Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

I mean Modern Day Pirates at least have never been romanticized, afair.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are in Somalia or other locations.

It's also worth nothing that Britain's main issue with pirates was that they weren't plundering for them.

Elizabethan England made heavy use of privateers - it's what you call pirates when the government hires them - in its wars with Spain.

It goes even further than that. Blackbeard and the majority of other pirate captains of the Golden Age of Piracy are EX-PRIVATEERS. Britain prepped for an enormous war with Spain and recruited/impressed thousands of sailors for Queen Anne's War. Many of these sent out as privateers.

Then...the war kinda just ended.

So it became 10K or so trained sailors that were furthermore sent out to be pirates and then told they were being fired.

Oh and not to raid the Spanish anymore.

@Kayek: I have not, actually, thanks! My main source is Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates, an old favorite non-fiction book of mine that tells about the rise and fall of what could be considered the first Republic in the Americas: The Pirate Republic of Nassau, which was essentially (for a brief period of time, around a decade if you are generous) a hide-out of pirate crews that became a republic where the crews elected their captains and the captains decided what to do amongst themselves. Basically a crime-based liberal representative democracy, of sorts. It's a very interesting story and a very interesting book, to my knowledge the most in-depth ever written on the subject.

These two vids don't feature any information actually not contained in the book, but they're very useful as quick summaries for quick checking, particularly the Quartermaster vid on the general economics of a crew and how they're paid. So thanks.

On the topic, by my reckoning (and Colin Woodard's reckoning) Charles is essentially correct. Black Flag actually had Colin Woodard as a historical consultant, so it's one of the fairer shakes Caribbean piracy got in current media (though they do try to make the conflict slightly less gray when it come to Blackbeard, who gets a hero upgrade, and Ben Hornigold, who gets a villain upgrade, but I digress).

Republic of Pirates goes in a lot of thoroughly researched detail about the sociological nature of pirates. As mentioned, merchant and royal navies both were totalitarian nightmares of exploitation, torture and squalid living conditions where crewmen were paid a dime and could be mistreated and tortured in any number of ways for minor breaches of conduct. What isn't mentioned here is that this is just a surface description because A) it was a incredibly common practice to simply kidnap dozens of unwilling people from the streets to crew merchant and royal ships. This is why people so often jumped ship to piracy when pirates arrived, because quite a few of them were press-ganged into servitude aboard ships. B) Sometimes the employers would simply refuse to pay their employees, and if they did, it was a legal suicide mission (what exactly are you going to do, sue the british crown?) C) even when the crew was paid, the employers had any number of legal loopholes to chip away at their pittance (taxing the pay with damages to the ship and the like). All the navies of the European powers (merchant and not) were basically dystopian horrors at the high sea, and this is why it was so easy for Pirates to find members among them.

As a result, pirate crews were incredibly democratic and egalitarian for their time. Woodard estimates that around 25% of pirate crews were formed by slaves and former slaves, for example, plus the not-uncommon occurrence of women. Hell, the Republic of Nassau was said to be one of the most egalitarian places in the Americas due the more mixed make-up of Pirate crews. As mentioned, pirates also operated by pirate codes, and these codes contained some surprisingly modern concepts (like vast compensation for lost limbs) and things like "if you rape anybody, you will be fucking hanged on the mast".

The other, often overlooked, note here is that all the riches being transported were evidently taken from colonies and thus it was already stolen from oppressed countries. The Pirates weren't exactly redistributing all that wealth to the colonies in question but their more egalitarian model enabled that at least it'd be taken off imperial hands (see the 25% slaves and former slaves stat above). Plus, as also mentioned, the Golden Age of Caribbean Piracy was kickstarted by the use of pirates-for-hire by the nautical empires.

Pirates of the Republic weren't saints. You have the like of Charles Vane, who was a seafaring torturing murderous psychopath (as very well-depicted in the aforementioned Black Flag), but you also had on the opposite end of the spectrum "Black" Sam Bellamy, "Prince of Pirates", who was the Romantic ideal of every pirate in fiction since: a man born in poverty and misery aboard the royal navy who struck out to piracy, always said to treat prisoners with utmost grace and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, liberating many slaves along the way (and recruiting them to his "Merry Men" as they called themselves following the Robin Hood motifs) and talking a lot about bringing greedy, exploitative Empires to heel.

Republic of Pirates include the occasion where he chatted a bit with a Captain of a crew he captured, trying to convince him to join his crew (as many of the men under him did).

(bolded for my emphasis on that amazing sentence right there).

As mentioned, the Pirates were never saints and they did have to kill people every now and then, though as mentioned they preferred to get by simply on intimidation, if that failed they went for cannonfire, and if that failed they went to board by which point the enemy ship was indeed likely fucked (because by that point the pirates would be pretty pissed) but that was incredibly rare. It just shows up a lot in fiction because it's more exciting to see the crews duking out in the deck. Torturing or mistreating the crew captured was often against their direct self-interest, as they'd often be in need of manpower to recruit.

I think what a lot of people end up overlooking is simply how nightmarish the European colonial empires were. The entire structure, top to bottom, was built on human corpses and exploitation, to the point it can read as pretty silly when I read people discussing "why should we be rooting for the pirates in x rather than the forces of law and order?" when said "forces of law and order" are genocidal slavers. Like gee, why do you think, my man?

On the topic of Piracy in Somalia: I've been meaning to read up on that after I finish my trip down the Caribbean memory lane. One thing I do know is that they are borne of inhumane conditions and sociopolitical tyranny (sound familiar?) brought upon by Somalia's unstable government and the fact industrial pollution is killing off their main source of employment by wiping out fishing grounds. Pop culture rarely picks up on those traits per see, but Captain Phillips (of all places) actually does focus on that, showing the Pirates as ultimately tragic figures victims of their enviroment. The movie ultimately doesn't focus on that too much past the first third, but it's still very much present.

It even features the memorable dialogue that summarizes the whole thing when Phillips asks: "There has to be something else to do with your life other than robbing and killing people" and the Pirate Captain simply responds, sadly "Maybe in America, Irish. Maybe in America."

Should be noted that many pirates profited from the slave trade, and many actively worked in it. To a privateer especially, a slave owned by a hostile nation is just another resource to be seized.

Yes and no.

The world's most successful pirate, Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) and villain of AC:BF was a slaver as well as pirate. However, there were not that many slave related pirates because the trades were simply incompatible.

Of course. Privateers as a concept are basically a whole other ballgame, since their functioning was a midway point between piracy and the royal navy. The most famous privateers of all time Sir Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake both profited off slavery pretty charitably (Morgan even ended his life as a plantation owner). The "father of Caribbean piracy" Henry Avery and the proto-founder of the Nassau Republic was also a pretty avid slaver and mass-murderer as Charles alluded.

But we are more more specifically talking about the Pirates (not Privateers, though some pretended to be) of Nassau of the early 18th century. Blackbeard, Benjamin Hornigold, Calico Jack, Charles Vane, Henry Jennings, Black Sam Bellamy, Stede Bonnet, Anne Bonney, Mary Read, and some others. And for those, the slave trade was just not much of a thing. For some it might have been moral causes (which I suspect to be the case for the aforementioned Black Sam Bellamy) but on the whole the general conclusion is that the slave trade simply didn't mesh with the Nassau pirate economy all that well. Possibly due a lack of nearby markets or difficulty in transporting slaves (pirate ships being, of course, very hard places to transport anything living that's not the crew).

From that list I threw out I know only of Stede Bonnet (used to be a plantation owner, but seems to have had no role in the slave trade once he became a pirate), Hornigold (acted as a privateer escort for a slave cargo ship during the War of Spanish Succession, but again nothing during his actual pirate activities) and Blackbeard (is reported to have sold a few slaves once as a pirate and recruiting the rest, but the source is his alleged personal diary which is literally lost to time as it disintegrated, so we have to take the word of it at face value). It just doesn't seem to have been a big focus of the Pirate Republic, probably for economic reasons.

Edited by Gaon on Jul 17th 2020 at 5:07:13 AM

There's also the fact that slavery was effectively something all the rich practiced after a certain point in this, which meant that the association between piracy and slavery is a mistake the same way that associating hedge funds and organized crime would be today. Yes, some mobsters have hedge funds but the wealth of the slave trade's Moral Event Horizon went squarely into building the basis of the British Empire.

Starting with America.

Indeed, the people who ended piracy were more likely to be heavily involved in the slave trade.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 17th 2020 at 5:16:24 AM

Here's a good pair of videos for discussing the reality of gangster movies:

I'm reading a book about the origins of the mafia and it makes an interesting claim about how mafia movies and tv shows are often not necessarily wholly false or detached from reality, but rather stylized. A famous mafioso who squealed and revealed a lot of information about how the modern mafia worked remarked that he liked The Godfather, but found the film's affectation of having people kiss Don Corleone's hand to be unrealistic.

The best view of what the ground level mafia is like is probably Mean Streets — just a bunch of dudes shaking people down for money, wandering around, getting shitfaced, and killing the occasional person, but otherwise just being pretty aimless. It's like a ganger Seinfeld, the mob movie about nothing.

Actually, one of the most interesting things I ever read was a report of an FBI agent (I hate that I'm blanking on his name) that said that the RL mafia actually has a imitative relationship with mafia media. According to him, he used to monitor the mafia via wiretaps and a few months after the Godfather movie, wiseguys were suddenly discussing "honor" and "respect" that previously never discussed anything more than cash and sex.

This is something that apparently is actually continuing and common in that mobsters love watching mobster movies and occasionally adopt lingo as well as practices they see on TV. They like the allure and the glamour that Hollywood gives their profession that is otherwise fictionalized. He speculated that this actually went all the way back to Prohibition and the earliest gangster movies.

Edit:

The Guardian did do an article on it: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/sep/29/mafia-gangster-films-godfather

Another thing is that Henry Hill said this actually saved his life as he got outed after his testifying but Goodfellas saved his life. Despite being a rat, the mobsters he'd testified against were gone and everyone else in organized crime loved the movie so much they let it slide.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 17th 2020 at 10:49:22 AM

The original Sicilian mafia did care a lot about "honor" and "respect", but those were rather self-serving concepts for them (basically "don't talk to cops, be discreet, respect other mobsters, and do what your bosses tell you", among other things) . I don't know if that kind of lingo was widespread with the american-italian mafia around the time The Godfather movie came out, but if it wasn't you could see the movie as repopularizing old-school terms the mafia used to rationalize their ideas and actions.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jul 17th 2020 at 2:02:25 PM

That's similar to the relationship between the yakuza and yakuza cinema. I'm not really well-versed enough to say much on it, but a ton of yakuza films popularized the ideas that the yakuza were "the new samurai" upholding values of honor and humanity.

Oddly, I was about to post about that. Having read some books on them, the Yakuza actively cultivated the image of Friendly Neighborhood Gangster and Robin Hood types.

I have been increasingly put off by this kind of media. I have similar reservations about those damn Netflix and Hulu films that sensationalize con artists like Elizabeth Holmes or Billy Mc Farland.

The history of crime has always been a fascination of mine, because it always has that sort of ropewalk between truth and fiction. Crime, by definition, is a shadowy activity that doesn't tend to leave a paper trail because no one involved with crime has any incentive to actually leave one (in fact erasing your own history of crime is one of the main aspects of crime, i.e covering your own trail). The shadowy mystique lends itself well to myths and legend. In turn, this obscure nature of the inner functioning of crimes brought upon by the absence of primary sources means that crime historiography has to rely on hearsay and the aforementioned legends to form any sort of complete picture. And in turn crime itself has a direct incentive to cultivate those legends, because the blurring of fact and fiction benefits the obliqueness that allows crime to exist in the first place.

It's a sort of history study Ouroboros eating its own tail. There's always the fog of history in other fields, but most other fields have an active incentive to keep tabs of their own work (e.g war historiography is going to base itself on troop documents and accounts of "military bravery"). Crime simply doesn't and everything changes with it.

We were just discussing piracy, and piracy is another example of that. The absence of information on pirates led to hearsay and legend, and pirates themselves started to incorporate these legends into themselves, e.g the titular Republic of Pirates in Nassau I've gone on about was inspired by the Madagascar Pirate Republic of Libertatia, which almost definitely didn't exist and was a fanciful legend fed by European newspapers, but enough men believed in it and it became real in Nassau. I've also read a bit on the early Gangs of 19th Century New York (made famous by Gangs of New York) and London (made famous by Sherlock Holmes), which likewise fed off on the tall tales told about them and shifted to hew closer to those tales.

History of crime is like American Gods: Belief is everything. As Media and Technical Boy discuss in the live-action show: "They believed it was true and it was." "Not everyone believed." "They didn't need to. Just enough. Maybe just one."

To be fair, I think the Elizabeth Holmes documentary works like the Enron documentary in that it shows just how easily capitalism can be abused. When Donald Trump dies, he'll need a two parter about how essentially is entire career was about convincing people he was rich when he was chronically one of the most in-debt men alive and managed to waste 600 million dollars.

It's interesting to find this in a video game of all things but the Yakuza video games are actually kind of like Spec Ops: The Line in that they're about the media of their subject versus their subject itself. A major theme of the games (particularly 0) is that Kiryu joined the Yakuza because he was impressed with the legend of the Yakuza as honorable warriors as well as his image of his Parental Substitute.

However, the games repeatedly bring home that the Yakuza are Just a Gangster and there's no high minded ideals beyond making as much money as possible.

Oddly, one of the promotions for Yakuza 3 was getting them to play Yakuza 3 and comment. Their comments are well worth a read and pretty much hint at the fact, "This is fun and all but nowhere near sleazy or horrifying enough."

https://boingboing.net/2010/08/10/yakuza-3-review.html

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 18th 2020 at 12:08:52 PM

The above linked videos about gangster movies led me to this one about how gangster movies were deconstructed over the years. It discusses how gangsters in movies are glamorized as power fantasies (children of immigrants who rise to the top in the criminal world) even when criticized i.e Scarface and Bonnie & Clyde. It's 35 minutes long and also features some discussion about the way women in gangster movies are depicted.

Warning for discussion of rape and scenes of rape @27:36.

Edited by windleopard on Jul 18th 2020 at 7:57:32 AM

Scarface actually had a video game What If? sequel, that give in completely in Power Fantasy aspect and let the Villain Protagonist have a happy ending (rebuilding his criminal empire and killing all his rivals). Which completely ruins the point of the movie, or so i think.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jul 18th 2020 at 6:23:17 PM

Its for people who genuinely missed the point of the film,it had a Misaimed Fandom for reason

Or just not giving a damn about it, people can get a point and still throw away if entrainment is there.

is kinda of a sad fact of fiction.

The thing about the mafia specifically is that there were actually fairly detailed records of how their inner workings functioned (secret brotherhood with a specific initiation ritual, structure, running on extortion rackets, escaping consequences for murder with bribery and intimidation, etc), but the mafia was so ingrained in sicilian society and italian politics that very little was done over the years to actually combat them. A lot of people didn't think the mafia was an actual organized crime ring (or at least, not as big as it truly was), or just turned a blind eye because they were bribed or intimidated. Often there was the nonsensical excuse that "mafia" was just some character trait of sicilians as being self-important and larger than life.

Because there was so much ambiguity it was hard to know whose accounts were even worth trusting. It was only with the 1992 Capaci bombing that the modern understanding of the Mafia as a legitimate dangerous thing was accepted by everyone and a modern historiography of the mafia could be properly written.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jul 18th 2020 at 1:16:57 PM