Theoria

Apologies to whoever actually looks at this: I have been out of town since Sunday in (what appears as counter-intuitive) to prepare to move. Computer access — and the desire to write anything — has been intermittent at best. What is ‘at best’, however, is the factory outlet at Hershey’s in Smith Falls. After picking out what I was sure was at least $50 worth of chocolate, I went to the cash only to find out they wanted about $7.50 tax included for what easily ten pounds of junk food. Never will I buy chocolate at a grocery or convenience store again.

There are a couple of things I wanted to return to in that article on pirates and terrorism by Burgess I discussed in my last post. I decided to leave out the comments as the post was already getting too long. This goes towards my uneasiness with declaring terrorists as hostis homini generis.

Burgess begins his discussion of pirates with the following paragraph:

AT FIRST GLANCE, THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PIRACY AND TERRORISM seems a stretch. Yet much of the basis of this skepticism can be traced to romantic and inaccurate notions about piracy. An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism. Viewed in its proper historical context, piracy emerges as a clear and powerful precedent.

It is the third sentence that is of most interest: “An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism”. Unfortunately he leaves most of these parallels implicit. Burgess writes the following description of pirates:

The pirates of the so-called golden age, as historian Hugh Rankin described them, were “a sorry lot of human trash.” Coming from the lowest tier of the English merchant navy, they struck indiscriminately in ferocious revenge against the societies that they felt had condemned them. Often these disenchanted sailors cast their piratical careers in revolutionary terms. The 18th-century English legal scholar William Blackstone defined a pirate as someone who has “reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature by declaring war against all mankind,” while another account tells of one Edward Low, common seaman, who “took a small vessel, [hoisted] a Black Flag, and declared War against all the World.” Pirates gave their ships names that reflected this dark purpose: Defiance, Vengeance, New York’s Revenge, and even New York Revenge’s Revenge.

Perhaps the most telling statement of the pirates’ motives comes from a pirate named Black Sam Bellamy. To a captured merchant captain, he boasted, “I am a free prince, and have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a 100 sail of ships and an army of 100,000 men in the field.”

This was more than bravado. Historian Marcus Rediker has suggested that it indicates a new “pirate democracy” that drew its revolutionary principles from its perceived war against civilization and cast itself as civilization’s antithesis. Some pirate bands even had constitutions. The “pirate articles” that became commonplace in the early 18th century purported to lay out in legal terms both the rights and obligations that members in a pirate band enjoyed. An excerpt from articles of Captain John Phillips, drafted in 1723, even provides a sort of liability insurance for injured comrades.

Burgess creates an interesting series over the course of these three paragraphs. First, pirates are the lowest of the low; the most disenfranchised; they chose a career path that leads to certain death — i.e., piracy as capital offense — in order to enter into war against “all mankind” or “all the world”. Burgess, however, is happy to leave the point stated simply: it isn’t the world understand in a particular way or “mankind” or “civilization” understood in a particular way; rather, it is the entire world and everyone living in it. Pirates aren’t, as Burgess tells us, opposed to a particular constituted juridical order — one, for instance, that would kill them for taking their disenfranchisement to its logical conclusion — but are rather opposed to order as such. This is interesting given his second paragraph: he cites Sam Bellamy who claims, by virtue of capturing and commanding a ship, to be on the same level as anyone else possessing means of violence. Bellamy describes himself in two ways: as a “free prince” and as having “authority”. Clearly, Bellamy isn’t opposed to order at all: he understands order for what it is and wants a part of it. Finally, we come to the most troubling aspect of piracy for Burgess: “pirate democracy”. Not only do some bands of pirates organize themselves around constitutions and democratic principles, they also create forms of social welfare approximately two hundred and some years before comparable schemes are governmentalized in the European states.

With this rather odd discussion of pirate democracy and an opposition to the constituted order, Bellamy creates the following parallel between pirates and terrorists:

The corollaries between the pirates’ “war against the world” and modern terrorism are profound and disturbing. With their vengeful practices, pirates were the first and perhaps only historical precedent for the terrorist cell: a group of men who bound themselves in extraterritorial enclaves, removed themselves from the protection and jurisdiction of the nation-state, and declared war against civilization. Both pirates and terrorists deliberately employ this extranationality as a means of pursuing their activities. The pirates hid in the myriad shoals and islands of the Atlantic. The terrorists hide in cells throughout the world. Both seek through their acts to bring notice to themselves and their causes. They share means as well—destruction of property, frustration of commerce, and homicide. Most important, both are properly considered enemies of the rest of the human race.

Suddenly the revolutionary impulse, the democracy, and the social welfare has disappeared. Pirates are suddenly reduced to the negative moment of the “war against the world” (where ‘world’ is undefined and taken as legitimate — a questionable claim at best). The positive reconstructive and constituent moment is lost in the comparison with terrorists and this, I think, rather revealing of the entire approach to the “War on Terror”: the specificity of the revolt (“against the world”) must be erased so as to erase the more important element — the possibility of a “pirate” or “wild” democracy. A democracy and a constituent power that legitimately challenges the constituted power — a power even those in power will call corrupt at any opportunity.

More on deterritorialization later.