When I visited Hobart last year I took a tour of the Sea Shepherd vessel the MY Steve Irwin which is registered under a Dutch flag but which flies the Jolly Roger (right). I was quite irked by the ship's Skull and Crossbones ensign and I confronted the nice young man giving me the tour. "Isn't that a pirate flag?" I asked him. "It is," he replied happily. "Oh, so I suppose you consider yourselves pirates then," I said somewhat annoyed. Why was I irked by a silly flag? Well, I come from a Royal Navy family: my dad was in the navy for twenty five years, I had a great uncle at Dunkirk and my brother is currently an officer in the Royal Navy. Piracy is a huge problem in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and ships sailing under the Black Flag are not cool in my book. But the young man had an answer for me. "We fly the Jolly Roger because we have sunk enemy boats," he explained. This completely disarmed me. I knew that since World War I Royal Navy submarines that have sunk vessels in combat are allowed to fly the Jolly Roger on the day that they return to their home port. It began as a goof (because the First Sea Lord had called the submarine service "piratical and damned un-British") and quickly became a tradition. The Jolly Roger was last flown - somewhat controversialy - in 1982 by the returning submarine HMS Conqueror after the Falklands War. The Sea Shepherds have embraced this tradition and when their vessels collide with whaling ships (the Shepherds claim that they do not deliberately ram ships) and the whaling ship is forced to be scuttled then that's another ship sunk. ...
Morally this is all pretty dodgy. On the one hand they say they are not terrorists or pirates because every ship they have sunk has been an "accident" but on the other hand they embrace the Jolly Roger and its connotations with piratical glee. The flag of course isn't a true skull and crossbones: a shepherd's crook is crossed with (presumably) Poseidon's trident under the skull and there are three dolphin motifs, but basically its the same. (For more on the history of the Jolly Roger, click here.)...
I was thinking about all this yesterday when I read in the New York Times that under pressure from the Sea Shepherd ships the MY Steve Irwin and the MY Bob Barker the Japanese Whaling Fleet has completely abandoned their Antarctic whale hunt for 2011, has steamed back to Japan, and has said that they may never return because of the Sea Shepherds "dangerous tactics". It therefore looks like the Sea Shepherds and their aggressive methods have triumphed where governments and more pacifist groups like Greenpeace have largely failed. Even today it seems the Black Flag can be intimidating.
12 comments:
They should replace the crook with an AK47 and some rocked propelled grenades. I believe they are the weapons of choice for the modern pirate. Its enough to me put off a yacting trip around the coast of Somalia.
Im pleased that someone is trying to save whales. That was good at least.
It's funny that this same kind of moral dilemma was just discussed on the Rachel Maddow show a few nights ago, though the adherents and detractors would likely be in opposite positions. She was asking the question whether, regardless about how anybody feels about abortion, we really wanted to live in a country where a procedure that is legal throughout the land by Supreme Court ruling can be made functionally unavailable by the terroristic tactics of murder and imtimdation. The unrepentant tone of the radical activists seems similar, though I bet both sides would deny it.
Actually, I have posted some Royal Navy trivia in my latest blog post, oddly enough.
Frankie
If I was going anywhere near the Gulf of Aden I'd want at least an RPG on board and better a shoulder launched TOW antitank missile.
Seana
I should have asked them where they drew the line. Is it ok to kill a Japanese sailor to defend a whale? I wonder what they would have said.
I think I could predict the answer, but morally, I think human casualty is the line.
Seana
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Who cares? The whalers have been called back to port... Does it matter what flag the organisation flies? A victory for the whales and maybe some peace for them at last.
I'm sure if your family were being slaughtered using explosive harpoons, shotguns and then cubed in a factory ship, a vessel coming in your defence would be a welcome sight... Regardless of the flag it flew.
Anon
Yes I take your point. I was just being me - perhaps overly persnickety about a symbol.
Symbols do matter of course, if they started flying the Nazi flag and named one of their ships after that famous animal rights activist and vegetarian Adolf Hitler, people would get upset.
Not that they would of course and before the comments pour in I am not putting Bob Barker and Steve Irwin on the same continuum.
No. Id take out a sailor to save a whale. Went to college in Portsmouth, plenty of em there, in no way an endangered species.
The problem I've got is that, yes the whales need to be saved, but can you imagine how much better society would be if this much effort was put into the homeless problem or poverty
Speaking of the homeless, there is a very thoughtful piece on their situation by William Vollman in the March Harpers. Being Vollman, he goes out and lives among them from time I'd link, but it doesn't take you to the full article.
While the animals depicted on the flag are merely outline drawings, still the one on the upper right side of the skull is clearly a whale, not a dolphin.
I too was at first surprised (shocked) to see the Jolly Roger style flag and the black paint jobs on the Sea Shepherd ships. But once I understood the psychology involved and the significance of it I was impressed once again again by that cagy old fox, Paul Watson. He does indeed understand human nature.
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