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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: X3J14 Holding Pattern Here
Message-ID: <2511.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 19 Mar 91 02:05:01 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 44

Category 10,  Topic 12
Message 39        Sun Mar 17, 1991
ATFURMAN [Alan F.]           at 21:00 PST
 
My understanding is that in American political circles of 200 years ago,
"democrat" was a term of abuse (meaning: mob-rule advocate).

Someone once pointed out that a 1920's edition of a U.S. Army indoctrination
manual maintained that America was "a republic, not a democracy".  The 1950's
edition simply stated that the American political system was "democracy". 
History had gotten a New Deal.  He who controls the present controls the past.

Given John Wavrik's much different usage of the term, it is clear that the
word "democracy" is wide open in its ambiguity.  How lucky for those who seek
the Total State: just sell people on "democracy" as meaning INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS,
use it in slogans for a while, then pull some Orwellian doublethink by
switching its meaning to absolute rule by a "representative" two-party
oligarchy.

Rule by the Divine Right of Kings has been replaced by the Divine Right of
Collectives (i.e. by a 51% majority in idealized Radical Democracy). Victims
of our Trabant-Motorwerke State-owned educational system may not be able to
read, but they have been taught well to love Big Brother.  A failure? You
forgot to ask, "Who profits?"

The real American system has been pretty much flushed away to oblivion by the
New Deal and the War on Drugs, but it is still interesting to remember what it
used to be.  The REAL government was Self-Government: the individual's
sovereignty over his/her own mind, body, property, life.  (As Jefferson wrote,
"may it be to man to enjoy the blessings of self-government".)  The State's
job was limited to protecting individual liberty, and oversight of this
limited State was by *democratically elected* representatives.  But the system
as a whole was not "democracy".

=========================================================================

And now to settle the argument over X3J14's system of governance.  It is
Constitutionalist.  Those who have the constitution to endure one meeting
after another, rule.
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