July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
08:55
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So now it's all about the pirates, arrr! | |
| Man, oh man. | |
| My forehead. | |
| I'm gonna need to get rubber here for the forehead slap. | |
| Now, you see, we're supposed to be afraid of pirates. | |
| Because pirates, you see, are those who use violence on the high seas to take things from people. | |
| And now, off the coast of Somalia, there are pirates getting blown away by seals. | |
| So, there's never any context, nothing is ever put into any kind of principle, so I suppose you come here for that, and I'm happy to provide the service as best I can. | |
| So, these are just a few little things about the supposed pirates. | |
| The facts are that these, quote, pirates are fishermen, and the fishermen live in villages along the coast of Somalia, which has a huge and extended coastline. | |
| Their way of life, livelihood and so on are being threatened. | |
| European countries and others have been dumping nuclear waste off the coast of Somalia for years. | |
| These waters are now among the most toxic in the world. | |
| So, of course, every country that has a navy has a 12-mile perimeter around the country where the Coast Guard and the Navy patrol to make sure that dumping doesn't occur in terms of waste, to ensure that the fish stocks are not pillaged by other countries and so on. | |
| And every single hijacking has occurred within this 12-mile limit, so it's not hijacking, it's protection of territorial waters. | |
| They're not pirates, they're a voluntaristic and spontaneous coast guard, at least that's what they would be called. | |
| If China were to sail ships within two miles of the American coast, And, uh, dumped nuclear waste, uh, and, uh, detonated all the fish out of the water, the American Navy would go and encircle it, and they would hold it, and they would hold people prisoner until they could be extradited. | |
| So that, of course, would be perfectly legal action. | |
| But when other people do it, they're pirates, I tell ya! | |
| So, oil tankers that load up in the Gulf should load at less than 100% because the oil expands as they transit through the hot areas around Africa. | |
| They don't, and in an effort to carry 100% load, they fill up and then dump the excess off the coast of Somalia. | |
| The coast of Somalia is littered with waste and garbage from cargo ships and others who dump their trash waste off the coast. | |
| So these fishermen spontaneously formed something called the Somali Volunteer Coast Guard. | |
| And they demand ransom, sure, for the damages that are caused by the great powers and their shipping companies. | |
| They use the money for guns, boats, cleanup and food. | |
| They're not interested in fighting for or against the Somali central government. | |
| They just want to have the same rights and treatment as any other country. | |
| Live, work and feed their families like everyone else. | |
| And basically the way that it works is That European countries will, quote, sell or give their nuclear waste to the mafia, right? | |
| The mafia runs the garbage industry. | |
| And the mafia then takes it and dumps it off the coast of Somalia. | |
| Now, I know everyone and their dog is going to be tempted to email me and say, well, this is why you can't have a stateless society, because all the other governments, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But, you know, just... | |
| Think through that one yourself. | |
| I'm tired of answering those kinds of questions. | |
| So as soon as the government was gone, which was in the early 90s, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. | |
| The coastal population began to sicken. | |
| This would be in the 90s. | |
| At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea, and malformed babies. | |
| After the 05 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. | |
| People began to suffer from radiation sickness and more than 300 died. | |
| Ahmedud Abdullah, the US envoy to Somalia, UN envoy, tells me, quote, 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 Oud Abdallah what the European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh of nothing, there has been no cleanup, no compensation, and no prevention. | |
| At the same time, this is from Huffington Post, I'll put the link up of course, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas with their greatest resource, seafood. | |
| We have destroyed our own fish stocks by over-exploitation, and now we have moved on to theirs. | |
| More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster, and other sea life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. | |
| The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. | |
| Mohamed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka, 100 kilometers south of Mogadishu, told Reuters, quote, if nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters. | |
| This is the context in which the men we are calling pirates have emerged. | |
| Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try and dissuade the dumpers and trawlers or at least wage attacks on them. | |
| They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia and it's not hard to see why. | |
| In a surreal Taliban interview, one of the pirate leaders, Suguli Ali, said the motive was, quote, to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters. | |
| We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. | |
| We consider sea bandits to be those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. | |
| The pirates, of course, have a long and noble history. | |
| They were originally a response to the press gangs or the government predation upon British men that would basically just be ripped out of their homes or ripped out of a bar and sent off to be flogged, beaten and starved to death with scurvy for the Royal Navy. | |
| If you've ever seen there are tankards with clear glass bottoms, the reason for that is somebody would drop a coin into it and if you lifted up and drank it you would be considered to have accepted His Majesty's coin and therefore you would be taken and basically enslaved on a ship. | |
| So you'd lift it up and see if there was a coin underneath and then you wouldn't drink it. | |
| So, pirates are a long rebellion against the predations of central authority. | |
| And here we can see it happening, of course, again, with all the usual propagandistic void around it. | |
| And there's some interesting things, right? | |
| Because they say, oh, the Somalis are stealing things, right? | |
| I mean, this just takes a moment's thought, right? | |
| At the moment they have apparently stopped a A ship with food aid for some African country. | |
| That's what they say. | |
| I don't believe a word of it, but let's say that it's true. | |
| Any more than I believe. | |
| The army story about how they shot these guys and it was all so cool and high-tech and so on. | |
| I mean, these are the guys who said that that football hero suffered a hero's death when he was actually killed by friendly fire. | |
| I mean, everything the government says is a lie and that goes triple for the military. | |
| But let's say it's all true, right? | |
| Well, I mean, if we're going to say that theft is a problem, then of course the dumping of toxic waste onto Somali waters and shores is a problem. | |
| The theft of the fish from the Somali waters is a problem. | |
| The food that is on the ship is foreign aid, which means that it was bought or contributed with money that was stolen from American taxpayers. | |
| The military, which is out there, is paid for by the forced extraction of taxation from American taxpayers. | |
| So the whole goddamn thing is theft. | |
| To point at four little Somali fishermen desperate to survive radiation poisoning and starvation as the pirates and those who are stealing, is to make a mockery of basic human reason, which of course is the purpose of the media. | |
| In my own way, I was the media's bad boy or enemy for, I guess, I don't know, a month or two last year, and it's all complete nonsense. | |
| Everybody that they talk about being your enemy is very likely your friend, and that's just something to keep in mind. | |
| The last thing, of course, that is interesting, and this is something that I've mentioned before, but When a pirate was dragged before Alexander the Great and he asked, well, how can you justify what you do? | |
| And he says, well, you call me a pirate because I have one ship. | |
| You have a thousand ships and so you're called a navy. | |
| And that really is the only distinction. | |
| One question that, you know, any remotely intelligent person would ask about this It's that if the exercise of naval force, the initiation of force in naval matters, or patrolling waters, is a huge and big problem, right? | |
| So to have ships out there that are armed and patrolling waters, that's piracy, you're able to stop or inflict whatever you want at will. | |
| If that's a problem, then what the hell is... How can the US draw in a cruiser or a destroyer Within an hour or two. | |
| In other words, what the hell is the American Navy doing off the coast of Africa in the first place? | |
| But of course, that's not called piracy. |
Export Selection