Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

This is something of a tradition [1] - for example, the British Embassy in Tehran has its street name changed to Bobby Sands Avenue in the 1980s; Glasgow renamed a street adjoining the South African consulate to Nelson Mandela Place during apartheid; in 2018 Washington DC renamed the street housing the Russian Embassy as Boris Nemtsov Street; and so on.

While this might not accomplish much in real terms, I do find it hilarious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_street_names_changed_a...

View on HN

These name changes may have some superficial "feel-good reinforcement" domestic value on social media, but they're never an avenue for change.

At best, they are a distraction. At worst, they reinforce the more juvenile members of each nation's diplomatic core that encourage non-constructive tit-for-tat "optics" politics.

Well, they force all data stores that refer to the embassy as well as every person visiting it, and all correspondence to it to mention something they'd rather bury. But you might be right.

Of all the potential ways that tit-for-tat "optics" politics could manifest, this seems one of the more harmless.

It happens all the time. For example, just shy of a year ago in DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Plaza

It must suck living in the same street as an embassy.

I did for a while. One embassy was for a minor, but controversial country, another was for a minor (but regionally significant) neighbor. Had it not been for the flags and the CD cars, I wouldn't even have known these were embassies. They really don't cause much of a stir usually.

Streets can have multiple names in some cities, and not always for political axe-grinding. I believe that the 1600 block of Crittenden St. NW is also Rev. Jerry Moore Plaza, after the pastor of the 19th St. Baptist Church when in relocated from downtown to the block bounded by the street/plaza on the north. And once in lower Manhattan I saw a "way" apparently named for a cousin of mine (with not an uncommon name)--but it had a companion original name.

I do imagine that the USPS will deliver to the 1600 block of either Crittenden St. or Rev. Jerry Moore Plaza, or to 800 block of either 16th St. NW or Black Lives Matter Plaza.

In more recent history Washington D.C., Vilnius and Prague changed Russian embassy addresses to Boris Nemtsov Plaza.

I think this does accomplish a lot by simply reminding of the past. People will forget without a reminder

I suggest renaming the US Embassy street in Vienna as Evo Morales Street

I suspect most embassy staff are -- like the ones from Western nations -- generally pretty liberal, and probably secretly fairly supportive of this.

Um, probably not.

I just heard an interview with a journalist, Jolyon Naegele, a Western correspondent in Czechoslovakia in the 80s (who worked for Radio Free Europe). He talked about how Czechoslovak secret services bothered him (often in a very crude, stupid ways) and also how they, in some sense, were afraid of him, since they assumed that he is a foreign agent. The assumption came from the fact that all the Czechoslovak foreign correspondents in the West actually _were_ agents of secret services.

My point is, you cannot generalize the systemic features of Western liberal democracies to authoritarian countries.

So I would be surprised if this is not true for diplomats as well. Most of them, if not all, are probably operatives of Belarusian secret services, and they probably have mostly conservative-authoritarian values.

Even if they aren't, they've been vetted very carefully by the secret service. Embassies are among the last places where liberal-leaning individuals would be allowed by the regime to get.

Typically embassy staff are well vetted for being loyal to their governments. Also, some embassy staff are straight up legal spies, tasked with carrying out clandestine work for their governments. These are not people who you would recruit if you weren't absolutely sure of their allegiances and beliefs.

I don’t think one gets delegated to an embassy for not being totally supportive of the delegating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com