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Well, is the Gulf of America or the Gulf of Mexico? Is Mount McKinley or Mount Denali? For Google Maps users, the answer will depend on whether it lives in Donald Trump’s America or in the rest of the world.
When fulfilling Trump’s insistence on changing the name of the Gulf and America mountain, Google saying This week I had “a long practice to apply name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
Users of the United States application will continue to see existing names, but it is unlikely that this satisfies Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. Before Trump’s inauguration, she He stepped on a blow in his plans to retain the Gulf. The vast extensions of the United States that once were part of the Spanish Empire and later Mexico could rename as “Mexican America,” he suggested.
Google is not the first and surely will not be the last maps manufacturer to align with the wishes of a government. At centuries, maps have served for ideological, imperialist, religious and cultural purposes more frequently than impartial erudition, such as Mark Monmonier, an American geographer, is proposed in his book, As to Lie with Maps.
The great powers have an inclination for maps that express territorial claims or national greatness. In recent years, Porcelain He has celebrated a “National Mapeo Consciousness Advertising Week”, encouraging citizens to think of Taiwan and parts of the maritime areas of the nearby Asian countries as Chinese.
In the Russia of Vladimir Putin, the government has used anti-extremism laws To tighten the maps that question if Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, or the Kuril, seized islands of Japan in 1945, belong to Russia.
The smallest countries have the same probability of entering the event. Since the former Yugoslava Republic of Macedonia won Independence in 1991, a long -lasting sore in relations with Greece and Bulgaria has been the use of nationalists Maps which include parts of both countries such as “Great Macedonia”.
Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, promotes maps that show his country with the borders of the previous World War, including the areas of Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Modern Slovakia. Ludovic Orban, the former Prime Minister of Romania, once screwed up these efforts with a Romanian proverb, “the dreams of sparrowing the dough”, which implies that the leader of Hungary was enjoying fantasy.
During the Cold War, even time forecasts contained political messages. Western German Network displayed Germany with borders prior to World War, challenging the legitimacy of the communist state of East Germany.
Before our times, the physical maps published with explanatory texts often betrayed the assumptions of their creators. A Japanese map of the 18th century world observed From Brazil: “The inhabitants of this country do not build houses. . . They like to eat human flesh; However, they only eat men and not women. Your clothes are made of bird feathers. “
In western countries, our mental image of the world remains deeply influenced by A 1569 map Produced by Gerardus Mercator, a flamenco cartographer. In his effort to represent the three -dimensional land on a two -dimensional map, Mercator caused the places away from Ecuador to seem relatively larger. That is why Greenland seems approximately the same size as Africa, although it is not even such a large tenth.
That they think about it, I could avoid Denmark Cedir Green Earth For the United States, as Trump wants, using maps to flatter your ego? A friendly government with the United States in Warsaw once proposed Appoint a Polish military base after the president. That brain wave did not reach nothing, which means that the name is free for use. Perhaps the capital of Greenland, Nuuk, known until 1979 as Godthåb, could be renamed Fort Trump.
