From Greenland to the Great Lakes, Secession is Our Best Hope for Escaping Tyranny

Nicky Reid

February 13, 2026

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“We will have everything we want; we’re getting everything we want, at no cost!” the President of Babylon barked triumphantly over his latest diplomatic conquest in Greenland. After weeks of mounting tensions between our dear leader and his on-again-off-again rivals in the EU over which member of the country club should get to stick their flag in that rapidly thawing colony, a beautiful “framework” was announced from some bulletproof ski lodge in Davos. Trump declared the agreement to be a complete and total success for his open conspiracy to conquer the Arctic and as usual our cut-rate Bonaparte was completely full of shit but also kind of right.

The grand framework he keeps belching about was a deal offered to him by NATO Secretary Mark Rutte that promises to give the US total sovereignty over small but expandable portions of Greenland for the purpose of building Arctic military bases. This is indeed a sickening gift to the American war machine, but it was one already given to us back in 1951 with a bilateral defense agreement that pretty much gave America the divine right to build bases wherever the fuck they wanted on that desolate island and use them for pretty much anything we wanted to do, and I do mean anything. The US spent most of the Cold War stashing thermonuclear warheads in Greenland without any of the local’s knowledge or consent. But I digress

Long story short, a bunch of nervous NATO Eurocrats gave the Donald the slip by regifting him a 75-year-old deal and Trump grabbed this silly hand-me-down trophy and took a victory lap while chanting “I am not a pedophile!” over and over again to his dwindling MAGA faithful. All stupidity aside though, a far sadder reality here lost on most international observers is that Donald Trump didn’t need to colonize Greenland because Europe had already colonized it for him.

Denmark stole that Inuit territory back in the 16th century and America helped them hold on to it when the Danes were briefly colonized by the Nazis in the early 1940s. As one of the founding charter members of NATO, the tiny Nordic Kingdom then allowed the American empire to turn the island into a gigantic military base that once housed as many as 6,000 American troops at a time when Greenland’s native population was only about 20,0000, forcibly displacing entire villages to make way for their doomsday devices in the process.

The people of Greenland have been fighting for their sovereignty from both Europe and their NATO-American overlords for generations, finally achieving home rule in 1979, voting to withdraw from the EU in 1985, and expanding home rule to a self-government agreement with a window to complete independence in 2009. This is what the actual people of Greenland overwhelmingly support; to be free of pompous white assholes from both sides of the Atlantic along with their toxic waste and petty pissing matches.

But Denmark, dear tolerant socialist Denmark, continues to hold Greenland’s local government hostage with a 5 billion Kroner block grant that funds nearly all of their public services with the unspoken threat being that full independence would mean economic devastation.

And these are the fine gangsters draping themselves in Greenland’s flag and singing “hands off” from the bougie boulevards of Copenhagen. The truth only spoken between verses is that the Danes welcome any white men with guns to the island, so long as they don’t make a big show about it, because any sane native would cut the first deal they could get from China to be rid of them all. And as America sinks deeper and deeper into our own debt besotted Chinese money-pit, we have increasingly been reduced to little more than white men with guns.

Greenland’s seemingly inescapable fate, to be reduced to the polluted military playground of an increasingly belligerent American empire is tragic but perhaps the most tragic thing about the whole predicament is that this diplomatically toxic arrangement isn’t even particularly unusual. As grotesque as Donald Trump may be, he is far from the first American strongman to rape internationally ill-defined soil with climate torching military hardware. It’s actually kind of an American tradition and it didn’t stop with Geronimo either. Manifest Destiny aside, this is how our nation acquired its 49th and 50th states.

Like Greenland, both Hawaii and Alaska are overwhelmingly indigenous territories who have been fighting losing battles to free themselves from a hellish existence as glorified military bases for generations.

America bought Alaska from its previous conquistadors across the Bearing Strait in Tsarist Russia in 1867 and immediately placed its people under military rule for over a decade, during which the US Army and Navy were used to shell Tlingit villages, like Angoon in 1882, when they refused to be assimilated by bayonets alone. The end result wasn’t just Alaska’s forced statehood; it’s the ongoing military occupation of sacred northern indigenous lands by over 22,000 American troops along with the ecological devastation of this soil by massive imperial infrastructure projects like HAARP and the Alaska-Canada Military Highway.

America couldn’t quite buy off the Kingdom of Hawaii, so we orchestrated a coup in 1893 followed by annexation in 1898 instead, with turning Pearl Harbor into the tip of the spear for expanding Manifest Destiny to the Pacific Ocean as the primary goal. Now, the US Military occupies over 200,000 acres of “ceded lands” on the islands including 22% of the Island of Oahu. As if mere conquest weren’t enough, the ecological devastation done by our forces and their allies in the fruit plantation industry has turned large swaths of paradise into an open-air fire trap primed for climate change facilitated devastation the likes of which we all bore witness to in Maui just a few years back.

Sadly, this kind of post-colonial ecocidal devastation didn’t end in 1959 and wasn’t limited to one hemisphere either. The American Military has also similarly taken over raping and pillaging duties from Japan in the former Ryukyu Kingdom more commonly known as Okinawa.

Japan has been savaging these people since the Satsuma Clan invaded in 1609, but the US took charge after the Battle of Okinawa in which over 200,000 were slaughtered by both sides including a sizable population of civilian human shields that neither side seemed particularly shy about torching alive. With the former Empire of Japan’s consent, the US seized 25% of Ryukyu’s territory for military bases, forcibly displacing about 250,000 locals in the process in order to house over 26,000 US Military personnel who quickly busied themselves raping teenagers, running over children with their trucks, and devastating the Islands’ ancient fishing and farming industries.

In all of these lands the natives continue to struggle for self-rule but remain unrecognized by a world governed by globalist superstructures like the US, the EU, NATO, and the UN who define sovereignty based exclusively on the propertarian rule of the Westphalian system; a Eurocentric construct extended globally through colonialism in which only western style nation states with rigid borders and legally codified hierarchies are granted sovereignty. This leviathan continues to expand to this day, with the so-called “international community” waging war against regions like Somalia and New Guinea for the simple reason that they remain unruled by any single monopoly on the use of force.

And as the Western World continues its Spenglerian decline these colonialist tactics are increasingly being turned inward on modern city states like Minneapolis and Barcelona that simply refuse to forfeit local sovereignty to governments that their communities did not vote for and to a federal rule which they do not consent to.

I strongly believe that the solution for all of us is to embrace a framework that recognizes communities as sovereign organisms regardless of borders and recognizes secession as a basic human right. In order to achieve this, we will likely require a coalition similar to that of the Non-Aligned Movement formed by former colonies that found themselves with increased autonomy after the collapse of the old European empires in the Second World War.

Their goal was similar to that of the unrecognized nations of Greenland, Alaska, Ryukyu, and Hawaii; to remain independent and neutral during a time of violently shifting global alliances. They also share the same hidden strength held by all colonized people. They occupy space of strategic importance which is the reason why they were colonized in the first place. Alone, territories like Greenland and Ryukyu seem insignificant but they have been carefully developed into geostrategic chokepoints necessary for global governance and if they can cooperate with each other then they can quite easily hamstring American primacy while it reaches the apex of its decline.

Can you imagine an American empire with zero ability to command over the Indo-Pacific or the Arctic? I can and it’s a crippled fiefdom stretched too thin to govern Minneapolis or Portland or my girlfriend’s trailer park for that matter. It’s a recipe for a new world order freed from the restraints of the Westphalian trap and it’s one I welcome for my own obscure corner of the map and yours.

How about you?

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

Community Political Power v. the Corporate State

Seth Sandronsky

February 13, 2026

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The multi-racial resistance to violent federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and across the U.S. is an exercise in community political power. That’s a clear and present danger to the wealth behind the two political parties, or duopoly.

It’s not a mystery. The Democratic Party and GOP advance the class interests of corporations and billionaires, and don’t want challenges.

This political duopoly wants the corporate and billionaire dollars to keep flowing.

Community political power has other interests—meeting people’s needs. They are primary: food, health care, education and shelter, necessities for a reasonable quality of life.

Building community political power are working class Americans such as Viviana Salazar bringing food to immigrants too terrified to leave their homes to shop for groceries in Minneapolis. There are no illegal aliens on stolen land.

Popular culture is instructive. English is my second language, according to Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, the global megastar rapper and singer who hails from Puerto Rico. English is also the second language of America, he added, which should be common knowledge but isn’t for reasons of ideology.

Ruling ideology dismisses and distorts European colonialism (sin papeles, or without papers). This bloody conquest systematically underdeveloped the Global South for over five centuries. Economic imperialism is the name of this game.

Immigrant labor powers the U.S. economy. Removing that demographic from the nation harms native-born workers under a capitalist economy that requires an expansion of sellers and buyers of wage labor.

Labor of all national origins makes our world. Americans building community political power understand and act on that.

The Poor People’s Campaign builds community political power by organizing and mobilizing poor and low-wealth Americans. Their numbers have swelled with the corporate state’s war on labor unions.

Philosophers have interpreted the world according to the 19th-century writings of Karl Marx. The point is, however, to change it, he wrote.

Much maligned as a godless communist during the Cold War, Marx’s critique of global capitalism as it grew from European feudalism via colonialism and industrialism remains strong. Later, Soviet communism defeated German fascism during World War II.

Then, communism was popular around the planet. Then, capitalism was unpopular, having birthed fascism and the Jewish Holocaust.

A sustained campaign of anti-communism to legitimize capitalism since the end of the Second World War rose as the dominant ideology in the Global North of the former colonial empires and the U.S., once a British colony. However, the ideology of anti communism has limits, as all who choose to see can comprehend.

Consider this. Capitalist investors, not atheist communists, bought millions of people’s foreclosed homes at fire sale prices after the housing bubble burst and caused the Great Recession. The financial interests behind the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s got a federal government bailout, while homeowners got sold out.

Capitalism is causing the climate catastrophe. Extreme weather and species extinction are two examples. Can’t blame such planetary destruction on communism.

Recessions are to capitalism what water is to fish. Recessions recur regularly, baked into the system that prioritizes profits over people and the planet. Instability is systemic.

Uncle Sam bailed out capitalist investors after the popping of the housing bubble. Capital, a social relationship between the sellers and buyers of labor services, demands and receives Democratic and Republican help. That equation holds no matter who is in Congress and the White House.

Community political power confronts the duopoly that handles the capitalist economy this way. The protracted conflict in Minneapolis is a case in point of ordinary people resisting the system’s drive to crush humanity in favor of profitability that bankrolls Blue and Red politics. Its primary purpose is to create the political conditions for the continuation of capital accumulation.

There is a history of the political duopoly shifting income and wealth from the bottom and middle to the top, relentlessly, during the past forty-plus years. This political process has spawned the monopoly corporations that dominate industries (Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech etc.). The faces of this new Gilded Age are the smarmy billionaires like Bezos, Ellison, Musk and Zuckerberg, the public faces of a minority ownership of the two political parties lock, stock and barrel.

Therefore, Democrats and Republicans prefer to focus on the personal identities of their voting bases. There is no lack of greenbacks to pursue a politics of ugly. Patriarchy and white supremacy loom large.

The color line remains a flashpoint of division and its opposite, unification. Hence the threat to the social order that the Minneapolis resistance poses. The multiracial uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 was a kind of dress rehearsal for President Trump’s unleashing of violent federal immigration enforcement in 2025-2026.

Democrats appeal to labor unions and minorities. Democrats nod and wink at the military-industrial complex that enforces the American empire directly and by proxy. Recall former President Biden’s reassurances to his donors that “nothing fundamental will change.” It didn’t.

Republicans are the party of white Christian nationalism. Patriarchy or male supremacy, thrives because and despite the fact that the U.S. economy of a male worker in a labor union earning a family wage to support a wife and children that prevailed in the postwar era has been over for decades. The American working class has suffered horribly.

MAGA is an ideology, a band aid covering up wounds of late capitalism. The rise of finance and decline of industry in the U.S. has devastated the working class under successive Democratic and GOP administrations. The safe haven of MAGA ideology is a cruel hoax.

The ideological war of ideas is powerful. Debating the amount of surplus value that can balance on the head of a pin does nothing to weaken the ruling ideology of capitalism and imperialism. Ideology flows directly from a global economy that disappears the human labor making our world of commodities for reasons of profitability.

Building community political power like working-class folks in Minneapolis are doing is a post-capitalist move. Delivering groceries to immigrants terrified to leave their homes to avoid arrest via violent federal immigration enforcement officers is an example of working-class solidarity. Call it a vote for humanity.

Is this socialism in practice? That’s fine in practice, according to the egghead professor. But how does it work in theory?

Being on the side of humanity is a theory of building community political power. Its practice is feeding the hungry, working-class people, born abroad or stateside. A look back is instructive.

The Black Panther Party fed poor people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s. As a result, over 20,000 poor black school kids ate breakfast before school. That was a material example of building community political power.

Food Not Bombs feeds hungry people in America today. No doubt some of the recipients are the so-called working poor. No doubt some of them are laboring union-free at Amazon and Walmart, the two biggest private-sector employers now.

President Trump seeks to increase the annual war budget to $1.5 trillion versus the current level of $1 trillion. Damage abroad from U.S. bombs harms poor people in America, according to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shifting resources to the military and away from humanity. The Democratic Party is central to this military-industrial complex that former President Eisenhower warned against.

Meanwhile, the U.S. president has demonized and scapegoated immigrants in a campaign of sustained skin-color identity politics, successfully. The tip of this spear is the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, masked like a modern Klan, which received increased funding under the Biden administration. That created the conditions to hike ICE spending to $75 billion over the next four years under Trump 2.0.

Identity politics divides the laboring class from their material interests. Democrats and Republicans for reasons of public distraction and manipulation can and do perpetuate myths about the other.  Against this backdrop, public division and unification flow from the material conditions of living and working.

Here’s the thing. The parties’ similarities far outweigh the differences. Ideology distorts that similarity of ruling class interests that in times of crisis can create a clarity out of uncertainty.

The corporate state is the delivery system for a status quo. The political duopoly and the wealth that controls it play a version of three-card Monte, a rigged game that defeats the working class. Bear with me.

For example, the GOP slams Democrats as the extreme left of cultural Marxists. Democrats critique the GOP as extremist warmongers. The former is farcical, while the latter is partial.

Together, the political duopoly perpetuates capitalism and imperialism. The political defeat of health care for all financed via the tax system that could prevent a cancer diagnosis from meaning one must declare personal bankruptcy to fight the disease, is proof of that. There are other examples of the U.S. political economy of health care that benefits the few and harms the many.

Here’s more on the tentacles of a medical-industrial complex. It’s the goose that lays the golden eggs via campaign contributions to the political duopoly. These are legal bribes producing reforms that grind down the working class.

Meanwhile taxpayer dollars currently buy the bombs and bullets that Israel deploys against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a siege of extermination. The building of community political power stateside challenges that grotesque priority of death over life.

One main challenge to building community political power is collectively forming an approach to self-governance to replace the existing system of political disempowerment. Its feature is what author, consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader terms “lesser evilism” (vote Blue no matter who).

The Democratic Party masquerades as a liberal alternative to racist and militarist Republicans. The GOP wraps itself in the flag of patriotic national interest.

Biden’s staunch support for Israel and the U.S. arms industry to maim and murder Palestinians after Hamas killed Israeli settlers on Oct. 7, 2023, that Vice President Harris refused to change, led to Trump’s victory in 2024. Polling in swing states bears that out.

Liberalism U.S.-style paves the path for fascism. The authoritarian police state, e.g., mass black incarceration and working class immiseration, that community political power is wrestling against in Minneapolis and across the U.S. today, emerged well before President Trump arrived.

“Spending on policing has risen by 40% since 2017,” according to the Prison Policy Institute, “and one-third of that change is due to increases in federal spending on policing (not including ICE or Customs and Border Patrol). Taken together, federal spending on policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now makes up 25 percent of all government spending on the criminal legal system.”

It’s of course a mismatch, economically and politically, between community political power and that of the corporate state. But that’s where things are at currently. Imbalances in power of the status quo generate resistance.

Recently, Bishop William J. Barber II—president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy—began a 50-mile march from Wilson to Raleigh as part of the “Love Forward Together” movement. He emphasizes a moral revolution of values. Christian nationalism is not the only rodeo in town.

“Clergy and impacted people are protesting the relentless policy violence against poor and low-income people and gerrymandering efforts to suppress these voters in the midterm elections,” according to a Repairers of the Breach statement. There were 300 marchers at the beginning of this nonviolent protest. Its multiracial character is a strength.

Participating groups range from the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign to the Institute for Policy Studies, St. James Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), North Carolina Council of Churches, Union of Southern Service Workers, Indivisible, Second Chance Alliance, Human Rights Campaign, Service Employees International Union, Public Schools First NC to the Save America Movement.

Masses of people in motion can build community political power from a democracy in form but not content under Trump, spawning one crisis after the next, drenched in bigotry and misogyny. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian author, communist and labor organizer, who the fascist dictator Mussolini imprisoned between World Wars I and II, wrote the following. “The Old World is dying and the New World struggles to be born: now is the time for monsters.”

The future is unwritten.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com