If we had true democracy, I gather we would bring back Capital Punishment.
Then we'd be "killing our own citizens".
Giving Gaddafi (or anyone else) excuse to invade.
Might actually be a good thing.

You mean true populism. True democracy is premised on the presumption of excellent education, full access to the relevant information and heightened civic virtue (what Tocqueville called 'habits of the heart'). A multiplicity of boneheads voting according to prejudice has nothing to do with democracy, even when it suits some groups and parties to claim otherwise.

But Pru surely Demos means "of the people".

And the majority of people are idiots.

JK2006 wrote:
But Pru surely Demos means "of the people".

And the majority of people are idiots.

It does JK, but the term derives with specific meaning, from Aristotle onward, and it is value-laden and, in this modern world, expensive. In the Greek city polis it worked, sort of, because most people were classified as slaves while the citizens concentrated on mastering 'prudence'. You take the same concept into the modern world, without slaves, and it makes no sense at all. Even three hundred years ago, David Hume said: to be democratic you have to recognise the difference between short term and long term benefits, and choose the latter over the former, and...who does that nowadays? Whereas populism is just the counting of votes. It's populism these days. It probably always has been. But democracy has always been a precious ideal. An ideal in search of people who deserve it.

But it's all used as Orwell 'doublespeak'. War equals peace, imposing democracy by force, all these things the West are saying. You can't impose democracy on a country that isn't built for it or doesn't want it (Iraq, Afghanistan). It's all about Western power.

These a film by Alex Jones (www.infoseek.com) called Terrorstorm. Part of it is filmed around Stockwell tube where this woman says she would give up her liberty for freedom, and she says it two or three times, failing to see that liberty IS freedom.