I am usually a fan of Ryan Grim and his reporting but his conversation with Saagar Enjeti on Breaking Points today was not his finest hour. While his country is drunk on war, genocide, regime change and the prospect of “taking Greenland'“, he suggested that it was hard to get worked up about Greenland because “it’s already a colony”. Greenland, perhaps to his surprise, is not a colony however, and is instead an autonomous constituent country with its own language and culture and a distinct identity that should be respected. Grim went on to calculate how much it would cost the United States to buy off each Greenlandic citizen as if a price can be placed on their identity and heritage in exchange for being owned by a country that is the greatest enemy of peace on earth and seeks to use them as a military base and a resource to be tapped dry. The relatively small population of Greenland should not devalue the rights of those people and they should not be treated like a piece of meat being bartered for at market. This is the same sick mentality that has the United States and their client state Israel causing untold suffering in Gaza. Americans often frame debates around whether a leader is or is not a dictator as a convenient justification for war and invasion, even as their own presidents readily cozy up to those same figures. They argue about whether owning Greenland would be good or bad for the United States, yet rarely question whether they have any right to set foot in someone else’s sovereign territory in the first place. It’s this mindset that continues to isolate the U.S. in the eyes of ordinary people around the world. A genuine discussion can be had about whether Greenland should maintain its current status or move toward full independence, but not about whether it should be handed over to the school yard bully and swallowed up as a pawn of empire. Ryan is usually one of the good ones, and I hope and expect that he can do better in the future.