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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction

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To: Sully- who wrote (71157)	4/16/2009 7:39:14 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) of 90947

Not So Simple Jonah Goldberg The Corner From a reader in response to my column: <<< Jonah, Everything you say in your article is true, and once again you have done an excellent job. However I would like to perhaps clarify whether the issue of Piracy was as simple as you say it was even 200 years ago. You must remember that Europe was plagued by the Barbary Pirates for over 200 years (approx 1600-1800) before the British finally crushed it in the early 19th century. The Barbary pirates once took an entire fishing village (about 400 people) in Iceland into captivity (around 1680, if I remember). The village members (I was gonna say “people” ha, ha) were never seen again. The Barbary “confederacy,” which extended from Morocco to Egypt, conducted slave raids along the entire European coast during this time and took tens of thousands of Europeans into slavery. As a result, the European powers were constantly bombarded with ransom requests, which they often paid (or not) because it was cheaper than mounting military expeditions to stamp out the problem. The Pirates learned to play the European governments like a Stradivarius. When the outcry in a country such as Britain got loud enough, the Brits would send an ambassador to a Barbary state to threaten war. The Barbary state would then negotiate a “peace treaty” (for a large sum of money) and then that Barbary state would agree not to prey on British shipping anymore. The treaty had no effect with other nations. Nor would that treaty be binding on other Barbary states. So the Brits (and other powers) were constantly negotiating these treaties, which were soon abrogated whenever one pirate state felt like upping the ante. The pirates always set the price of a treaty below what it would cost a European state to achieve a military solution. Thus short term political expediency on the part of European politicians always trumped any effort to form a united front against the Pirates (sound familiar?). The British were eventually embarrassed into solving the problem for everyone else (they were the world Naval power at the time. Again sound familiar?), by the young U.S. Navy’s response to Barbary piracy. This is a lot of history in nutshell, but hopefully it is enough to show that the problem was not simple back then, either. >>> corner.nationalreview.com

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