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Comment by 4oh9do | Hacker News Reader

This is the anecdote that is most egregious to me in this article:

> This is not the first time Bitche has been caught up in a censorship crossfire. In 1881, U.S. Ambassador to France Levi Parsons Morton took issue with the location of the American embassy on the Place de Bitche in Paris, named in honor of the town's wartime effort. Morton, embarrassed by the embassy's letterhead, asked Parisian authorities to rename the square — they obliged, changing it to Place des États-Unis.

As long as other countries continue to willingly comply and bend to the will of the US, the US will continue being the bully that it is.

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The US of 1881 wasn’t in a position to bully France. That came after the two world wars.

To me it sounds like the name was mocking the Americans, by renaming what the Americans considered "bitch" to United States, implying the US was the bitch.

Nonsense, that's just standard diplomacy - no reason to purposefully insult an ally.

> Nonsense, that's just standard diplomacy - no reason to purposefully insult an ally.

Can you name a comparative example of the US renaming a street at the request of an ally?

Your example comes from 1881, about 75 years before the US would become anything close to a superpower. So the simplest explanation is that the French simply agreed that it sounded weird in English to have it on all official letters, in stead of a superpower bullying it's allies into submission.

There's an opposite example, search for Boris Nemtsov Plaza.

> There's an opposite example, search for Boris Nemtsov Plaza.

This is an 'opposite example' in the sense of the US modifying a street name to intentionally spite a country (naming a street after a Russian dissident to spite Putin), not an 'opposite example' in the sense I was requesting: a case of the US modifying a street name to appease an ally, like France did.

Well, not bending to the will of the US used to be a lot easier in the 1800s. But the way it looks now, hopefully it'll soon be a lot easier again.

Well, the 1800s were also when not bending to the will of European powers was likely far harder and more damaging than not bending to the will of the US (even today) in many parts of the world. There has been some improvement in the overall bullying problem, in my book, and hopefully that will continue.

Most mindblowing is that in honor of the "enlightening intervention" they even renamed it to United States Square.

According to Wikipedia, the name Place de Bitche was moved to another square in Paris.

Right, it couldn’t possibly be a request to an ally based on the coincidence of a totally fine French name with an unfortunate meaning in English. Similarly, if for some reason the French end up on Merde Avenue, we should be equally offended when they request a different name with which to correspond. Because this matters. A lot. And it’s absolutely worth a mortal slugfest in a comment section about the great evil of the western world making an accepted diplomatic request of precisely zero consequence several thousand years ago.

You fight the good fight. Show us our follies. Perhaps France should have invaded Maine over this inordinately egregious insult of insults.

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