{"id":14869,"date":"2025-02-01T05:06:44","date_gmt":"2025-02-01T05:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=14869"},"modified":"2025-02-01T05:06:44","modified_gmt":"2025-02-01T05:06:44","slug":"maps-distort-reality-while-revealing-the-eternal-truth-about-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/?p=14869","title":{"rendered":"Maps distort reality while revealing the eternal truth about politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> \n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n<p class=\"article__content-sign-up-topic-description\"><span>Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe class=\"article__content-sign-up-iframe close\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"signUpIframe\" data-prev-url=\"\/register\/in-article-sign-up?ft-content-uuid=68d3ba97-18d2-4f4c-8d6b-305040b31c5b\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-body\">\n<p>Well, is it the Gulf of America or the Gulf of Mexico? Is it Mount McKinley or Mount Denali? For Google Maps users, the answer will depend on whether you live in Donald Trump\u2019s America or the rest of the world.<\/p>\n<p>In complying with Trump\u2019s insistence on renaming the gulf and America\u2019s highest mountain, Google <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c8634nwxd46o\" data-trackable=\"link\">said<\/a> this week it had \u201ca longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Users of the app outside America will continue to see existing names, but this is unlikely to satisfy Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. Before Trump\u2019s inauguration, she <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/c8702574-fd47-4cfb-b047-63e76786ff48\" data-trackable=\"link\">took a swipe<\/a> at his plans to retitle the gulf. Vast tracts of the US that once formed part of the Spanish empire and later Mexico might be renamed \u201cAm\u00e9rica Mexicana\u201d, she suggested.<\/p>\n<p>Google isn\u2019t the first and will assuredly not be the last mapmaker to fall in line with a government\u2019s wishes. Down the centuries, maps have served ideological, imperialistic, religious and cultural purposes more often than impartial scholarship \u2014 as Mark Monmonier, a US geographer, sets out in his <a href=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/book\/chicago\/H\/bo27400568.html\" data-trackable=\"link\">book<\/a>, <em>How<\/em> <em>to<\/em> <em>Lie<\/em> <em>with<\/em> <em>Maps<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Great powers have a penchant for maps that express territorial claims or national grandeur. In recent years, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chinadaily.com.cn\/a\/202308\/28\/WS64ec91c2a31035260b81ea5b.html\" data-trackable=\"link\">China<\/a> has held a \u201cnational mapping awareness publicity week\u201d, encouraging citizens to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gmfus.org\/news\/unpacking-chinas-new-standard-map\" data-trackable=\"link\">think<\/a> of Taiwan and parts of the maritime zones of nearby Asian countries as Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>In Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia, the government <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euractiv.com\/section\/global-europe\/news\/russia-makes-punishable-maps-in-breach-of-new-territorial-realities\/\" data-trackable=\"link\">has used anti-extremism laws<\/a> to clamp down on maps that question whether Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, or the Kuril Islands, seized from Japan in 1945, belong to Russia.<\/p>\n<p>Smaller countries are just as likely to get in on the act. Since the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia gained independence in 1991, a long-running sore in relations with Greece and Bulgaria has been the use of nationalist <a href=\"https:\/\/macedonian-heritage.gr\/OfficialDocuments\/FYROM_Agressiveness.html\" data-trackable=\"link\">maps<\/a> that include parts of both countries as \u201cGreater Macedonia\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Viktor Orb\u00e1n, Hungary\u2019s prime minister, promotes maps that show his country with pre-first world war borders, including areas of modern Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia. Ludovic Orban, Romania\u2019s former premier, once brushed these efforts off with a Romanian proverb \u2014 \u201cthe sparrow dreams of the dough\u201d \u2014 implying Hungary\u2019s leader was indulging in fantasy.<\/p>\n<p>During the cold war, even weather forecasts contained political messages. West Germany\u2019s ARD network <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/a863f978-21e5-40cd-8158-45020e920b85\" data-trackable=\"link\">displayed<\/a> Germany with pre-second world war frontiers, challenging the communist East German state\u2019s legitimacy.<\/p>\n<p>Before our times, physical maps published with explanatory texts often betrayed their creators\u2019 assumptions. An 18th-century Japanese map of the world <a href=\"https:\/\/www.raremaps.com\/gallery\/detail\/43034\/japanese-world-map-kaisei-chikyu-bankoku-sankai-yochi-zen-nagakubo-ricci\" data-trackable=\"link\">observed<\/a> of Brazil: \u201cThe inhabitants of this country do not build houses\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009They like to eat human flesh;\u00a0however, they only eat men and not women. Their clothes are made from birds\u2019 feathers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In western countries, our mental picture of the globe remains profoundly influenced by <a href=\"https:\/\/atlas.co\/blog\/what-is-the-mercator-projection\/\" data-trackable=\"link\">a 1569 map<\/a> produced by Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer. In his effort to depict the three-dimensional Earth on a two-dimensional map, Mercator made places far from the equator look relatively larger. This is why Greenland appears about the same size as Africa, though it is not even a tenth as big.<\/p>\n<p>Come to think of it, could Denmark avoid ceding <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/176c0208-b953-41c3-b3d8-e31b3e5e6c86\" data-trackable=\"link\">Greenland <\/a>to the US, as Trump wants, by using maps to flatter his ego? A US-friendly government in Warsaw once <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/world\/us-polish-fort-trump-project-crumbles-idUSKBN23H36O\/\" data-trackable=\"link\">proposed<\/a> naming a Polish military base after the president. That brainwave came to nothing \u2014 meaning the name is free for use. Perhaps Greenland\u2019s capital, Nuuk, known until 1979 as Godth\u00e5b, could be renamed Fort Trump. <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/mailto:tony.barber@ft.com\" data-trackable=\"link\"><em>tony.barber@ft.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/content\/68d3ba97-18d2-4f4c-8d6b-305040b31c5b\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":14870,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}