The islanders are a somewhat strange, special people. Although in appearance nothing differentiates them from their peers on the mainland, their way of conceiving the world, existence, is very typical of them and even peculiar at times. They inhabit a piece of land surrounded by water, but this does not prevent them from getting into disputes that end in borders that divide the island into two or more opposing parts, as seen in, without leaving Europe, Ireland, Cyprus or, each time more, Great Britain.
Right now, in the tangled geopolitical framework that threatens the future of our planet, the role of the islands has come to be decisive in some of the greatest conflicts between the superpowers that have occurred or will arise. The case of Taiwan is obvious, a very difficult solution, an extreme that promises to turn this island for years into the scene of all kinds of confrontations in which China, the US and the Taiwanese themselves will fully use all their military means, cybernetic and propagandistic, in order to each get away with it. We are lucky that, at least for now, none of the opponents has dared to reach for their nuclear arsenal. But it would seem that none, if forced to do so, would give up using it, either in self-defense or for the express purpose of annihilating the enemy.
Then there is Hong Kong, another troubled island, which is not on the right track either. And it would even be said that Beijing has a fixation with the islands, since it is creating artificial islands throughout the South China Sea, not to mention its interested approach to a whole series of islands in the South Seas.
Japan, a nation of islands, which in recent times has re-armed itself at a forced pace, maintains open disputes with China and Russia over who is entitled to sovereignty over certain archipelagos coveted by both, but with no solution in sight. .
They are also at odds in Sri Lanka and the two poles of the Earth, which, after all, are islands whose sovereignty is disputed between too many actors, and which already has signs of ending in a tragedy of truly tremendous proportions and consequences.
A large part of the billions that escape the fiscal controls of half the world end up in secret accounts in any of the tax havens, many of them islands where wealthy people allergic to paying taxes also establish their residence.
Islands throughout history have served as prisons, such as the disputed Russian island of Sakhalin, which Anton Chekhov visited in 1880. Or the island prison in the Bay of Marseille from which the Count of Monte Cristo escaped; the also French Devil's Island in the Caribbean; Alcatraz federal prison in San Francisco, Sing Sing in New York; not to mention Australia, whose colonial history began with the immense island-continent turned into a fateful British prison.
After the islands of discontent, come their cousins, the peninsulas -tongues of land with a vocation to become islands-, as well as the coastal enclaves and islands, such as Barataria de Sancho Panza, Crimea, Corea, Ceuta, Melilla, Gibraltar and so many others. None today offers a happy ending to the territorial dispute it suffers, not even in fiction.
But the islands have also been fundamental throughout history in the birth of new cultures, for example the Minoan or the Hellenic. And who knows what we lost with the sinking of Atlantis. It was no coincidence that Thomas More placed utopia on an island or that Gulliver's travels took this Jonathan Swift character from island to island, one of them, Laputa, a flying island.
The English poet John Donne said that no man is an island, that if the sea takes away a portion of land, all of Europe is diminished, and therefore, never ask for whom the bell tolls because it tolls for you. This he wrote in 1624. But in view of the current global mess in which we find ourselves up to our necks, it would seem that this is no longer the case, and that is why the richest men on Earth are building false islands where hide in space
