Thursday, March 16, 2006

Persia/Iran

Joseph Farah claims that the choice of the name "Iran" reflects the Iranians' Nazi sympathies. Supposedly, they chose the name in the 1930s because they wanted to identify their Aryan heritage so as to tand with Hitler.

The problem with this account is that it ignores the fact that Iran has always been what the people living there called it. Persia was a name imposed by outsiders.

To the natives [of Iran] themselves, it has been known as Iran for centuries. "Persia" was simply what foreigners insisted on calling it, because that was what the Greeks called it...The Iranians eventually tired of accepting someody else's name for their own country... - Tom Burnam, The Dictionary of Misinformation

That is all.

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