North Pole: If you believed ...

If …

The chorus goes – If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon (Lyrics by R.E.M) – well, we saw the footage, but no one to tell us where they got it from.

If I believe they’ll dig a hole at the pole, it probably would not be far off. I expected some level-headedness in dealing with the rush to the North Pole and the planting of the Russian flag in the abyss of the dark de-icing waters of the pole, but that is becoming far-fetched.

First the Canadian Prime Minister sets off on an Arctic trek then deploys military bases on their sovereign claims, now the Danes are setting off from a Norwegian port on a Swedish boat with the aid of a Russian ice-breaker to conduct a geological survey to decide who would take the spoils.

Changing the world and believing nothing

At the moment, the United States have not shown their hand, but I am getting prepared to see a fundamental realignment of latitudes and longitudes if not the obfuscation of time when nuclear weapons are set off on the North pole radically altering the rotational axis of the earth and turning the constituted order we have into a seriously inebriated wobble.

I am however not ready to believe anything that comes from any of those expeditions because the Russians in all their heroics presented footage from the Hollywood blockbuster – Titanic – as a record of their visit to the bottom of the sea.

It took a 13 year old – Waltteri Seretin from Finland who lives not too far from the North Pole to spot the deception; deceptions which seem to be pervading our screens all around the world lately; the presentation of footage as reality that it is not.

If you believed they put a flag at the pole, flag at the pole – who is going to find out if they really did? I lay claim to my hotel room, now I need a flag. I have no heart for this nonsense, it cannot go on.

References

This gas flare marks the North Pole

My Heart will go on – Celine Dion

The Arctic “Gold Rush”

This gas flare marks the North Pole

Planting a stiff flag

If civilisation ever does come to Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, it probably would not be in this century. I never thought anyone could go lower than a snake's belly but at the top of the world they got into their Kursk-like bubbles and descended 4.2 kilometres to the seabed under the North Pole and planted a rust-proof titanium metal Russian flag. [BBC News Story].

When Hillary (New Zealander) and Tenzing (Nepalese) planted a British and possibly a Nepalese flag at the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, it was not claimed as land belonging to the great British Empire and neither are the British taking tribute for the many that get dragged up or piggy-backed up the mountain.

Time might even come when getting to the summit would be a simple chopper ride from the sunny climes of the Indian subcontinent for a three-minute photo opportunity to hug someone in the late stages of pulmonary oedema and taking a last message back to loved ones becomes a more laudable quest than mountaineering.

Proximity for conservation

There is no doubt that Arctic and Antarctic facing countries and the some wayfaring countries of old have bases on the lands of the earth's poles and they all conduct research quite relevant to understanding how our stewardship of the world's resources and ecosystems might be failing.

But to then go round planting flags and laying claim to land or seabed just because you got there first in an area that is essentially in keep for the whole human race with the view of exploiting the resource for selfish national profit smacks of 15^th Century adventurism in the paraphrased words of the Canadians.

Results of the scrambles

It reminds one of Africa where the seeming orderly alignment of country borders in the 1880s is aptly called the Scramble for the Partition of Africa, nothing could have been more savage than to observe the savagery of seemingly cultured Europeans corralling "savages" into pens which are now called African countries.

Worse still was the pox and syphilis that Europeans brought to South and Central America that wiped out vast civilisations for which no reparation has been made or the indigenous tribes of North America whose only claim to the land is the footprints of reservations dotted around the landscape where the excess of gambling trade is the only economic development available.

The last insult is where the invaders having attained population superiority over the last few centuries of wiping out every vestige of the indigenes now have the effrontery to want to make English the National or even Official language of the United States.

Stop this nonsense

This race to the partition of the poles should and must stop, if anything must be exploited of those vast resources that have turned the energy megalomaniac Russians into resurgent but irrational global power brokers, it must be done under the auspices of the United Nations for the benefit of the whole world.

Frankly, the resources must be left well alone as the stability and equilibrium of our existence is already under threat from the abuse of the resources we already have access to, more of the same abuse for the accumulation of wealth to weald undue influence around the globe is not good for humanity and I hope that would become the civilisation of Russia.

This is the time for the United Nations to become seriously relevant and rubbish this quest without equivocation, before the poles become a centre of atrocious nuclear grandstanding between world powers whose coup de grace in terms of global warming might as well be a gas flare sited on the North and South poles.

In the name of science, misplaced national pride or apish chest beating, I am not impressed with this development. No, not at all.