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Google Erases Kurdistan From Maps in Compliance With Turkish Government (kurdistan24.net)
schwit1 shares a report: Google has removed a map outlining the geographical extent of the Greater Kurdistan after the Turkish state asked it to do so, a simple inquiry on the Internet giant's search engine from Wednesday on can show. "Unavailable. This map is no longer available due to a violation of our Terms of Service and/or policies," a note on the page that the map was previously on read. Google did not provide further details on how the Kurdistan map violated its rules.
The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google's My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as "Corduene" or "Karduchi" have existed since antiquity. The use of the name "Kurdistan" was banned by the administration of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925. Further reading: Local media report. "Turkish officials outraged by Google map showing the unofficial border of Kurdistan. Turkey demands the removal of the map. There are around 40 million Kurds divided between 4 main countries," Jiyar Gol, a BBC correspondent tweeted.
The map in question, available for years, used to be on Google's My Maps service, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to create custom maps for personal use or sharing through search. Maps drawn by ancient Greeks, Islamic historians, Ottomans, and Westerners showing Kurdistan with alternative names such as "Corduene" or "Karduchi" have existed since antiquity. The use of the name "Kurdistan" was banned by the administration of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the immediate aftermath of the crushed Sheikh Said uprising for Kurdish statehood in 1925. Further reading: Local media report. "Turkish officials outraged by Google map showing the unofficial border of Kurdistan. Turkey demands the removal of the map. There are around 40 million Kurds divided between 4 main countries," Jiyar Gol, a BBC correspondent tweeted.
The winner writes the history. That is always the case.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Deliberately selling out to murderous authoritarian governments is about as close to pure evil as you can get.
Historical Revisionism. Let's call it what it really is. Lies.
Billions of people?
Normal stories get green headlines, and ads get brown. So what does blue mean?
Realizing a new tactic to winning this war against the yankee rebels, Google removes all maps of the USA because the British government asked them to.
There was no country called Israel for 1900 years either. The last long-term ruler of the area was the Ottoman Empire so the former citizens of that have a far better claim on the area than a bunch of European refugees.
Quite literally... In this case, two people, british and french, who really had no clue as to what they were doing, have been shaping the world for almost a century. (source)
...Unless the loser is really bitter about the winner, such as medieval English monks writing about vikings.
Compared to everyone else in that region the Kurds are pretty decent.
Just don't make them annoyed with you.
It's only the Sikhs that have a better standard.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Pakistan was a place that didn't exist, either. But, if you kill enough people, you to can have your own country.
Think about it from the point of view of Turkey. How about if Google showed a map of Mexico that included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California? USA wouldn't be happy.
Google is beholden to governments where they do business, which is everywhere on the globe. Google does not want to annoy or upset any government. It cannot serve any good purpose for them. If someone wants to define a country called Kurdistan, or Palestine, or Candyland on a map, can't they extend to the users the ability to define such a country? Is it possible for the internet in 2018 to create a service that provides an open map that can be defined as the users as they so choose? Services like Wikipedia suggest it is possible.
Google erased Kurdistan?!! We knew it would come to this, however it seems they started with a powerless country and no one will really complain. One by one they are going to erase us all until only the state of Google remains.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
On the one hand the people of a geographically defined area should have every right to self determination, on the other hand basing self determination on ethnic majorities in arbitrarily defined regions isn't something that the modern more metropolitan world wants to be based on... but ethnic groups predominantly still is the dominant political organizing principle in the world.
So if we go with democracy and recognize that organizing along ethnic lines is a valid way to organize politically, then we should support the kurds and the right of any ethnic group that gains majority status in a large enough geographic area. But if we go with democracy and reject ethnicity as a valid way to organize politically, then we have to somehow reconcile that there is some better overarching commonality that we should be organizing around.
Otherwise, humanity are just a bunch of thugs working towards the biggest gang that can control the most turf using whatever BS excuse they can to include some and exclude others.
by integration of the Kurds into their society
Kurds don't want to be integrated into Turkey.
Have gnu, will travel.
...and maybe the British empire should integrate its rebel colonies (such as the USA).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you replace "integrate" with "assimilate" (very much in the Borg sense), you actually have a correct statement there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How about if Google showed a map of Mexico that included Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California? USA wouldn't be happy.
I doubt the United States would object to a historic map labeled "Mexico prior to American intervention". If it did, then a map of Mexico as of 1824 would already have been removed from an article about American intervention in Mexico on an American website.
Would the map of Kurdish regions have been removed if its author eschewed the disputed name "Kurdistan" in favor of "Historically Kurdish regions of modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria"?
One of the highest female genital mutilation rates in the region. Unapologetic and unironic marxist-leninist system.
It's true that enemy of your enemy can be your friend, but the enemy in question is all but gone for the West at this stage. Which means there's no need to maintain friendship with someone who's ideologically diametrically opposed to capitalism. And kurds are even more prone to fighting their civil wars in European countries after going there as refugees, and about as rapey as everyone else from the region when in contact with Western women whom they view just like everyone else in the area does. Massive sluts who view sex like those in Brave New World and who utterly emasculated their own men and are in a desperate need of a true man.
It's the same reason kurds have been dropped by the West after their purpose was served after first Iraq war. They're not any more "decent" than the rest of the region unless you either really like marxism-leninism and really hate capitalism, which is unfortunately increasingly true for modern Western media workers. Or you're into empowering women through dampening their biological interest in men. Which aligns with interests of modern feminism that are doing just that. The only divergence is that they do this via psychological rather than surgical methods in the West.
But if you're not ideologically aligned with those two groups, then compared to the rest of the region they're marginally better in some ways and worse in others. As such, your approach to alliance with such people should be pragmatic to the extreme, just like it would be with any other entity that is utterly opposed to you on societal level. And pragmatic reasons to support Kurds ran out with failure of IS. Turkey and Iraq are far more important as allies and both are diametrically opposed to Kurdistan (greater or not) as a state. Which is the primary political goal of Kurds today. So when the choice comes to choose either Turkey and Iraq or Kurdish forces, the pragmatic choice is obvious to the extreme.
Sure there was. You should check out all the references in the bible to "The Land of Israel", "The People of Israel", "the Borders of Israel." You're just confused into thinking if it didn't happen in the last hundred years it shouldn't be counted.
M
You're confused into thinking that something written in a book is cold hard fact. I've had textbooks that were very wrong.
If someone wants to define a country called Kurdistan, or Palestine, or Candyland on a map, can't they extend to the users the ability to define such a country?
Hasbro might object to one of those.
As for the other two, I'd find it justified to map "historic Kurdish lands" and "historic Palestine", but "country" is a stretch. Just because you call something a country doesn't make it one. Recall a story that appears in the 1909 book Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln edited by Allen Thorndike Rice: If you call a tail a leg, a kangaroo has five legs but a cow only four. This is because a leg bears weight, and a cow's tail does not. Likewise, Kurdistan and Palestine fail international treaty organizations' tests for what makes a sovereign state.
Sorry, but your bible is a work of fiction. Do you have a real source?
Everybody knows that Israel was occupied and now occupies, it is not "informative". The word "so" is usually used to mean implication, I don't think you are using it right in the second sentence.
The state of Israel ceased to exist under the Roman Empire. I didn't say it never existed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
There's so much media now and so much information. Cell phones and the Internet make it possible to suss out the truth in a way that wasn't possible before. e.g. a big part of the reason Black Lives Matters became a thing was folks using cell phones to record abuses by police officers.
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Sadly, this was not the first time Google caved in to Turkish demands. I mean, just a few years ago there was some kind of a video on Youtube that mocked Ataturk and caused an uproar in Turkish internet. Well, google took it down.
Has anyone gone to the Internet Archive and tried to get the map from there? I get an error when it starts loading Google Maps but the border does show up. I think it's the way my browser is configured. If it had worked I was going to post a screen shot of the map on Twitter saying it's the map that Turkey doesn't the world to see. Maybe someone else can do it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
The Kurds are in deep economic trouble because they're practically under an embargo both from the central government in Baghdad as well as from Turkey, with Syria and Iran being absolutely no help. They do try to run a welfare state that they can't really afford, but the rest is you smoking crack. Capitalism is very much alive and well in Kurdistan.
Turkey is becoming another Islamic theocracy under Erdogan, the territory is strategically important but as allies they're in the "they're bastards, but they're our bastards" category. They're pissed off about the West and EU and is looking east to Russia for more dictator-friendly regimes. The Iraqi government can barely keep the country together, if it hadn't been for foreign military support and the Peshmerga most the country would be lost to IS.
They do seem to be one of the territories with a history of female genital mutilation though, I'll give you that. But hey they have women in the armed forces, this is not "stay at home and pop out babies in a burka"-Islam. The problem is that the creation of any Kurdistan - even just the independence of the Iraqi region - would set off a helluva chain reaction nobody wants to see where leads. But I think they've earned it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What troubles you Google Brother? Are you not of the happy? All hail the glorious Google!
You're regurgitating stock grade current Western media propaganda, which demonstrates utter lack of familiarity with the region. Kurdish power structures themselves, such as PKK and YPG openly declare themselves marxist-leninist all the way from the time of founding to on the ground operations today. This is so uncontroversial, that it can be read on wikipedia if you're uninterested into wading into regions history and understanding how and why these people adopted these systems.
You're also utterly unaware of realities of Turkey-US relations beyond stock propaganda either. Turkey is necessary for containment of Russia because of Bosphorus as well as being one of the three primary powers in the Saudi-Turkey-Iran triangle. US is necessary for Turkey because of its military reach and ability to provide security guarantees in the Saudi-Turkey-Iran power struggle. Ideological narratives about "person with massive democratic support in his country is actually a dictator because we don't like him" is utterly irrelevant to actual realities in the region. These narratives only matter in how the actions and outcomes are packaged to ordinary people in Western states for variety of domestic propaganda reasons. These reasons are utterly disconnected from realities in the region and do not interact with such realities in any meaningful way.
Borders are not as well defined as some like them to be.
Border disputes happen for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes a border line is considered when it hits a river. Now over time such river will change, and give more land to one entity and less from the other, or even more complex the river bends to a point where there is an island, then which municipality owns that?
We have other areas such as districts where a particular culture resides where there is no formal border. Like the Italian District or China Town.
Then we have other areas such as the Native American Reservations which some take up large spots of land, have their own rules and government, that spans and crosses state borders.
There may not be any formal country called Palestine, but there is a splotch of land called Palestine, with its edges of its borders in dispute.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And this is as opposed to all the indigenous peoples who were disorganized and allowed themselves to be colonized by the Brits and Frenchies?
There is no such thing as a native peoples. We are all conquerors. Might always makes right. The strong united tribes displace and subjugate the weaker tribes. This is how it must be. As we speak a weak and disunited United States of America is being colonized by Latino's. As we speak a weak politically correct European Union is being taken over by a strong and united group of Islamic fundamentalists. Don't hate them for it. Blame the weak. I don't blame Europeans for colonizing the world, just as I don't blame the Latinos and Muslims from recolonizing the USA and Europe.
Empires rise and fall. Eventually the losers become the victors once again. It has nothing to do with morality. It has everything to do with Darwin.
Some day 250 years form now a European Union united under the flag of Islam and perpetually worried about the Islamic Brown Privilege will be reconquered by barbaric strong barbaric tribes of White and Black Christian fundamentalists. The old Muslims living in Europe will the decry the loss of faith in the youth, while the youth will see no problem letting these poor disadvantaged hardworking white Christian build a church across from an empty mosque.
The future is for the strong. The strong inevitably become week and compliant until they are conquered. Then the cycle repeats.
No she didn't.. The President isn't elected by popular vote. Never has been, never will be. The fact that you don't understand WHY the system is as it is does not make it wrong or unfair.
Systems like this are all over the place.
Case in point: You could own 99.9% of the shares in a company, but if it's not preferred (voting) stock, you have no say in how the company runs. You get the share of the profits (if they are paid out) but no say in day to day operations. This information is not secret. Companies have to disclose this information. But if you bitch about it later, nobody is going to give a fuck.
Constitutional amendments require the consent of the states. The smaller states (population wise) will not cut their own throats and change this system.
Just as you can find Palistine under the similar name Philistine on biblical-era maps, you can find Karduchia too.
If you read Anabasis by Xenophon, he describes in detail their northwest border, which is currently in land claimed by Turkey. If you use a topo map, you can see that their traditional land includes most of a mountain range that goes from just north and east of the Euphrates river in modern Iraq, north to their border with the land that was traditionally Western Armenia, east in Iran, and south nearly to the Persian Gulf.
The British and French are responsible for a lot of problems in Southwest Asia, but not this one. The fate of the Kurds was sealed by Turkish victory in the 1919-1922 War of Independence. The British and French were the losers, along with their Greek and Armenian allies.
Right, 2500 years ago when the Ten Thousand invaded Karduchia (in order to pass through it and escape the Persian Empire) they were victorious in their strategic retreat. They fought a running battle from the southern border, in what is now Iraq, all the way north into Western Armenia, where the people were much more accepting of strangers. (!)(lol)
The Karduchians had previously been famously invaded by 1 million Persian cavalry, none (!) of whom made it home. If you look at the topo map, you can see a really really long valley, not a river valley but rather the remnants of an ancient mountain chain, with steep sides and no exits but at the ends, something like 50 or 100 miles apart. They blocked the end with their army, and the whole length of the trench was lined with villagers throwing down stones.
The Greeks took a different route; they captured a guide, and went right through the heart of the land, down the twisting mountain roads that the Karduchians used for local traffic. Without a guide, you just go in circles, but with a guide, (and heavy infantry) they were able to fight from ridge to ridge in two teams.
And later Xenophon wrote that history down. So it is too late to erase Karduchia merely by winning some war, because victors of yesteryear already wrote it down. And being that they had no intention of war, the Greeks merely wanted to pass through the land, they give an honest and direct account. The Kurds refused to even negotiate for passage at all, but they did negotiate and respect temporary cease-fires for both sides to recover and bury the dead.
The future is for the strong. The strong inevitably become week and compliant until they are conquered. Then the cycle repeats.
This is a general rule, but there are exceptions, especially China. Throughout history, China has expanded by allowing themselves to be conquered, and then demographically swamping and absorbing the invaders. They won by out breeding their enemies rather than out fighting them.
This happened with the Xiong Nu (Huns), Mongols (90% of Mongols today are Chinese) and the Manchus.
Even Tibet first became part of China in the 1st millennium when the Tibetan Empire invaded and conquered large parts of Sichuan and Yunnan.
Can we erase Turkey, the real problem child of the region? Google made a big mistake and will be judged for this. This is political censorship on the "open" internet.
In a nutshell, a large part of the Middle East including part of modern-day Turkey used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. One of the less-known facts about WWI was that the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side, which eventually led to its dissolution. The European victors then carved it up with little regard for the cultural and religious boundaries of the indigenous people. The modern countries there - Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel - Palestine, Jordan were drawn with these arbitrary borders. The instability in the region is partially (mostly) due to the cultural borders not coinciding with the political borders. The Kurds (about 40 million of them) were the biggest ethnicity screwed out of a country to call their own. They're spread between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, and all of those countries are paranoid that the Kurds will try to declare independence and secede.
1900 years is more than an "interruption"
What i find amazing is how this is not a English native language text. There is a few odd formats here and there, a few odd structures. And a really big masturbary focus on "Persian military numbers", written like somebody was dragging their jock strap like a mad man while hammering the keyboards tangents.
I don't have a opinion on this text, but i have seen similar expressions used when doing direct translation of various Arabic dialects.
What this strikes me as, is that the Text is intended to be a Strong Open, as a verbal piece. Its intended to have emphasis and tonal range on a lot of the concepts, almost sung between those major strokes of the bellowing lungs.
So what i will find amazing is that if you read about Turks talking about Ottomans, Iranians/Iraques about Persia, or their society written dialogues on religion: It follows the same format with the exact same presentation.
Its how Arabic society spread its word(s)
Remember South Vietnam, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Tibet and ST CIRCUS, 1991 Kurdish uprising.
Now the truth sets in again with big US tech brands.
The USA used the Kurds for its own strategy of tension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in the region.
Not to allow a US approved and supported "Kurdistan" to emerge.
Always read the fine print when the US gov and mil offers "support" for "democracy" and "freedom fighters".
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
There is no such a thing as kurdistan. There is turkey country, armenia, irak, iran, syria where kurds live, but no such country as kurdistan. Now a case may be made that there should be one, but factualy there is no kurdistan country.
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There is no comparison to Palestine.
The Kurds already live in the area. And have proved themselves capable of operating an effective, fairly democratic state for many years. The Israelis had not lived there for centuries. An the Palestinians have proven themselves incapable of anything.
Your comment is nonsense.
What about them
Not RO
Depends on the leftist mate. I've got no time for religious fanatics of any stripe and there is plenty of that on both sides. The Israelis don't have any right to the former Ottoman province of Palestine just because their holy book says God gave it to them 4000 years ago. That doesn't give the Palestinians the right to murder the Israelis.
Thank you for your incredibly useful input. It added so much to the discussion.
Not much distance between erasing a map of a tribe's territory and deleting the entire history of the tribe.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Don't Google Turkish genocide of Armenians, or Chinese genocide of Muslims
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Of course Google cannot explain how this private map violates its rules, because it doesn't. Every time some state official voices a desire, Google says Your wish is my command.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Their fake asses deserve their own Google maps.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That is the equivalent of the tobacco industry publishing information on the health benefits of smoking.
Just leaving this trojan horse headline here for the Turkish thought police in case I ever have to go to the Ottoman empire on vacation, to prove my "support" for Turkish dictators.
You're on crack. The actual number is around 300,000. Out of a total population of 81 million.
Compare that to Israel with about 1.5 million Muslims and 170,000 Christians, out of a total population of just under 9 million.
Conversely, there have been serious and significant human rights violations against the Palestinians by Israel.
And there haven't been any human rights violations against Israelis by Palestine, eh?
And Israel's current ultra-right-wing government is not showing any signs of changing that.
Whereas Palestine's current ultra-right-wing government is all about change, right?
This is why people assume you hate the Jews. You make a halfhearted effort to criticize Palestinians for indoctrinating their kids, and then turn around and lambast Israel with terminology which would apply even more strongly to the Palestinians.
For my part, I understand that this is just the limp-wristed-left's knee jerk reaction to back the non-western underdog in all conflicts. It's not that you hate the Jews neccesarily; you're just trying to make up for your white-guilt by criticizing whichever side of the conflict happens to be more civilized, democratic, tolerant, and otherwise "westernized". But I can certainly see why others would assume that your position was based on nothing more complex than pure jew-hatred.
You could own 99.9% of the shares in a company, but if it's not preferred (voting) stock, you have no say in how the company runs.
While I'm quite happy you understand the subtleties of a Constitutional Republic government, its (mostly) the common stock that has the voting privileges. Preferred stock has no voting privileges. If it makes you feel any better, I've never really understood what makes preferred stock "preferable".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
You are correct. I got my definitions wrong. The prime difference is that preferred stock are paid dividends. Common stock owner may or may not receive dividends.