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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Snarky editorials are missing the memo here, that like it or not, history is happening again. Trump's not going to pull a Crimea with little green men, but the Overton window is opening.

Why can't the US pay each Greenlander $1mmm to vote for independence and then ratify joining the US? Nobody can give a good answer what's stopping this. Denmark has already promised to allow an independence vote.

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“Why can’t China give each person in Guam $1 million to vote for independence and then ratify joining PRC, what’s stopping this”

Expansionism is bad. The suggestion to manipulate the population against their normal wishes by supplying them with helicopter money is depraved.

The likely outcome would probably be a hoard of like-minded millionaires moving to the same locale in the mainland US.

It would suck far more for the US governments strategic vision than it would for the locals.

The level of patronization here is incredible.

Maybe Greenlanders would use the million dollars to move to a US metro area so their kids could get a better education. Maybe they want to get a tech job. Maybe they just don't like being cold!

Inuits aren't serfs. Stop treating them like part of the landscape. They are human beings free to make their own choices.

EDIT: I can't post more comments right now, so about Guam — I've never heard China make an offer! If the US has to counter to hold onto a strategically important territory, that's a good thing for the residents!

The fact that trump junior had to bribe homeless people with food to get enough people in maga gear to take a supportive looking photo I think is quite instructive about what the Greenlanders feel

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Well, maybe Denmark should have done something to help the crowds of homeless elderly people in the supermarket, so Don couldn't use them a a photo op. The entire island is 75k people, how could Don round up 20 homeless people in an hour at a single grocery store?

Either this is the entire homeless population of Greenland or Denmark isn't really doing a great support job.

By your logic Washington state should consider becoming Icelandic. Relative levels of homelessness are not an indication of who wants to join whom or who gets to annex whom.

This entire line of reasoning is INSANE

>round up 20 homeless people in an hour at a single grocery store?

pretty sure I could manage that in +- any decent sized city globally. Hungry people like food. Completely irrelevant to this topic. A political player needing to stage photo ops with bribery does indicate that there isn't organic support for it though.

Greenland doesn't have any decent sized cities! The largest city is 19,000 people!

Denmark promised to allow a fair independence vote. They certainly didn't promise to respect the results of an unfair independence vote with significant outside interference.

Really ask yourself — if Denmark, the colonial state, who never asked Greenland whether it wanted to a colony in the first place, rejects an independence vote (and pro-US) by the 88% native Inuit population, are they the good guys?

I'm not saying Greenland would vote to join the US! But if they do, it would be extremely hard to view Denmark as the "good guys" for rejecting it. That's a real white-man's-burden perspective.

> who never asked Greenland whether it wanted to a colony in the first place

If that was the criterion for legitimacy in such a claim for land then I have to ask, who asked the native Americans anything? Or Mexicans?

This kind of "works for me but not for you" argument, similar to the one you threw above (US to "buy democracy" by paying people to vote for independence) and then dodged any follow-up, can only take you so far in a quality conversation.

The interference wars commence!

What would your response be if Russia paid each US citizen $1mmm to vote for allowing it to annex Alaska?

My response is that Russia does not have $733 billion to throw at that project, but the US has $75 billion to do it in Greenland.

What if the population of Alaska was smaller?

The pop of Alaska is not the relevant number here. Presumably the vote to transfer Alaska to Russia would have to be at the level of the whole country. (The question of whether a state can unilaterally leave the United States has come up in the past and was pretty violently settled.)

> The pop of Alaska is not the relevant number here. Presumably the vote to transfer Alaska to Russia would have to be at the level of the whole country.

No. Nobody proposed a Greenland referendum where all Danes can vote. Greenland ≈ Alaska, Denmark ≈ USA.

Now that you've agreed that it's for sale, let's negotiate the price.

We don't have that authority.

As per the Civil War and SCOTUS rulings during Reconstruction, US States are not allowed to leave the Union. Even if the people of Alaska (or any state for that matter) voted overwhelmingly to secede, the other states would have to pass a constitutional amendment allowing for secession. America’s own Article 50, if you will.

In Greenland’s case, Denmark has guaranteed a right to an independence referendum. A closer parallel would be the status of Puerto Rico as a US territory. The choice to apply for statehood, remain a territory, or vote for independence has no clear majority. However there isn’t anything that would prevent independence for Puerto Rico if that’s what the people there wanted.

Also like, Greenland never voted to join Denmark. Denmark just took it! Every single US state at least had a ratification vote for the territory to become a state.

And by that you probably mean people who just showed up, claimed some land, and then voted?

California... It was taken by military force ending in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It ratified statehood 2 years later, so it was annexed and then accepted into the Union, not very legitimate to be done this way.

Okay, what if some American rich person promised to give $1m to people to vote for the candidate that he was supporting.

Money for votes is the issue I have, regardless of the hypothetical.

That is already illegal under US law. I suppose a foreigner buying votes would likewise be illegal.

In any event I agree with you that buying votes is a perversion of democracy and should not be allowed.

Plenty of ways around it. Look at Musk's bullshit $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes.

> guaranteed a right to an independence referendum

exactly a independence referendum

and that is what Greenland wants independence not being a US territory

like think about it why would they want to be US territory it's pretty clear cut worse for them in close to every aspect. Like they would have less self control then under Denmark, they would have a way worse health care system, way worse labor rights, way less democracy, worse legal system etc. No one (who is well informed) in Greenland wants to be a US territory.

It may seem pedantic but once independence is granted Greenland would become a sovereign nation. Sovereign nations have the right to request annexation into another state. Whether that happens within days or a century after independence is immaterial.

the point is they don't want to so if it's happen it would happen because the US forced them to do so which mean the US would have degraded to be on the level of evil states the world would be far better of not existing

it would have betrayed all of it's core values and it's founders would turn around for shame if such a thing where possible for dead people (EDIT: well at lest some of them)

If Denmark was noble enough to allow a referendum in a time when it was regarded the correct thing to do, it does not mean that the referendum can be abused so that the U.S. can later annex the substantial natural resources of Greenland and say it is for everyone's security.

You cite legalistic reasons that make it impossible to annex Alaska. I'm sure similar legalistic reasons can be found to reverse Denmark's offer in an age that has turned neo-colonial.

Because Danish voting law, having been written with a bit of insight, outlaws bribing the electorate.

Why would anyone in Greenland believe that they would ever actually get paid? And if they were paid ahead of a vote, why wouldn't they just take the money, vote no, and go on with their lives?

The US government has a history of not following through with promises like these, even when they are codified into law or ratified in legally binding treaties.

It's my (unsophisticated) understanding that any country/territory in the world could petition US Congress for statehood. The only qualifications are that it be a republic, and have an explicit constitution (no wishy-washy UK "we sort of have an unwritten constitution").

Any of the Canadian provinces could do this on their own (though, maybe they should consider getting the divorce finalized first), Greenland could do it, hell, Argentina or Mongolia could do it.

The catch being, of course, Congress doesn't have to accept.

Could provinces do it? They are not strictly republics - they still each have a lieutenant governor, appointed by the governor general and act as the King’s representative. Passage of legislation still requires royal assent.

I do not believe that it counts that Canada has a monarch, unless say Alberta has its own private king or something. But I'm conceding that I don't know the answer to this and my first comment's overstated. My bad.

>Could provinces do it?

Yes. The Canadian Supreme Court's Re Secession legalized secession. More info: <https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/tkg5gf/who_has...>.

>They are not strictly republics - they still each have a lieutenant governor, appointed by the governor general and act as the King’s representative. Passage of legislation still requires royal assent.

Nothing prevents former Canadian states from retaining parliamentary systems after annexation. They would still need a governor, either elected or appointed by the federal government, who would fulfill the role the king's representative does now, but that is no different from any former monarchy that, after becoming a republic, now elects a president to serve in that role.

the huge majority of citizens in Greenland do _not_ want to be part of the US nor is there wide spread historic US control over it so you can't pull a Crimea.

The reason they don't want to be part of Denmark is because they don't want to be a external territory but their own _independent_ country, making their own decisions for themself.

Not only would joining the US not give them that, they would actually be worse off then before as they pretty much guaranteed wouldn't become a US state but external territory instead. Not speaking about all kinds of living and right standards they are used to and would likely lose when entering the US (e.g. health care, consumer rights, etc.).

And when it comes about having a military outpost on Greenland the US already has that.

So we have:

- Denmark: Want's to keep it, and is doing financially well so they have no reason to sell, but have many reasons to keep it.

- Greenland People: Want to be a _fully independent_ nation.

- A US president with megalomania who wants to _force allays_ to give him territory they don't want to give up and force his rule onto people which do not want this. And that not just with a random EU allay but one of their closest allays (Canada)

Let's be realistic the US trying to "do a Crimea" wouldn't be a Crimera but more like Germans invasion into Poland i.e. the start of WW3 due to how it basically signals to China and Russia that Nato is weak (I mean NATO would at lest boarder on a internal war, if not even some members having declared war.) and forcefully sizing territories is fine.

Ignoring megalomania the worst thing here is IMHO how much facts are again just absurdly misrepresented, like treating "Greenland wants to be a independent country" as "Greenland wants to be a territory of the US"

For some reason I thought of Comcast telling me when I called in to get the 20 dollar rate on a mailer, that it's only for new customers. I suppose their purpose is transparent with a teaser rate, but still feels unfair.

Regardless of existing US citizens not getting offered 1MM, what does the regular citizen get if Greenland were to join I wonder?

>Regardless of existing US citizens not getting offered 1MM, what does the regular citizen get if Greenland were to join I wonder?

They get

* Enhanced national security

* Long-term tax revenue from mining and other natural resources

> Why can't the US pay each Greenlander $1mmm to vote for independence and then ratify joining the US?

God hated Esau because he sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew. It never made sense to me but now I kinda get it.

The military base is already there, why not? Also, IIRC the base is of dubious legality. It was built during WWII when Denmark was part of the Third Reich.

Denmark was first neutral, and then occupied by the Germans during WWII. This is not what people would typically consider "part of the Third Reich", unless one would also consider Switzerland or Belgium to have been.

Switzerland was not occupied. (Belgium was.)

guess you upset some american sensibilities friend... i see youve been appropriately greyed out

Their government was eventually dissolved and they were ruled by Germany directly, IIRC.

Switzerland remained independent throughout the war.

> To replace the agreement entered into during World War II between the US and Denmark, a new agreement with respect to Greenland was ratified on 27 April 1951 (effective on 8 June 1951). At the request of NATO, the agreement became a part of the NATO defense program. The pact specified that the two nations would arrange for the use of facilities in Greenland by NATO forces in defense of the NATO area known as the Greenland Defense Area.

So I wonder what would happen to the treaty/base if the US left NATO?

Why should the U.S. steal 2 trillions in minerals from the EU just because Denmark is incompetent?

> "already promised to allow an independence vote"

Exactly, an _independence_ vote.

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