Those removable contraceptives were put in without consent and without knowledge. Many women wore them for decades without knowing, and were unable to have children throughout that time. The effect here is the same whether the procedure was permanent or not, and the intention was clearly to reduce childbirth among Inuk women.

> The towns were unsustainable due to extreme population growth.

Only if you are unwilling to put in the infrastructure to accommodate. The government of Denmark was racist and didn’t want to spend money that would benefit the people of Greenland.

> The "forced relocations" were due to famine!!!

Where do you get that? Ittoqqortoormiit was established in 1925 by relocating people from Ammassalik to prevent Norway (under Quisling) from establishing a colony there. Even though most the Inuit settlers went north voluntarily (undoubtedly because the hunting grounds were better up North) not everyone did.

The case for Qaanaaq—who were forcibly relocated from Pituffik in 1953 to build an American air base—is even more clear cut. The Danish courts have even ruled that the relocation was illegal and ordered reparations to be payed to the victims. You could argue that the hunting in Ammassalik wasn’t that great in the early 1920s (though saying there was a famine is very much an exaggeration), but there was no such thing in North Greenland in the 1950s. And the people were only relocated to the next fjord over, where the hunting cant have been that much different (in fact the presence of the American military must have made it worse).

>> Greenlanders had unbroken settlements in their lands for a thousand years.

> plainly wrong. Just like the Norse, the previous Greenlandic settlers died out.

Sorry, 700 years than, that is still 450 years longer than the Norwegian/Danish settlements. The Norse and the Inuit both migrated to North America around the same time (1000 CE). The Inuit started in Alaska and spread over to Greenland around 300 years later. Meanwhile the Norse only had 2 settlements in North America, over the course of some 400 years, which they finally abandoned, and didn’t return until 300 years later, by which time the Inuit had populated south and west Greenland with dozens of settlements.

Can you please not post in the flamewar style or cross into personal attack on Hacker News? We're trying to avoid those things.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Fill me in, little buddy. Teach me all about it.

Not OP, but I think there's a valid argument about how "modern" those countries are. It's generally accepted that Romania and Bulgaria were let into the EU somewhat early, mainly for geopolitical reasons (foreclosing Russian influence there, cutting off Russia from the West Balkans). They are countries that continually lie on the tail end of every EU statistic, and have relatively unstable domestic politics and rule of law.

Personally, I'd like to see Ukraine in the EU asap, but I'd also like the EU reformed into a democratic federation, such that the equivalent of the FBI has meaningful authority to investigate and prosecute corruption and rule of law irregularities in member states like Ukraine and Bulgaria.