US Preparing to go to War With Putin Over Alaska: Alaskan Seperatists Petition To Leave US And Become Part Of russia (video and picture)

Russia’s “far abroad”: Alaska

Much of the concern over where Putin might seek to march his soldiers next has focused on what Russian nationalists call their “near abroad,” i.e. the parts of the former Soviet Union outside the Russian Federation.  But these are not the only formerly Russian-ruled parts of the world, if Moscow wants to get truly ambitious in their irredentism.  There is alsoRussian America, i.e. Alaska, which Czar Alexander II sold to the United States in 1867.  Now there is a new petition on the White House’s “We the People” online petition page titled “Alaska Back to Russia.”  Placed there on March 21st, the petition gathered over 10,000 signatures in three days.  At this writing (March 25th), it has 24,129, almost a quarter of the way to the 100,000 required for an obligatory response from the White House.  As reported in this blog at the time, this petition site was the forum for a raft of declarations of independence from the U.S. following the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012.  Not surprisingly, most of those were from the former Confederate States of America, but all states were represented (plus the Republic of Molossia and the State of Jefferson), and only Texas’s petition reached 100,000.  (Obama’s answer: fuhgeddaboudit.)
 

The good old days—at least according to 24,129 Alaskans

It is hard to know what to make of the “back to Russia” petition.  The petitions are posted anonymously, as are the signatures, but the location of the originating computer is recorded, and this one was posted by someone in Anchorage.  That doesn’t mean he or she is an American citizen.  In fact, this petition’s tortured syntax can well be imagined as that of a Russian with partial knowledge of English.  It reads: “Groups Siberian russians crossed the Isthmus (now the Bering Strait) 16-10 thousand years ago.  Russian began to settle on the Arctic coast, Aleuts inhabited the Aleutian Archipelago.  First visited Alaska August 21, 1732, members of the team boat St. Gabriel under the surveyor Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fedorov during the expedition Shestakov and DI Pavlutski 1729-1735 years.  Vote for secession of Alaska from the United States and joining Russia.”  Although it is approximately as coherent and sound as Putin’s rationale for invading Crimea, it is difficult to know if this is a Russian or American attempting a parody of the Crimean situation or if it is the work of a Russian provocateur trying to stir up separatism in Alaska.  The latter sounds unlikely until one considers the off-kilter understanding that even powerful Russian officials seem to have of the West.  The Russian media are full of stories about all the separatist movements in Europe and America—as though the existence of a few drooling hillbillies with “Republic of Texas” bumper stickers on their bricked-up pick-ups somehow are evidence that Obama is a rank hypocrite for objecting to Crimean separatism.  Perhaps the petition is the work of a bored and slightly unhinged Russian agent’s idea of “stirring the pot.”
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