Perhaps, but there is one major difference. The pirate are breaking the law, the liars are not.
the liars are breaking international treaty law against whaling. they are lying they are only doing it for research. if they weren’ t lying they wouldn’t be breaking intl law. not everyone swallows their blatant lying.
I could believe that to keep up the ruse, they "donate" the whale parts to people who use the parts for "nutrition" studies. In return, the study recipients donate monies for furtherance of the research, ie, killing more whales...
...but as I said, they need to kill each other to end this "standoff"...