DEMOCRACY

How many countries in the world are currently involved in wars of one kind or another? Perhaps war is contagious, and the world is infected. But maybe not—or not with war, anyway.
Since the days of the ancient Greeks the Western world has been talking about and experimenting with democracy. In modern Western history, we have watched what should have been—or could have been, or claimed to be—democratic revolutions, short-circuited or perverted.
Since 1776 the United States has been the standard-bearer for democracy. And since 1776 the United States has been the standard-bearer for the new aristocracy of the capitalist, liberty-glorifying culture rich.
When I was in school—all through university—I was taught as all Americans were that democracy was the opposite of communism. Absurd. Democracy is the opposite of dictatorship or some other form of totalitarianism. Capitalism is the opposite of communism. Enlightened democracy would be communist—so socialist, if you prefer. Capitalism tends toward dictatorship, or the totalitarianism of the rich.
Perhaps the United States never did have any real ambitions toward democracy. Those states practiced genocide on Native Americans, and owned African slaves; Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams wrote letters expressing very un-democratic thoughts about the farmers on Virginia plantations.[i] It may be that the American Revolution was no more a revolution than England’s “Glorious Revolution” a century earlier; in both instances, the only thing that changed was the monarch.
Since World War II the United States has claimed the banner of the “free world,” meaning the capitalist world or the world-run-by-the-rich.
“Free” is a very important word, and “freedom” is very different from “liberty.” The immediate root of “liberty” is the Latin LIBER—which also gives us “libido” and “libation.” “Libido” has to do with desire; “libations” are outpourings, from the Greek.[ii] “Liberty” is a do-my-own-thing word; it has nothing to do with the idea of society.
“Free,” however, is a friendly word—literally, historically. “Friend” comes into English from the Germanic FREI, which means dear, or beloved. “Free,” remarkably enough, comes into English at about the same time—in perhaps the eighth century—from exactly the same root. The understanding in both “friend” and “free” is what we call love: the relation of self with what self holds dear. As “friend” becomes “free,” it makes the idea of freedom social. It says that you can’t be free by yourself.
In much of the world, the totalitarian world represented by the Soviet Union was the alternative to the version of democracy that the United States advertised. The corruption of Soviet communism also turned what was a people’s revolution—a democratic revolution—into a totalitarian state. So the United States “won,” even though what it peddled as democracy was corrupt.
But maybe something odd—and serious—has happened since then.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the developing world has erupted in people’s revolutions—almost all of which the United States and other capitalist states oppose. This cause for this eruption could be that third world leaders, particularly in Africa, understand communism, in spite of the perversion and corruption of the Soviet Union, and are trying to convert their world to a new communist experiment.
Alternatively, these people’s revolutions could be taking place because the people of many African and other third world countries have heard the propaganda about democracy from the United States—where “all men are created equal”—and believed it: believed that there was a place where there could be both “liberty and justice for all.”[iii]
These people may have learned from our propaganda the principle which was supposedly behind America’s democracy, but haven’t learned enough history to know that the United States betrayed the ideals of freedom in that democracy, even as they were supposedly enshrining them in their most sacred documents.
Maybe the third world nations will get their revolutions right.

[i] See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, vol. 1.
[ii] The oldest root we have is the Sanskrit, which is the closest we can get to our Indo-European ancestors’ language ten thousand or more years ago. The Sanskrit is LUBH—which means to perplex, bewilder, confuse, desire greatly, lust for. We get our word “love” from LUBH, through German.
[iii] To have both liberty and justice is a society is to be free.