According to Fox News Somali pirates have kept some of their hostages even after being paid a multi-million dollar ransom.
NEW DELHI — The owners of a hijacked ship said Saturday that they were perplexed by the continuing detention of some of their crew members by Somali pirates despite their paying a multimillion-dollar ransom.
Pirates released the ship and some of the crew on Friday. But a Somali pirate told The Associated Press afterward that the Indian crew members’ hostage ordeal is being prolonged in retaliation for the arrests of more than 100 Somali pirates by the Indian Navy.
*sigh* How hard is it to figure out that paying ransom only guarantees the taking of hostages? Obviously they do not know their Kipling:
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: –
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Kipling wrote about appeasement, eh? Funny how, outside of Riki-Tiki-Tavi, both my high school and college education never introduced me to Kipling—and I’m an English major. I suppose that would have meant risking a demonstration of the merits of addressing human nature from a non-Leftist perspective . . . and also the merits of British imperialism. Time to pick up a Kipling anthology and read my way out of my mis-/dis-education.
If you’ve never read kipling you’ve missed a great deal. He said so much so well. Click the above link which will take you to the above poem and an anthology of Kipling’s work.
i’m in the same boat oak—
another fellow english major
one thing i’ve done recently (as i never got rid of any of my schoolbooks) was to comb over some of the anthologies of american literature (curious now the subject matter that was chosen by the teacher) as giant swaths of the curriculum was completely shunned
for example:
norton anthology american lit
subject: early american literature
school material—> anne bradstreet, mary rowlandson, sarah kemble knight…
ignored material——> benjamin franklin, john adams, thomas paine, thomas jefferson, federalist papers, etc…
It would seem I’m the odd man out…
I too majored in English Literature, and while Kipling was not a part of my “Major” he was a part of the professional development and leadership curricula. Then again, when asked where I went to college I frequently answer NA.
BS, English Literature
United States Naval Academy, 1987
Being introduced to Rudyard Kipling would expose you to a man that was a racist bigot. Therefore, it was your school’s duty to protect you from the wisdom of appeasing pirates by a racist who hated Blacks and Indians.
The bigotry of the above is not just exposed but flaunted by the ignorant parroting of the phrase a racist who hated Blacks and Indians.
That was the party line of the campus left beginning in the 60s. Had ‘Chris Bolts’ read any measurable amount of Kipling, he/she’d have seen the sympathy for those colonized populations, and the story after story where they outsmart and outhumanitize their English colonists.
Better to give up the reflexive yowling of ‘racist’, than to expose the wilful ignorance that underlies it.
Someone can’t detect SARCASM.
The amazing thing is how infinitely stupid that idea was. Rudyard Kipling was a man who wrote:
* Gunga Din, about a man who was a despised servant, treated very badly by his so-called betters, the British soldiers of the Raj, but who bravely saved those soldiers and died in the effort. What’s his last line? “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”
* Or the Mother Lodge:
We’d Bola Nath, Accountant,
An’ Saul the Aden Jew,
An’ Din Mohammed, draughtsman
Of the Survey Office too;
There was Babu Chuckerbutty,
An’ Amir Singh the Sikh,
An’ Castro from the fittin’-sheds,
The Roman Catholick!
We ‘adn’t good regalia,
An’ our Lodge was old an’ bare,
But we knew the Ancient Landmarks,
An’ we kep’ ‘em to a hair;
An’ lookin’ on it backwards
It often strikes me thus,
There ain’t such things as infidels,
Excep’, per’aps, it’s us.
* Or the Ballad of East and West, with
They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on leavened bread and salt:
They have taken the Oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.
The Colonel’s son he rides the mare and Kamal’s boy the dun,
And two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.
And when they drew to the Quarter-Guard, full twenty swords flew clear –
There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer.
“Ha’ done! ha’ done!” said the Colonel’s son.
“Put up the steel at your sides!
Last night ye had struck at a Border thief –
to-night ’tis a man of the Guides!”
… which, in case you haven’t read it, is talking about the English and Afghan sons of two great enemies.
Like Mark Twain (who Kipling greatly admired) the fact is Kipling was less of a racist than the people who continue to insist that “people of color” need special advantages to compete.
clinton’s failure in somalia is responsible for all these buffons in rubber dinghys
we should have never been in somalia in the first place but when the black hawks went down there should have been instantaneous and overwhelming reciprocation
I should also note that Kipling is well known (and not infrequently quoted, or quoted in part with an expected response [to Kiple]) amongst the officer and senior NCO corps of the U. S. Armed Forces (and the Commonwealth forces, or so I have heard).
Just a man in Khaki kit…
I’ve known very few military men who didn’t have a deep and abiding love for Kipling.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!
I deeply adored Kipling, and read every single story and most of the poetry when I was in high school … the library had a complete collection; even in the late 196os, they haden’t thought to protect our delicate sensibilities from him.
So I didn’t mind being an English major in college, and having him virtually ignored – I had already made up my mind that he and Mark Twain between them were giants, and lesser 20th century writers were just running around like ants on the floor beneath them.
I came to Kipling’s poetry somewhat late, in the Marines, but I still have deep affection for it, in fact, it’s about the only poetry I do read.
I have respect for the likes of Maya Angelou, but she speaks neither to me nor for me. Kipling does.