…when the last American merchantmen were seized by pirates, polite society was a lot more polite than today.\u00a0 Paradoxically, impolite society was a lot rougher than today, in a lot of ways (depending on where you were, yadda yadda bla bla bla).<\/p>\n
And so it was considered the height of manners for gentlemen to be armed – to carry some <\/em>kind of personal protection, a firearm or a sword or whatever – to protect themselves and theirs from life’s ugly exigencies.\u00a0 It was their responsibility<\/em>.<\/p>\n Back around the same time, cargo ships were almost invariably armed as well.\u00a0 Piracy was a real, constant threat on many of the world’s key trade routes; the richer the trade route, the more dangerous the threat.\u00a0 Some merchantmen – the British and Dutch East Indiamen, which traded between Europe and South\/Southeast Asia, were basically warships with cargo holds, due to the threats they faced from pirates both indigenous (the Horn of Africa was a hotbed of piracy then as now) and official (“Privateers” were pirates hired out by nations to do the dirty work of screwing with their enemies’ commerce).<\/p>\n It was their responsibility<\/em>.<\/p>\n Now, with the Navy’s successful rescue of Captain Phillips and the expungement of three pirates, and the Obama Administration’s threats to attack pirate strongholds ashore (is that <\/em>where Osama Bin Laden’s been hiding?), the pirates are threatening to ratchet up the violence.\u00a0 Which, by the way, more or less belies the notion that they’re just in it for the money, as some were saying last week.<\/p>\n Some of the world community’s been getting the vapors about this.\u00a0 But the past offers at least part of the solution today.<\/p>\n Just as it is the duty of every real American to own and be proficient with a firearm, merchant ships need to be armed; merchant crews need to meet skiffs full of thugs with gunfire.\u00a0 If they are <\/em>in it for the profit, hard targets are a drag on the market,with ships as with people.\u00a0 If they’re not, then it’s war\u00a0 anyway.<\/p>\n With piracy as with economics 101 – if you subsidize bad behavior, you’ll get more of it. Ransoms – as the US discovered in 1803 against the Barbary Pirates of the western Mediterranean – merely create more pirates looking for the big payday.\u00a0 It was only when Thomas Jefferson broke with pure libertarian tradition and built a Navy and Marine Corps to track down and kill the pirates that the threat abated (and it was only when the “international community” in the 1840’s launched a concerted effort to crush them that they went away for good).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …when the last American merchantmen were seized by pirates, polite society was a lot more polite than today.\u00a0 Paradoxically, impolite society was a lot rougher than today, in a lot of ways (depending on where you were, yadda yadda bla bla bla). And so it was considered the height of manners for gentlemen to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}