What Century is This

Close your eyes and this could very well be the 16th Century. Barbarism is alive and well, living off the coast of the Somalia. Pirates have reappeared using the same tactics as their ancestors used in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries. Being what 21st economics are, the pirates are more interested in payment of ransom by the vessel's owners than the vessel's cargo so they continue to capture ships with out fear. They know the ship's value is to great and that no naval power would ever fire upon a foreign flagged ocean going vessel. So just how is the world to deal with pirates? No power wants to capture them out of fear of human rights violations. If they are imprisoned they will have to be repatriated which could set a terrible precedent, no country wants Captain Cook or Black Beard as a citizen. As far as I am concerned, pirates are enemies of the human race and should be dealt with accordingly. That's what happened in the 18th Century and the problem vanished for over two hundred years. When pirates were over come on the high seas they were dealt with by hanging them from their captures highest mast or by making them walk the plank to a watery death, legal judgment was never needed. Severe as this punishment may seem it was necessary to rid the high seas of pirates.
Piracy is hardly the only form of barbarism in today's world but it is certainly the most primordial. The inability of the world to deal with this problem says much about about how far the world has regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it over came barbarism in the past could inevitably lose sight of the meaning of civilization and the means of sustaining it.