“Comply or die” has always been my country’s operative motto, especially when “compliance” has been a priori impossible:
On May 14, 1854, six Missourian explorers crested a steep ridge, some 150 miles north of San Francisco. After days of hard travel through mountainous, broken terrain, they encountered a stunning sight. Spread below them was twenty-five thousand acres of lush, flat land. The next day, the six horsemen descended to the floor of what is now known as Round Valley, in northern Mendocino County. According to Frank Asbill, son of one of the six, “they had not gone far when the tall, waving, wild oats began to wiggle in a thousand different places all at the same time.” The group’s leader, Pierce Asbill, then called out: “We’ve come a long way from Missouri to locate this place . . . an’ be damned if wigglin’ grass ’ull keep us away! Git a-hold of yer weapons—we’uns are goin’ in!” Reaching a creek bed, the six horsemen reportedly encountered three thousand Yuki Indians. “A war hoop went up from the Missourians [who] just lay over the horse[s’] neck[s] and shot. . . . They just rode them down. . . . It was not difficult to get an Indian with every shot. . . . When the shootin’ was over, thirty-two dead and dying [Yuki] lay scattered.” By the end of the day perhaps forty Indians were dead. The massacre was a prelude to an American genocide.
Source: Benjamin Madley, “California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History, California History, Vol. 96, Number 4, p. 11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.4.11. Image source.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. will seize control of Greenland “the easy way” or “the hard way” and warned that he won’t miss out on the opportunity to Russia or China.
“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” he said. He brushed off naming a price to purchase the land from Denmark but also didn’t describe what any potential military action would look like.
“I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way,” Trump said.
He made the comments during a press availability Jan. 9 as he met with some of the top oil companies in the world to discuss investment in Venezuela, where the U.S. just a week earlier captured leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to face drug charges.
Trump said if the U.S. hadn’t gone into Venezuela and attempted to reinvigorate their oil industry, Russia or China would have. He also referred to Venezuela as a next-door neighbor because of its location in the Western Hemisphere.
“And by the way, we don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you’re going to have Russia or China as your next door neighbor,” Trump said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Trump said there are Russian and Chinese destroyers, Russian submarines and larger Chinese ships, already sitting outside of Greenland.
Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark that has about 31 billion barrels of oil in reserves, about three-quarters of what the U.S. has. But the territory banned drilling in 2021, citing environmental concerns.
White House aide Stephen Miller questioned Denmark’s right to control Greenland in a Jan. 5 interview with CNN.
Source: Erin Mansfield and Bart Jansen, “By right or by might? Trump vows to take Greenland before Russia, China,” USA Today, 9 January 2026. I inserted the illustration, which I found here. ||||| TRR
