Friday 4 February 2011

Beware of the democratic

The ruling party in Egypt isn't really fooling anyone with their name 'National Democratic Party'. Surely there is no point in using a title when it is clear that the country is far from democratic.

Still at-least they haven't gone the whole hog like North Korea and called their country 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea'. A blatant two fingers pointed squarely at the USA.

It's a funny old world or it would be if things were a bit more equal.

3 comments:

  1. Sometimes I despair of the use of 'democratic', but there's something ironic about it too - if that's someone's free choice it's an expression of democracy to use it to refer to something undemocratic, even if it means the choice may not be free for long!

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  2. It's a clever trick to include words that mean the opposite of what you stand for in your name or title. For example:
    "The Right Honourable Andrew Mackay"

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  3. The assembly of all the citizens of the often quoted Athenian democracy was in fact only 30,000 people, out of 250,000.
    Citizenship was only for males of a certain class.
    I am not sure that any democracy has ever reflected what we might think the word means.
    Words have a habit of meaning things that are not always obvious. "The Right Honourable" in this case refers to someone who is a member of the Privy Council.
    As often some are more equal than others.

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