number of dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets and at least one Hollywood blockbuster (Blackhawk Down, for those of you under a rock, or too young to remember).

When someone offers to help you and you shoot at them, they tend to shy away from offering to help again.  It’s a pretty clear cause and effect.  Which makes it hard to understand why anyone is surprised that the rest of the world left Somalia alone for the past decade or so, who wants to get shot at for trying to lend a hand?

I know, I know, it’s sexy to be a contrarian, it’s hip to like the bad guys, and it’s cool to fight The Man.  But when you’re picking a cause to rebel with, make sure you pick something righteous.  The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.