BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Negativity Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 21.1% saturation with 196 hits. Analysis detected 1,803 faulty-reasoning hits from 928 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 45.7% and a BS Rank of 41% (12,939 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.10% of the article peer group.
In June of 1932, the scuttlebutt in Illorsuit, the sole settlement on an island off the western coast of Greenland, concerned the German film crew then crashing about the fjords.
Since their arrival in nearby Uummannaq, the Germans had shot thousands of feet of what would become S.O.S.
Eisberg, a joint Berlin-Hollywood adventure flick about a scientific expedition to the Arctic that goes haywire.
In Illorsuit, where the population may have been 160 at the time, they were impossible to miss.
Camped out on the beach, the cast and crew drank fearsomely and carried on at all hours of the night, screaming, fighting, having sex with each other, and playing ping-pong.
These activities amused the Kalaallit residents of Illorsuit as they made their rounds trapping and fishing.
Never before had they hosted such a lively group of foreign visitors, yet they were hardly unfamiliar with the coarse customs of white people.
They spotted the local trader (Illorsuit’s Danish colonial administrator, of the Royal Greenland Trading Department) emerge from the encampment so drunk that he crawled his way home along a ditch.
Local kids nicknamed the occupant of one tent Adliskutak—“The Mattress”—for the frequency of the sexual visitors observed coming and going.
Adliskutak was possibly Leni Riefenstahl, the star of S.O.S.
Eisberg, then two years away from achieving even greater renown as the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the person in Illorsuit most irritated by the Germans’ antics was also an outsider: a painter from America, bald as a puffin’s egg and nearly as white under his clothes, whom everyone called “Kinte.”
Fifty-year-old Rockwell Kent had been living on the island for months.
“Painting; painting incessantly,” he logged in Salamina, one of three diaristic memoirs of Greenland he would write and illustrate.
“Pursuing beauty in bewilderment of its profusion, greedy to get in one short year the whole of what might thrill a man a lifetime.”
Kent found his pursuit stymied, though, by the “preposterous moving-picture outfit” that had “settled on the district like a locust blight.”
To some hapless crew member, he gave an earful: “Your being here affects my work about as my running in on all your shots would affect yours.”
Nearly a century on, President Donald Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland gives this encounter a new salience.
On one level, it looks like an argument between the cultural proxies of two aspiring hegemons—the United States and soon-to-be-Nazi Germany—over the right to represent Greenland to the world.
The full picture is a little more complicated.
Kent, for one, was hardly an ambassador of American expansionism; he came to Greenland a committed socialist and critic of American power—though with certain proprietary instincts and colonial assumptions intact.
Greenlanders were the subjects of this conversation between great powers as well as participants in it, even if their guests engaged them only in rough translation.
“The natives saw it all, got it all,” Kent reported.
They were assessing these strangers—and engendering in Kent, at least, an awareness of being seen in Greenland while having done so much seeing there himself.
The one written account we have of Kent’s stay in Illorsuit from the perspective of a resident emphasizes his reputation for kindness, good humor, and generosity during his stay.
Kent was hardy, but alone he would never have made it without Kalaallit hospitality and expertise.
Kent’s paintings can productively raise all these subjects, I think, but they have been very difficult for Americans to see.
The reason is simple: America didn’t want them.
After Kent’s appearance before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, American museums rejected his work for fear of associating with a radical.
As a result, Kent gifted an enormous number of his pieces—“more than 800 drawings, lithographs and wood engravings,” reported The New York Times, plus 80 paintings, many of them of Greenland—to the Soviet Union, where he was embraced.
Not the smallest of McCarthyism’s injustices is that it deprived Americans of those paintings, of that Greenland.
Kalaallit artists today are busy representing their communities, their land, and their perspectives on sovereignty and colonialism to the rest of the world according to their own terms.
As for Illorsuit, it’s now empty.
But it became so only recently, after the government of Greenland ordered its permanent evacuation following landslides and flooding from a tsunami in 2017.
This part of the world is changing because of carbon emissions from countries like the United States and Denmark, as are the other cold places whose beauty Kent celebrated and whose people, he thought, had much to teach the rest of the world.
Illorsuit remembered Kent for a long time: The trust he established in memory of Saalamiit, who died of an accidental injury at age 36, in 1936, issued its last disbursements in 2013.
Kent specified that its funds were intended “particularly for mothers, married and unmarried, and its administration locally is to be in the hands of the Greenlanders themselves.”
The United States has no right to Greenland, obviously, while Denmark’s own claim is no stronger than the doctrine of “finders keepers.”
Even if the threatened American conquest fails, it seems likely that Greenland’s appeal to the exponents of unabashed, extractive imperialism in this century will endure.
Rockwell Kent went there to extract something of his own: not oil or minerals but American art.
The profits of those ventures were ambiguous.
Ultimately, though, he did the best thing for his neighbors in Illorsuit that any American—that anyone not from Kalaallit Nunaat—could do.
He left them alone.
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