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What's in a Name?
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18958 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
4,693 Words |
| Author
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Adam M. Garfinkle
Adam M. Garfinkle is adjunct professor of political science at
the University of Pennsylvania and research associate at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is also
a contributing editor of Orbis. |
Some months ago, on June 19, 1989, to be specific, Burma changed its name to Myanmar. The "socialist" military government explained that it wasn't fair to name the whole place Burma, since the name Burma referred to only one of many ethnic groups in the country. Hence the change. So now the country is named after none of them--Myanmar translates roughly into "fast and strong"--and the capital, Rangoon, has become Yangon, supposedly a more accurate rendition of a native pronunciation.
This has already caused big trouble for non-Burmese--particularly hard-pressed American students of world geography--because Myanmar is much harder to pronounce and spell than Burma. Also, the nameplates of every country in the UN General Assembly between b-u and m-o have had to be moved down one space. Before, Burma separated Burkino Faso from Burundi. Now Myanmar separates Mozambique from Nepal--as if the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas weren't good enough.
What justifies all this trouble? Government spokesmen in Yangon claimed that the people were already using the new names, so the change was just a formality. But if that were all there was to it, why wait forty years? No, when a government decides to charge the name of the country that it governs, this invariably coincides with a period of social turbulence and is often part of an effort to distance a regime from the turbulence and is often part of an effort to distance a regime from the turpitude, disgraces, or sins of the past. Sometimes it presages plans to commit new sins in the onrushing future. In the Burmese case, the government has been locked in a battle with its people for more than two years, and most of the aforementioned non-Burmese ethnic groups have engaged in episodic insurrection against central authorities for even longer. Nearly all the people want an end to Burmese "socialism," which, as far as they can make out, comes to two parts repression, two parts poverty, and more than a pinch of fear.
Perhaps the craven old men who run the place figured that if they switched the name of the country, their people and the foreign press corps would become confused and leave them alone. If that's what they thought, they were soon disappointed. So new sins began. Taking a page from the Chinese communist playbook, the government arrested hundreds of opposition members, tortured some, and murdered others on various trumped-up charges. They changed the name for that, too; they called it execution.
Inventing the
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