is one of the principal explanations for North African piracy, the scarcity of capital as the basis

for the generally thriving commercial economies characteristic of Europe and the United States

encouraged the Barbary States to acquire species, which means coins, with which to purchase

imported food. Many of these funds were derived from piracy for seized goods

could be sold or consumers, prisoners could be exploited for their labor or ransomed in tribute,

could be exacted from foreign governments in exchange for immunity from capture, yada yada,

rulers continuance and power, partly depended on the steady income he derived from

tribute and the regular acquisition of goods and people, which is a system fed on the wholly

unwholesome diet of extortion and white slavery. So it's a dirty business, but it's kind of the

same thing. They're developing an economy, right? And the way they do it is through piracy, which we thumb our nose at abroad here in the United States, you know, especially the unsavory slavery stuff. But as we mentioned earlier, we were doing the same thing in spades, right? We had a much more industrialized slave trade than they did. And that we had, you know, all kinds of superstructural justifications for that. And we're looking down on these people as as barbarians when they they do basically the same thing.

So it's just, it's just two developing countries having a trade war, basically, is how I would

view the, the Barbary Wars.

That's my, that's my thumbnail Marxist analysis of it.

Sure.

I mean, I don't want to make like the fucking hackist observation of all time here,

but I'm going to because I think it's hacky because it's true,

which is that you know, you're talking about like how in the 2000s and the early,

up until like 2012 or whatever, there was retrospective on this where the language of it because of the Iraq war

is, oh, this is like terrorism, right?

And, you know, that's because that's how we're justifying the wars that happened post-9-11

and all that sort of stuff, is by using this amorphous term of terrorism that's just conveniently really racist and kind of

implies some slavophobia and stuff like that. But, you know, it's subtle and it converts it or

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