Today's Easter.
However, like the rest of the US, I was listening much of today for news of Capt. Richard Phillips, the merchant marine who was taken hostage by Somali pirates. Very glad and relieved to learn that he is now safe. Navy Seal sharpshooters apparently "took out" three of the four doped-up Somalis that were holding him in a drifting life boat, injuring the fourth pirate and arresting him. Capt. Phillips is fine -- and has a lot more guts than I do. People like him give me faith in America.
Anyway, I haven't kept up on the whole pirate cultural thing. When I hear the word "pirate," I still think of Robert Newton as Long John Silver with a peg leg and a ring in his ear, clad in fashion circa 1780 or thereabouts. A young Jackie Cooper tags after him. Though I love Johnny Depp, I've never really sat through the more modern film version of "pirates." I don't think I could spend two hours looking at that guy whose face, literally, is like a pan of worms.
So Somalia occupies the Horn of Africa, wrapping around it like the brass corner fitting on a war chest. It's a good location for piracy, being the southern coast of a shipping lane that leads to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. It's largely Muslim, as opposed to neighboring Ethiopia, which is largely Christian. There have been conflicts. The northern part of Somalia was a British colony (or something), and the Brits were reluctant to sink any money into developing it because of the political unrest. The southern part was an Italian colony at one time and it's supposed to be more developed.
But apparently after several decades of civil war, Somalia is primarily run by tribes and warlords.
A leader-dictator-whatever named Barre worked for about 20 years to try to make Somalia a socialist democracy on the order of almost any European nation, but it didn't take hold. Believe Barre was a Marxist, or was that some other dictator? Anyway, Somalia had been on the receiving end of aid from the USSR, Russia, and China for a couple decades, and apparently there was an internecine dispute at one time if Somalia actually could be communist or even socialist, having failed to go through the preceding stages of social-economic development. Or, apparently, any generally recognized process of civilization at all.
Now it's pretty much tribes and warlords. Probably always has been, really, the influence of the British and Italians skipping over the population like a flat stone over the surface of a pond. And everyone there pretty much stays stoned on khat all the time. That's some kind of speed. This sounds like some kind of psychotic fantasy background for a movie on the Sci-Fi Channel.
So actually Russia and France have been attacked by Somali pirates, too, and both have tried to take some action against them. The U.N., that powerful and admirable mouthpiece for the Third World and mechanism for skimming funds and redirecting them to the Swiss bank accounts of petty authoritarians and multinational bureaucrats, says it's OK to defend oneself against Somali pirates if you catch them in the act, but otherwise, no one can touch them.
As though piracy is some kind of legitimate way to make a living and no one has the right to complain about it.
The U.N. are buttheads, too. That's the key reason I find it rather frightening to even suggest letting the U.N. determine US foreign policy. Under U.N. direction, US foreign policy would probably be some version of a large funnel siphoning off American-made products and revenues and "redistributing" them across the scuzzier nations of the southern hemisphere. Like Somalia.
Still bizarre to me -- and this whole piracy thing is a good example -- that some people actually believe it's perfectly fine to rob and pillage other people. Kill them. Take them hostage. Like it's a perfectly rational way to make a living.
This is my test of civilization: If you are willing to kill someone else in order to rob or control them, and somehow you can morally justify this in your twisted and fevered little brain, you've missed a couple steps in evolution. This applies to Al-Qaeda types, too.
About the 1960s, this anthropologist named Desmond Morris wrote a book called The Naked Ape. It was about Uganda going through a years-long famine due to a lack of rain. Morris painted a picture for me of a mother who died in a dusty village road. She'd just gotten a cup of tea from one of her neighbors. Her daughter saw the woman fall over in the street and quickly ran to the woman's side to grab the cup of tea before it spilled out and run off with it, laughing gaily. She left her mother in the street.
Morris also noted as a kind of afterward that since he'd completed the book, Uganda had received significant humanitarian aid from the U.N. He said soon after that, the weather improved and the famine could have been over, but by that time, no one was farming anymore. Pumpkins were rotting in the fields. By then, Ugandans apparently had abandoned the idea of fending for themselves in favor of begging from the U.N. And they ended up a few years later with Idi Amin.
Whatever goes around, comes around. No way out of it. You always pay. Can't escape reality.
Doesn't it ever occur that a more positive alternative to piracy and begging is to try to maybe produce something? I suppose in these crummy countries production would be difficult -- anything you produce would be confiscated by the government, or a warlord or someone.
Gee.... doesn't that sound familiar? Kinda like the Democrat blueprint for the USA?
We have so much to look forward to.
No comments:
Post a Comment