Piracy out of hand
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[It may be tempting to see the romance in the Somali piracy game. After all, they aren't harming their hostages and aren't even keeping the bounty, but only holding ships for ransom.
The sufferers are large shipping companies who pay up and get their ships back. Meanwhile, the war torn country that has been without a government for 20 years now has electrical generators, flashy cars and even Internet cafes built on this enterprise in the poorest coastal villages.
The Somalis have figured out how to make anarchy work. The only risk is having a ship blown up and sunk and that risk is not great.
Meanwhile, the pirates get to strike terror into the sailers with their battle cries, firearms and rocket propelled grenade launchers upon the high seas.
As appealing as the pirate lifestyle sounds, we must reject this outrageous form of capitalism. But is it pull-youself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalism or is there an element of socialism, distributing the wealth so that the poor villagers can have the convenience of electricity at the expense of the wealthy shipping companies?
Whatever the political equivalent, it is no way to get ahead in the long run.
The greedier the pirates become, hijacking eight ships in a week and sailing farther and farther into sea, the faster their spread-the-wealth program will meet its doom. The reason the piracy will ultimately fail is it has become too lucrative, too high-profile and too brazen for other nations to continue to ignore.
Though various political philosophies may also result in influence and wealth through bullying, exploitation and seizure, most developed nations are able to do these things through legal means.
No national leader with a brain in his head would endorse an economy built on ransoms, hijackings and hostage-taking. The Somali's methods, however effective, are too crude for anyone to applaud.
Our forebears seized the property of Native Americans and hearded them like cattle through the winter to Oklahoma upon the Trail of Tears, but that was done through legal means. Though 4,000 out of 15,000 Cherokees died on the march through disease or starvation, this was a legal removal approved by President Andrew Jackson and supported by Congress under the grand goal of westward expansion.
Even though the Somali pirates only "borrow" their captives, even hiring caterers to cook them western foods and release them upon delivery of a negotiated-upon delivery of cash, instead of starving, exhausting and mistreating them, their actions are without approval of a government and are a nuisance to shipping companies.
Maybe that's an unfair comparison, seizing ships to seizing homeland. It probably sounds unpatriotic. Besides, what our nation did was long ago and our sensibilities have improved since then. We were taught in school noble terms like Manifest Destiny and nation building, not negative terms like genocide.
The Somalis definitely need to do some work on public relations. If their pirates were handsome, clever and colorful like Captain Jack Sparrow we might snicker and even admire their ability to capture a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million in crude oil.
Instead, the American image of the Somali pirates is probably of the ferocious warlords shaking their guns and attacking the crashed helicopter in the movie "Black Hawk Down."
Our memories also recall the gruesome news images of charred bodies hanging on the bridge and the warlords overtaking the sacks of grain being given to the villagers back in the Bill Clinton years.
Considering those dark days we will likely forever think of Somalians as low, beastly, violent people incapable of helping themselves out of their pitiful condition without resorting to dramatic criminal indecency. And that's unfortunate.
Any group with the tenacity to overtake 39 vessels in a year and negotiate handsome rewards for their country ought to be able to figure out how to care for its people.