Anonymous Comrade writes

"Bush's Ultimate Thule"

By Mike Davis



In the early summer of 1951, a group of Inuit hunters, guiding a French anthropologist, returned to their homes at Thule in the northwest of Greenland after a daring expedition to Canada's Ellesmere Island. When they had left the year before, Thule was one of the most remote communities on earth: twenty igloos and a trading post established in 1910 by Greenland's national hero, Knud Rasmussen, to provide a base for his famed

ethnographic explorations.As they crossed the still frozen sea they were stunned by an extraordinary

"mirage." "A city of hangers and tents, of sheet metal and aluminum,

glittering in the sun amid smoke and dust, rose up in front of us on a

plain that only yesterday had been deserted." In their absence, an

American armada of 120 ships and 12,000 men -- the biggest amphibious

operation since D-Day -- had taken possession of North Star Bay. Without

any consultation with Thule's residents, the Pentagon was transforming

their fox hunting grounds into a bomber base for the nuclear war that

seemed imminent as U.S. and Chinese armies clashed head-on in Korea.



In 1953, in order to make room for a new Nike missile battery, the American

commander gave the Inuit but four days to evacuate their homes. They were

forcibly exiled to a new village -- "instant slum" in the opinion of some --

125 miles away. Danish and American officials lied to the world that the

move had been "voluntary." Now, half a century later, their grandchildren,

many of them members of the socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit Party (IA), have

become arguably the biggest roadblock to Washington's "Star Wars" fantasy

of global omnipotence.



As in the early Cold War, Thule's top-of-the-world location, peeking over

the pole at Central Asia and the Middle East, is again deemed one of the

Pentagon's most important geopolitical assets. The Bush administration

argues that the National Missile Defense (NDM) initiative urgently demands

the upgrading of the huge BMEWS radar installations at Thule and Fylingdale

in England.



London's subservience, of course, was immediately forthcoming; while

Copenhagen, although more discreet, also signaled its willingness to

barter Thule, as in the past, in return for some small gratuities. But

Nuuk, the tiny Home Rule capital of Kalaaallit Nunaat (as its people call

Greenland), has so far refused to be conscripted into "this insane

project."



Indeed, in a historic election last December, a majority of Greenlanders

voted for an anti-NMD coalition of the social-democratic Siumut and radical

IA parties, whose representatives are pledged to oppose any unilateral

Danish deal over Thule and to accelerate progress toward complete

independence. This shift to the left, in defiance of both Copenhagen and

Washington, is a remarkable development, rooted in a bitter and little

understood colonial experience.



The Pentagon Colony



Although the Danes established a theocratic colonialism in southwestern

Greenland in the early eighteenth century, the east coast Inuit were not

"discovered" until the 1880s and the Thule region remained self-governing

(even with its own postage stamps) until the 1930s. In the same decade,

general diplomatic recognition of the Danish claim to the whole island, long

contested by Norway, coincided with reconnaissance of Greenland's air

routes by German, British and American military planners. (One German

"explorer" of the period was an assassin of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl

Liebnecht.)



In spring 1941, President Roosevelt, worried as much by a proposed Canadian

landing as any German invasion, extended the Monroe Doctrine to Greenland,

which soon became the largest span in the famous air bridge used to ferry

B-17s and B-24s to England. A country that the Danes had kept as isolated

from the outside world as Tibet was overwhelmed in a few months by

thousands of GIs in seventeen bases along both southern coasts. With

Denmark a German satellite, Greenland became an American military colony.



After the war, the Pentagon was keen to retain control over the "world's

biggest aircraft carrier" and pressed the Truman administration to buy

Greenland from Denmark. Eventually, Washington settled for the

next best thing: a 1951 treaty that gave the U.S. Strategic Air Command

(SAC) free reign to use Thule as a launching pad for Armageddon. In the

fall of 1956, Thule-based B-47s made repeated deep incursions into Soviet

airspace (Operation Home Run) that were designed to push Kremlin nerves to

the limit. Later Curtis Le May, the singularly sinister commander of SAC,

wistfully recollected that "with a bit of luck we could have gotten World

War Three started back then."



In 1961 SAC commanders almost ordered a nuclear strike after they lost

contact with Thule due to a technical glitch that they misinterpreted as a

Soviet attack. Seven years later, a B-52B armored with four hydrogen bombs

caught fire and crashed offshore of Thule. Although the Air Force insisted

that

it eventually recovered all the bombs, local salvage workers have always

claimed that one bomb was never found. In 2001, the Independent

corroborated

their account (missing bomb serial number 78252) and estimated that 12

kilograms

of plutonium had escaped into the ecosystem. According to the Thule Workers

Association, representing Greenlanders who worked on the salvage effort,

that would

explain high local incidences of cancer as well as bizarre phenomena like

seals without hair and musk oxen with deformed hooves.



Although the B-52s were finally withdrawn from Thule during the Vietnam War

and the big US bases at Narsarsuaq and Kangerlusuaq were closed down, the

Pentagon never cleaned up its mess. Nor, for that matter, has the

complicit colonial landlord, Denmark, bothered to protest. Yet, as

Greenpeace has documented, there is massive toxicity and environmental

blight in the archipelago of abandoned US airbases and radar stations.



The Danish Slum



In the 1951 Treaty for the Protection of Greenland, the quid pro quo for the

Pentagon's militarization of the high Arctic was a strict prohibition on

contact between Americans and Greenlanders. To ensure permanent Danish

hegemony over the indigenous population, Greenland became part of the

metropolis in 1953: a status, as in "French" Algeria, which aggravated

rather than ameliorated civic inequalities.



Over the next generation, Greenlanders -- including the exiled hunters of

Thule -- were subjected to a coercive and paternalistic "modernization"

which

radically dislocated their culture. The Danish strategy was to

concentrate the populations of scores of outlying fishing villages and

hunting camps into a few "efficient" centers around large canneries and

administrative complexes.



Ruggedly independent Arctic hunters -- now unemployed -- were rehoused in

multi-story concrete tenements while their kids studied Danish and their

wives worked as cleaners or on fish-processing lines. Skilled and

professional work was generally reserved for highly paid strata of

imported contract workers -- the true beneficiaries of the soaring subsidies

that the Danish Right loves to complain about.



Copenhagen's policies acted in tandem with the political economy of the

American bases (with their demand for service labor, their prodigious

waste, and their celebration of consumerism) to catastrophically urbanize

Inuit culture. One state-sanctioned result has been a plague of addictions.

In contemporary Greenland, 56,000 people smoke 120 million cigarettes and

drink 40 million cans of beer per year. Likewise, with only 15,000

residents, modern Nuuk manages to emulate southcentral L.A.: with angry

graffiti on slab apartment walls, gang fights in the alleys, and hash

dealers prowling in custom snowmobiles.



Greenlanders, highly conscious of their communitarian past and heroic way

of life, have fought back hard against both American and Danish

colonialism. Home Rule in 1979 was both a concession to Greenlandic

nationalism and an attempt to neo-colonialize Danish domination through new

Copenhagen-educated Inuit elites. The spanner in the works was the IA: a

political formation created by an Inuit New Left inspired by Vietnam and

the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1970s.



The IA (the party to which Smila belongs in the famous novel) is sometimes

described as the Greenlandic counterpart to Denmark's centrist Socialist

Peoples' Party, but its program is highly original: traditionalist,

pan-Inuit, Green and Red at the same time. IA played a leading role in

the creation of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, an activist NGO that acts

as a shadow government for 152,000 Inuit people in four countries and

anticipates the IA's dream of a peoples' Arctic without atomic bombs,

addiction, or pollution.



Last December it was widely expected that the IA would surpass

social-democratic Siumut as Greenland's largest party. It narrowly failed

to do so only because Siumut's leadership was captured by Hanns Enoksen, an

independence advocate who deposed longtime party leader and prime minister

Johanthan Motzfeldt after the latter attended the NATO summit in Prague.



But the new Siumut-IA coalition government headed by Enoksen

self-destructed in January only weeks after its formation. Foreign papers

caricatured the crisis as the result of a Siumut official's employment of a

traditional "sorcerer" to exorcise government buildings of evil spirits.

In fact, the IA walked out - as it had several years earlier - over growing

corruption and favoritism in the government. Siumut promptly formed a new

government with the neo-colonial Atassut Party which shares Copenhagen's

willingness to deal with Washington over Star Wars.



But the IA's break with Enoksen only strengthens its claim to be the sole

genuine voice of Greenlandic self-determination. Moreover it continues to

fiercely oppose Washington's plans for the re-militarization of the Arctic.

As Johan Olsen, one of the IA leaders, told the European Parliament last

year:

"Greenland must not participate in any horse-trading deal with the USA

with reference to furthering the American wish to upgrade the Thule radar?

It is our opinion that is necessary to declare the Arctic as a

demilitarized, weapons free zone."



Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most

recently, Dead Cities, among other works. He now lives in San Diego but has

recently visited Greenland.



Copyright Mike Davis