Armed Forces

In March 1877, on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War, a British civil servant who did caricatures on the side drew a map that rendered the Russian Empire as a horned octopus, with its tentacles wrapping around Poland, Finland, Crimea, Bulgaria, and Persia — all illustrated as recognizable people. The German emperor, William I, is seen pushing back on an encroaching limb, while others are caught somewhere between alarm and indifference. “The Frenchman, remembering his late defeat, is carefully examining his weapons,” an inset legend explains. “Spain is taking his much required rest.”

Hugely popular, Fred Rose’s Serio-Comic War Map established a trope that politically charged pictorial maps proceeded to copy with abandon. In 1899, the League for Social Service called out the “ecclesiastical despotism” of the Church of Latter-day Saints with a black octopus enveloping much of the American West. Five years later, a student at Keio University in Japan basically ripped off Rose’s original to depict Russian threats to Manchuria, Tibet, and other parts of East Asia. The Hapsburg Empire was shown as an octopus in 1915, and Prussia as a pair of them in 1916. Toward the end of the First World War, German propaganda portrayed England as a beast with twenty-seven arms, which had encircled scattered locales from Bermuda and Newfoundland to Vancouver and Calais. Japan reproduced that map in 1941 almost exactly, but with more colour.

Among the most captivating octopus maps are those that skewer big business. In 1904, the satiric magazine Puck represented Standard Oil as a cartoonish cephalopod strangling state capitals and critical industries, while reaching for the White House. Several decades later, a pamphlet entitled The Destroyer took aim at the mail-order catalogue business harming local mom-and-pops. On its cover, a map by Frank Pifat cast Chicago, home to both Sears and Montgomery Ward, as a massive octopus with googly eyes laying waste to Middle America. (Picture View of the World from 9th Avenue, that classic Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, but with suckers.)

Uncle Sam has starred as an octopod antagonist multiple times as well. In 1918, the radical Colombian poet and journalist José María Vargas Vila published Ante los bárbaros: Los Estados Unidos y la guerra (Before the barbarians: The United States and the war). Its paperback cover featured a greedy sea creature — with massive eyes and a head bonneted with the Stars and Stripes — attempting to asphyxiate Latin America. The dust jacket of a 1930 hardcover edition ran a slightly adapted version of the evergreen imagery. The following decade, a Dutch Nazi charted Washington’s plans for “world domination” by showing the imperialist reach of a pink octopus with a dollar-sign mouth. In the Pacific, a Japanese knife has severed an arm that was wrapped around the Philippines, while German U‑boats are bearing down on American influence in Iceland, Newfoundland, and Curaçao.

For more than a century, pictorial maps of various leanings have used the octopus to symbolize perceived evil — to allude to menacing forces that are lurking in the depths or that have already begun unleashing their wrath. More often than not, the inscrutable animal has represented unadulterated avarice, acting as a spineless stand‑in for strongmen.

With oligarchy and totalitarianism again in vogue, it might seem that now is the perfect time to release the cartographic kraken once more. Like Standard Oil at the turn of the twentieth century, Elon Musk has gotten his tentacles wrapped around just about everything, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Like the Sears catalogue of yesterday, Amazon has reached into our pockets and our lives, blighting the publishing industry and main streets everywhere. And like empires of the past, the United States of today is flexing its muscles with heartless disregard for its allies or long-standing norms.

The thing about the octopus, however, is its methodical intelligence. While certainly slimy, the Trump administration that is callously rewriting the world order and detaining scholars who dare speak out appears to be neither methodical nor intelligent. An octopus hunts with stealth and precision (its appendages are also, relatively speaking, much larger than the president’s). Yet the sycophantic coterie in Washington that blunders through executive orders and capricious fiats does so with the grace of the Tasmanian Devil.

One can study the behaviour of an octopus, however enigmatic. One can react accordingly. Whoever forms government after April 28 will need to recognize that we are no longer dealing with an irascible mollusc hell‑bent on hemispheric or even global dominion but facing an impulsive trickster that thrives only on its own self-regard. There is no map for navigating this precarious moment. Drafting one must be the new Parliament’s first order of business.