Racist / Eurocentric World Maps

The world maps we are accustomed to were drawn using a rather ancient (year 1569) Flemish mapping model (a man by the name of Mercator). Please take a look at the following pictures and captions. Strangely, the world maps haven't changed much since then. Sure, some new places were discovered or some slightly more accurate land sizes were found, etc. But, almost all of the Eurocentric distortions remain.

I showed this to a friend, and in turn he showed it to a friend. His friend's reply was "Mercator's way of mapping was amazing for the time, think about it, 1569!" He is right. It was amazing (it is very difficult to map a 3d object (the earth) onto a 2d surface (a map). One of the glaring distortions is the size of Greenland - It is actually about the size of Texas but appears on maps as about the size of the entire US. This is because distances over the ocean would be completely distorted and so on, the problems with mapping 2D onto 3D.

But there are two questions to ask.

1) Have not new techniques and measurements come about in the past 450 years, i.e., why are we still using them?

and the more important question

2) Why are all land sizes and importances distorted in favor of northern and european countries while asia, africa, and so on are curiously shrunk and moved away? (Well the answer is obvious)

Please take a look at the following pictures and captions. (note these came from http://www.heliheyn.de)


The equator isn't at the center of the map! Two-thirds of the map shows the Northern hemisphere.



The Soviet Union (22.4 million square km) appears incredibly larger than Africa (30 million square km).



Greenland appears with its 2.1 million sq km considerably larger than China, which is 9.5 milliom km in reality, much more than four times as large.

Scandinavia (1.1 million square km) appears larger than India (3.3 million square km).



Europe (9.7 million square km) appears larger than South America (17.8 million square km)


And a few more dealing with countries!


Great Britain (244,000 square km) appears as large as Madagascar (587,000 square km)



Italy (301,000 square km) appears as large as Somalia (637,000 square km)



France (547,000 square km) appears as large as Niger (1,267,000 square km)



Sweden (752,000 square km) appaers twice as large as Egypt 1,001,000 square km)


By the way, I bet you didn't know that Japan from northeast to southwest is about the same length as the entire East Coast of the US (from at least NY and more down to the tip of Florida).