🚀 go-pugleaf

Ian Johnston wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Jul 2005 12:32:07 UTC, JLB <JLB@bigbad.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Ian Johnston wrote:
>>
>>>Semantic quibbling. Do you or do you not think elected governments 
>>>preferable to mob rule?
>>
>>My opinion on that question has no bearing at all on the issue of 
>>whether the features (secret ballots, representatives etc) earlier 
>>alluded to are necessary & defining for democracy. They are clearly not.
> 
> 
> Nonsense. They are clearly entirely necessary for defining democracy 
> nowadays: how it was defined two thousand years ago is interesting but
> utterly irrelevant.
> 
> You claim that democracy and mob rule are identical is both ludicrous 
> and an insult to those who have campaigned, suffered and died for 
> modern democracy over the years.

Hardly. Democracy *is* mob rule. That is what the word means.

Citing various countries that currently adopt the word changes nothing. 
Perhaps you think it should be solely applied to a parliamentary system 
such as that in the UK; if so that merely reflects your parochialism. 
What about the Democratic Republic of Congo? The Loa People's Democratic 
Republic? The German Democratic Republic? It is sometimes pointed out 
that the most wonderfully democratic constitution to be found anywhere 
during the 20th C was that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

As Orwell pointed out, "The words democracy, socialism, freedom, 
patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different 
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a 
word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the 
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally 
felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: 
consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a 
democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it 
were tied down to any one meaning."

http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/orwell.htm

The real insult to all those who have struggled, fought and died for 
political freedom within a parliamentary system in the UK over 
centuries, is that a government with no discernible mandate can remove 
essential liberties at exactly the same time as it asks us to celebrate 
those who fought (and many of them died) to stop Napoleon and Hitler. 
The response of our elected representatives is proof they have abandoned 
their constitutional role. The idea that any of these proceedings are 
democratic (so far as that word means anything) is laughable.

-- 
Joe * If I cannot be free I'll be cheap