With President Donald Trump’s already towering ego further enlarged with each day he spends in office, foreign diplomats have cynically begun pandering to his colossal narcissism as their most efficient available means of statecraft. The latest embarrassing example comes with Ukrainian negotiators aiming to exploit his vanity and lock in his support of their war with Russia by sycophantically suggesting renaming a portion of the invaded country “Donnyland,” an appealingly (to Trump) crass fusion of “Donald” and “Disneyland.”
An imaginary green and gold flag and anthem have been generated for the place too, but the Ukrainians should be careful about heading down this particular path. Vladimir Putin could easily outbid them for Trump’s support by promising to rechristen the entire Donbas region as the Donaldbass, and win his favor for Russia’s continued military conquest that way.
The Burden of Atlas
Renaming a portion of the world after a white man, as with Donnyland, rather than renaming it to take a white man’s name off it, goes against present prevailing political trends, however. So self-abnegating has Western society now become that no linguistic length is too great to pursue to accommodate the supposed “needs” of diverse incomers.
In search of more Chinese cash flooding into the nation’s coffers, back in 2015 marketing men from a subsidiary of the UK Government invited Chinese tourists to enter a “GREAT names for GREAT Britain” competition to officially rename leading national landmarks and thereby enhance their appeal in Chinese-language marketing materials. Winning entries included “Huge Stone Clusters” for Stonehenge, “Strong Man Skirt Contest” for the Highland Games, “Big White Streaker” for the famously nude Cerne Abbas Giant, and “Obvious Giant Communist Spy-Center” for the new Chinese Embassy in London. (Okay, that last one I made up myself.)
For over a decade now, the tourist organization responsible for the above total sell-out, VisitBritain, has been running a parallel campaign called GREAT Britain, intended to make gullible aliens jet to the rainy, miserable island in question by printing the initial word of its name in big capital letters, to misleadingly imply that everything there is just GREAT, when it clearly isn’t.
So less-than-great is the place that some British critics thought the GREAT Britain slogan was in itself deeply racist, a mere bigoted exercise in “assumed glory,” suggesting the location’s name should be clipped simply to “Britain” in marketing materials, as the failed land “needs to get beyond the rhetoric and thinking of itself as ‘great’ Britain” altogether.
Perhaps such defeatist thinking helps explain why, following Brexit, some left-wing satirists also launched an unsuccessful online petition to go even further and call it the “Former United Kingdom” instead—I’ll let you spell out the intended acronym there for yourself. As an extra clue, it’s a word, and a spelling, that is not unknown in the Chinese language itself.
A Word In Urea
Former colonial possessions of GREAT Britain have joined the call to throw off the shackles of slavery by renaming themselves on global maps. At 2023’s G20 summit, attendees were invited to attend a dinner with “the President of Bharat,” a confusing offer, as no such nation appears to even exist. It turns out this is just what the natives call India in Hindi, “India” itself being an exonym, or place-name given by outsiders, in this case the evil white English during the era of the Raj. India’s many Muslims, however, far from embracing this proposed name as anti-colonial praxis in action, instead complained, seeing it as an intentional slight towards them and their own frequent language of Urdu on behalf of the present Hindu nationalist government. The much more tolerant native Urdu-language name for the old British India is, of course, “Pakistan.”
Many former European colonial possessions have changed their identities throughout the post-war decades: Swaziland became Eswatini; Rhodesia became Zimbabwe; Upper Volta became Burkina Faso; Europe became Wakanda; and Iraq, Syria, and Libya were all turned into Lebanon, following Western military intervention.
The latest African country to get in on the act is Nigeria, which is only one short extra letter “g” away from being a genuine geographical hate-crime, hence the current suggestion it be rechristened the United African Republic, or UAR. One posited new name for UAR’s inhabitants is Ureas, which suggests someone can’t spell very well.
South Africa, meanwhile, is subject to a crusade to rename the land Azania, promoted by something called the African Transformation Movement, whose initials, ATM, imply they may only be in it for the money. Azania’s mistaken advocates think the word is an expression of pro-black, pan-African, anti-colonialist solidarity, but it turns out it is really derived from an old racist term used by Arab slave-traders to insult their dark-skinned human cattle.
Sudden Persianality Change
Given his own current mania for renaming everything possible after himself, maybe Trump would prefer it if South Africa went back to calling itself the Orange Free State, as in the days of the Boers. Anticipating the current diplomatic attempts to rename Ukraine after Trump, other now-eponymous items, buildings, and locations lately retitled by Donald include the U.S. Navy’s Trump Class battleships, the Donald J. Trump Centre for the Performing Arts, and, most cunningly of all from a military disinformation point of view, the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. A few weeks after renaming this last one, Trump bombed Iran.
Or did he? Iran was traditionally known in the West as “Persia,” but since the Islamist revolution of 1979, it has officially been known as the Islamic Republic of Iran, by order of the ayatollahs. Hence, present-day opponents of the regime have launched an online propaganda operation to get the name changed back as part of moves to overthrow the present oppressive theocracy, under the Trump-imitating slogan “Make Iran Persia Again.” Naturally, due to the murderous nature of the mullahs, most of these online agitators live and post from abroad. Mainly, in Israel, funnily enough.
Elsewhere in the world, there is a nomenclature-based jihad against Israel itself, called “Make Israel Palestine Again.” Settlers in the West Bank, meanwhile, use the Biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” for the territory.
Across the Atlantic, activists seek to have the United States of America renamed “Turtle Island,” as the entire North American continent was supposedly called by several tribes of the Native Indians (surely Native Bharatians?). In ultra-woke Canada, white post-colonial authorities have become keen to admit the historic sin of their forefathers by ritually reciting a spoken acknowledgement that public meetings are taking place upon stolen land, land which by rights should really be called Turtle Island once again. Donald Trump also has a new term for Canada: the 51st State.
Gulfs of Understanding
Trump’s most famous act of renaming was calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America; he originally considered calling it the Gulf of Trump, but eventually decided this sounded too immodest. When it seemed he had “succeeded” in coaxing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump mulled calling it the Strait of Trump instead.
According to the POTI (President of Turtle Island), his current actions in Persia represent a purely defensive operation, as Benjamin Netanyahu had told him that the ayatollahs intend to build nuclear bombs and ICBMs to blast both Judea and Turtle Island alike off the world’s recently redrawn maps. No country will be safe if Tehran gains such weapons, no matter what it chooses to call itself; even if Iceland renames itself Niceland to prove it is no threat whatsoever to the region, it will still be nuked nonetheless.
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Unfortunately for Trump’s presentation of his war as a purely defensive operation, he has also renamed something else rather important of late too: namely, the Department of Defense (DOD), which has become the Department of War (DOW). Some may prefer to imitate Homer Simpson and call it D’OH, or Department of Hegseth, after the blunderer placed in charge of turning defense into aggression by the president. According to Patriot Pete, the relabeling was necessary, as the only reason Turtle Island hadn’t won a meaningful major conflict since the end of WWII was not due to its leaders’ continual poor decisions of strategy, but the simple fact that some fool in Washington had created a self-fulfilling prophecy by removing all reference to winning wars from the Department’s name:
We changed the name after World War II from the Department of War to the Department of Defense and… we haven’t won a major war since. And that’s not to disparage our warfighters… That’s to recognize that this name change is not just about renaming, it’s about restoring; words matter.
Why don’t you just call it the Department of Winning, then? Possibly because, these days, the Department generally isn’t. Maybe America really should rechristen itself Turtle Island. Then it might finally learn how to pull its head back inside its shell.
