How governments set up nations and lie to you to get you to endorse war
and military action against people and nations whose resources are being stolen, and whose
lives are being terminated for the sake of corporate interests.
Winds
of Change - CD2 - 04 - Chico - Papa Stop the War 
Like everything else these days, there's more to the story of the so
called pirates in Somalia. If you were to ask the people of Somalia, they would claim that
these "pirates" are actually the citizens acting like the U.S. Coast Guard would
in protecting its own territorial waters, like U.S. Citizens guarding the Mexican Border.
Thus, the people of Somalia consider most of these so called pirates the
Somalian Coast Guard, citizens on patrol, doing what its government doesn't have the
budget to do itself.
And Obama is credited with his firt tough military decision? Like a
hero... a hero to the Rockefellers, opening up the Gulf of Aden without accountability for
the interests of oil, regardless of the harm done to Somalia and Yemen. Think about that
the next time you're told about those terrorists who aren't. And how tensions are being
fanned between Yemen and Somalia because of it. That's a dialectic. Get 2 of your own
"enemies" to fight each other so you don't have to. Or to give you an excuse to
intervene.
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Related
Stories |
Johann Hari:
You are being lied to about pirates
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.
Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal
dumping and trawling
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4/13/2009
Feingold: Obama must not
neglect Somalia
"If we don't, we will continue to see Somalia's historic instability manifest
itself in piracy and growing extremism, both of which pose serious security threats in the region and around the
globe," he said. |
4/14/2009
Somali pirates on hijack spree
since weekend
The pirates say they are fighting illegal fishing and dumping of toxic
waste in Somali waters. The Egyptian boats were taken in the gulf off Somalia's
northern coast. Said Mursi, Egypt's ambassador to Somalia who is based in Kenya, said the trawlers probably did not
have licenses to fish Somali waters. "From my experience, I think that they were
illegally fishing," he told The Associated Press.4/15/2009 Experts: How to stop piracy
The Danish Institute for Military Studies (DIMS) concludes in a new report that the
way to stop piracy off the coast of Somalia is to introduce a regional coastguard from
Egypt in the north to Tanzania in the south. “This coastguard service should address
piracy, rescue operations, fishing inspection and environmental protection,” DIMS
Researcher Lars Bangert Struwe tells politiken.dk. |
Orig URL:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html
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."
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
overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna,
shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local
fishermen are now 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 "pirates" have emerged. Somalian
fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a
"tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia –
and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found
70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".
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 in a
telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't
consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish
and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our
toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and
Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem –
but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per
cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
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 – but who is the
robber?
Note from that forum at the original url: This piracy story was based on
20 American hostages. But it turned out that the ship was manned by a crew from Southern
Asia. Lies and spin fed to the media to make it look like it was an American crew -
because we all know that the life of an American is worth many fold more then the rest of
humanity.
