A gift always looks to a gift
Published: Tue, 01/27/26
Updated: Tue, 01/27/26
Doesn’t Greenland ‘belong’ to Denmark? Maybe. However, not many other European countries have colonies thousands of miles away any more so why should Denmark? I know Britain still has the Falklands and it would make sense for those remote Islands to be administered by Argentina, probably one day they will be.
I am not saying that there is necessarily anything wrong with the current arrangement. Or that it is a particularly good thing that President Trump wants the acquisition of Greenland to be part of his dubious legacy. However, nothing stands still in life and I am seeing something quite interesting going on here.
I am writing a series of articles for my monthly members newsletter which I am calling ‘Meditations on the Runes’. There will actually be 19 of them as I am writing a response to the deities and their associated animals as much as the runes themselves. I have just completed my reflections on Skuld, the third of the Norns who is associated with becoming and what we might face in the future. In one sense you cannot predict exactly what will happen even next weekj. However, if you have been incurring debts in the past you can be sure that at some point there will be a reckoning. I am also reminded of Stanza 145 in the Havamal as translated by Jackson Crawford: :’It is better not to pray at all than to pay for too much; nothing will be given that you won’t repay. It is better to sacrifice nothing than to offer too much.’
I have recently read Paul Ham’s excellent account of the battle of Passchendaele which took place near Ypres in the autumn of 1917. The campaign remembered as Passchendaele was yet another attempt to break the stalemate of trench warfare which the Great War had become since 1914. It wasn’t so much that the leaders such as Field Marshall Haig were incompetent. Rather that a war of attrition which resulted in 953,104 British empire deaths in action, 1150,000 French deaths and the German empire lost 1,800,000, turned out to be the only option for fighting such a war between such well matched opponents. The war finally ended when the exhausted Germans launched a major offensive in March 1918 which was initially very successful until it over stretched supply lines and the gains could not be properly reinforced. For the allies the arrival of around 2 million US troops made a huge difference. Although the US had declared war on Germany
in April 1917 the first American troops did not participate in combat until the October of that year. Their full strength was not used until 1918 during which about 53,402 died in battle and another 63,000 died from other causes such as disease and accidents.
In the second world war around 2.4 million US troops served in Europe with roughly 250,000 deaths in combat. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany the US established bases in Western Europe and even now has between 70, and 90,000 troops stationed here. In the UK alone there are 13 US Air Force bases, among them the huge installations such as Lakenheath and Mildenhall. Also, since 2022 the US has spent something between 130 and 180 billion dollars on supporting Ukraine.
What has any of this to do with Greenland? Maybe Skuld has been keeping a tally of all the USA has spent in terms of blood and treasure and has brought the balance to President Trump’s attention. Suddenly the gift is looking to a gift in return. Is the USA telling the Europeans; You owe us Greenland? And if you are going to be ungrateful and refuse then there will be threats of sanctions against any country which opposed this move and even the likelihood of military action. You could say that a couple of weeks ago Trump was acting as bailiff in chief and demanding payment for services rendered.
Then, suddenly in Davros during the WEF forum something even more insidious seems to have happened. The NATO chief, Mark Rutte made an agreement with President Trump that the USA could have large bases on Greenland, rather like the UK has on Cyprus. Apparently neither the government of Denmark or the people of Greenland were consulted, or even informed, of this move. Once the USA has substantial parts of the territory of Greenland fully under its control as well roads, sea and air ports for its use any meaningful sovereignty is gone. In the meantime the Danish government will probably be expected to keep administering the native population is the remainder of the territory. What President Trump demonstrated here was that NATO, rather than being a source of protection for its member states, even the smaller ones such as Denmark and its territories, the ‘alliance’ is actually an empire of colonies which must submit to the USA.
The USA has its own debt problems with the Federal deficit at $39 trillion dollars (it that isn’t the official figure just yet it will be very soon, and probably $50 trillion by the end of the current presidency. Europe is massively in debt to the USA for ‘protection’ since 1917. Whoever holds the US debt has the supposedly most powerful country in the word over the proverbial barrel. It may well be that the USA is bullying weaker countries at the instigation of its own masters who hold the whip of debt over the ‘indispensable nation’. President Trump may not so much be a bully as just completely out of his depth and struggling to balance competing demands between creditors and allies.
I don’t know how we are going to get out of the mess we are currently in. Some kind of very large scale bankruptcy is probably the only way forward. It won’t be pleasant but maybe the human race can finally learn the lesson that the Havamal has been trying to teach us for hundreds of years.
Regards Graham
PS There will be a Stav Martial arts training day in Salisbury on the 21st of March, it will be great to see you there if you can make it. Full details at https://iceandfire.org.uk/salisbury210326.html
Graham Butcher
21 Beaver Road
Beverley East Yorkshire HU17 0QN
UNITED KINGDOM
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