As surely as autumn follows summer, the latest contribution by Willam “Black Bill” Cubbins has been followed by a counter-post by Felisa Lloyd Matsumura-Tamaribuchi. In the interests of balance we present it to you here. Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi is a noted participant in the Anti-Pirate Freedom Flotilla, the Port Elizabeth Tribunal for Buccaneer Crimes, and the Boycott Booty campaign. She is a current Distinguished Fellow at Kaizoku University and is the current Tokugawa Chair of Shinobi Studies there.

Rather than feeling sorry for the plight of pirates who are being undermined and reduced in number by so-called foreign competition, we should rejoice in the fact that this vile way of life is slowly and naturally becoming extinct. Ninja activists like myself have long since held that there is no room in the modern economy for pirates or piracy, and the racist, disenfranchising, and bigoted attitudes they encourage.

Piracy is, no matter how “locally” and “sustainably” conducted, an inherently dishonorable and disenfranchising profession built around taking–taking of land, of lives, of booty. It has no value in any economy, much less an economy as bad as the one now facing the world. Activists in the pro-pirate media can talk all they like about “cherished” and “ancient” ways of life, but all pirates are nothing more than thieves and cockroaches.

Contrast that situation with that of the shinobi–or “ninja” to use a less-aware but more popular term. The silent, amoral assassins that make up the major ninja clans have value in any economy. As scouts, as spies, and as dealers of death to those who deserve it, ninjas have no peers–and those skills are needed more in a bad economy than in any other. While pirates only take, ninjas give back by cutting away the dead wood of society with a surgical knife. There will always be a need for the subtle art of honorable killing, and ninjas will always be there to provide it from the shadows.

This makes them unlike pirates, whose days are limited by both a world that increasingly sees them as the disenfranchising barbarians that they are. A skyrocketing ninja birth rate that will soon see the pirates’ one advantage, that of numbers, whittled down to nothing as they are hurled back into the sea.

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