Blowing the Wogs Out of the Water

I found myself cheering on the Indian Navy as it sunk a pirate ship during the piracy crisis of late '08 (never mind that the boat turned out to be a Thai fishing vessel) and thinking about how much it would cost to put Blackwater guys with RPGs on every ship or to simply slap a 5" gun turret on the freighters. About blowing the kaffirs out of the water and sending them scurrying back to shore. And then I think about why I'm so eager to take the fight to these Red Sea raiders, these brown buccaneers. Isn't it a form of racism? Is there anything that makes us different from stuffy peers in a London club in the 1900s, fulminating about the brazen wogs (Sepoys, Boxers, Afghans, Zulus) and how they need the taste of good English iron to put them in their place?

Could it be that with our own empire crumbling, the industrialized world going to hell in a handbasket, the American economy settling into its own dust, that we approach the piracy problem with a special verve? Like the tyrannical schoolyard bully with the abusive father and the alcoholic mother?