The Conflict Over The Non-Existent Island

In 2012, the diligent crew members of a scientific expedition in the  South Pacific un-discovered an island. That island, Sandy Island, was noted in the omnicogniscent internet by GoogleEarth, but not on the nautical maps of the area. So, in order to resolve this discrepancy, the oceanographers sailed to the supposed location of the island, and found … open ocean, nothing else. The island had only existed in the internet.

This, first and foremost sucked for the people who live there. They all had Facebook accounts, some of them were on Google+ and on Twitter and the really bored ones even on Pinterest and Linkedin. Most of them had more than 200 Facebook friends and those on Linkedin had sent out invites to many dozens of acquaintances. Being shown to only exist on the internet significantly hampered their efforts at online visibility.

But in reality, being shown to not exist in reality was only the beginning of the trouble for the Sandy Islanders. Only days after the island’s un-discovery, revisionist Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara claimed that Sandy Island had always been a part of the holy Japanese motherland. He outfitted an expedition of Japanese rightists to cruise to that part of the world, set foot on Sandy Island, eat rice there and establish a municipal administrative office in charge of regulating the lives of the non-existent islanders. Upon stepping on non-existent ground, the members of the Japanese expedition, most of whom were in their 60s or older and poor swimmers, all drowned. They will not be missed by anyone other than their fellow Japanese nationalist douchebags.

China was immediately alerted by this Japanese non-success in occupying the non-island, and sent warships to the area with orders to keep a vigilant watch for an eventual rise of land in the area. In the meantime, the Chinese government censored all web content created by Sandy Islanders who claimed that they were not Chinese.

The government of the country closest to Sandy Island, Australia, declared that it would send refugees hoping to obtain humanitarian asylum in Australia onto its shores, and, if there was actually no island, even better.

Meanwhile, witnessing this international clownery, the inhabitants of Sandy Island became more and more glad that they didn’t in fact exist.

Thanks to Jeremy Deschner for contributing to the ideas for this pseudogeographical treatise!