Pyne’s history fail: It’s time for Greenland to reclaim America

We can only begin to imagine the unbridled joy sweeping Greenland at Christopher Pyne’s endorsement of US President Donald Trump’s desire to rip the frozen island from Denmark’s grasp and colonise it with American strip miners and pumped-up military types.

It is tempting to think Pyne – once a Liberal defence minister and these days, naturally, a lobbyist – came up with this splendid thought-bubble after one too many of his famed evening gin and tonics.

The 1893 painting Leiv Eirikson Discovering America by Christian Krohg.Credit: National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

But that would be unfair to gin and tonic, even if it was the favoured indulgence of colonists of the Raj.

You’d need something more virile for the invasion of Greenland.

Aquavit comes to mind – a powerful Nordic spirit suitable for stoking the fires of Erik the Red, the Norwegian Viking who gave Greenland its name while exiled for murder circa the year 1000.

Pyne resorts to precedent and history to support Trump’s wish to take over Greenland, but history, it happens, is a double-edged Viking sword.

Erik the Red’s son, Leif Erikson, is credited with being the first European to make his way to North America, where a Viking settlement was established in Newfoundland, also around the year 1000. Erikson later became chief of the Vikings on Greenland.

Perhaps, rather than Trump’s administration grabbing Greenland, Pyne might instead consider it is about time for the Scandinavians to reclaim America.

Pyne, you understand, used this masthead on Tuesday to argue that Greenlanders would be richer and safer if Denmark caved in to Trump’s demand that it sell their home to the US.

“Though the idea may sound ridiculous,” wrote Pyne (and bravo, he got that right), “there are a welter of precedents for such a thing. In 1803, president Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1898, president William McKinley ‘acquired’ the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from Spain.”

A Viking replica longship sails across a fjord in Greenland in 1997 en route to North America, following the same route as Leif Erikson 1000 years earlier.Credit: John Rasmussen

Up to a point, Mr Pyne.

Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana, for a knockdown four cents an acre, was certainly the sort of deal that would cause the voracious real estate developer Trump to break into one of his weird, talent-free victory dances, but it didn’t make the original inhabitants of Louisiana either richer or safer.

It led to one of the most brutal human tragedies in American history: a massive ethnic cleansing. In the decades after the Louisiana Purchase, pressure grew from white settlers to remove Native American tribal groups from the new US territory.

That led to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, culminating in what is still known as the Trail of Tears.

A statue of Leif Erikson outside the Hallgrimskirkja in Iceland.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

At least 60,000 members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, plus thousands of African-American slaves, were forced to march to desolate areas far west of the Mississippi River. Many thousands died on the trail, and thousands more on arrival.

As for Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico: they weren’t so much “acquired” as captured as spoils of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

And why did Trump’s favoured “great” US president William McKinley go to war with Spain in the first place? One reason proposed by scholars of the war was that despite wishing to stay neutral, he was goaded into it because he was being characterised in the newspapers as effeminate.

Greenlanders might note that residents of Puerto Rico, Guam and other “acquired” US territories never got voting representation in the US Congress, and are not entitled to vote for the president, even though they are US citizens.

Regardless, Pyne thinks Greenlanders could be among the richest people on the globe if “The Great Developer” could get his hands on their home.

Best they don’t turn their thoughts to Puerto Rico, then.

Trump, during his previous presidential term, withheld $20 billion in federal funding that Congress had allocated for the devastated island after it was hit by the deadliest hurricane in a century, leaving the territory a ruin.

Who could resist the Pyne-blessed Trump charm offensive? Pass the aquavit.

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