Quotations

Emma Ashford

@EmmaMAshford

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18h

The congnitive dissonance required for European leaders to worry about an armed invasion of Greenland while simultaneously insisting that Ukraine needs US security guarantees is astounding.

General Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council, stated in mid-November 2023, “The international community warns of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from it. Severe epidemics in the south of the Strip will hasten victory”.

He would have been right except that victory over Hamas was never possible and so what was the purpose of the Israeli actions in Gaza? It is an interesting question to which nobody knows the answer for sure.

Wiliam Clouston, Leader of Britain's (Owenite) SDP: "Denmark, like Portugal in the 1950s, is becoming the victim of prejudice against what I would call non-contiguous colonialism. That the Norse settled southern Greenland before any others is indisputable. Trump’s coveting the territory is, of course, without justification beyond pure self-interest. The fact that Greenland is geographically separate from Denmark is seen by some as a means of delegitimising its claim over it. Portugal suffered the same prejudice from the UN in the post war ‘winds of change’ period when its long held Ultramar territories were challenged - by both the United States and the Soviet Union as well as almost all emerging Third World states. That both the the USA and Russia had ‘gobbled up’ continental lands in the 1800s and before - wholesale - seemed to pass without question. Portugal had held Goa since 1510 and parts of Angola since 1575 but because they were geographically separate their status was questioned in a way that, say, the much later US acquisition of Utah or Nebraska was not. Likewise, Russia’s territorial expansion into Siberia in the C17th falls into the same category. Colonisation and settlement was, therefore, deemed acceptable if the successor state is contiguous but illegitimate if not. Logically, this is unsustainable. As the formidable Dr Franco Nogueira (Portugal’s Foreign Minister 1961 - 1969) stated, the UN General Assembly made colonial governance illegal and yet ‘colonialism practiced in a continuous territory is not regarded by the United Nations as part of the colonial phenomenon’."

Patrick Cockburn: