Somali Pirates

Allison Kilkenny has a great blog post up on the huffingtonpost.com about the somali pirates.

Basically its not as clean cut as the corporate news media lets on, but you knew that right?

When I hear the word pirate I think of those bad johnny depp movies. Huge ships, with gangs of criminals roaming around, causing trouble.

Allison points out this is far from the case in Somalia. That the case in Somalia, get this, might be a result of the western nations shitting on Somalia and forcing their hand.

WHAT?

I dont believe it. Could it be? The Western super powers taking advantage of a small third world nation? Yes its true.

In Iraq the people we liberated thought it was ok to kill our soldiers based on how our soldiers treated them after the liberation. The people we liberated in Afghanistan have turned on us after we killed so many innocent people with our unmanned drone planes. Osama and his whole movement attacked us on 9-11 because of the way we abuse the middle eastern world. Their might be a pattern here. Too many people hate us for our freedom. At what point do say maybe its not the entire world that has the problem maybe it is us?

Some people, we shall label them republicans, think these are necessary evils. "They want to kill us all shouldnt we defend ourselves?", they chant. Yes we should. But dropping bombs on entire villages to kill a hand full of terrorists might not be the best approach.

US government reports have determined that our war in Iraq has created more terrorists, yet so many people still refuse to look at themselves and their own countries habits in the mirror. Are we lazy, are we scared to face our skelatons?

What makes someone say look at impoverished, violent parts of the word and choose bombs as the solution over schools, war over job creation? It really does seem like we want the war, the violence, the hate, the retaliation.

Go read Naomi Kleins book right now, the shock doctrine. She argues the shock of violence, bombs, war, violence, poverty, lawlessness, chaos, leads to corporate profit. And Republicans love to talk up their stock portfolio.

So where were we, oh yea, Somali Pirates. So I just laid out a pattern of the whole world attacking us for some reason or another, and the US media still arguing its all of them that have lost it, not us, we had nothing do with it.

Allison Kilkenny goes deeper. Pointing out two issues that have crippled the lives of the Somali people, both resulting from the inability of the nation to form a stable government after 1991.

The first issue is overfishing of its seas by western nations, leaving few fish left for the native somali population.

The second is the dumping of nuclear waste in the waters(documented by the UN) which has been washing on shore and making many people sick. The dumping has occured, get this, to save money on disposal fees.

I know what your thinking, western corporations, hurting people to save a buck, thats sounds crazy. I know I know, I would find it hard to beleive too if i got my news only from corporate media.

Guess what the pirates have been asking for, money to clean up their waters. Sounds like something a crazed terrorist would want. And even though many experts agree that the somali pirates have never mistreated their captives, we chose to escalate the issue by killing some of them this week.

Am I saying kidnapping should be allowed and what the pirates did was ok, no way. Im am just saying their are many perspectives, and one powerfull is that we have a pattern of pissing people off and them biting us in the ass, than we bomb their neighborhood and they build an international terrorist network.

Also of interest, TPM is a news website who posts clips on you tube every day, corporate news roundup in 100 seconds. Check out the day after the killing of the pirates, and see how violent our corporate media appear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIgu-YNe3Ys