Image by Annie Spratt.
Something very strange has happened to American colonialism. Somewhere between the shock-and-awe of Dubya’s New American Century and the explosive verbal dysentery of Orange-Sphincter-Bad, Uncle Sam’s mask of sanity got cracked. Naturally, the neocons and neolibs will blame it all on Trump but the election and reelection of such an openly debauched hooligan would never be possible in a functioning empire. That would be like blaming Caligula alone for Rome’s demise just because he stopped drawing the blinds before the orgies. The rot here clearly runs much deeper than 2024. Any nation that responds to a recession by reigniting the Cold War was already on its way down whether the fools calling audibles from their ivory towers realized it yet or not.
With that being said, the reign of Trump II is clearly defined by what I can only describe as a sort of imperial cognitive decline. Donald Trump has done more damage to this wretched empire’s ill-deserved standing on the international stage in the first few months of his second term through his bombastic social media decrees and his deranged slurry of executive orders than Al-Qaeda, covid, Walmart, and American Idol sewn together. We are retaking the Panama Canal and renaming it the Gaza Gulch. We are declaring trade wars against anyone in the neighborhood who refuses to dig a flaming border moat. And we are preparing to add Denmark to the Axis of Evil if they refuse to sell us Greenland like a used Toyota.
As absurd as all this sounds and is, it does appear to be a part of a coherent if desperate late-stage capitalist gamble on restructuring American supremacy in an era of virtually unprecedented collapse. The Trump mafia has largely called it quits on our decades long crusade to obliterate the Eurasian land bridge with dueling forever wars in the graveyards of Ancient Babylon and the former Soviet Union in favor of betting the entire house on a final showdown with China. But first, we have to shore up our resources with a return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Monroe Doctrine. Basically, putting America first means strengthening our presence across the entirety of the Americas and that includes expanding our hemispheric hegemony to the rapidly thawing European colony of Greenland.
This cheesy eighties action flick style throwdown may be a savage farce, but a farce shouldn’t be confused with a joke, and nobody is laughing in Nuuk. This is an autonomous Inuit island nation that has been struggling gallantly for centuries against brutal European colonialism and just as the violence of climate change has unlocked the long frozen economic resources that may afford them the ability to slip the leash, every gangster with a cheap smile and a tailored suit is showing up at their doorstep with a stainless steel briefcase full of cash in one hand and a loaded Uzi in the other.
Cue JD Vance and the Second Lady for a splashy photo-op. Just days after Donald Trump refused to rule out the use of military force to kidnap 57,000 people in the name of national security, these two fine young Republicans, duded up like models for the LL Beam winter catalogue, show up with camera crews and cellophane smiles to make nice with the natives. The natives smelled them coming before their private jets could land. Every single door that the White House knocked on in the capital of Nuuk slammed shut the moment they heard the name Trump. The wealthiest empire on earth couldn’t find a single native family or business willing to be seen on film with these yuppie pit vipers. So, the Second Couple ended up having to slum it over at the US military’s barren Pltuffik Space Bace and play benevolent pilgrim on the set of The Thing.
This kind of pandering white savior bullshit is nothing new to Greenland. They have been dealing with the passive aggressive cruelty of Western Civilization going back to the 16th century when the then ascendent Danish Kingdom colonized the island shortly after Christian jihadist mercenaries arrived to convert the heathen Inuit fisherman who migrated there from Canada in the 12th century. What transpired over the next 300 years was a story all too familiar to the darker nations of the global south like Palestine. A story of genocide, apartheid, cultural erasure, and ecological exploitation. And it’s a story that all too frequently included the United States as a less than silent partner.
The first major mining operation in Greenland was launched by Denmark and those fine folks over at Oresund Chemical Industries in the tiny village of Ivittuut in 1854. Danish workers were shipped in directly to the mine to extract a rare mineral known as cryolite, which was used to smelt aluminum. 400 billion Kroners of revenue was ripped from the earth by the time the mine closed in 1987 and one of their top customers was the United States Military who used this magic dirt to produce fighter jets for their own imperial adventures while also making sure to keep this useful Arctic territory under their thumb.
This effort graduated to a military occupation in 1940 after a rival white supremacist named Adolf Hitler took Denmark in his Blitzkrieg rampage across Europe. The Allied Forces, led by Great Britain and the United States, swooped in to occupy Copenhagen’s Atlantic colonies in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. 6,000 troops were sent to occupy the latter which at the time contained a native population of about 20,000. FDR declared Greenland to be a part of America’s expanding “defense” sphere of influence in 1941. His nuke dropping toady, Harry Truman would offer to buy the Island from Denmark just like Trump for $100 million dollars in 1946. The Danes would politely decline but they had no reservations about the United States turning the colony into a radioactive NATO playground.
America unilaterally expanded their sacred right to conduct widespread military operations on the Island with the 1951 Defense of Greenland Act and opened Thule Air Base the same year after forcefully evicting the local Inuit population from the site. Thule would become the depleted uranium tip of America’s spear in our nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. It wouldn’t be revealed until the 90s that the US had stashed doomsday devices at the base with the Danes full consent, in spite of that Nordic socialist nation’s publicly anti-nuke stance. This is because Denmark’s progressive secular democracy had far more important things to worry about than world peace, namely the brutal Danification of Greenland’s native population.
Denmark used the awesome power of a centralized nanny state to fund major urbanization projects on the island, forcing rural Inuit communities into massive public housing blocks and compulsory public schools where they were forced to abandon their traditional subsistence lifestyles for something more modern. Inuit children were systematically removed from their families and placed into foster homes in Denmark for further indoctrination, but the Danish state didn’t stop at killing the Indian, they targeted the child as well, fitting Greenlandic girls as young as 12 with intra-uterine devices, often without their knowledge and consent, leading to the sterilization of 35% of native women of child bearing age by 1970.
None of these grotesque efforts of forced assimilation managed to stifle the Greenlandic people’s desire for liberation though. As the anti-colonialist movement of the Third World reached oppressed people in the heart of Babylon, inspiring uprisings from Watts to Stonewall, opposition to Danish rule and a desire for the revival of Inuit Power swelled in Greenland. The island managed to achieve home rule over domestic affairs in 1979 and used this power to withdraw from the neo-colonial monstrosity known as the European Union in 1985. Home rule was expanded further in a 2009 self-government agreement that granted the former colony control over its own mineral resources as well as the right to be consulted on NATO military maneuvers. But total independence has been affectively stymied by a 5 billion Kroner block grant from Denmark that still essentially keeps the lights on on the island.
In the ultimate sick twist of irony, the environmental rape perpetrated by Western Civilization and their numerous industrial complexes has given the island access to mineral riches long trapped beneath the glacial ices that could afford it the resources it needs to unshackle itself from Danish subjugation but as the Trump Administration’s increasingly belligerent behavior proves, this still leaves Greenland at a treacherous crossroads, one not dissimilar to that faced by many newly decolonized Third World nations. On one hand, you have the quite openly rapacious advances of western powers in decline of which Trump is not alone. France has responded to Trump’s nationalist caterwauling by raising the prospect of sending French troops to defend “EU territory”, despite Greenland’s clear rebuke against being unilaterally deemed European.
On the other hand, you have China and the ascendant economic powers of the BRICS coalition. As tempting as embracing this anti-western front against dollar supremacy may seem on the surface, it would sadly likely amount to little more than switching pimps. China is now the world’s biggest creditor nation and BRICS looks a little bit more like a loan shark cartel dressed up in radical chic with each passing imperial creep state like Saudi Arabia and the UAE that it adds to the fold.
Greenland’s best hope would be to go the way of their ancestors with a diverse tribal coalition that creates autonomy through sheer decentralized numbers, something similar to what the recently liberated Third World attempted during the last cold war with the Non-Aligned Movement, only this time avoiding the pitfalls of the Westphalian nation state by refusing to comply with global constructs of central authority like the UN and the World Bank. This would mean embracing a form of monetary diversity that would include the use of cryptocurrencies and admitting nations without traditional borders like Chiapas, Cheran, Hezbollah, and Ansar Allah.
We have been slamming our fucking brains out against the western-style nation state for thousands of years now and its greatest achievements aside from climate change and nuclear bombs are global peace treaties that recognize kingdoms run by trust fund cadavers before the people they enslave and the miracle of modern medicine that allows them to shove eugenics machinery into children. Maybe we should all try governing a little bit more like the Innuits before modern liberal democracy boils us all alive in our own glacial juices and maybe this begins with us all showing the same level of solidarity to Greenland that we do Palestine.
The post Greenland Deserves Solidarity, Too appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.