Greenland Redux

Stafford Beer, (1926–2002) the father of management cybernetics. Beer created a model of industry management based on information sharing. He is credited with contributing to the nationalization of British steel and creating an industrial management model for the government of Chile. That is until America arrived. Photo courtesy kevinmunger.substack.com

America has tried to annex another resource-rich country. It left a damning legacy.

One of the facets in the adoption of “strongman regimes,” is the false premise that the strongman provides a unique solution to a host of socio-political challenges. (1) Mussolini is credited with modernizing Italy’s railroads. Hitler is credited with “saving Germany” from economic decline. President-elect 47 is credited with reinterpreting tariffs, expansionism, and rewriting diplomacy in America’s “favor.”

However, an alternative perspective reveals that these premises are intended to misrepresent and are emblematic of the strongman’s purpose of staying in power by providing “newness.”

Greenland is not the first autonomous, self-governing nation to fall prey to America’s extraction of global mineral resources. On December 21, 1970, newly elected President Salvador Allende of Chile proposed a constitutional amendment allowing for the nationalization of Chile’s copper mines. On July 11, 1971, the Chilean Congress approved the amendment. At that time Allende’s staff reached out to Stafford Beer, to help integrate Chile’s economy for the welfare of Chilean workers.

“For over 2 years until Allende was overthrown in 1973 in the bloody Pinochet coup, Stafford Beer and a substantial project team worked on a new cybernetics-based control system, applying it to the…