Blogs For Victory

There is a line in Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization: “piracy returned to the seas, rejoicing in the suicide of States”, or words to that effect. Meaning, of course, that when the defenders of law and order either can not or will not do their duty, the lawless will grow ever bolder. The Somali pirates, small in and of themselves, are a harbinger of our future – Mark Steyn takes a look at the issue:

…Once upon a time we killed and captured pirates. Today, it’s all more complicated. The attorney general, Eric Holder, has declined to say whether the kidnappers of the American captain will be “brought to justice” by the U.S. “I’m not sure exactly what would happen next,” declares the chief law-enforcement official of the world’s superpower. But some things we can say for certain. Obviously, if the United States Navy hanged some eyepatched peglegged blackguard from the yardarm or made him walk the plank, pious senators would rise to denounce an America that no longer lived up to its highest ideals, and the network talking-heads would argue that Plankgate was recruiting more and more young men to the pirates’ cause, and judges would rule that pirates were entitled to the protections of the U.S. constitution and that their peglegs had to be replaced by high-tech prosthetic limbs at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, which over the centuries did more than anyone to rid the civilized world of the menace of piracy, now declines even to risk capturing their Somali successors, having been advised by Her Majesty’s Government that, under the European Human Rights Act, any pirate taken into custody would be entitled to claim refugee status in the United Kingdom and live on welfare for the rest of his life. I doubt Pirates of the Caribbean would have cleaned up at the box office if the big finale had shown Geoffrey Rush and his crew of scurvy sea dogs settling down in council flats in Manchester and going down to the pub for a couple of jiggers of rum washed down to cries of “Aaaaargh, shiver me benefits check, lad.” From “Avast, me hearties!” to a vast welfare scam is not progress…

…As my colleague Andrew McCarthy wrote, “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.” Very true. Somalia, Iran, and North Korea are all less “civilized” than they were a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense they have made undeniable progress: They have globalized their pathologies. Somali pirates seize vessels the size of aircraft carriers flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies run Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state provides nuclear technology to Damascus and Tehran. Unlovely as it is, Pyongyang nevertheless has friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protect one-man psycho states. One-man psycho states provide delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. Apocalyptic ideological states fund non-state actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere non-state actors are constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

Word is now out that Captain Phillips has been rescued, and that is a good thing – but while the apparent US military action of freeing Phillips is an excellent lesson to the pirates, it will be worse than useless if not followed up.

If one was looking for a one-word description of what being uncivilized was about, the word “piracy” would fit the bill. Pirates are people who simply latch on to good, productive people and extort a living from them – a feudal baron was a grand improvement because at least he pledged to defend those he lives off of…the pirates just take, and then take some more…and often throw in a bit of rape and murder, when it suits them. The reason why, in order to have a pirate movie, one has to set it back in the 18th century is because for the past two centuries, piracy has been a rarity. And its not rare because pirates went to sensitivity training and learned to respect the lives and property of others. No – they were destroyed, mostly by the Royal Navy, but with some help from the US Navy (and Marines – “to the shores of Tripoli”, and all that). We can either be civilized, or we can allow piracy to continue. Pick one; there are no alternate choices.

The barbarians at the gate must be converted to civilization, or destroyed. And to do this we cannot become fixated on one aspect of barbarism – useful as it would be to take down the pirates, unless we restore a sense of civilization being overwhelmingly superior to barbarism, barbarism will just continue to flourish. What kind of a world do we wish to live in: a world where we talk to barbarians and hope they don’t do anything savage, or a world where we attack and destroy barbarism whenever and where ever we can?