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.
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!
ReplyDeleteIt's a clever trick to include words that mean the opposite of what you stand for in your name or title. For example:
ReplyDelete"The Right Honourable Andrew Mackay"
The assembly of all the citizens of the often quoted Athenian democracy was in fact only 30,000 people, out of 250,000.
ReplyDeleteCitizenship 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.