Donald Trump and The Utmost North

Sunday posts from now on will be paid posts, but this one is free because I don’t think people are aware of the potential for disaster regarding this Trump-buys-Greenland drama, and I once wrote a book about Thule air base and Pituffik (I know, but I really did, and it sold but then got shelved). It’s quite long, sorry! But it might give some historical context for what that verbally incontinent lunatic is talking about, if you don’t already know.

If you would like to keep reading the longer posts like this, you could consider becoming a paid subscriber, and if you take an annual subscription then you will receive a copy of my next book, Born: A History of Childbirth, which is out in August. But you will receive yours when I have them. Hope you had a lovely weekend, and wishing you a super week.

Thule

Danish: Too-luh

American: Too-lay

Kalaallisut: Pituffik (where the dogs are tethered)

The U.S. Armed Forces' northernmost installation, located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where the icebergs in North Star Bay, the polar ice sheet, and Wolstenholme Fjord form the only place on Earth where three active glaciers meet.

And a mythical location used by explorers over the last three thousand years to symbolise a single idea:

Utmost North.

As the global travesty that is Donald Trump opens his mouth yet. again. on the subject of Greenland, you have to wonder what goes through his mind. Apart from the howling vacuous gale that is the soundtrack to his existence, and a few brittle strands of that combover.

‘The farthest of all, which are known and spoke of, is Thule; in which there be no nights at all, as we have declared, about mid-summer, namely when the Sun passes through the sign Cancer; and contrariwise no days in mid-winter: and each of these times they suppose, do last six months, all day, or all night.’ Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book IV, Chapter V

This, written around 77AD indicates that explorers had made it to Greenland, or at least the Arctic Circle by that stage. It is always a thing of wonder to me that people were traversing oceans at this date (and well before). I don’t like small sailing boats, but that is likely a result of learning to sail on the Humber. The Greek explorer Pytheas had probably made it to Greenland around 325BC, and he named it Thule, representing Utmost North. Equally, Pytheas states that Greenland was populated and that the people were agrarians, which seems highly unlikely, so it could be that he only reached southern Sweden. Modern scholars remain divided on the subject.

Nevertheless, archaeological evidence indicates that the Paleo people of what’s now Canada were the first settlers on Greenland, predominantly in the north. First the Saqqaq people around 2500 BCE then the Independence I culture around a century later. Modern Inuits are the descendants of these two cultures.

The sad truth of it is, after the arrival of the Paleo peoples, Greenland has had a dreadful time at the hands of pretty much every nation that has ever interfered with it, but particularly Denmark and the United States. It all started when in 986AD, Erik the Red set out from Iceland, leading a fleet of 24 boats filled with potential settlers on the new island he had named ‘Greenland’. Green is a bit of a stretch, but Erik, during a 3 year exile from Iceland 982-985, had explored the southern part of the island and deemed it suitable for a new settlement. Ten of the boats were lost or turned back, but the remainder made it to the new island. Erik was a pagan, but with him he took his Christian-convert wife Thjodhilde and at least one of their sons, Leif. Leif found fame as the first European in North America when, following in his father’s restless footsteps, he set foot on North American land around the year 1000. Meanwhile, the Vikings had created two settlements at the southern tip of Greenland, establishing sheep and dairy farms. The climate was milder than it is now and enough grass grew to support modest numbers of livestock. In the eastern settlement, known now as the Farm-Under-The-Sand, at Erik’s smallholding, Bratthild, one of the cow stall partitions was made out of improvised materials including a whale scapula, owing to the lack of trees on the island. The Norwegians initially had the southern part of Greenland to themselves, as the Inuit kept to the north, and their competition for resources was minimal owing to their completely different food cultures.

By the time of the Crusades, the Norwegians and Christianity were established in southern Greenland, and the Church held most of the decent grazing land. Unfortunately, they tithed the residents strictly on the remaining meagre plots, then sent the money to help out in the Holy Land, which didn’t go down brilliantly with the Greenland Viking farmers. Furthermore, the Little Ice Age was coming, and there soon wasn’t enough food growing to feed the livestock. The Vikings turned to the abundant marine life around them, but it was a dismal existence and by the 1540s only the hardy, seal-hunting Inuit remained.

The Englishman William Baffin (c1584-1622) visited in 1615-1616 in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage, and the bay between the west coast of Greenland and Newfoundland is named Baffin Bay in his honour. Other British explorers visited in the seventeenth century with the same aim, but it took until the Victorian age for the NWP to be navigated successfully.

The Denmark-Norway union assumed there were still Vikings on Greenland, so in 1721, when Christianity was well-established in Scandinavia, they sent missionaries to baptise the faithful. Finding no Scandinavians there, they baptised the Inuit instead, who were baffled but went along with it, then reverted straight back to their own beliefs. The union established trading posts along the southern coast and the Danish-Greenland relationship began in earnest.

With the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, Norway became the property of Sweden and Greenland became the property of Denmark. The nineteenth century was a time of global exploration and there were many visitors to Greenland during this period, including Americans who thought that it should be classed as part of North America. In 1917, though, the USA agreed to relinquish any claim on Greenland in order to purchase the Danish West Indies from Denmark, which became the tax haven of the Virgin Islands. President Woodrow Wilson promised Demark that Greenland would remain, ‘forever Danish’. I assume that because someone perhaps once mentioned this historic tax loophole transaction in the tangerine lackwit’s presence, that’s how he’s latched onto the idea that Danish territorial holdings are ‘up for sale’.

What we know of Greenland during this period comes mainly from one man, Knud Rasmussen. His father was a Danish missionary and his mother was half inuit. He was born in Ilulissat on the western coast and grew up amongst the Kalaallit, speaking native Kalaallisut, revelling in dog-sledding in particular. He began to study Inuit culture in earnest after his education finished, and became the western Greenlanders communication channel with the outside world. His unflinching records of his time on the ice include the Inuit practice of infanticide regarding female newborns, thus explaining why male Greenland Inuits outnumbered females by 2:1. In 1910, aged 31, he opened the Thule Trading Station at a village called Qaanaaq, 60 miles north of Pituffik. At that time it was the most northerly trading post in the world, hence why he chose the name. Rasmussen was also largely responsible for introducing to the Inuit a piece of equipment that became - and still is - a cult object in almost every home or ice camp even now: the original Primus stove. Believe it or not, fresh, clean water is hard to come by in Greenland, and ‘Arctic Thirst’ is a risky business even for the canny Inuit hunters. The Primus stove, invented in 1892 when Franz Wilhelm Lindqvist built a small, clean-burning and relatively safe kerosene stove in his spare time, and partnered with stove maker Svenson to mass produce a hardy little stove that worked under almost any conditions, and could be used inside a tent without choking the inhabitants. ‘The Primus’ was soon being packed for Arctic expeditions, and was deemed indispensable for an attempt on Everest. The Inuktun Inuit tribes of Greenland prized a Primus and they came to represent the heart of the home in the way we soft southerners might regard our hearths. It was a happy bride who went to her new marital dwelling with a Primus, and although used widely by the male hunters on extended hunting trips, the little stove came to symbolise female power within Inuit familial structure. Until his death, aged 54, Rasmussen was a titan of Arctic exploration, completing a 620 mile inland trip by dog sled, described by the Royal Geographical Society in 1921 as, ‘the finest ever performed by dogs’. He also dog-sledded across a frozen over Northwest Passage and hoped to be the first European to pass into Russia having done so, but the Russian border guard turned him back. Rasmussen was famous and well-liked among the Greenland and Canadian (Nunavut) Inuits, as well as a hero in Denmark, and is often called The Father of Eskimology, although the term ‘eskimo’ is now rightly contentious (some native people don’t care at all, and others really do, but as people they self-identify so strongly that they can also find wokeism annoying).

In World War II, Greenland began to emerge as strategically important as a link between the USA and continental Europe. Germany’s invasion of Denmark was a severe blow not only to the southern Danish border, but to Danish consciousness. In a flat out headless chicken panic, Henrik Kaufmann, the Danish ambassador to America, signed over to the US the right to build long range weather ‘stations’ on Greenland territory. The Danish government had no idea that he had done it, and charged him with treason when they found out, but too late: the Americans had their foot in the door.

By 1943 there were a series of ‘weather stations’ all around the Greenland coastline. American code for Greenland during the war was Bluie, and the small Kalaallisut Inuit village of Pituffik on the western coast was known as Bluie-West 6. During the installation, America just happened to discover that Pituffik has what is known as a ‘deep harbour’, which in the Age of Sail used to mean it could accommodate galleons for repair (hence why Hong Kong grew up on an barren rock at the mouth of the Pearl River) but which now means it can accommodate submarines. Even better: Pituffik has the northernmost deep harbour in the world. Cue more fevered rubbing of thighs in Washington.

After the war, when Russia emerged as the Red Peril, there was less than zero chance that America was going to get out of B-W 6, let alone Greenland. Pituffik is pretty much halfway between Washington and Moscow, making it a great big American jackboot just hours away from the Kremlin. So, in 1951, America decided it was going to build a massive air base on top of Pituffik. It moved the villagers slightly, as they were in the way, and then the American and Danish governments thought that there might be ‘undesirable’ contact between the airmen and the local girls (there was) and gave the villagers - hunters and fishermen, and their families - a fortnight to remove themselves and find somewhere else to live, or, they could move up to Qaanaaq, the site of Rasmussen’s old trading post, to be rehoused miles and miles from their hunting grounds. They had to live in tents for months as the Arctic winter set in, because although America could build an airbase for 10,000 members of the armed forces in double-quick time, it couldn’t work out how to build 27 houses as the bare minimum to rehome displaced native families. The building of the airbase was a massive undertaking. Three thousand metres of runway, endless accommodation and service buildings, hangars and canteens. All the heating and hot water has to run overground, because the permafrost prevents it being dug in and subsequently maintained. The place steams. They called it Thule Air Base as a nod to Rasmussen, even though his Thule/Qaanaaq was dozens of miles to the north. Thule Air Base, when active, has never housed more than 1,000 serving airmen or women and usually only around 300.

In 1953, Denmark changed the status of Greenland from ‘colony’ to a self-governing country that happens to lie within the Kingdom of Denmark. Yet Greenland was prevented from having its own government until 1979. Quite the admin oversight, Denmark. In the meantime, the Cold War became more entrenched, and then, in 1968 America managed to crash a B-52 bomber full of nuclear material straight into North Star Bay, where the payload detonated, poisoning the waters and the ice sheet. This was more than a little uncomfortable, as Denmark had turned a blind eye to the Americans’ nuclear antics, despite having declared the Kingdom of Denmark a nuclear free zone in 1957, exposing their endless internal ‘othering’ of Greenland. Awkwarrrrd. Ultimately, post clean-up, the result was better than it could have been, but still resulted in musk oxen with deformed hooves and hairless fur seals. By 1995, 410 members of the original 1,500 strong Danish clean-up crew had died from cancer. America has never revealed the numbers for its clean-up crew, and no one bothered to keep a tally for the exposed Inuits within the 17km danger zone radius of the crash site.

At the same time as the ‘Thule Incident’, as the B-52 crash was coyly termed, Denmark was busy fitting contraceptive coils to 12 and 13 year old Inuit girls attending their first secondary school medical examination. Inuits are highly private people regarding their bodies and many of the girls did not know what was happening to them. Worse, the coils were often fitted by male doctors working alone, and inappropriate for young bodies, causing damage, scarring, infection and sometimes permanent sterility. Between 1966 and 1970 it’s estimated that over four and a half thousand Inuit schoolgirls were fitted with the coil - which they call The Spiral - accounting for half the reproductive females in Greenland at the time and resulting in an abrupt halt and then decline in the native population. The Danish government performed the triple Ps (pregnancy prevention practices) on Inuit girls in Greenland, but also Inuit girls living in Denmark, until 1991. It is currently investigating itself on the matter. So that’s all fine then.

As it was easier for Denmark to administrate the Inuit from urban centres, and the US just wanted them off THEIR OWN LAND, the Danish government pushed money into the larger urban centres such as Nuuk, with fish processing factories and basic education, as well as apartment blocks. Inuits and apartment blocks don’t really work and soon balconies and hallways were draped in bulky hunting or fishing gear, parkas and kamiks (fur ice boots). Although used to communal living, Inuit peoples don’t actually want to live on top of each other in cramped tower blocks. Mental health problems became rife, along with unemployment when cod stocks collapsed in the 1980s, then alcoholism which, like many First Nation tribes in the States, is a constant spectre for the Inuit. Denmark tried to keep as many schoolteachers as possible Danish, and to promote the use of Danish language. Danish products were marketed to teenagers as ‘cooler’ than indigenous ones. *loud raspberry noise* Rude, considering the Inuit had reached peak Accidental Hipster at least a century ago.

Perestroika ushered in a quieter time for Greenland, but America wasn’t about to give Thule up, and the arrival of that dangerous and sinister ghoul Putin made it even more strategically key to hang onto the vast, steaming airbase at the top of the world. Airmen and women perhaps like it even less at Thule than the local population like knowing they are there. Mental health issues are a worry among those on the base, and crippling insomnia, in a land where it is frequently either light all night or dark all day, can result in a condition known as the Thule Big Eye in the United States Air Force corps. Things get smashed up, broken, consumed, crashed, swept up and not talked about again. It’s just part of a stretch up there in the Arctic Circle.

In recent years, Denmark has continued its remorseless campaign to marginalise Inuit peoples who won’t play by Danish rules. One of the most pernicious is the forældrekompetenceundersøgelse which is a set of psychological tests for expectant mothers to see if they are capable of raising a child who can integrate into society. Psychologists and psychiatrists have said repeatedly that psychological testing (Danish style) is not suitable for Inuits as First Nation peoples do not have the same child-raising parameters as other ethnic groups. In addition, Inuit people are, to the average European, exceptionally inexpressive when communicating. They are, in fact, communicating a huge range of information through inflection, and through highly nuanced facial gestures that are understood within the broader Inuit ethnic group but totally lost on outsiders. Think of reading a detailed menu in a nice restaurant: one tiny word on a menu can change the meal you are getting, and that’s a rough, clumsy equivalent to an Inuit eyebrow raise or head tilt. To Danish psychological test administrators they appear withdrawn, and are often described in terms of sullenness, and worst of all, in terms of reduced mental faculty. In cases such as this, the Danish government will remove the child from the mother, deeming her unfit to raise a child who can integrate into society. It was still happening in November 2024.

Into this absolute maelstrom of tenuous connections, global history, vulnerable and isolated populations, and powderkeg international relations, hoves the lumpen orange golem of Donald Trump. He’s claiming that Greenlandic people ‘want to be with America’. He neither knows nor cares what the people of Greenland think or want, and I bet you 10 pence (I don’t gamble, so a ten pence bet is a matter of honour) that you know more about Greenland from reading this blog post than he does, as ‘the leader of the free world’. If all that weren’t nauseating enough, he wants to buy it. What he wants to buy is the copper, lithium, cobalt and nickel that lies embedded under the shifting ice sheet that covers Greenland’s interior. And the massive oil and gas reserves that lie off its eastern coastline, and which Denmark approved for exploration licences a decade ago then had to stop in 2021 because of unhealthy interest. What a clucking coincidence, eh?

The Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, says that ‘Greenland is not for sale’. Except, as we have seen, the Danish attitude to Greenland is the one that suits Denmark when it feels like it. Denmark doesn’t have the money to exploit Greenland’s natural resources, but America does. And in the last decade, China has been sniffing around, which of course is something that sends the Marmalade Foghorn into a near-priapic rage, because in his mind, America already owns Greenland. Because of course it does. Because he wants it, like an unweaned toddler grabbing at a breast. Now imagine all those natural resources, with the added zing of extraterritoriality and a free port, because he has. The Frozen Virgin Islands, with vast untapped energy and reserves. Yeah, baby! He’d have American wildcat drillers and frackers in there like rats down a drainpipe, blowing up that shifting, icy interior quicker than you can blink.

Perhaps sadder still, is that with the retreat of the polar ice as we destroy the planet, the Northwest Passage is becoming evermore navigable on a year round basis. It’s a faster route to the east than Suez, which is becoming more and more politically sensitive and unstable all the time, and the NWP has far fewer restrictions on its use. Yet another reason Trump wants America camped on Greenland’s north coast, to peer over what will likely become the world’s busiest shipping lane within a generation.

Some facts to end on:

One of the 4 warheads that ditched into North Star Bay in 1968 never detonated, and is still sitting there on the bottom of the harbour. Expeditions are mounted to monitor it every so often, and it remains intact, letting off a tiny bleed of radiation to let people know it’s there. A little American beer keg of destruction just biding its time.

The Greenland Inuit believe that the spirit world encompasses everything above the ice, and that the Northern Lights is the spirits of their ancestors playing a very rowdy game of football in the sky, with a walrus head for a ball. I like this.

In 2023, Thule Air Base was renamed Pituffik Air Base. Jeez America, talk about salting the wound.

Greenland is the largest island on the planet.

It has the highest suicide rate in the world.