10-04-2008, 04:23 PM
Those old movies are just movies. In real life, merchant crews hardly ever resisted pirates. Why should they? They were underpaid proles who served under the lash. Merchant crews were kept as small as possible because it was cheaper that way, while a pirate ship was crammed with as many armed men as it would hold. It was the cargo the pirates were after, and the crew had no stake in that. Who wants to die for someone else's insured money? All it meant was that, at the end of the year, an insurer would declare a slightly smaller profit for the shareholders.
It would be easy to wipe out these modern pirates except for one thing - hostages. the best way to hit them is not to pick off their boats one at a time, but to annihilate their land bases. Problem is, they keep lots of prisoners for ransom, from all over the world, and they'd get killed, too, causing no end of international indignation.
However, in recent days, the Russians have shown up on the scene, and they're not known as people who care much about political correctness or other people's sensitive feelings. Plus, Putin wants to reassert Russia as a major player on the worldwide military scene. Two hundred years ago that other upstart nation, the United States, saw an opportunity to assert itself by crushing the Barbary Corsairs. It would be fun if Russia were to send in a small fleet and maybe some Spetznaz troops to scour out these pirate bases and, when the wailing rose from the U.N., would say a polite "screw you." (In Russian, of course.)
It would be easy to wipe out these modern pirates except for one thing - hostages. the best way to hit them is not to pick off their boats one at a time, but to annihilate their land bases. Problem is, they keep lots of prisoners for ransom, from all over the world, and they'd get killed, too, causing no end of international indignation.
However, in recent days, the Russians have shown up on the scene, and they're not known as people who care much about political correctness or other people's sensitive feelings. Plus, Putin wants to reassert Russia as a major player on the worldwide military scene. Two hundred years ago that other upstart nation, the United States, saw an opportunity to assert itself by crushing the Barbary Corsairs. It would be fun if Russia were to send in a small fleet and maybe some Spetznaz troops to scour out these pirate bases and, when the wailing rose from the U.N., would say a polite "screw you." (In Russian, of course.)
Pecunia non olet
