Abuse/Use of "democracy"

[Adam White]

When the bourgeoisie is strong, when it can arrange everything and everybody to serve its power, it does not hesitate to affirm positively certain democratic ideas which claim to be universally applicable.

- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth - on The Pitfalls of National Consciousness

[Adam White]

I cannot urge everyone enough to read (or perhaps read again) Dr. Fanon's last work. Yes. Doctor. Physician. And Psychiatrist. Both mens of science. (Mens = Minds)

What I take from the work is a CHILLING parallel to what we are living in these United States. I was certain of that, as I have now finished two sections. The quote above is in the third section; these words are a few paragraphs later in the chapter:

The national bourgeoisies, who are quite clear as to what their objectives are, have decided to bar the way to that unity, to that coordinated effort on the part of two hundred and fifty million men to triumph over stupidity, hunger, and inhumanity at one and the same time.

[Adam White]

In the concluding paragraphs of this third chapter, Fanon writes:

The masses should know that the government and the party are at their service. A deserving people, in other words a people conscious of its dignity, is a people that never forgets these facts.

[Adam White]

Furthermore:

We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.

[Adisa]

I was actually looking into some information involving another topic discussed in class which lead me to this thread.  Growing up I can recall hearing the word bougie, which I later found out was a reference to the word bourgeoisie.  Based upon the way the word was used, I was led to think it meant someone snobbish or uppity.  As with many other words, I never thought to find out or ask what bourgeoisie meant or who it actually referenced.  I've discovered the bourgeoisie were a new social class of people living in cities, who were neither vassals or nobles.  This new social class was acquiring money through commerce and trade and power with the money they were earning.  The power the bourgeoisie were coming into was slipping away from those considered as nobles.  The King of the time period allowed the bourgeoisie into the Cortes Generales, the legislative body that had the power to enact laws.  This appears to have been the beginning of the transition from divine right to natural right.   

[Adam White]

You found an angle here I had missed! I am about to dig into this.

So. Divine Right -- > Capitalism -- > where we are heading now, in inevitable fashion towards either a New World Order of global oppression or a socialized unity of the world for the people and of our work.

[Clifford Black]

Namaska Adisa, make sure that you stay AWARE of the fact that the saying of something, is not, actually, the Doing of Something--in regards to Divine Right vs. Natural Right.

B.

[Adisa]

Namaska, understood especially when one's natural rights intrudes on the natural rights of another!

[Adam White]

Ah, and quickly it comes together, including Bergers, and Burgesses. The etymological links there are obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortes_Generales

[Adisa]

Yes it is coming together, Cortes Generales, House of Burgesses legislative assemblies of merchants.  Someone may have had an understanding of what the letter B means.....  

[Adisa]

The Modern French word bourgeois derived from the Old French burgeis (walled city), which derived from bourg (market town), from the Old Frankish burg (town); in other European languages, the etymologic derivations are the Middle English burgeis, the Middle Dutch burgher, the German Bürger, the Modern English burgess, and the Polishburżuazja, which occasionally is synonymous with the intelligentsia.^[4]

In the history of Southern Africa, the Trekboere (now referred to as Trekboer in English; pron. /ˈtrɛkbuːr/) were nomadic pastoralists descended from mostly Dutch colonists, French Huguenots and German Protestants in the Cape Colony (founded in 1652). The Trekboere began migrating into the interior from the areas surrounding what is now Cape Town, such as Paarl(settled from 1688), Stellenbosch (founded in 1679), and Franschhoek (settled from 1688), during the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century. The Trekboer included families of partial Khoikoi descent who had also become established within the economic class of burghers.

[Adam White]

I would call it systemic that I have never heard of these so called "white" people forging a nomadic life (what all students are taught is a lesser existence to the societies based on agriculture) in Africa. Since the 17th century CE.

[Adisa]

It appears as if the hunting and gathering culture presented more freedoms than each of the cultures that replaced it.  I hear you, I also never heard much regarding so called white people as hunter gatherers, but after looking into the area believed to be the origin of so called white people, people in those areas who were hunter gatherers and nomadic were often displaced and enslaved.