The Guardian Notices The Benefit Of “The Death Penalty”
…Analysts say that in the long term the key to ending piracy is establishing an effective authority on land in Somalia. In 2006, when the Islamic Courts Union controlled most of southern and central Somalia for six months, bringing in law and order for the first time since the early 1990s, piracy all but disappeared.
But after the Islamists were ousted by invading Ethiopian forces, pirates began to flourish once more. The Transitional Federal Government, headed by President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, exercises no authority on the ground or at sea and claims, with some justification, that it can do little to rein in the pirates…
Leave it to the “intelligence” experts at the Guardian to miss how terrorism (in this specific form, “piracy”) flourishes primarily in two realms:
1) In democracies, where limited force governance, individual rights, and “rule of law” makes it extremely difficult to control “rogue” individuals and groups by application of nearly unlimited violence. Hence the U.K. has had its IRA and Islamist extremists. Germany has had its Baader Meinhof. The U.S. has had its William Ayers’, Bernardine Dohrns and various other renegade groups of all sorts and professed goals.
2) In regions were effective governance does not exist at all. Like in current Somalia.
And where doesn’t “terror” usually exist?
3) In locations where the state, or non-state de facto authority, is the terrorist. For such a “terror state,” which naturally doesn’t allow “competition,” by definition crowds out (meaning kills off, often literally) “free-lancers.” Examples have been Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy (the Mafia, for example, did not “do well” under Mussolini), Stalin’s Soviet Union, Saddamist Iraq, Taliban/ al Qaeda Afghanistan, and “Islamic Courts” Union-ruled Somalia.
Yes, even terror authorities have their “achievements.” As is well-known, Hitler essentially built the autobahns, Mussolini “made the trains run on time,” Stalin forged an industrial Soviet Union through his “Five Year” plans, Saddamist iron-rule prevented Iraqi “chaos,” and the Taliban “outlawed” poppy cultivation.
And such was quite often accomplished without the concurrent messiness of individual, private ownership either. That being especially a “leap forward” which Guardian writers no doubt still get misty-eyed over whenever recalling. After all, no need to worry about “credit crunches.”
So it is unsurprising that now we have the Guardian, and certain of its ever insightful readers, hankering back to the “good old days” of “Islamic Courts”-rule in Somalia as a means to curtail “piracy”.
Although, in one respect, that is actually a bit surprising for this reason: the Guardian’s current international editorial line is built upon the essential proposition that it is actually the U.S. and the democratic West which is that cynically realist. But nevermind. Just because the Guardian perceives certain virtues in Islamic fundamentalist rule, don’t you dare question the paper’s commitment to liberalism, enlightenment and secular freedom.
