Skip to main content

What is Listenbourg?

From euronews.com

 


It only took three days after a photoshopped map showing Listenbourg — a fictional country haphazardly tacked onto the Iberian peninsula — appeared on social media for the joke to take the world by storm.

At first, it was nothing more than a jab at Americans and their supposed lack of knowledge of geography.

“I’m sure Americans don’t even know the name of this country,” Twitter user Gaspardo said on 30 October, accompanying a map with a red arrow pointing at the slab of land liberally added to Spain and Portugal and coloured green, implying this was an EU member state.

Another user instantly replied: “Who does not know Listenbourg?” — and the meme was born.

What happened next?

At the time of writing, the post gathered more than 95,000 likes and thousands of shares on Twitter. 

Meanwhile, some decided to take the trolling to another level, claiming the place was actually real.

A high-definition satellite map replaced the original one, while on Reddit, a channel quickly sprung up, claiming that Listenbourg has its own Formula 1 Grand Prix and that its astronauts were a part of a mission to the Moon.

Others quickly organised around what they claim is an “extreme-centre party,” whose leader pledged to “improve Listenbourg’s image abroad,” while its alleged Ministry of Interior already offered to answer any questions regarding its identity documents and visas.

Another post on Twitter claimed that Listenbourg’s king Listen XV was, in fact, the first Sun King, going to war against Louis XIV for the prestigious title in 1661.

A national anthem together with a red-and-white flag sporting a golden eagle appeared on YouTube almost instantaneously on a purportedly official Listenbourg government account.

The French Wikipedia entry for the Republic of Listenbourg, further elaborating on its supposed history, has since been taken down.

Although all of it is fictional, users on social media are not letting up, and big, professional accounts such as that of Toulouse Football Club got fully involved in the meme.

The Formula 1 race joke has been picked up on and supported by Julien Febreau, a well-known French sports commentator for Canal+, and others, such as the French national hockey team, are making tongue-in-cheek demands for Listenbourg to join international competitions.

Like many other European countries and regions, France has been the victim of geographical bad takes by US-based outlets.

Famously, in 2005, CNN mistakenly placed Toulouse and Strasbourg in Switzerland and Germany.

CNN has also placed the Ukrainian region of the Donbas in Pakistan — an entire continent away — after the war first broke out in the Eastern European country in 2014.

Slovakia and Slovenia get mistaken for each other so commonly that the latter considered redesigning its flag in 2004 to aid in preventing any future mix-ups.

And after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing suspects were identified as being of Chechen background, a slew of comments from those mistaking Chechnya for the Czech Republic forced the Czech ambassador to the US to clarify the difference between the two places publicly.

What are other famous fake countries?

Molvania is a prime example of another completely made-up state created to highlight the lack of awareness — and tact — when it comes to less-commonly known parts of the world.

The imaginary post-Soviet state described as the “birthplace of the whooping cough” was an on-the-nose creation by a group of Australian comedians known as The D-Generation, published as a travel guide in order to mock colonial and imperial approaches to the genre.

Likewise, Yugoslovakia — a non-existent country that came out of a misnomer for both Yugoslavia and Slovakia — is used as a joking dismissal of those with a flawed knowledge of central and eastern Europe, getting an occasional chuckle out of the in-the-know on social media.

Borduria and Syldavia, both fictional Balkan countries appearing in the Adventures of Tintin graphic novel, also merit a mention as places used to highlight the stereotypes about the southeastern parts of the continent.

And then there is Absurdistan, a term used by Soviet dissidents to describe parts or all of the USSR and its satellite states, most notably by the former Czech President Vaclav Havel.

Some unrecognised microstates also merit inclusion, like the tongue-in-cheek Kingdom of Wallachia in the Czech Republic, the result of an elaborate practical joke in 1997.

A well-known example of similar countries includes Lithuania’s Republic of Užupis in Vilnius, where the residents of the neighbourhood declared their own state, together with a flag, currency, constitution and president.

There is also the Free Republic of Liberland, created by Czech politician and activist Vít Jedlička after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Said to be situated on a parcel of land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, Liberland has its own flag, anthem and constitution, while Jedlička has been issuing citizenships and passports of the micronation since 2015.

www.euronews.com


    Labels:

    Comments

    1. Carol A.3 November 2022 at 11:30

      Some people have so much free time... I wonder what would happen if these people would put all this effort into actually doing something worthwhile and important. And it also goes to show us (if that was needed) that some people can be so easily fooled into believing something and that some of us don't check to see if something we see online is true or not.

      ReplyDelete

    Post a Comment

    Cloud Bookkeeping

    HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

     Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...
    4 comments
    Read more

    Small business will be excluded from fraud law.

      Min­is­ters are plan­ning to exclude small busi­nesses from anti-fraud legis­la­tion by nar­row­ing the scope of a crim­inal offence tar­get­ing com­pan­ies that fail to pre­vent eco­nomic crimes. MPs and anti-cor­rup­tion cam­paign­ers had hoped the gov­ern­ment would seek to amend the eco­nomic crime and cor­por­ate trans­par­ency bill to ensure the new offence covered all com­pan­ies. The plans to limit the scope of the amend­ments will also dis­ap­point those who had hoped the legis­la­tion would remove key hurdles to the pro­sec­u­tion of white-col­lar crime. A new «fail­ure to pre­vent» offence for fraud would bring it in line with exist­ing sim­ilar cor­por­ate offences for bribery and tax eva­sion. At present, pro­sec­utors need only prove that organ­isa­tions lacked «reas­on­able» or «adequate» con­trols to pur­sue the offence in bribery and tax eva­sion cases. «It would be much more sens­ible for the gov­ern­ment to provide strong guid­ance for SMEs on what these pro­ce...
    3 comments
    Read more

    Doubt on CS's collateral.

      Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...
    2 comments
    Read more