From Greenland a fairy shouts/What are you doing, President...
If it's Green Land, then the Vikings gave geographical names as if they were high. Admittedly, even today's most powerful politicians seem high, at least when it comes to Greenland.
First of all, it looks like some form of geopolitical swindle. The idea of taking over Greenland and the attempts to rationalize such an idea seem imbecile. And ridiculous, even with the handful of lies, of which the current American president is not at all ashamed. Trump probably lies more in an hour than American presidents have since Trumana do Richard Nixon lied in all their terms. And American presidents are generally not averse to lying, throughout history.
Where do wars begin?
It is well known that they often start with somnambulistic political ideas.
Gunther Grass Before his death, he said that World War III began in 2014, but we just don't see it yet. Grass's diagnosis seems more and more convincing. When we see things, they actually happened a long time ago.
And where and how do they end?
The Cold War, with its rigid and inexorable logic, was a kind of framework for a global order that worked, despite the challenges. In a historically deceptive moment of apparent equilibrium. The world was far from justice, it always is, in fact. Eastern Europe and Central Asia were regions of unfreedom, thus paying a (terrible) price for Russian imperial nostalgia. The price of American power was the brutal wars to supposedly stop communism in Asia. So from the Korean and Vietnamese, or Polish and Lithuanian perspectives, the Cold War was certainly another name for slavery.
That's why it seems crazy when pro-Russian political tones come from the Czech Republic and Hungary today. It's as if the Soviet invasions of 1956 and 1968 never happened. In one of the memoirs Mirko Kovača we come across a brilliant detail: frozen in a Belgrade entrance, young Rain and young people Glavurtić, they are thinking about how they could get to Budapest to make themselves available to defend the city from Soviet tanks...
The reaction to imperial hysteria at the individual level is usually emotional. Again, I don't know if I could imagine two young Europeans today planning to go to Greenland and wage a partisan struggle against a possible American occupation. (Or better yet, stay home and - write their books, as in the above case)
From today's perspective, it is clear - my generation grew up with a bunch of positivist-modernist misconceptions, which time served us. Today, it all seems like a naive story.
In other words, the burial of an international order always means the demise of the associated ideas, those thought constructs that made the order possible.
So that these days, before our eyes, some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit are dying, fading away or disappearing - ideas like equality, freedom or, God forbid, fraternity seem like unnecessary, overvalued, dubious ornaments today. And that is always, one way or another, a dangerous moment.
We believed - so we were told, and so we believed - that the world was moving towards complete peace and a time of prosperity. That modern politics was working to overcome poverty and hunger, not to fight for territories and resources. We believed that all historical injustices would be righted... That no just struggle could fail. That the world would be a noticeably better place decade after decade. Of course not.
I must admit that one must feel miserable if one lives in a time that wants to "get rid" of such noble "prejudices".
Do you remember that scene from The Great Dictator, when Chaplin he jumps with a large balloon-globe in his hands and exclaims "The world is mine, the world is mine!" Once upon a time, this scene must have seemed too jovial to the viewer of this film, while today it seems almost documentary.
And in the background, quietly: From Greenland, a fairy hook/a scandal broke out in Europe...
Bonus video:
