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Areas where treasure ships could be found on routine runs, such as the Spanish Main, were key hunting grounds for pirates because of the yearly trips made by the Spanish treasure fleet between Portobello and Peru that were packed with potential loot.
— Pirateshipvallarta.com
“When the king brands us pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries. He doesn’t mean to make us criminals. He means to make us monsters.”
― C“No matter how many lies we tell ourselves, no matter how many stories we convince ourselves we’re a part of, we’re all just thieves awaiting a noose.”
― C
*
In one of the most exciting developments in a year of unexpected delights, we now find the practice of looting being normalized, contextualized and, indeed, exalted. It’s about time.
NPR served up a platform taller than the poop deck on a Spanish treasure galleon for one Vicky Osterweil, who has graced the world with a tome entitled In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. Read the interview. It’s most instructive.
Ms. Osterweil:
Often, looting is more common among movements that are coming from below. It tends to be an attack on a business, a commercial space, maybe a government building — taking those things that would otherwise be commodified and controlled and sharing them for free…
…It does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage — which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That’s looting’s most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.
It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.
…it also attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy. The very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country. Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.
Bartholomew Roberts, Edward Teach, Sam Bellamy or the fictional-yet-oh-so-real Captain Flint … they couldn’t have said it any better.
Pirates looting a ship they have captured. The trampling and the fighting went on all night long. For they stopped only to drink, and then fought again, like so many devils.
The Chiricahua Apaches and the Comanche had plundering down to a tactical and cultural art form. They could have utterly destroyed the settlements of northern Chihuahua and Sonora pretty much at will — but then who would have raised the livestock for them to loot? They cultivated Mexican settlements like a crop, and the Apaches sometimes cut deals with Chihuahua cities to fence goods they stole in Sonora.
“Plunder From Sonora” by Howard Terpning.
I have a solid cadre of friends who would make excellent pirates or raiders. Osterweil has opened up a lot of possibilities that seemed foreclosed for our generation. We’ve all mistakenly bought into silly civilizational norms that led us astray into having straight jobs and not stealing stuff that belongs to other people or exploitative corporations and such. But maybe it’s not too late for us — though we must recognize that we are all getting deep into middle age and looting can be strenuous.
I know the Urca de Lima is out there for us somewhere.
Stand and Deliver!
Working on it Max! Working on it!
Jim says
There is no level of Socratic logic that can be used to compete with that justification. There’s nothing there. So I won’t try. That is a typical college education.
But that is the current dilemma. People who are intelligent enough to grasp and appreciate logic and cultural civility are not inclined to run screaming through the neighborhood with a Molatov Cocktail. And that’s what makes them so dangerous. Defective is effective.
At this point in the game the only thing I could say is woe to the person that tries looting my property.
John M Roberts says
“If God had not meant for them to be sheared he would not have made them sheep.” Calvera, “The Magnificent Seven.” (1960)
Brilliant.
J.F. Bell says
Splendid!
I accept, with the collary that anyone so engaged who happens to meet his untimely end participating in the Great Property Redistributin’ Plan of 2020 be marked an acceptable loss the revolution, preferably without further notice. As the revolution is bigger than one man, memorials and tears so spent are a waste, no?
Further, that those of us disinclined to participate ought be spared the wails and moans of near relations after the fact. Had Junior been attacking his schoolwork with the same gusto he displayed against the liquor store and the corner-mart he might well have gone to college and cured cancer, but what-if is something of a moot point after jacketed hollowpoints have claimed the right-of-way.
Incidental to all this, I have some sinister plans for the building of a muzzleloading coach gun with unreasonably short barrels (no NFA paperwork on non-firearms and all). An exhilarating prospect, tempered only with the dismay that the modern world is direly short of coach traffic. Knocking over a Greyhound lacks the panache of way-laying carriages on a misty night, and the preponderance of armed citizenry these days makes the whole thing a dubious proposition from any angle.
This also provides an excuse to buy a tricorn hat and listen to Loreena McKennitt’s version of Noyes’ poem.
I don’t need the hat, but what the hell. The enterprise seems stupid and pointless without it.
Must have the hat. The angelic tones of Loreena McKennitt will evoke the correct mood. And we can meet the dreary realities of modernity with a storm of buck-and-ball.
deuce says
The Magnificent Mile or the Spanish Main: what’s the difference?
NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride cried out “Belay that talk!” walking back NPR’s interview with Osterweil:
“Publishing false information leaves the audience misinformed. On top of that, news consumers are watching closely to see who is challenged and who isn’t. In this case a book author with a radical point of view far to the left was allowed to spread false information,” McBride wrote.
Well, we still have Charles Vane’s gallows speech…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VMDGBp3uJM
Matt Taibbi swept Osterweil’s decks with chainshot. Took out the mainmast.
These and countless other details make In Defense of Looting more cringe-worthy in its own way than a Sean Hannity flag-and-mugshot insta-book could ever hope to be, but what makes it a perfect manifesto for the woke era is its pathos. Adherents to this theology are characterized by a boundless, almost Trumpian capacity for self-pity, even as they’re advocating setting you on fire. They can make wrapping fishwiches sound like digging coal in Matewan, being deprived of a smartphone like being whipped by Centurions, and they matter because everyone, including especially Democratic Party politicians, is afraid of the fallout that comes with telling them to shut the fuck up. So their “ideas” spread like cancer.