Martin Luther quit wearing his Augustinian habit symbolically breaking his ties with the monastic order of which he had been a part.
He had been excommunicated from the Church three years prior.
Last edition:
Showing posts with label 1500s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1500s. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Fish on Fridays, the Environment, and somewhat missing the point.
Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:
Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests
Eh?
This found:
In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.
FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.
Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.
Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.
For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.
Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.
For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.
I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.
Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.
Related threads:
The secular left's perpetual surprise at arriving at the Catholic past.
Secular suffering for nothing
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the East: The ruins of of Saint Albain Nazaire, France.
Churches of the East: The ruins of of Saint Albain Nazaire, France.:
All photographs by MKTH.
The ruins of of Saint Albain Nazaire, France.
The 16th Century "Old Church" at St. Albain Naizaire in France stands as a silent reminder of the violence of World War One. The church was destroyed by the French Army to keep it from being used by the Germans as an observation post in 1914.
Following the war, locals elected not to rebuilt the church and leave it as a monument to the tragedy of the war.
All photographs by MKTH.
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
November 17, 1558. The Reign of Queen Elizabeth I commences.
On this date in 1558 the disastrous reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which would last for 44 long years, commenced.
The illegitimate daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, her long rule saw the Elizabethan Religious Settlement which was brought about due to pragmatism rather than religious conviction, and indeed there's reason to believe that Elizabeth personally shared the religious convictions of her half sister Mary but chose not to continue to pursue them in order to make civil compromises. Her long reign guaranteed the success of the settlement and it many injustices for centuries.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
The Reassessors: St. Ignatius of Loyola
He was ordained a cleric at an early age, but received a release from his vows and became a soldier. He was noted to be vainglorious in this period. A battlefield wound lead to a long period of painful books during which his request for books about chivalry was met instead with religious works as the castle he was recuperating in had those and not the former.
This lead to a profound conversion, lead an austere life, dedicated himself to study, and ultimately returned to the clergy. He founded the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
"shortsighted and irresponsible."
So says Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump's stoutest defenders, about Trump's decision to betray the Kurds and leave them to the mercy of the Turks.
And it is an outrage.
To be clear, I opposed the United States intervening in Syria militarily. This isn't because I think the Baathist regime there is nice. Rather, I was, I think realistic about the nature of the combatants there.
When the civil war broke out in Syria, the United States, both its population and its government, Americanized it in their minds. To us, all revolutions against are by the good guys against the bad guys. Indeed, it's summarized that way in the 1960s movie The Professionals, with the follow up line by Burt Lancaster's explosive expert characters adding; "the question is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."
Well, it's not that simple.
In Syria there was one main westernized force set for overall control of the nation, realistically, and then there were Islamist theocrats. One or the other was going to be the one that prevailed. Trouble was, the westernized force their was the government, and the western ideology it had adopted was fascism. Fascism is a western creation, and the Baath Party are fascists. Indeed, the Middle Easter fascist party, the Baath Party, is the most successful fascist party of them all by some measures as its been in power far longer in various places, principally Iraq (formerly) and Syria, than any other fascist party was anywhere else.
The prime opponents of the Syrian government were Islamic radicals who sought to impose a theocracy. Oh, sure, there were other forces, but they were disorganized and inept.
Really effectively intervening in that situation would have required creating a Syrian rebel force out of something while also wiping out the Islamic elements. That would have required the commitment of thousands of troops, probably 20,000 or more. And it would have required a long occupation.
We weren't going to do that and it was obvious from the first.
Instead, over time, when we realized what was going on there we supported efforts to quash ISIL and support regional rebel forces where possible. In the meantime, Russian backed Syrian forces with quite a bit of support from actual Russian troops of one kind or another (not officially Russian, but clearly supported by the Russians and made up of Russian military men) crushed the rebellion. Overall, our small scale intervention was much more effective than I would have supposed, although the winner overall is the Syrian regime which is now closer to Russia than ever.
And then there are the Kurds.
The Kurds are claimed to be the largest ethnicity in the world with a distinct territory that lacks a state. Their territory is spread over Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. All of those nations have suppressed the Kurds. Right now, probably ironically, the Kurds are best off in Syira and Iraq.
That's about to end in Syria.
The Kurds deserve a country. They've long demonstrated that and they're fairly politically adept and cohesive. By and large, politically, the Kurds would make most American politicians wince as they're on the Marxist end of the scale without being full blown Communists. They're basically what we hoped the Castro lead Cuban revolutionaries would be and what we still like to pretend the Spanish leftist combatants, who were really Communist, in the Spanish Civil War were. They've been fighting for political independence for decades.
Now they're running a quasi state in northern Syria where they successfully threw off the Syrian government and defeated ISIL.
Let me note that again, they defeated ISIL.
And they're running their own state, uneasily and quasi officially, within the Iraqi state.
The number of American servicemen in norther Syria, supporting the Kurds, is quite small. The exact numbers are likely unknown publicly, but President Trump claims its only fifty men. Maybe, but at least as of a couple of years ago there were at least 4,000 Special Forces troops in Syria and additionally there was a small contingent of U.S. Marine artillerymen. Indeed, at one point American troops and unofficial Russian troops engaged each other with the Russian unit being utterly destroyed. And this doesn't include the air contingent.
If its small, does it matter?
It certainly does. The map tells the reason why, as well as the history of the region.
American troops in the Kurdish region keep the Turks from going into that area. The Turks would, and now will, as the Kurds are there.
Turkey is a patch quilt country created in part by ethnic cleansing. The Turks invaded Anatolia during the 15th Century, completing their conquest of the Greek Byzantine Empire in 1453. Coming out of Asia Minor, where many of the Turkish culture remain, the Ottoman Turks ruled from Constantinople until the Empire fell under the stress of the Great War. At its height it threatened Europe before being contained by efforts in the 1500s which coincided with the Reformation and which constituted the one thing that fractured Christianity could agree upon.
The Ottoman Empire was just that, an empire, a conglomeration of peoples and nations which, in its case, were ruled by one nation, the Ottoman Turks. The Empire was vast, stretching into Europe and over North Africa, but unable to spread into Asia Minor, ironically, where the Turks had their ethnic base. Even on Anatolia the population was far from uniformly Turkish, but included substantial populations of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. World War One changed that.
During the war the Turks slaughtered gigantic numbers of Armenians in what may be legitimately be regarded as the first ethnic holocaust of the 20th Century. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the surrender of the Ottoman state to the Allies, the Greeks intervened in Anatolia and proved to have a grasp that exceeded their reach. In the areas of Anatolia that they occupied, atrocities occurred against the Turkish population, often the majority in these areas, that were both horrific and inexcusable, and which are now largely forgotten. This caused the Turks, who beat the Greeks in the Greco Turkish War, to do the same to the Greeks in the areas that they came back into control of, as they did so, and in the peace the Greeks were basically expelled.
The Kurds and the Armenians remain, and the Kurds have been fighting for their own country ever since. The Turks want no part of that for the reason that the map makes plain. If the Kurds secure their own country, Turkey will be considerably smaller.
Well, so be it, and the same for Iran, Syrian and Iraq. Putting aside all old rights and wrongs, the Kurdish part of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran is Kurdish. A Kurdish state should be there.
But we're pulling out, and the Turks are coming in.
And by coming, let's be clear. They intend to invade northern Syria to deal with our allies the Kurds.
That is what Graham had to say:
Exactly right.
The Kurds have been our allies and now we're betraying them.
Flat out betraying them. We're literally stepping aside so that an enemy of theirs, Turkey, can put them down.
And in doing so, we're doing that by way of what appears to have come about in a telephone call between President Trump and President Endrogan.
In fairness to Trump, he signaled a desire to pull out of Syria earlier, and was backed down by opposition within the GOP and his own administration. He apparently returned to his earlier views in his phone call with the Turkish president.
And that president, Endrogan, is an Islamist himself, the first one to really rule Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans (and they weren't terribly Islamist in their final years, even though the Turkish Emperor claimed the title of Caliph). Those following Turkey have been nervous ever since Endrogan came to power as he's sidelined his opponents and seems from time to time set to take Turkey in a non democratic, Islamist, directly, and away from the strongly secular government it had featured (not always democratic by any means) since 1919.
That's not a direction the Kurds would go in.
And beyond that, while I didn't think we should go into Syria, once you do, you have an obligation to the people who you are allied to, and who are allied to you. Graham, who has been a strong supporter of Trump, is exactly correct. We're abandoning our allies.
We have a history of doing that. We set the South Vietnamese up for betrayal with horrific results. Our messing around in Cambodia lead to a Cambodian disaster in a country we never intended to become directly involved in.
Now we're doing that in Syria.
That's disturbing in and of itself, but the President's reply is disturbing as well.
First of all, let's deal with the blistering absurdity of the proposition we'll punish the Turks if their invasion gets out of hand.
What the crud would that mean? An armed invasion is out of hand in the first place. When you send in an army it's not the same thing as a local church coming to your door and asking you to convert or something.
Secondly, we haven't ever "obliterated" the economy of Turkey. If that's a reference to Iran, well we've badly damaged the Iranian economy, but the regime there is still keeping on keeping on and probably diligently working on acquiring an atomic bomb. The economy of North Korea is a rampaging mess and has been for a long time, but it's Stalinist court is still in power and they have the bomb.
And using the phrase "great and unmatched wisdom" is amazingly inept for a man who must know that there are those who seriously question his mental stability. That this came about by way of a phone call, where the individual in question is already in trouble due to a phone call, is stunning.
Of course this may mean nothing more than Trump has returned to his isolationist view of the world, one in which the consequences do not so much matter as long as U.S. troops are involved.
If that's so, or in any event, this decision is flat out wrong.
And it is an outrage.
To be clear, I opposed the United States intervening in Syria militarily. This isn't because I think the Baathist regime there is nice. Rather, I was, I think realistic about the nature of the combatants there.
When the civil war broke out in Syria, the United States, both its population and its government, Americanized it in their minds. To us, all revolutions against are by the good guys against the bad guys. Indeed, it's summarized that way in the 1960s movie The Professionals, with the follow up line by Burt Lancaster's explosive expert characters adding; "the question is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys."
Well, it's not that simple.
In Syria there was one main westernized force set for overall control of the nation, realistically, and then there were Islamist theocrats. One or the other was going to be the one that prevailed. Trouble was, the westernized force their was the government, and the western ideology it had adopted was fascism. Fascism is a western creation, and the Baath Party are fascists. Indeed, the Middle Easter fascist party, the Baath Party, is the most successful fascist party of them all by some measures as its been in power far longer in various places, principally Iraq (formerly) and Syria, than any other fascist party was anywhere else.
The prime opponents of the Syrian government were Islamic radicals who sought to impose a theocracy. Oh, sure, there were other forces, but they were disorganized and inept.
Really effectively intervening in that situation would have required creating a Syrian rebel force out of something while also wiping out the Islamic elements. That would have required the commitment of thousands of troops, probably 20,000 or more. And it would have required a long occupation.
We weren't going to do that and it was obvious from the first.
Instead, over time, when we realized what was going on there we supported efforts to quash ISIL and support regional rebel forces where possible. In the meantime, Russian backed Syrian forces with quite a bit of support from actual Russian troops of one kind or another (not officially Russian, but clearly supported by the Russians and made up of Russian military men) crushed the rebellion. Overall, our small scale intervention was much more effective than I would have supposed, although the winner overall is the Syrian regime which is now closer to Russia than ever.
And then there are the Kurds.
The Kurds are claimed to be the largest ethnicity in the world with a distinct territory that lacks a state. Their territory is spread over Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. All of those nations have suppressed the Kurds. Right now, probably ironically, the Kurds are best off in Syira and Iraq.
That's about to end in Syria.
The Kurds deserve a country. They've long demonstrated that and they're fairly politically adept and cohesive. By and large, politically, the Kurds would make most American politicians wince as they're on the Marxist end of the scale without being full blown Communists. They're basically what we hoped the Castro lead Cuban revolutionaries would be and what we still like to pretend the Spanish leftist combatants, who were really Communist, in the Spanish Civil War were. They've been fighting for political independence for decades.
Now they're running a quasi state in northern Syria where they successfully threw off the Syrian government and defeated ISIL.
Let me note that again, they defeated ISIL.
Central Intelligence Agency map of Kurdish regions.
And they're running their own state, uneasily and quasi officially, within the Iraqi state.
The number of American servicemen in norther Syria, supporting the Kurds, is quite small. The exact numbers are likely unknown publicly, but President Trump claims its only fifty men. Maybe, but at least as of a couple of years ago there were at least 4,000 Special Forces troops in Syria and additionally there was a small contingent of U.S. Marine artillerymen. Indeed, at one point American troops and unofficial Russian troops engaged each other with the Russian unit being utterly destroyed. And this doesn't include the air contingent.
If its small, does it matter?
It certainly does. The map tells the reason why, as well as the history of the region.
American troops in the Kurdish region keep the Turks from going into that area. The Turks would, and now will, as the Kurds are there.
Turkey is a patch quilt country created in part by ethnic cleansing. The Turks invaded Anatolia during the 15th Century, completing their conquest of the Greek Byzantine Empire in 1453. Coming out of Asia Minor, where many of the Turkish culture remain, the Ottoman Turks ruled from Constantinople until the Empire fell under the stress of the Great War. At its height it threatened Europe before being contained by efforts in the 1500s which coincided with the Reformation and which constituted the one thing that fractured Christianity could agree upon.
The Ottoman Empire was just that, an empire, a conglomeration of peoples and nations which, in its case, were ruled by one nation, the Ottoman Turks. The Empire was vast, stretching into Europe and over North Africa, but unable to spread into Asia Minor, ironically, where the Turks had their ethnic base. Even on Anatolia the population was far from uniformly Turkish, but included substantial populations of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. World War One changed that.
During the war the Turks slaughtered gigantic numbers of Armenians in what may be legitimately be regarded as the first ethnic holocaust of the 20th Century. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the surrender of the Ottoman state to the Allies, the Greeks intervened in Anatolia and proved to have a grasp that exceeded their reach. In the areas of Anatolia that they occupied, atrocities occurred against the Turkish population, often the majority in these areas, that were both horrific and inexcusable, and which are now largely forgotten. This caused the Turks, who beat the Greeks in the Greco Turkish War, to do the same to the Greeks in the areas that they came back into control of, as they did so, and in the peace the Greeks were basically expelled.
The Kurds and the Armenians remain, and the Kurds have been fighting for their own country ever since. The Turks want no part of that for the reason that the map makes plain. If the Kurds secure their own country, Turkey will be considerably smaller.
Well, so be it, and the same for Iran, Syrian and Iraq. Putting aside all old rights and wrongs, the Kurdish part of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran is Kurdish. A Kurdish state should be there.
But we're pulling out, and the Turks are coming in.
And by coming, let's be clear. They intend to invade northern Syria to deal with our allies the Kurds.
That is what Graham had to say:
Replying to @LindseyGrahamSCThe most probable outcome of this impulsive decision is to ensure Iran’s domination of Syria.
The U.S. now has no leverage and Syria will eventually become a nightmare for Israel.
I feel very bad for the Americans and allies who have sacrificed to destroy the ISIS Caliphate because this decision virtually reassures the reemergence of ISIS. So sad. So dangerous.
President Trump may be tired of fighting radical Islam. They are NOT tired of fighting us.1,2847:49 AM - Oct 7, 2019
The Kurds have been our allies and now we're betraying them.
Flat out betraying them. We're literally stepping aside so that an enemy of theirs, Turkey, can put them down.
And in doing so, we're doing that by way of what appears to have come about in a telephone call between President Trump and President Endrogan.
In fairness to Trump, he signaled a desire to pull out of Syria earlier, and was backed down by opposition within the GOP and his own administration. He apparently returned to his earlier views in his phone call with the Turkish president.
And that president, Endrogan, is an Islamist himself, the first one to really rule Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans (and they weren't terribly Islamist in their final years, even though the Turkish Emperor claimed the title of Caliph). Those following Turkey have been nervous ever since Endrogan came to power as he's sidelined his opponents and seems from time to time set to take Turkey in a non democratic, Islamist, directly, and away from the strongly secular government it had featured (not always democratic by any means) since 1919.
That's not a direction the Kurds would go in.
And beyond that, while I didn't think we should go into Syria, once you do, you have an obligation to the people who you are allied to, and who are allied to you. Graham, who has been a strong supporter of Trump, is exactly correct. We're abandoning our allies.
We have a history of doing that. We set the South Vietnamese up for betrayal with horrific results. Our messing around in Cambodia lead to a Cambodian disaster in a country we never intended to become directly involved in.
Now we're doing that in Syria.
That's disturbing in and of itself, but the President's reply is disturbing as well.
- Donald J. Trump
....the captured ISIS fighters and families. The U.S. has done far more than anyone could have ever expected, including the capture of 100% of the ISIS Caliphate. It is time now for others in the region, some of great wealth, to protect their own territory. THE USA IS GREAT!
First of all, let's deal with the blistering absurdity of the proposition we'll punish the Turks if their invasion gets out of hand.
What the crud would that mean? An armed invasion is out of hand in the first place. When you send in an army it's not the same thing as a local church coming to your door and asking you to convert or something.
Secondly, we haven't ever "obliterated" the economy of Turkey. If that's a reference to Iran, well we've badly damaged the Iranian economy, but the regime there is still keeping on keeping on and probably diligently working on acquiring an atomic bomb. The economy of North Korea is a rampaging mess and has been for a long time, but it's Stalinist court is still in power and they have the bomb.
And using the phrase "great and unmatched wisdom" is amazingly inept for a man who must know that there are those who seriously question his mental stability. That this came about by way of a phone call, where the individual in question is already in trouble due to a phone call, is stunning.
Of course this may mean nothing more than Trump has returned to his isolationist view of the world, one in which the consequences do not so much matter as long as U.S. troops are involved.
If that's so, or in any event, this decision is flat out wrong.
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Greenland?
The White House Retweeted
Donald J. Trump
Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time....
What on earth?
There is a point at which the news becomes so surreal, you just can't quite grasp that something is really in the news. The bizarre news on the President making sounds on purchasing Greenland is news of that type. The New York Times, no friend of President Trump's headlined an article on this in this fashion:
Trump, Greenland, Denmark. Is This Real Life?
Or a Peter Sellers movie?
Whatever a person thinks of Trump, or the New York Times, the Times pretty much nailed it. It feels sort of like something out of The Mouse That Roared, or something like that. It's really hard to grasp what's going on here and a person has to suspect its some sort of odd news cycle diversion.
The story started off with what seemed like a joke and then evolved into something that just seemed like innocent ignorance, combined with a discount of the original suggestion. But now its escalated to cancelling a state visit with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who made it plain that purchasing the Danish possession was not going to be discussed. Trump has since referred to Frederiksen as "nasty".
The irony there is that while Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat, she's a populist conservative on the European scale. As Prime Minister she's opposed liberal immigration into Denmark, supported confiscation of items from refugees, and supported banning the burka. She's critical of globalism and has made open comments about Islam being a barrier to integration in Denmark in a way that no American politician would dare.
In other words, Trump and Frederiksen should get along fine.*
Instead, we now have the American populist President insulting the Danish populist Prime Minister over Greenland.
I'm quite certain that 100% of the leadership in the President's party, as well as probably 98% of the people who work in the Administration, have the same reaction. Greenland?
The United States isn't going to buy Greenland. Denmark isn't going to "sell" Greenland. Greenland is self administering and if it has a change of status of any type, and it could, it would become an independent nation, something that it more or less would like to do, and which with its independent status, it more or less nearly is. In my view, that's what it should be, which is not to say that its really actively asking to be that.
The flag of Greenland
Moreover, there was never an era when the US was going to "buy" Greenland. If the country ever had any interest in doing that, it would have been about the same time as we fought the War of 1812.
88% of the residents of Greenland are Inuit. Culturally, that places Greenland a lot closer to northern Canada, which isn't purposing to annex it, than it does to the United States. If Greenland, however, was to join a North American nation, it'd be Canada. . . not the United States.
Greenland has belonged, in one fashion or another, to Scandinavian countries since 986 when it was first settled by Norwegians and Icelanders. At that time, all Scandinavians, while not unified in rule, were close in culture and the distinction between a Norwegian, Swede or Dane was more theoretical than real. Hitting Greenland during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, Scandinavians successfully colonized the coastal areas and a Christian Scandinavian population lived there all the way into the 1400s. At the same time Greenland was also inhabited by the Dorset Paleo Indian culture, which also disappeared from the region around 1500.
The 15th and 16th Centuries were not kind.
As the Dorsets declined the Thule came in. They're an Inuit people and they make up the vast majority of Greelanders today, as noted. The Danes came back in as early as 1605 when they started a dedicated effort to relocate the Scandinavian communities of Greenland which they had never forgotten, unaware that those colonies had been abandoned. Still, a 200 year long recollection that they had been there is impressive.
Denmark and Norway shared a joint monarchy during this period which dissolved in 1814. Norway went into a sort of unhappy union with Sweden shortly thereafter, but it maintained a fair degree of independence until Norway formally left that union in the early 20th Century. All the way until 1933 Norway, however claimed unoccupied areas of Greenland until that claim was extinguished in favor of Denmark that year.
The first real substantial contact with the United States came in World War Two, during which the U.S. occupied Greenland as Denmark was occupied by Germany. Greenland basically became self administering during this period but the experience did open up what had been a highly isolated society due to the American presence. It pushed for self administration after the war but did not achieve it until 1979, in part, and 2009, in full.
It's pulled out of the European Community, which shows how self governing it is.
After World War Two the United States did maintain a military presence in the form of Thule Air Force Base, which was opened in 1943 and is still in use. The US actually offered to buy Greenland at that time, offering Denmark $100,000,000 in 1946. As Greenland was much less independent than it is now, perhaps this is not surprising. The US had actually pondering buying it once before, in 1867, when Congress put an end to the idea.
In 1867 and 1946, of course, the situation was much different than it is now, in 2019. Greenland for all practical purposes is independent in everything but name. Greenland has full internal autonomy but does not administer its own foreign affairs. With the 2009 arrangement, however, granting fully sovereignty over resources to Greenland, it's assumed that independence is on the horizon. Greenland still maintains a close association with Denmark, and Danes make up a significant portion of the 12% of the population that's not Thule, but the end of Danish rule is coming.
The beginning of American ownership is not and its a really odd thought that anyone bothered to ask the Danes to sell something that they basically are giving back to the people who live there. The Danes have never shown any interest in giving up Greenland to another country and remarkably reestablished contact with Greenland after a 200 year absence in the first place. They contested Norway's claim to an unoccupied portion of it. They've been very clear in their views.
So what brought this about is really a mystery. To Americans, it's probably just one more distraction, but if you are Greenlandic or Danish, it's no doubt insulting. And now the insult for the Danes has been compounded. And for what reason?
_________________________________________________________________________________
Greenland has belonged, in one fashion or another, to Scandinavian countries since 986 when it was first settled by Norwegians and Icelanders. At that time, all Scandinavians, while not unified in rule, were close in culture and the distinction between a Norwegian, Swede or Dane was more theoretical than real. Hitting Greenland during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, Scandinavians successfully colonized the coastal areas and a Christian Scandinavian population lived there all the way into the 1400s. At the same time Greenland was also inhabited by the Dorset Paleo Indian culture, which also disappeared from the region around 1500.
The 15th and 16th Centuries were not kind.
As the Dorsets declined the Thule came in. They're an Inuit people and they make up the vast majority of Greelanders today, as noted. The Danes came back in as early as 1605 when they started a dedicated effort to relocate the Scandinavian communities of Greenland which they had never forgotten, unaware that those colonies had been abandoned. Still, a 200 year long recollection that they had been there is impressive.
Denmark and Norway shared a joint monarchy during this period which dissolved in 1814. Norway went into a sort of unhappy union with Sweden shortly thereafter, but it maintained a fair degree of independence until Norway formally left that union in the early 20th Century. All the way until 1933 Norway, however claimed unoccupied areas of Greenland until that claim was extinguished in favor of Denmark that year.
The first real substantial contact with the United States came in World War Two, during which the U.S. occupied Greenland as Denmark was occupied by Germany. Greenland basically became self administering during this period but the experience did open up what had been a highly isolated society due to the American presence. It pushed for self administration after the war but did not achieve it until 1979, in part, and 2009, in full.
It's pulled out of the European Community, which shows how self governing it is.
After World War Two the United States did maintain a military presence in the form of Thule Air Force Base, which was opened in 1943 and is still in use. The US actually offered to buy Greenland at that time, offering Denmark $100,000,000 in 1946. As Greenland was much less independent than it is now, perhaps this is not surprising. The US had actually pondering buying it once before, in 1867, when Congress put an end to the idea.
In 1867 and 1946, of course, the situation was much different than it is now, in 2019. Greenland for all practical purposes is independent in everything but name. Greenland has full internal autonomy but does not administer its own foreign affairs. With the 2009 arrangement, however, granting fully sovereignty over resources to Greenland, it's assumed that independence is on the horizon. Greenland still maintains a close association with Denmark, and Danes make up a significant portion of the 12% of the population that's not Thule, but the end of Danish rule is coming.
The beginning of American ownership is not and its a really odd thought that anyone bothered to ask the Danes to sell something that they basically are giving back to the people who live there. The Danes have never shown any interest in giving up Greenland to another country and remarkably reestablished contact with Greenland after a 200 year absence in the first place. They contested Norway's claim to an unoccupied portion of it. They've been very clear in their views.
So what brought this about is really a mystery. To Americans, it's probably just one more distraction, but if you are Greenlandic or Danish, it's no doubt insulting. And now the insult for the Danes has been compounded. And for what reason?
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*Which may be trivializing the seriousness of her views. She's also a strong opponent of legal prostitution in Scandinavia. Frederiksen is Prime Minister, it should be noted, as head of a minority party in coalition with parties of the left.
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