The recent episode of “Greenland for Sale” deserves analysis of the European (old and new) mind-set. President Trump views Greenland as a large real-estate full of resources and hence made an unsolicited offer to buy it from Denmark. Greenland is a semi-autonomous region of the Kingdom of Denmark. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen in turn described the offer as “absurd”.
As expected, Trump in a fit of anger cancelled his scheduled state visit to Denmark on 2 September which was arranged after an invitation by the Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. Denmark is a close ally of the USA and also a NATO partner. President Trump discerns nothing wrong in his offer in the 21st century as his predecessors had done similar things in the past (like Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana in 1803 from France and Woodrow Wilson bought the Danish West Indies now called Virgin Islands in 1917).
Greenland is populated by Inuit for millennia. Presently they account for 88 to 90 percent of the population with the remainder being recent colonizers. Have the buyer and unwilling seller, in the current era of 21st century, thought of the opinion and welfare of the majority (native) population? Where is their self-proclaimed modern value system gone? It seems their colonialism mind-set is alive and well. Strangely, main stream media is agonizingly silent on this point.
Narsibhai Patel
New Malden
