In a little-reported vote last month, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution endorsing the use of map-projection methods that display the size of landmasses in accurate proportion to each other. The reason? Because other map-projection methods, most notably the Mercator projection, are racist.
The resolution, designated A/80/L.104, was adopted on September 4 by a vote of 164-1. Only the United States voted against it, while six countries — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine — abstained.
Fueling “Prejudices”
The resolution claims that the Mercator projection has “perpetuat[ed] an unbalanced view of the world,” one that benefits Europe and North America at the expense of “Africa, Latin America and South Asia.” It further claims that those “cartographic distortions of sizes of continents” have led “in particular to a symbolic minimization of Africa in collective imaginations and knowledge systems.”
The resolution went so far as to claim that the Mercator projection has influenced global development, “minimizing the extent of socioeconomic realities, infrastructure needs, development potential and prosperity in the Southern regions, and [fueling] prejudices in the environmental, geopolitical and security fields.”
Accordingly, to ensure “cognitive justice and memorial reparation” and to promote “the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” the resolution endorsed the use of “the Equal Earth cartographic projection and equal area map projection methods” as alternatives to the Mercator projection.
The Mercator Projection
The Mercator projection, first introduced in 1569 by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, is particularly useful for navigational purposes, but does not accurately depict the sizes of landmasses in proportion to each other. Equal-area projections, meanwhile, are less useful for navigation and distort the shapes of landmasses while portraying their relative sizes accurately.
Leftist activists have long opposed the Mercator projection. The Guardian, a far-left British newspaper, noted their claims that it is “rooted in western stereotypes” and an example of “cartographic colonialism.”
United States Objects
In a September 4 statement, Yaryna Ferencevych, the deputy U.S. representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, denounced the resolution. She noted, “While this initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions, the United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to — as its most vocal and committed proponents plainly and openly state.”
Goal: World Government
This is far from the first time that the UN has promoted an extreme racial agenda. In August, for example, the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published a “general recommendation” calling for reparations and even more radical measures to compensate for slavery and the slave trade. Of course, virtually all of the UN’s policy recommendations involve giving government more power (particularly at the international level); limiting individual freedom; and imposing draconian, cultural-Marxist mandates on society, including those inspired by Agenda 2030.
In her statement, Ferencevych urged other countries to “instill common sense” in the UN. However, despite frequent claims that the UN has “veered off course,” its original purpose, as intended by its founders, was to serve as a nascent one-world government — and certainly not one that would uphold Western civilization or reflect limited-government principles.
Instead of trying to “reform” the UN, the United States should get out of it completely. To that end, Congress must enact the DEFUND Act (H.R. 1498 and S. 669).
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