Withnail wrote:By that I mean Athens at the time was a much worse society than ours in many ways, but was also much more genuinely democratic.
These days it's just simply a word that's abused in order to justify the crimes of our rulers.
We live in capitalist authoritarian societies, with trappings of democracy, is what I think.
Athens was just one city state. Spartans were the fascists, of their day. Those Greeks were sure smart though. One philospher deduced the nature of matter, that it is made of "atoms" -- small spheres that are in motion and don't quite touch each other. He turned out right about that, exactly!
And another one figured out the circumfrence of the earth. And Plato's allegory of the cave.. genius.. and Socrates, and Aristotle.
The more democratic a place is, the more freedom there is, the more free thought there is, the more innovation you have. Ancient Rome picked up on the Greeks, and the Roman Empire had a lot of similarities to today. The empire was a military dictatorship. But the Republic before that was about he same as what we have. Senators had clients, like our lobbyists today, and a lot of money changed hands.
The Senate were rich patricians, mostly, and then a few new money men too. About the same as the modern US Senate. And then there were the People, the plebs. SPQR -- the Senate and People of Rome. The plebs got to vote for tribunes, which had a fair amount of power. Even if tribunes got bought off by the patricians, usually. There was a bourgoise class, the "knights," and I can't remember it all exactly but I guess they got to elect a tribune too. It was a system of checks and balances.
It's not so simple to just say, "there is no democracy." There was "republican," representative democracy in Rome, and the modern world now too of course. It's not the same as empire, or dictatorship, though it is different than pure democracy like an ancient Athens or Iceland.
The thing about total democracy is that it only works in a small place, like a city state.
The internet actually makes democracy workable again, in the modern world.
But total democracy isn't perfect either -- there's a lot of chaos with these state voter initiative referndums.
There are just different systems Withnail, all of them can work, some are the best of both worlds, and one thing is for sure is that with the most freedom comes the most innovation. Freedom yet rule of law, and order.
P.S. Bringing this back around to Hong Kong, you say the protesters are just backed by the CIA. Well, Roman patricians used to blame 'demagogues" for stirring the plebs up and getting them worked up.
The root causes are the same though, sometimes the plebs get worked up about something and then Rome -- or Hong Kong -- or Kiev -- is facing King Mob and the patricians -- oligarchs -- communist party tyrants -- can either BEND, or they can CRUSH IT, or they may COLLAPSE.
The Roman mob used to riot over various things, akin to Michael Brown type issues, or maybe low wages and bread, or in Julius Caesars rise they were complaining about slave labor taking free men's jobs. Caesar took the plebs cause, a patrician adopting populism to use it as a power base, but also seeing the overall good for society. Unlike a FDR, he went a bit far with it and made himself dictator, as a few others had before.
It's just the same old sh*t man, history just repeats itself.
Power struggles between rich and poor and middle, patrician and pleb.
The plebs in Hong Kong have a right to elect their town council members. Ain't like they're asking for the world.
All hat and no trousers.
