American Democracy is not the Italian democracy

I am linking to an op-ed from the New York Times called Iraq Voted. Did Democracy Win?

Imagine I live in Iraq. I don't speak English. You come and tell me: "I want to give you Democracy". I see that you have good intentions and I learn the word giving to it a positive meaning. I don't really check its meaning on the dictionary to see what you want to give to me exactly. And I don't ask you to give me the exact definition. Words are there for this reason. Communicative economy. Saving the time and effort that would be needed to explain all the times something by giving its exact definition. And I am fucked!

Mirriam Webster's definition of democracy:


1 a: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority
b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2: a political unit that has a democratic government
3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States
4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

Interesting is entry n. 3. And this is exactly the meaning of the word that is being exported. But the dictionary is not honest enough to tell you the truth.
What is being exported by the USA is a two-party system controlled by the richest people of the country, where people can only choose between two factions of the same party that makes the interests of the rich people.
The word 'democracy' is really misleading....as John Searle would put it.
Reading "Mind, Language and Society" by Searle I have noticed how many words have different meanings in American English and Italian. Demoracy, communism...and many others. When in Italy we will all speak English we will end up accepting the meaning these words have in American English. And what we will have in July will be Democracy in the American sense. Now I would define it as 'una dittatura', a 'dicatorship'. Because the Italian system is far more democratic, allowing different parties to be elected...even those who are closer to the interests of the people...
Then when we will learn Chinese the word communism will be used to decribe 'capitalismo', because what they have there is not very different from what they have in the USA. My Chinese flatmate is a shopaholic.

What was also intersting in Searle's book was the analysis of the word money.
Money at the beginning meant 'piece of paper that stands for a fixed amount of gold". Unfortunately we will still consider our money to have the same meaning. The truth is that the name has remained, but the thing has changed. Nowadays money is subjected to inflation and deflation, those processes used by the governments to abuse the private property of the people. Here in the States, where private property is so important, nobody complains that at the moment the state is printing money causing its value to decrease and taking away the private property of the people? No, because nobody questions the meaning of the word money.

Things change, words stay the same. This is how people are fooled.