I was very interested to read an article about how google have left the name of the Persian Gulf unnamed on google maps.

Why would they do that? It’s politics, stoopid. Oh, and Arab money.

Given the rapidly warming Cold War between “the West” and its Arab alllies and Iran, propaganda is becomingly increasingly important. If you are going to attack a country, it is vital that you portray that country as being without saving grace and most importantly, without a history.

For Caucasians, African history only began with the arrival of white Europeans man and their grand colonialist enterprises.

Darkest Africa had to be enlightened by the superior military, financial and religious  hegemony of the white man so a clean slate had to be made of the colonised lands.

Put another way, Africans had to be treated like “noble savages” to satisfy the greed, the hunger for power and the racism of developed nations.

We are familiar with this in Ireland. From the writings of early Romans to the anti-Irish jokes of Punch and The Comedians on ITV, the Irish have been labelled as savages, stupid, thick, without a vast supply of myths to make up for the lack of a “real” history.

For instance, how many Irish kings can you name?

The replacing of the Irish language with English was also part of the great colonial scheme from the statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 onwards.

The Ordnance Survey in the 1830s gave every townland in Ireland an official name in English as part of that project. When you brand a place as English rather than Irish, or English rather than Swahili, or French rather than Arabic, it is a way of sweeping away a past native identity with a new counterfeit one, replacing the authentic with the synthetic.

The Anonymous Gulf

The Persian Empire was in the 5th century BC the largest and most powerful empire in human history up until that point.

In a lecture of 1948, Will Durant described how “for the first time in known history an empire almost as extensive as the United States received an orderly government, a competence of administration, a web of swift communications, a security of movement by men and goods on majestic roads, equaled before our time only by the zenith of Imperial Rome.”

But Persian history – and the mind-set that comes with it – cannot be allowed for if you want to emasculate the current regime in Iran, a country with the second largest gas reserves in the world, a commodity becoming more and more important in a developed and developing world learning to depend less of petrol.

That’s what google is up to but they are not alone. The Parisian museum, the Louvre, is reported to have dropped the word Persian from their map guides at a time when they are hoping to open a museum in the Arab state of Abu Dhabi.

Of course, there has been discord became Persians/Iranians and Arabs throughout history and the latest battleground is the stretch of water between the two, with Arabs inventing “the Arabian Gulf” in an attempt at toponymic theft.

That google is willing to play a part in this charade is disgraceful.

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