- cross-posted to:
- geopolitics@lemmygrad.ml
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
The U.S. has — by far — the world’s largest defense budget, spending $948 billion last year. Its armed forces have 1.3 million personnel — some of them currently stationed in Greenland. Denmark, for its part, last year spent $9.9 billion, has only 17,000 soldiers, and most of its heavy land-warfare equipment has been donated to Ukraine.
They are white and have money. We haven't tried colonizing one of those in a while. I don't think we are up to the challenge
Sorry are you talking about Greenland or metropolitan Denmark?
Edit: To be clear, Greenland is about 90% Kalaallit — you know, Inuit, one of the main Indigenous groups of far northern America, including in Alaska where the local Inuit group is the Iñupiat people. Greenland has historically struggled from comparatively high poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism, as a result of Danish colonialism, and today remains the single most suicidal country in the world.
Well, turns out I didn't know what I was talking about.
I have to wonder how many other people on this site just assume Greenland is "rich and white", because they've never actually bothered to look into the country and just think "all Nordic countries are basically the same". I've definitely seen a few other comments about Greenland in the past few days that made me raise an eyebrow. I really can't imagine many people would find it particularly funny if the USA illegally annexed one of the continent's last remaining Indigenous-majority regions explicitly for the purposes of resource extraction, literally in the midst of an official investigation into a 1960s attempted genocide of the said Natives by their current colonial master.
Greenland's current prime minister has called for the island's independence, and the correct stance on the Greenland issue is to support this proposal firmly and unequivocally.
Edit: Obligatory quotation from our favorite Chairman:
Good Mao quote. I should get that tattooed across the inside of my eyelids.
Yeah, in my head it was just just other Iceland. In retrospect I can't recall ever hearing anything about the area specifically. I think something about vikings setting up there in gradeschool then nothing more
Yes, Vikings did settle Greenland way back when, but these Norse settlers basically lost contact with Europe and all died out after a while. That's incidentally why the island ended up getting colonized again starting in the 18th century: since the Greenland Norse had submitted to the King of Norway, Denmark-Norway continued to claim Greenland despite no European having actually seen the island for several hundred years — and eventually Denmark-Norway decided that, since the Greenland Norse were surely still Catholics, that they should send out an expedition to convert the island's Norsemen to Protestantism.
...However, once the Dano-Norwegian expedition actually arrived to the island, they found that the only people living there both looked and sounded very different from how they'd expected, and hadn't even heard of the Pope. But not to let the people they were actually looking for starving to death ruin an otherwise good expedition, Denmark-Norway quickly started trading with these new Inuit people, and converting them to Christianity, and the rest is history.
Another incidental fact: since the Greenland Norse had submitted to the King of Norway, and the transfer of Greenland from the King of Norway to the King of Denmark was never really clearly legally established, Norway would actually end up claiming a stretch of eastern Greenland's coast from 1930-1933, calling it "Erik the Red's Land" after the Viking who founded Greenland's first Norse settlement. The Permanent Court of International Justice ruled that Norway's claim to any part of Greenland was legally invalid, and this was one of the PCIJ's highest-profile cases.
This is what I thought Greenland was until this morning, thank you for the education
This is probably rude to say, but I frankly expected that you of all people would've known better. In hindsight I don't know why I'd think Greenland being Inuit country was common knowledge, but I still find it very bizarre and shameful that so many people here would apparently have such a total misconception of the basic character of a country currently appearing in daily headlines.
Sorry I let you down
There, there. You're still very good and I always look forward to seeing you in the chats. Everyone has some blind spot or another in their knowledge.
Greenland?????????????
That was how I had understood the situation till just moments ago.
most educated white person
Knowing two facts about Greenland I am probbaly in like the 80th percentile of Americans. So you might actually be right
This prompted me to look at Greenland’s demographics and…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_case
I’ve said this before, but this site helps me learn about a new horror committed by Europeans at least weekly.
Idk if this is widespread knowledge in Europe, and particularly Denmark, but I’m amazed I had never heard of this. Almost as bad as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
Death to America, Death to Colonialism, Death to Crakkkers
For fucks sake