Captain Phillips, Somali Pirates, and an 800 Pound Gorilla

We're just back from seeing Captain Phillips, a pulse flogging suspense and action film based on the book by the eponymous Captain Richard Phillips and Stephan Talty, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea.

It is an inspiring and wonderful story that manages also to enlist one's compassion for the awful snake pit which is the anarchy of Somalia, wrenched by warring tribes and the pitiful situation of those pathetic, frightened and drug-pumped teenagers who are the Somali pirates.

But as you leave the movie multiplex, there is an 800 pound gorilla in the room, smiling sweetly. 

How in the name of sweet reason can it be that just four dirt-poor, ill-schooled, skinny teenagers with a few small arms and a tiny motor skiff can chase down and board an enormous cargo ship, laden with 17,000 metric tons of cargo and a crew of 20 grown men, hijack the ship, and provoke an international incident requiring a multi-million dollar intervention by a battle group of the United States Navy, with two nuclear powered destroyers, an aircraft carrier, a specialized detachment of US Navy SEALS, the able assistance from allied units operating a C-130 transport aircraft, and much more besides?

And this hijacking was not an rare aberration!  In recent years, these pirates have hijacked many hundreds, yes, hundreds, of cargo ships for ransom, in the international waters off the eastern coast of Africa.  Pirating is a thriving business for these poor Somalis.  Rows of hijacked cargo ships are moored off the coast of Somalia, their kidnapped crews sweltering in jails, awaiting the conclusion of talks for ransom.

The question, uttered once in the film, and then only sotto voce, fast and barely audible, is to wonder why the hell don't these big cargo ships have any armed guards among the crew?

Voila!... the 800 pound gorilla in the room!

One man with a rifle could have stopped the hijacking before the ship was boarded.

Well, okay, let me grant that since some of the pirates have RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) in addition to AK-47 machine guns, it would require a weapon like a .50 caliber machine gun to have a longer range than the pirates' RPGs, and therefore prevent the pirates from getting close enough to fire the RPGs.  Their RPGs would otherwise allow the pirates to remain outside rifle range while threatening to destroy a cargo ship (or at least to kill the officers and crew on the ship's bridge and other areas if they did not surrender to the pirates.)

Why can't we implement this common sense solution of employing armed crew members, Marines, or sea marshals aboard the cargo ships?

Because our hands are tied by insane international agreements signed at the United Nations.  The policies governing these matters stem from international agreements overseen by the United Nations and agreed to by its member nations.

But why have we signed such agreements in the first place?

By my reckoning, this inexcusable situation is the product of several of those crazy, cockamamie, deadly intellectual viruses which I am always lambasting on these pages.

The United Nations is the logjam that prevents the free flow of much common sense in the world.

But what's wrong with the UN?  I believe that, with respect to this matter of piracy on the high seas, there are at least three intellectual viruses that make the UN a largely ineffective body that suffers countless unintended consequences of (what one would hope are) well-intentioned policies. 

In my opinion, these destructive ideas are:  cultural relativism, pacifism, and something like an international version of gun control.

But first another word about the UN. 

The United Nations 

Sigh.  We want to believe in the United Nations.  The guiding idea for the UN is that all the countries of the world would meet there and talk with each other instead of waging war with each other.

So what's wrong with this?  Talk is better than war, right?  Peaceful dialogue instead of ballistic missiles?

Well, as always, the mischief is in the details.

Here is the essence of what is wrong with the underlying political structure of the United Nations: what outcome would you expect if our city government were run by a principle equivalent to the way the UN is run, where we have a council of members with equal voting rights that includes the Democrats, Republicans,  Libertarians, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, the Socialist Workers Party, Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, Islamic Jihad, Al Qaida, Hamas, Hizbullah, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mafias of Russia and Sicily, the Hogwarts Houses of fair Gryffindor, and evil Slytherin ... and, finally, the Somali warlords who rule the pirates? 

Equal voting rights, remember!  Each group will be put in charge of the City human rights council when their turn comes up. 

Most importantly, these factions have a veto power over all the decisions of the larger group.  If, in one group's neighborhood, they start lynching members of their group, and the city council passes a resolution to stop the lynching, the lynchers can just veto the resolution.

How would you expect this mélange to vote on restraining honor killings in the Mafia, Slytherin, and Hamas neighborhoods?  Ah, that would be meddling in the internal affairs of these sovereign neighborhoods.  No can do!

Cultural Relativism

 

While the United Nations is surely a boiling cauldron of conflicting ideas about fundamental arrangements of society, and many contradictory policies have been pursued over the decades, I don't think it is overstating the matter to say that if any one idea can be named as the guiding light of the United Nations, surely it is this idea that all cultures are morally equivalent.  

By this precept, no one can say with confidence that any culture is better or worse than any other.  This notion of moral equivalence grows out of the philosophy of modernism from at least the time of David Hume's skepticism, which in due course convinced much of the intellectual establishment that there are no grounds for believing in abstract reasoning, independent of experience.  By this view, causality itself is an abstraction, so it is inadmissible to the court of reason, and therefore (Hume's words, not mine) there is no good reason to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow.  This was written after Isaac Newton gave us the math by which to predict with exquisite precision the reappearance of a comet, unseen for 75 years.  This was a profound intellectual crisis, but Hume bizarrely won this argument in the court of European intellectuals, and we are feeling its effects, amplified in ever more weird formulations, to this day. 

Hume's followers delivered us into postmodernism, which denies that one can know anything with certainty.  This denial of absolutes applies not only to the epistemological questions of what is true and false, but no less to the questions of morality, of what is right and wrong.  Truth and right are assumed to be the product not of any facts of reality to which one can appeal for validation, but are instead products of the arbitrary conventions of the tribe into which one was born, and are further defined by the accident of birth that delivered us into a particular race, class, and gender.

 

No one can live his or her life on the basis of postmodern beliefs.  You would be dead in a day if you tried to.  Moreover, postmodernism is not widely known, explicitly, by most people, not even at the UN, but these philosophical tenets have indeed filtered down from the ivory tower into the culture in ways that have a profound influence.  We see this influence in such behavior as an unwillingness to condemn the murderous behavior of other cultures. 

The UN has been infamously ineffective at restraining the genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and in even more shocking ways, in the staggering hundreds of millions murdered in the former Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain countries, and Red China.

We also see this influence of postmodernism's dizzy moral confusion in campus speech codes that muzzle any real diversity of opinion, on the premise that the only sin is to express opinions that might hurt someone else's feelings (because nobody can know which opinions are true or false, right or wrong, and the only standard by which to judge statements must be the delicate feelings of the listeners.)  This postmodern skepticism denies the possibility of knowledge, epistemological no less than moral and ethical, and shows up in such expressions as, "Who am I to know?"  "Who are you to judge?"

 

Cultural relativism can be seen at the UN in its willingness to grant equal votes to some countries that are organized as liberal democracies, and others that are totalitarian dictatorships where the citizens are denied any right to life, liberty, property, and the rule of law, and where they have murdered masses of their own citizens.  Think of Red China, Zimbabwe under Mugabe, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union and East Germany, to name but a few out of dozens of examples.

 

Getting to the essence of what's wrong with the idea of cultural relativism is one of the deepest arguments that has occupied some of the world's brightest lights for the last three centuries.  I do not stand a good chance of persuading anyone here who is not at least already dubious of this relativism, but let me point to a couple points that should at least give pause to the cultural relativists.

 

Knowledge implies belief in the truth of a proposition.  When somebody argues for the notion that nobody can know anything with certainty or confidence, let us remember that this person is taking a position on a matter that he or she believes in.  He is stating something he claims as knowledge, an idea he believes is true, not false.  Moreover, this person is counting on your ability to hear the argument and decide for yourself whether you believe the argument for this idea is right or wrong, true or false.  All belief, to be a belief, must be held with enough confidence to say, "I believe this is so."  If there is no basis for any confidence for belief, there can be no belief.

It is incoherent and crazy to assert, as true knowledge, that there is no basis for knowledge as such, that you believe there is no legitimate basis for knowledge.  You are claiming as truth that there is no basis for truth.  This is insane.  Yet this is precisely what the postmodernists declare. 

 

With respect to morality, I should begin by stating the obvious, which is of course the fact that we are indeed all born into a particular race, class, and gender, and that we are certainly influenced by the ideas we breath in from the cultural air around us as we grow up.

 

But it is another matter to say that we are stamped by these ideas in a way that is beyond our power to challenge or change our minds.  The cultural relativists assume that these forces shape us deterministically, beyond any power of free will to resist or modify.

 

I would agree that our free will must operate within some constraints and is therefore not limitless, but there is still a degree of intellectual freedom, and this can be seen all over the world whereby some people escape the common herd's beliefs.

 

Moreover, those who argue against free will, like those who argue against one's ability to know anything with confidence, are counting on your ability to listen with discrimination to the argument, and then choose to agree or disagree!  The person who argues against free will must count on your possession of the very free will which allows you to agree with him.  He counts on your possessing the very power he is a arguing against!  This position is hopeless, contradictory, absurd, and self-refuting.  In a word, crazy.  Yet another intellectual vampire.

 



Pacifism

 



Now, strictly speaking, the UN is not an organization that fully practices a belief in pacifism, but this is nevertheless an idea that figures prominently in the guiding values of so many of its members.

Pacifists claim that peace can be achieved if only we refrain from returning force with force.  Passive resistance will win the day.  They uphold Gandhi and Martin Luther King as successful examples of this policy, and they piously hold these lovely thoughts to their breasts and congratulate themselves for the heart-warming enlightenment they feel they have thereby achieved.

Of course, one must ask how things might have turned out had Gandhi faced a more determined opponent than the British empire at its enervated nadir, limping, dizzy and reeling in its dotage, wringing its hands with liberal guilt?  

How would have events played out if Gandhi had faced, say, the Communist Chinese?  Surely nobody can doubt that the Chicoms would have destroyed Gandhi with the ease of (forgive me...) taking Gandhi from a baby!

Gun Control

In Britain, not long ago, the legal owners of guns were compelled to turn in their weapons to the government.  Ten years after this confiscation of the guns in the UK, the rate of violent crime with guns was double what it had been before the legal guns were turned in.  This pattern is the same everywhere the government confiscates guns from legal gun owners.

Another aspect of the confiscation of guns in the UK is that burglars are far more likely to break into an occupied home than an unoccupied one, knowing that the owners will almost certainly be unarmed.  Why would burglars do this?  Because if the occupants are home, they can be forced to tell the bad guys where the goodies are.

Fact:  every one of the mass shootings in America has been committed in places that were already gun free zones.  Had there been anyone who was armed in those places, the shooter could have been stopped far more rapidly, sparing the lives of countless victims.  Those armed could be police officers, or trained civilian deputies (equivalent to the airline pilot volunteers who are trained as Federal Flight Deck Officers at the same facility that trains the Air Marshals and the Secret Service agents.)  As in Israel, they could also be teachers who volunteer to be trained in this special service. 

Fact: until the world universally reaches a point of enlightenment where no one wants to be a predator, there will always be bad guys wreaking violence on others unless they are restrained by force.  Such restraint is impossible without adequate weapons of self-defense.  Guns are obviously the most effective  choice, as we can plainly see if we give it a moment's thought.

Consider that nothing so evens up the match between a 98 pound woman and a 200 pound rapist as a pistol. 

Fact: the police cannot be counted on to defend citizens in time to save us in the event of a burglary, or worse.  You may call 911, but the police can be counted on only to find your corpse and state in their report, how sad, too bad  that you were murdered.  If you had been armed, you yourself could have stopped the bad guy.

Gun control advocates blame the guns, or at least the availability of guns, for the violence perpetrated with these weapons.  Yet every new mass-killing field turns out to be, as I mentioned, an already gun free zone.  In these places, the killers know they can kill unopposed.  In Israel, where common sense still prevails on matters of security, there are some teachers in schools who are armed and trained to respond to any emerging violence in the school.  Nobody can enter an Israeli school thinking that they can start shooting unopposed and with impunity. 

The facts are immutable:  gun ownership among regular citizens leads to vastly lower rates of violence.  See John Lott's scholarly book, More Guns, Less Violence.

Gun Control on the High Seas

Now, to the point here, this heartfelt belief in gun control is what lies behind the United Nation's efforts to assure that cargo ships are gun-free zones, just like schools, movie theaters, and post offices. 

Pacifists, and anti-gun advocates are deaf and blind to the kind of evidence I list above, but I invite them to think about the situation of pirates and cargo ships  on the high seas, and then tell me how taking guns out of the hands of the ship's crews will improve matters.

Pacifism and gun-control advocates are ideologues who are deaf and blind to the evidence of the real world, and I condemn them as purveyors of deadly intellectual viruses.

Now, this situation is complicated by United Nations agreements that create this absurd situation that prevents cargo ships in pirate waters from including armed crewmembers who would be equivalent to our Federal Air Marshals on international flights. 

If the UN insists on gun control in international commerce, then surely the cargo ship companies could deploy their weapons on the high seas, and then lock up the weapons while in port, just as the air marshals have their weapons secured when their aircraft block into their international destinations, and deploy these weapons again when they depart.

The United Nations has confounded countless efforts to end this piracy, and its failure here clearly shows it to be a toothless, hapless travesty of an organization with a noble purpose and a history of tragic ineffectiveness.

What We Should Do to End Piracy 

We should act independently of the UN to defend ourselves.  Government has no more legitimate purpose than to defend its citizens from foreign aggression, and if we grant this premise, which is written into the founding documents of our country, then it is absurdly self-destructive to think we need to beg from any international body the permission to act in our own self-defense. 

The pirates continue to hijack ships today because they can do so with impunity, knowing that their victims are disarmed and helpless.

A pair of US Marines or Sea Marshals deployed on American cargo ships would stop the pirates dead in their wakes.  The word would get out immediately to the pirates, and we could thereby put an end to this wave of piracy. 

There is certainly good precedent for our acting independently in such matters, if we remember that under Jefferson, we stopped the Barbary Pirates. 

How much easier it would be to stop international piracy today than in Jefferson's time-- except that the minds of most of our politicians are infected by the insane intellectual virus that makes most of them refuse to steer government into doing what it should do (and, dare I add, restrain the government from doing what it should not be doing--which would include most of its meddlesome and burdensome activities today, most of which are beyond anything imaginable by our founders.)

 

 

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