01-20-2018, 02:16 AM
(01-19-2018, 12:17 PM)nebraska Wrote: Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
Let me try to make sense of this. First, democracy means more than majority votes (after all, lynch mobs make their judgment on the basis of majority votes, and that the Kim dynasty in the DPRK can win elections in which the dominant party gets 100% of eligible people to vote and 100% voting as they are expected to vote ) and the claim of freedom (which explains why so many 'liberation fronts' have proved themselves engines of subjection, and how even Hitler could say that he was for freedom).
Liberal democracy implies civil liberties, free and competitive elections, and the rule of law. The absence of any one of those implies something other than democracy. A slave system is not a democracy even if the leaders (as in the Confederate States of America) speak glowingly of the freedom... of the masters. A system in which one's vote is directed in a certain way or in which one has no meaningful alternatives is a sham of a democracy. Absence of the rule of law implies either anarchy, despotism, or gangster rule. If your conscience can get you killed you are not in a democracy.
Can people believe that they are free if they live under a tyrant? Certainly! A combination of isolation and propaganda can make such possible. But most likely people know the difference between liberty and tyranny. In tyranny there are no alternatives, or the nominal opposition is under control of the dominant Party. By the 1980s about everyone in the Communist bloc knew that they were living under some form of dictatorship. Can one have the illusion that one lives under a dictatorial regime when one is in fact living in a well-defined democracy? Only if there is ambiguity about the situation.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.