Pirates have, of course, become fashionably kitschy over the last few years, but there's a really interesting article over on the Huffington Post that delves into the true motives of piracy, both of the "classic" variety and the most recent. Turns out, people don't tend to get into piracy because they're "evil" but because they're forced into it by economic circumstances often brought about by the very governments that would condemn piracy in the first place. In other news, the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

Some choice quotes:

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

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When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

***

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 to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why.

***

During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Head on over here to read the whole piece. Quite thought-provoking.