Poles apart

On 16th April 1940, Osbert Lancaster, the master of the one-frame 'pocket' cartoon, satirised the positions of Poland and Denmark in The Daily Express.  He portrayed a group of penguins speaking into a microphone, amidst an icy wasteland, announcing how they were maintaining strict neutrality and would "defend our territorial integrity at all costs."  Of course, by this point Poland and Denmark had been overrun making their previous pronouncements very hollow.  Lancaster was also suggesting that the only safe place in the world at this time was the South Pole because there are no penguins in the Arctic.
This geo-biological fact makes for interesting imagery in a picture meme that is going viral amongst Russian internet users.  A mass of huddled penguins are 'holding up' (photoshopped) banners and placards stating "Crimea is ours!" and "Alaska next!"  It is Dali-esque in its conceptual surrealism.  Either that or the person who created it is an idiot and there are plenty of idiots who don't know that penguins don't naturally reside in the northern hemisphere, let alone Alaska.  10 million idiots can't be wrong!  Err... The furthest that penguins stray from the Antarctic are the most southerly tips of South America, Africa and New Zealand.  Given Russia is often identified as a Brown bear, couldn't something been done with polar bears, caribou or Arctic foxes, who all range in or around Alaska?  No let's have the non-threatening, cold-loving heroes of Happy Feet.  Hey, it's all ice, isn't it?
The success of this meme is borne out partly by an online petition and partly also by Russia (in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church) petitioning to request an island in the Aleutian range as their sole property, motivating many Russians to think about reacquiring Alaska, even though it has been part of the USA (territory, then state) for 147 years, not far shy of the 171 years Crimea was under Moscow's tutelage (which is 'why' it was an 'essential' component of Russia).  Why stop in Alaska; why not claim Washington state and Oregon, all the way down to northern California where a few outposts survived until the early nineteenth century?
Alaska is oil-rich now but when it was sold at a cut-price discount (a cent an acre) negotiated by William Seward, Secretary of State in 1867, it was known as 'Seward's Folly' and 'Seward's Icebox'.  But such is the many who are giddy from being drunk with revanchism, anywhere which was part of not just the USSR but Imperial Russia is seen as fair game.  35,000 digital signatures have been placed on the White House website for a proposal (in stilted English) demanding that Alaska revert to the control of Moscow.  Never mind that it has been uncovered that this petition was created by a company with close links to the Kremlin, it takes 100,000 submissions before Jay Carney, Barack Obama's spokesman, has to respond.
Currently, Ukraine is the principal occupation of the Putin administration.  If a little cheek about Alaska can distract from their antagonism towards Kiev, so much the better.  Just as Putin said that Russia had no designs on Crimea two weeks before he sent his special forces in to secure the strongpoints, Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, is on the record as saying that his government has no special demands on eastern Ukraine (though he isn't part of the Putin inner cabal).  Still the line goes about fascists and extremists - the Maidan mob - calling the shots throughout western and central Ukraine.  It is all reminiscent of 70 years ago today when the Soviet Union really was fighting fascists rather than make-believe ones.  As Soviet troops poured into Romania across the River Prut, Vyacheslav Molotov, Soviet Foreign Commissar, informed western press correspondents on the night of 2nd April 1944 (and printed in 3rd April newspapers) that the USSR had no intention of acquiring Romanian territory.  The current offensive was merely "The first step in the restoration of the frontier established by the Treaty of 1940," which was itself a land-grab of Bessarabia from Romania permitted under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  Molotov declared further that "the entry into Rumania [as it was then known] is dictated solely by military necessity and is in no way [my italics] aimed at the integrity of Rumanian territory or the existing social order."  Well, by 1947, under the auspices of the stationed Red Army, Romania was firmly under the control of the minority communists favourable to Moscow but even before that, in 1945, the USSR announced that Northern Bukovina (which had never been controlled by Russia) would henceforth be amalgamated into the USSR.  Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose and that is a meme with which I can agree.