One of my favorite fantasy novels is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, in which a tyrant ends a bloody existential war by magically renaming the land of Tigana. The word Tigana can no longer be spoken or written or even thought, and anything tightly attached to the concept is gradually forgotten. Once the name is forgotten, the killing stops.
At first glance, this looks like mercy: no more mass executions or reprisals or crushing the resistance. The tyrant achieves peace by making violence unnecessary. Kay’s insight, however, cuts deeper. This peace is purchased at a far higher cost. The erasure of the name does not merely end the war. It dissolves a people across time. History loses coherence. Memory frays. Inheritance becomes impossible. A culture is not conquered; it is unmade.
This is false mercy, the kind that spares bodies by erasing souls and human dignity.
We tend to think of renaming as administrative housekeeping, a matter of updated terminology or modern sensibilities. But names have never been mere labels. In Genesis, Adam’s first recorded task is naming the animals. This was not busywork. It was an assertion of human dominion over the natural world, a declaration that to name a thing is to stand in authority over it. Naming established relationship, responsibility, and hierarchy. From the beginning, names encoded power, ownership, continuity, and belonging.
When a name is erased, what disappears is not just a word, but the framework by which a people understand themselves. Stories stop cohering. Traditions hollow out. What was once a living inheritance becomes a curiosity, then an embarrassment, then nothing at all. The children inherit peace without identity, stability without roots, and the ancestors are forgotten. Life continues, but something essential has gone missing.
What Renaming Actually Does
Renaming is often dismissed as symbolic, and that defense is half true. It is symbolic. But symbols are not fluffy decorations. They compress meaning, authority, and intent. A name gathers history into a single word: America. The Bible. Shangri-La. Change the word, and you begin to change what can be remembered, spoken, and passed on.
First, renaming asserts a claim. To name a place, a people, or an institution is to announce jurisdiction over it, even before law or force follows. This is why empires give rivers and seas new names, why conquerors and revolutionaries rename cities, and why revolutionary regimes obsess over terminology. The name signals who believes they have the right to define reality.
Second, renaming fractures continuity. A name is a thread tying past to present. Cut it, like the Fate Atropos, and history becomes foreign territory. What came before is no longer inherited; it is merely studied, reinterpreted, or discarded. It becomes dead history. Renaming is one of the cleanest ways to declare that the past no longer has authority over the present.
Third, renaming can erase without appearing to destroy. Memory does not vanish all at once. It thins. Stories lose their center. Traditions lose their explanation. This is why renaming often succeeds where violence fails. Violence leaves scars. Erasure leaves silence, emptiness that can be filled with something else.
That is why false mercy is so tempting. If the killing stops, if order is restored, the cost seems abstract. But the cost is paid forward by people who have no concept of what has been taken from them.
How Names Actually Change in Practice
We like to pretend that names change by consensus or linguistic drift. Sometimes they do. More often, they change when power applies sustained pressure in one direction and resistance is worn down or delegitimized.
The first mechanism is administrative adoption. A name begins to stick when it appears in official documents, databases, signage, and institutional language. Governments, militaries, insurers, shipping authorities, and mapping systems matter far more than popular opinion. When these systems converge, the name acquires practical reality. People use it not because they agree with it, but because the system requires it.
That is why the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America mattered more than critics wanted to admit. Once the term appeared on Google Maps, it crossed a threshold. Map platforms do not invent names casually. They aggregate institutional usage. Whether the name ultimately sticks remains to be seen, but the mechanism is clear: when bureaucracy adopts a term, resistance requires effort, while compliance becomes frictionless.
The second mechanism is cultural enforcement. Media, academia, and professional institutions normalize certain terms while stigmatizing others. Language becomes a loyalty signal rather than a descriptive tool. You are not required to believe the new name is accurate or just. You are required only to use it, publicly and repeatedly.
This is where many attempted renamings fail. The Biden administration’s renaming of military bases offers a clean example. Justified as moral necessity and implemented through bureaucratic authority, the changes lacked cultural buy-in from the soldiers, communities, and traditions most closely attached to those names. When Donald Trump later ordered the changes reverted, the ease of the reversal exposed the weakness of the original act. Names imposed without legitimacy require constant enforcement. Once enforcement relaxes, the old names return. This is not nostalgia. It is memory reasserting itself.
The third mechanism is time coupled with victory. Names endure when the people using them continue to govern and shape institutions. This is how Rome’s Mare Nostrum became the Mediterranean. No decree abolished the Roman name. Rome simply ceased to matter.
Finally, there is a more dangerous category: remembered names. These are not imposed from above but recovered from below. When Iranian dissidents and their supporters call their country Persia, they are not proposing a rebrand. They are reaching behind the Islamic Republic to a deeper civilizational identity. This kind of renaming requires no administrative adoption to be threatening. It challenges legitimacy directly by denying the regime the right to define the nation’s origin story and claiming it for themselves.
Who Gets to Rename and Why
Renaming is often framed as a moral act. In practice, it is a permissioned act. The same behavior is praised or condemned depending entirely on who does it and whose authority it reinforces.
States rename through law and administrative fiat. This authority flows downward. Once the machinery moves, compliance is expected. Renaming here asserts jurisdiction not only over territory, but over memory.
Alongside the state stands the managerial elite: administrators, academics, media organizations, and cultural institutions. Their power lies in enforcement without overt coercion. They rename through style guides, policies, and repetition. When they rename, it is called progress. When others resist, it is called ignorance or malice.
Then there are those outside these recognized naming authorities, individuals or movements without formal control over law, bureaucracy, or elite institutions. This includes ordinary people, grassroots organizations, and even figures like Donald Trump. Their renamings are judged by a different standard.
The grassroots adoption of Martin Luther King Jr. as a namesake illustrates the point. Long before elite or federal recognition, local communities renamed streets and schools in his honor. At the time, these acts were condemned as divisive or inappropriate. Only later, once authorized institutions followed suit, were they reclassified as moral progress. The act did not change. The authorization did.
The real divide, then, is not between renaming and preserving names. It is between authorized renaming and illicit remembering. One is celebrated as justice. The other is condemned as provocation. Yet only the second reliably outlives regimes.
Which Names Are the Most Powerful
Not all names carry equal weight. Some can be changed with a memo. Others resist erasure for centuries.
The weakest names are institutional, like buildings, programs, or military bases. They derive authority from the institution itself and can be changed again when leadership shifts. This is why such renamings are often easily reversible.
More powerful are geographic names, especially those tied to land and water, like the Gulf of America. Rivers, seas, and regions accumulate myth, trade, and memory. Renaming them is never trivial, even for states.
Most powerful of all are names of peoples and civilizations. These names encode origin stories and inheritance. To erase them is not to tidy language, but to sever a people from their past and constrain their future. This is why Persia matters. It is older than the regime that governs the territory. It carries memory that predates modern political categories. It reminds both rulers and subjects that the present order is contingent.
Old names are dangerous because they do not need permission. They persist in story, ritual, and habit. They can be suppressed, but rarely destroyed. And when they return, they bring with them a quiet accusation: you are not the beginning.
False Mercy, Revisited
This brings us back to Tigana.
The tyrant’s solution works, at least for a while. The killing stops. Order is restored. By managerial metrics, the policy succeeds. And yet the cost is catastrophic. A people lose the ability to name themselves. Their history dissolves and their resistance becomes incoherent, not because they were defeated, but because they were forgotten.
That is the essence of false mercy. It offers peace without justice, stability without roots, order without inheritance. It avoids the spectacle of violence by committing a slower annihilation. No blood in the streets or obvious crime. Just the steady disappearance of meaning.
True mercy does not require forgetting. It requires memory disciplined by restraint and authority tempered by stewardship. Adam named the animals not to erase them, but to take responsibility for them.
To erase a name in order to stop conflict is not strength. It is an admission of fear. And that is why old names keep coming back. Why Persia is spoken again. Why imposed renamings quietly fail. Why memory outlasts regimes.
Killing can end a war. Erasure can end a people.
History, sooner or later, renders its verdict on which choice was truly merciful.
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