Blog Post #1 2/25

David Solomon

Professor Shirk

POL 357B

25 February 2017

Piracy and Terrorism

Our society has mistakenly romanticized the pirates of the eighteenth century. With movies such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean producing fan favorite characters such as Captain Jack Sparrow, we see pirates more as heroes than the more appropriate label of being villains. Marcus Rediker makes the same point in his perfectly titled article, Villains of All Nations. He states, “They [pirates] have become, over the years, cultural heroes, perhaps antiheroes, and at the very least romantic and powerful figures in an American and increasingly global popular culture” (Rediker 6). Our culture has taken their brutality and turned it into heroic feats. However, if we were to take the acts these men committed, (murder, kidnapping, rape, pillaging, extortion, stealing, etc…) as a collective whole and put it into a modern context, these men would be labeled terrorists.

Many would argue that pirates were not terrorists because up until the eighteenth century privateering was a legal practice. However, the only reason the practice was legal was because of the sovereign state’s reliance on privateers to protect and enforce their commercial enterprise. Once this reliance was surpassed with self-sufficiency, privateers were no longer needed and their very presence became a hindrance rather than a benefit. This is what inevitably led to privateering being outlawed, thus providing the basis for why pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy should be considered terrorists.

For logistical reasons, my own definition of terrorism is the natural progression throughout time of non-state groups using terror as a tactic against states in an attempt to achieve their own agenda. Using this interpretation now allows us to see more clearly the discrepancy between the pirates of seventeenth century and the pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy. Although in both time periods the acts of terror employed by pirates were relatively the same, the difference lays in the fact that the pirates during the Golden Age were not state sponsored. They were strictly acting on their own accord for the sole purpose of benefiting for themselves. Rediker does a good job summing this point, “They consciously used terror to accomplish their aims: to obtain money, to punish those who resisted them, to take vengeance against those they considered their enemies, and to instill fear in sailors, captains, merchants and officials who might wish to attack or resist pirates” (Rediker 5).

In a world “dominated by the nation-state system” (Rediker 7) pirates systematically took advantage of it by utilizing the tactic of terror. Through this they directly challenged the social order of the time and disrupted the commercial enterprises of the sovereign states in power. As a result, many will argue that pirates committed acts of terror in spite of these sovereign states and to liberate the sailors under their authority. However, this does not serve to explain their seemingly indiscriminate use of terror against civilians and noncombatants. Although they were anti establishment, they did not commit acts of terror in an attempt to give a voice to those oppressed by this system. They were terrorists who were against the “constitutional order” of the period and thus attacked this ideal for their own self-interests. They wanted to satisfy their greedy and sadistic desires and they had no regard for who they hurt in the process of accomplishing their self-interested agendas.

Bibliography

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of all nations: Atlantic pirates in the golden age. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008.