The Argument for Privateering Today

A Blimp of the same class as the Resolute

One of the cultural features that characterized warfare in the twentieth century was the virtual absence of privateers. Arguably, there were a few privateers, but even that has been discounted recently. The current entry on privateering in the Wikipedia says:

20th century

In December 1941 and the first months of 1942, Goodyear commercial L class blimp Resolute operating out of Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, flew anti-submarine patrols. As the civilian crew was armed with a rifle, many thought this made the ship a privateer, and that she and sister commercial blimps were operated under letter of marque until the Navy took over operation.^[32] Without congressional authorization, the Navy would not have been able to legally issue any letters of marque.

The last time I read this entry, prior to writing my novel Theodosia and the Pirates, it was much more positively in favor of the the idea that the blimp in question was issued a letter of marque. But whether or not the United States government did issue such a document authorizing the deployment of the Resolute is not the only question we should ask. Because in point of fact, historically many well known American privateers received their letters of marque from governments other than that of the United States. For instance, Jean Laffite had a letter of marque from the Republic of Cartagena. Later, he awarded other privateers letters of marque as head of the government in Galveston, as described in Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain. 

Recently, Austin Petersen, who is competing with two others for the Libertarian nomination for president of the United States, spoke at great length about the idea of issuing letters of marque and reprisal without declaring war against any nation. This way we can go after terrorists without starting a war. I am certainly in favor of that.

 Petersen mentioned the War of 1812 and American privateers, but not Jean Laffite, the most  important privateer contributor to that war on the American side. Is it because Laffite was not issued a letter of marque by the United States government? His letter of marque from the Republic of Cartagena allowed him to go after Spanish ships at a time when the United States had not declared war against Spain, even as Spain and Britain plotted together to take down the United States and return America to its status as a British colony. When Captain Lockyer approached the Baratarian privateer with an offer from the British, the letters he bore said that England had a treaty with Spain and had not an enemy in the world except the United States. He offered Laffite a chance to earn money and a position in the British Navy, but Laffite turned it down, because he wanted to be an American and an independent privateer, not a government employee. Laffite informed the United States of the British offer and of the British fleet's current location off the coast of Mobile. Instead of going after the British, the American Navy then attacked Laffite and his fleet of light privateering ships. Why? Because already privateering had gone into disrepute, and people like Commodore Daniel Patterson saw private fleets as an infringement on the career Navy officer's prerogative to a monopoly on waging war. 

Patterson did not use the ships he plundered from Laffite to fight the British. He sold them at auction to line his own pockets. But Laffite nevertheless managed to save the United States at the Battle of New Orleans by providing flints and gunpowder, which the Americans had run out of, as well as artillery and men to man it. And when his service was done, all he was granted for it was an empty pardon, and a flippant fare-thee-well. He was never compensated for his looted ships, and in the history books he has gone down as a pirate.

There are many reasons to prefer privateers over a standing army, not the least of which are these:

• Privateers can run a fleet on a shoestring budget, and always at their own expense. It is the enemy that pays their wages, not the American people.
• Privateers are a volunteer force, so nobody has to be drafted and nobody has to be taxed, and nobody need lose life or limb who does not get a share in the booty.
• Privateers can take care of business while the United States maintains neutrality, but this can only work if they are allowed to use letters of marque issued by countries other than the United States.

This last point is the one under contention between those like Austin Petersen, who favors privateering, and the vast majority of the American political establishment, who are against it. Neither side is very good at articulating what the problem is, so I will spell it out for you here: We must repeal the Neutrality Act so we can go back to the state of privateering at the time when the United States came into being.

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2014/03/whats-wrong-with-neutrality-acts-of.html

For an in depth discussion of the Neutrality Act, read the article linked above. But here is a short recap. At the time the constitution of the United States came into effect, there was nothing to keep individual US citizens from fighting on any side they wished of any war going on anywhere in the world.  Many American privateers had letters of marque from France that allowed them to wage open war against Britain on the high seas. This was legal and moral and made sense, because France had helped the United States win its war of independence against Britain.

Now the government of the United States was not at war with  Britain. In fact, they were at peace. But it was legal and lawful and right for each citizen to pursue his own foreign policy, none of them binding the United States or bringing about any breach in the peace. The constitution provides that the executive branch cannot go to war unless Congress authorizes an official declaration of war. But the constitution also provides that any powers not granted to the United States government explicitly are reserved to the States and to the people. And by "the people" the constitution does not mean "collectively" as in "People's Republic of China" where everybody has to agree in order for one person to do something. "The People" in the United States constitution refers to the individual citizens, one by one. Any of them could go to war any day they wished, so long as the US as a whole was not involved in it. And this is exactly what Americans did, until 1794 when the Neutrality Act was passed.

Who lobbied for the Neutrality Act? Why, Britain, of course! They did not want to be beset by those pesky American privateers, so they threatened the United States diplomatically, saying the peace between our two nations depended on the passage in the United States congress of a law outlawing privateering. Should we let Britain make our laws? What good was the revolutionary war, if they can dictate terms from afar?

The Neutrality Act does not outlaw privateering if the United States picks a side in a foreign war and grants letters of marque to Americans to go to war against declared enemies. But it makes it illegal for an individual American to go to war against a country with which the United States is at peace.

Jefferson initially opposed the Neutrality Act. It was Adams who wanted it, so he could pursue an undeclared Quasi-War against  France. Jefferson and Burr came to power after Adams' one single term in office, on a platform of repealing all those laws that the Federalists had put into effect in order to quash anyone who opposed Britain. But... Jefferson forgot all about that when Aaron Burr set out to conquer Mexico as a private citizen, acting at his own expense. Did you know that Burr was found not guilty of treason, but guilty of violating the Neutrality Act? When it served Jefferson's purposes, the law passed at the behest of Britain was allowed to stand.

http://www.historiaobscura.com/the-meaning-of-treason-united-states-v-aaron-burr/

Privateering came more and more under attack after the War of 1812, largely due to international accords that went contrary to the United States constitution. Today, most people do not know the difference between a pirate and a privateer. This situation will not be remedied unless we deal with the Neutrality Act head on. It is unconstitutional, as it abrogates the rights reserved to the people in that document. But you can be sure that no Supreme Court Justice, conservative or liberal, is going to rule it unconstitutional, because they are all Statists, right wing or left. So it is up to Congress to repeal it, once the Libertarian Party takes over.

Letters of Marque May Be Making a Comeback

Today I saw something that gives me hope. Someone was arguing in favor of letters of marque.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/25/is-it-time-to-bring-back-letters-of-marque/

However, they were afraid this solution to a current problem would be seen as a move to privatize warfare: as in in privateers! That's the etymology.

Some less rational factions will undoubtedly hail this as a crazy right-winged conspiracy to privatize the military. But Founders did not design a Constitution with powers that undermine other powers. If letters of marque were a tool of privatization, what good would it have been to include provisions, just a few lines below this, “to raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy”?

And exactly what would be wrong with that? It wasn't as if the constitution provided for a standing army. However, in order to give people the opportunity to take advantage of a letter of marque, we would also need to repeal the Neutrality Act. Is anyone prepared to do that?

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-neutrality-act-of-1817.html

The Importance of Context: Self Interest and Good Behavior

Recently, a time capsule buried by Sam Adams and Paul Revere has been opened, containing a number of items, including coins and a silver plaque.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/after-220-years-boston-time-capsule-finally-gives-up-its-secrets

Such tangible messages from the past, however, are fairly meaningless, unless we understand the context. The question is not what do these items mean to us, but rather what did they mean to them.

One of the problems with historical documents and historical events is that people tend to view them from their current perspective, and so whatever changes in morality or outlook or social expectation that have occurred can be entirely obscured for the average person.

Take the ten commandments.  Most people today, religious or not, see them as the basis of modern morality. But why is there an admonition to honor your father and mother and nothing whatever telling you to nurture your children? Because in the times when this list of dos and don'ts was written, nurturing your children was something people did out of self-interest. They did not need to be told. The more children you had, the richer you were. During your prime, your children worked for you. In your old age, they supported you. In many of the Biblical stories, people were tested by being asked to harm their children. Taking care of your children was seen as selfish, and a mark of loyalty to a god was the willingness to sacrifice them. On the other hand, the duty of children to be supportive of their parents was something less natural, that had to be drummed into them. People were told not to strike their parents on fear of death, but they were told that sparing the rod would spoil the child.

All of this has been changed, because having children is no longer seen as profitable, and hence the interest in child welfare and state involvement in child-rearing has become the norm. Nobody is told to honor parents, but children are being encouraged in school to report it if they feel their parents discipline them too harshly. And this change of circumstances is misunderstood by both the right and the left, so that some campaign to protect unborn children from their own parents, while others campaign to protect children who are already born -- again, from their own parents. All these people purport to follow a morality that is based on the ten commandments, completely ignoring the context and the underlying values that are left unspoken in those rules.

The same kind of context blindness is at the root of historical misunderstandings of  the war powers as enumerated in the constitution, and by extension, the importance of privateering to the early American way of life.

From Article I, Section 8: The Congress shall have the power ...

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

 To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; 

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy; 

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

Why did the framers of the constitution lump all these things together: defining and punishing piracy, granting letters of marque and reprisal, raising and supporting armies, but maintaining a single Navy?Why was it raising and supporting armies -- plural ', but maintaining a Navy -- singular and with a capital 'N'? Why was it indefinite Armies? Why was it the Militia? Why was a very formally capitalized Navy indefinite? Inquiring linguistic minds want to know.

In discourse, the little function words are telling. They are the words to look to in order to spell out the unspoken context. They let us in on what is assumed, what is common knowledge and what is new information.

The militia already existed. It was known. It could be raised or not raised, but it was a given. Armies come and armies go, but no standing army was to be tolerated, because that would be too much like the British they had just rebelled against. A Navy was something they planned to build, but not something they currently had.

  And what do piracy and letters of marque have to do with this? Why did they want a standing Navy, if they abhorred the idea of a standing army?

Why was there nothing in Article I, section 8 about preventing citizens from waging war on their own? What's so special about a Navy and not an Army? Why is piracy such a big deal? And why are letters of marque mentioned in the same breath? Why no provision for a Department of Homeland Security?

The context that might be missing for the average modern day  reader of the constitution is this: the framers were not afraid of  home-grown terrorists. They were home grown terrorists. They were not afraid of popular uprising. They were the uprising. There was nothing in the constitution telling people not to go around attacking each other, because that wasn't the issue. The thing the framers feared the most was that the government would get out of hand and attack the citizens. So they wanted nobody at home policing things except for the militia, which consisted of the people themselves.

They did want a Navy, but it was not so much to engage in all out foreign wars: it was to make sure that American vessels were not attacked at sea by foreign powers and out-and-out pirates. For this reason, they saw a small, standing Navy as a kind of police force to make sure that American commerce would remain unmolested, and as an added protection, in times of war, they wanted to grant letters of marque and reprisal to private ship owners so as to deputize them to attack foreign vessels. There was to be no heavy military spending, and the privateer was to finance his war operation at the expense of the enemy.

Now if we understand this, we understand the importance of privateering, and we see it as positive force, both in times of war and in peace time. We also understand that Jean Laffite, acting on behalf of the United States in War of 1812 was the ultimate hero of the American constitution. He was living the life that the founders envisioned.

But historians today writing about Jean Laffite do not know any of this about the context of the constitution, and so they see Jean Laffite as an opportunistic person acting for his own gain -- as if this were somehow unpatriotic!

Take this article by David Head:

http://www.nola.com/military/index.ssf/2015/01/jean_lafitte_didnt_save_new_or.html

Head writes:

"Laffite persisted, not out of patriotism but from his assessment of conditions in the Gulf. Aiding the Americans might win pardons for his men and the return of the valuables seized by the Navy. Plus, with the British out of the way, Laffite could return to his old business, in the old way."

Yes, Jean Laffite expected to be able to go back to his old business of being a privateer and an importer. That he could not is a shameful fact about the way the constitution was subverted in the wake of the War of 1812, as people began to forget the reasons for the specific provisions in Article I, Section 8. Just as the context of the ten commandments has been entirely forgotten, so it goes with the American constitution.


People used to take good care of their children, because it was in their own best interest. People were expected to defend their country for the very same reason. The idea that profit and duty have to clash is something new, something that ignores the historical context of how peoples and nations rise and fall.

Invitation to Attend a Talk about Jean Laffite and Privateering

If you happen to be in Galveston, Texas on October 14, 2014 at about six pm, you might like to attend my talk at the Meridian Towers.

The Oath of Loyalty and National Identity

At one point, Jean Laffite required an oath of loyalty of all his privateers operating out of Galveston. Why was that necessary? Did he think an oath would make them more loyal? Or did it have more to do with the shifting laws concerning privateering?

After the War of 1812 the American admiralty courts began regarding any privateering vessel manned by multinational crews to be a pirate ship. Multinational crews on ships are a very common thing. Because ships travel from one destination to another, none of the people on a ship will typically remain in the territorial waters of their own country all of the time. This is true of passenger vessels, ships that transport goods, and to some extent even of fishing vessels. That's just the nature of the work. Because of this, crews can be recruited in many different locations and can return to their home port periodically to be with their families. The fact that people belonging to different nations work together on the same ship is not a good indication that it is engaged in piracy.

However, to understand the issue of  multinational versus single nation crews, we need to better acquaint ourselves with the difference between piracy and privateering as generally understood at the time:

   Broadly defined, piracy was the unlawful taking of one vessel by another one. It was simple highway robbery on the seas. In time of war, however, the merchant trade of each combatant became the legitimate prey not only of its' opponents warships, but also of private armed vessels, or privateers. In order to finance its war efforts while damaging the economy of its enemies, a government issued letters of marque and reprisal to qualified vessels. The owners -- and often they were whole syndicates of investors -- armed, equipped, and crewed their ships at their own expense, and posted a hefty cash bond as guarantee that they would observe the rules of warfare and respect civilian life. The vessels were supposed to be commissioned in the home port of the commission-granting country. Their crews were supposed to be made up of a majority of men native to that country. They were to bring their prizes into the port of the commissioning country or a friendly country, where a court of admiralty would examine papers and other evidence to decide whether the prize was eligible for capture and lawfully taken. If the court awarded possession of the prize to its captors, the prize ship and its cargo were sold and the proceeds shared between the crew, the investors and the government whose flag the privateer flew. (Davis, The Pirates Laffite, pp. 28-29)

This is how Jean Laffite spelled Carthagena in his letter to Madison

What would it mean that a crew consisted of a "majority of men native" to a particular country?  This question is trickier than one would suppose, especially with new countries, such as Cartagena and the United States, the majority of whose adult citizens at the time were all born as the subjects of a European country (Britain or Spain) long before the new country came into being. Let us remember that in 1812, the United States was only 36 years old, and anyone below that age could not possibly have been born an American citizen. The Republic of Cartagena, whose independence was won in 1811, was only a year old at the time. Jean Laffite had a letter of marque from Cartagena, and he was not a native of that country, nor had he ever lived there when he accepted that commission.

The flag of Cartagena

The fact of the matter is that multinational crews typically worked on most private vessels, and that countries at war with each other do not always even recognize each others'  rights to grant citizenship. Britain was kidnapping and "impressing" American sailors all the time before war was declared, on the theory that "once a British subject, always a British subject."

How did you become a citizen of a country that only just now had come into being? One way was to have been born there. Another was naturalization. Some countries, like Switzerland, make it next to impossible for someone not born there to become a citizen. Others, like the United States, make people jump through a series of hoops, involving a combination of legal residence, affidavits by sponsoring citizens, a test on civics that has to be passed and ultimately an oath of loyalty. Other countries, such as Columbia during the period when Jean Laffite later came to live there (the 1820s), make it much easier to become a citizen. You merely have to show up and evince your willingness to serve.

How much should you have to give up in order to become a citizen? Can you still have other loyalties? Or should you have to tear from your heart all love and tenderness for your country of origin? Should you have to give up your language, your religion, your customs and your traditions? Theodore Roosevelt seemed to think so.

"In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." Theodore Roosevelt, 1919.

When America was first founded, everyone was a new American, and people from other countries besides England, such as DuPont de Nemours, were welcomed with open arms. In the national archives, there is a letter from DuPont de Nemours in French to President Madison thanking him  for a Navy commission granted his grandson. President Madison was happy to help DuPont, and he did not lecture him about how maybe he should learn English first. Ironically, that letter is right next to the letter by Jean Laffite asking to be reimbursed for his stolen ships. Laffite's letter was in English, but it did contain a lot of misspellings. Laffite was trying to fit in, and DuPont was not.  Clearly something else was at play here when Laffite was rebuffed, but DuPont was rewarded than Theodore Roosevelt's linguistic jingoism. Nobody thought at the time that you had to speak English exclusively in order to be a good American.

Letter from Dupont to Madison

But as things progressed, fear of being overwhelmed by a majority of non-British immigrants began to upset many powerful people, and prejudice against others who spoke different languages at home or who belonged to a different religion became acceptable. It was not unusual for Catholics to be held in suspicion, because of their loyalty to the Pope, which was thought to conflict with their citizenship, or for Jews to have their religion cited as a reason why they could not serve in diplomatic positions abroad. The French speaking population of Louisiana was forced to stop speaking French by punishment for same in the public schools and many native American tribes suffered the same.

As this issue of nationality versus citizenship began to hold a more prominent place in the American imagination, Jean Laffite was faced with a quandary in his rulership over Galveston. How could he show that the crews of his vessels were not pirates, despite the fact that the sailors came from different races or nations and spoke different languages and believed in different creeds? The answer was a simple legalistic one: make them all swear loyalty to Jean Laffite's country and its flag.

Was Jean Laffite a tyrant when he did this? Not at all. He was an extremely tolerant man. He had no desire to change the people who worked for him into carbon copies of himself. He thought it was fine for them to speak different languages and worship different gods, as long as they served him well. But the legalistic expedient of the loyalty oath was a way to present a united front to the American legal system, which wanted to make sure everybody belonged to the same nation when they served together.

Which attitude was more truly American in spirit, Laffite's openness or the progressively more stifling stance of the American legal system?

Why Being a Sea Captain is not a Realistic Career Today

Howard Pyle's "Walking the Plank" 1887 -- Harper's
from the wikipedia

Very few people will tell you that they mourn the passing of privateering. But sometimes when you ask a small child what he wants to be when he grows up, he will say "a pirate", and then all the grownups in the room laugh, and they suggest alternate careers, like being a lawyer or an accountant or a college professor.

But did you know that the privateering meme is so deeply ingrained into the American consciousness that when people who did grow up to teach in college and are now feeling the chains of wage slavery joke about alternative career choices, the specter of privateering immediately rears up its head?

“But I would have chosen what, actually—a sea captain?” Gregory wondered with a laugh. “Everyone is struggling.” 

This is a quote from a long article about the plight of adjunct lecturers. If you want to read the whole article, here is the link:

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/

So the question is: if you don't go for one of those middle class bastions of respectability in your career choice, if studying comparative literature or French language is not an option, what is left? And right off the bat this woman asks whether she should have trained to be a sea captain.

It may sound like a facetious response, but think about it: if you did want to be a sea captain, where could you go to make that dream come true? Join the Navy or the Coast Guard and become a government employee? Or work for a cruise line or an oil company? None of those positions offers the scope and personal satisfaction that being an independent sea captain used to bring. Why? Because the freedom that this line of work used to offer is gone. No more prize money. No more payment for shipments in silver and gold.  People do not own their businesses. By and large, they work for others, and they do it within the structure of collective entities, not sole proprietorships. And they get paid salaries, not a share of the loot.

 How many independent sea captains do you know? It's not just that privateering or cargo shipping are not as respectable as being a college professor. It's that none of us have any idea how one would go about it. If any child wanted to sign up as cabin boy (or girl), where would they go?  It's a career opportunity that is no longer open to anyone.

In Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain  we don't just witness the end of privateering. We see the beginning of the end for many other lines of work that used to involve sole proprietorships, from spinning and weaving to cabinet making. How many spinsters do you know -- and I am not talking about the term for an unmarried woman. How many weavers? Even among lawyers, those who work for others are outnumbered by those who have thriving independent practices.

The way salaries are paid has also undergone a massive change. While the common unskilled laborer in 1817 might have earned a dollar a day for his time, most were not paid for their time at all. On Jean Laffite's vessels, the share of each crew member in the prize money earned is spelled out in terms of a percentage of the take. Jean Laffite considered this an "egalitarian" arrangement, because everybody had an opportunity to earn more when the tour was more successful. But the down side was that they got nothing if there were no profits.

Back in the days of independent sea captains, people identified with the ventures they worked on, because they understood that if the ventures failed, they would not get paid at all. Today, people expect to be paid for their time. And when that happens, it turns out that the time of adjunct professors is worth less than the time of cashiers at McDonalds.

And yet.... It's really not all about money. People do seek a line of work in which they can have personal satisfaction, which is why the adjunct professors may complain, but they stay at those low paying jobs. They don't want to work at McDonalds, and they are willing to lose out on better pay to keep doing what they do.

But what if they could be sea captains, instead? I think then all bets would be off! When your teenaged child is looking for work this summer,  suggest looking into the cabin boy posts. Because that is where the money and the personal satisfaction can go hand in hand! After all, that's what Aaron Burr would have done if it were not for his Uncle Timothy who insisted he go to college to study Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

http://www.amazon.com/Theodosia-Pirates-Battle-Against-Britain/dp/1618790072/

http://www.amazon.com/Theodosia-Pirates-War-Against-Spain/dp/1618790099/

The Karankawa Indians

The Karankawa Indians lived along the Texas Gulf Coast. The first written account about them was by the explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in the 16th century who was taken captive by them. The Karankawa helped Jean Laffite recover after the hurricane in 1818. By 1860, just before the American Civil War, they no longer existed at all. Some say they had been completely exterminated. That is not necessarily the case. But any surviving members of their tribe must have been completely assimilated. Their way of life and their language were gone forever.

Karankawa encampment
image from http://www.indigenouspeople.net/images/guadalupe.jpg

According to Cabeza de Vaca, the Karankawa were very tall, well over six feet. The men went naked and were covered with tattoos, and their nipples and lower lips were pierced. They covered their bodies with alligator grease to keep themselves from being bitten by mosquitoes.

Without any modern technology or medical care, the Karankawa were an amazingly hardy people. Cabeza de Vaca, who served as their slave for a time, observed that they could go out in the heat of the sun completely unaffected. In the winter, they bathed in frozen water, breaking the ice with their bodies. The elements did not seem to trouble them at all.

The word Karankawa means "dog-lover", and the Karankawa always had dogs with them. The dogs were a fox and coyote hybrid, ad they shared in the food of the Karankawa.

The Karankawa used dugout canoes to fish and hunt for oysters, clams, mollusks,turtles and porpoises, as well as the more common types of fish. When they went inland, they also hunted for deer, bear, and ducks. They were nomadic and changed their location according to the seasons and where food was most plentiful at the time.

Some people accused them of being cannibals, but that is not true. In fact, when Cabeza de Vaca related that his shipwrecked crew resorted to eating dead members, the Karankawa were quite shocked. They would never eat their own people. They did occasionally eat certain organs of beaten enemies, but that was not as a food source. That was to magically gain the power of their enemies.

This is something we should think about for a moment, because it is a problem we are dealing with even now as we speak. People forget the true meaning of cannibalism. It means eating your own kind, feeding on members of your own group. It does not mean eating somebody who is outside your group.

Many people are confused about this, not the least the Buddhists and those "enlightened souls" who recognize that other living beings have feelings. There is the circle of life, where being feeds on being. And then there is the circle of those we offer protection and whom we consider our peers.

It is not cannibalism to eat a cow, even though we understand that cows have intelligence and feeling. It is cannibalism to eat a member of your own family, tribe or larger group with which you are identified, such as all humans. The circle that you extend your protection to and claim as your own may be small, or larger, but it cannot include all living things, because life feeds on life.

Here is an article written by my father, Amnon Katz, that explains this better:

http://aya-katz.hubpages.com/hub/Liberty-and-Justice-Why--How-and-for-Whom


This brings us back to the meaning of piracy. Piracy would mean preying on your own. Privateering means preying on enemy ships. The whole difference between the two is where you draw the circle. If the Spanish are your allies, then preying on them is piracy. If they are your legally acknowledged enemies, it is privateering.

When the government of the United States chased Jean Laffite away from Barataria and later from Galveston, they were choosing piracy over privateering, or cannibalism over eating their enemies' organs. They preferred to fund their military expansionist ambitions by taxing their own people, instead of allowing their friends and allies and their own people to prey on acknowledged enemies. They were siding with Britain and Spain against the American people.

And that in a nutshell is the difference between feeding on the in-group and feeding on those outside the circle.

If we go against cattle ranchers and independent farmers, if we save all the marine life, and give land only to large factories that will exploit it to the max, in the end there will be nothing left to eat but each other.

The Karankawa Indians were not exterminated because they ate too much, used too many resources or destroyed the land. It is because they were too modest in their aspirations that they were not allowed to exist at all. The same is true for Jean Laffite and his establishment, and the privateering way of life.

RELATED ARTICLES

http://www.indigenouspeople.net/karankaw.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karankawa_people

http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/info/newsroom/2014/February/Secretary_Jewell_Announces_Two_Solar_Projects_Approved_in_California__Nevada.html

http://benswann.com/hundreds-of-armed-feds-and-snipers-surround-nevada-cattle-ranchers-property-is-this-the-next-ruby-ridge/