The American kleptocratic "necrocracy": A "democracy" that kills

From Political Linguistics in America by Prof. John Kozy

Languages are called living because they constantly change. There's no way to stop that, of course; people use languages as they will. Linguists often speak approvingly of the change, citing the richness it adds to language and inventiveness of the human mind, but the change also has unintended consequences that are often overlooked. The change, after all, is what makes works written in old and even middle English unintelligible to modern speakers of English.

Some attempts have been made to control linguistic change; they have not had much success. L'Académie française, for example, has continuously fought a loosing battle against changes in French, and even the U.S. governments attempts to advocate Simplified English show few positive results. Yet attempts to control linguistic change arise because of an irrefutable fact, namely, that linguistic change often makes speech and writing ambiguous which obscures meaning and leads to muddled thinking.

Take the word 'democracy,' for instance. It has come to mean something like a government whose agents are 'elected by the people.' But that's a slippery definition. Democracy originally meant rule by the people, but the people do not rule in governments whose agents are merely elected.

If there are legal or financial restrictions on who can seek office, what is called democracy can be any one of a number of different kinds of government. If only clerics of a specific religious sect can seek office, the government that results is really an ecclesiocracy. If only the affluent can seek office, it would be a plutocracy. If only geniuses are allowed to seek office, it would be a geniocracy, and there are numerous other types. Merely calling a nation democratic is so ambiguous it has no real meaning.

When President Wilson went before Congress on April 2, 1917, to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world “be made safe for democracy,” exactly what was he pleading for? Almost a dozen major and numerous minor wars since have apparently not made the world safe for anything, no less, democracy. The world is more dangerous for nations and their peoples than ever.

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