This is a long one. Bear with me. 

I thought I’d said everything there was to say about Greenland six years ago in this article Uggianaqtuq. “We’re Going Climate Bonkers:” – Guardian

There’s even a short discussion with Dave Gardner at the end of the thread about Trump’s desire to buy Greenland – in 2019.

The point of my 2019 article was to ridicule the Guardian’s climate hysteria-induced obsession with the place. But the reasons for that obsession, and the obsession of climate doomers in general with everything chilly and far away, are still as obscure and profound as a million-year-old ice core.  

One of the problems with discussion of practically any political subject the slightest bit technical is lack of awareness of scale. A million years of ice core measurements versus a few decades of reliable thermometer readings; “12 billion tons of Greenland ice sheet melts in one day!” was a headline, which to most people would sound like a hefty chunk of the 2 quadrillion tons total weight of the thing. 

A similar wilful ignorance affects discussion of geopolitics. I’m no fan of bullies grabbing bits of someone else’s territory, but it’s important to keep an eye on the figures.  

While emphasising the size of this chunk of “European” territory (which isn’t actually in either the EU or the European continent) commenters on the geopolitics tend to minimise the importance of population (if you can talk about minimising the minuscule.) Persuading 56,000 people to fly a different flag shouldn’t be that difficult. Given that 90% of them speak either Kalaallisut Tunumiit or Inuktun at home, a new flat screen tv set in each hut, plus some dubbed “Desperate Housewives” might persuade them to prefer US media to Danish. But what do I know? Maybe Danish TV is a gas (though given EU restrictions on such things, I rather doubt it.)  

To emphasise their link to the Old Continent, it is often pointed out that several thousand Greenlanders live in Denmark, though this number is likely to diminish sharply, given that the Danish health service has been inserting intrauterine devices into some of them without their knowledge. 

Don’t ask me how, but my researches led me to Wiki’s page on LGBTQ rights in Greenland  

It’s good to know that LGBTQ people have rights in Greenland, but a bit odd that they should have a whole Wiki page about it. Climate sceptics, who are certainly more numerous and whose activities are arguably of greater public interest, are not allowed a Wiki page, but are directed to Climate Change Denial, much as if the LGBTQ Inuit were referred to a special page on Sexual Perversion in Greenland.]  

which in turn led me to a press article on Gay Greenland Past & Present:

Gay Greenland–Past and Present

Organizing gays over such a large, rugged and thinly peopled land mass as Greenland, where roads are few, winters are long and darkly brutal .. has never been an easy feat.

I dunno. Some people might like the idea of a six-month-long darkly brutal winter night with a few large, rugged close friends. 

The article goes on to quote a gay travel journalist who interviewed a gay radio personality who had organized a gay association called Qaamaneq [meaning ‘Light’]. 

“At the height of our gay organization a few years ago, we would rent out a house in the old part of town and have parties with up to 50 gay and lesbian people at a time.”

But inevitably over a few short years everyone became familiar with everyone else. “There were no new faces. It was like reading an old newspaper,” he laughed recalling how the attendance dwindled down as people moved to Denmark to meet new friends or got bored… “Eventually I was the only one left so I closed the group.”

(I know how he feels. I’ve been familiar with a few old newspapers myself over the years.)

There’s a lot more quotes from people called Bisgaard & Olsen, but not much from actual Greenlanders. There’s also nothing about the fact that 7% of the population of Greenlanders are Danish, and that there are also several hundred Filipinos and Thais. It’s a safe bet that most of them are young single male migrant workers. They may well be into clubbing, and not necessarily of baby seals.  

The business of getting bored with seeing the same old faces is obviously not limited to gays, since the Inuit population has been island hopping from Alaska across the top of Canada for two thousand years, reaching Greenland in the twelfth century, only to find that Scandinavians got there first.

Which brings us to Nunarput Utoqqarsuanngoravit, which is the Greenland National Anthem, the words of which were written by a Dane in 1912 and the music composed by another Dane in 1937. In the meantime it was sung to the tune of the Swedish National Anthem, “Du gamma, du fria,” though how they made it scan is a mystery.

Wiki helpfully gives two Danish translations, and two English ones, one literal, and the other poetic. The non-poetic one begins:

“Our ancient land under ice glimmer’s phryctoria”

Which I’ll leave you to work out. The English poetic version misses out on the chance of a great second line:

“..By rights should belong to our Great Queen Victoria.”

While they were waiting 25 years for someone to compose a tune for it, they also used the Danish National Anthem, of which Wikipedia provides an audio version, played by the band of the US Army.

There’s also a choral version of “Nunarput Utoqqarsuanngoravit.” 

If you want to know what it sounds like, but can’t be bothered to click on the link – think of a bunch of brass monkeys singing treble. 

The feature of the Frozen North that seems to fascinate both Trump and climate hysterics is the emptiness of it. It makes sense that a property developer should look on any empty space as an opportunity, but where’s the fascination for an ecofreak? Greenland is the least green, least biodiverse inhabited place on earth, and the last to fear global warming.  

I experience the same bewilderment when people mention the pleasure of holidays in the Sahara. They tend to be of the Green tendency, so I can understand the appeal of the wilderness, but why the desert? There’s nothing there. And nobody.

And maybe that’s the point. I once came across an article in the Telegraph colour supplement about holidays in Marrakesh. I haven’t been there, but I’ve always had the impression that the charm of the place was the teeming life of an old-style traditional oriental city out of the Arabian Nights. The article had six photos with not a soul in sight. I put it down to the snobbery of Telegraph readers and their preference for a gated existence far from the hoi polloi, but then I saw an article in the Guardian on the same city, also with a half a dozen photos, and with just one figure, an Arab cleaning the swimming pool. 

The Guardian is no longer searchable,  but I found a more recent article in my favourite rag on a nearby location:

Morocco’s happy valley – the wilderness that lies just beyond the souks of Marrakech

And, blow me down with a Sirocco if this article as well isn’t illustrated with four photos of the place with not a body to be seen. One photo shows a half a dozen riverside cafés which, we are assured “are full of visiting Marrakechis at weekends,” though the photographer has managed to snap the entire scene without a single human visible.

The title makes it clear enough that the charm of the place is precisely the fact that it’s away from “the frantic bustle.. and the clamour of the souks” of Marrakesh, and the author takes pride in announcing to a half a million Guardian readers that this isolated spot “could be Marrakech’s best-kept secret.” 

Could have been. But not any more.

To be fair, he doesn’t abhor all contact with Moroccans: 

..Marrakech … is still one of my favourite cities. For the moment, however, I’m immensely grateful that I’d decided to base myself in Ourika valley, where the only sounds this morning are the sizzling of my Berber omelette and the braying of a mule from the mountain trail behind the house.

And he even introduces a human element:

“Salam alaikum,” says Abdelkarim Ait Ali, as he loads my already groaning table with the generous breakfast offerings that are part of traditional Berber hospitality.

But the big feature is the groaning table and the sizzling Berber omelette – plus the braying mule, for local colour. 

George Orwell wrote an article about Marrakesh in 1939. He too is writing while seated in a restaurant:

As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. 

Orwell sometimes wrote for the Manchester Guardian, though not, thank goodness, on the Holiday Travel pages.

In Northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts.. where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. 

What distinguishes Orwell from most leftwing writers is that he includes himself in his diatribes against the colonial system of exploitation, which he experienced at first hand. It’s a protest against our own psychology, rather than against some abstract, theoretical -ism.

And of course you’re no longer likely to be assailed by starving inhabitants begging for a crust of bread in a place like Morocco. The world has changed since Orwell wrote, but human psychology – not so much.

The left-of-centre Guardian has a long, honourable history of anti-imperialism. Opposition to colonialism and “colour prejudice” was one of the big moral issues of the post-war period, and its readers are the sons, daughters and heirs of those who read Orwell in its pages. Once the colonies were abandoned, another issue had to be found, and “saving the planet” fitted the bill nicely. 

With this difference. The sufferings of the planet can be gazed on without too much pain to oneself. They can in principle be measured objectively – and photographed aesthetically – as long as there aren’t any people to get in the way. 

We still feel some compassion for the Wretched of the Earth, but more for the Earth itself. As Orwell nearly said: “It is the same colour as the people, and a great deal more interesting to look at.”