You've got an ocracy??

I keep hearing the word "democracy" being used in connection with what's going on in Afganistan and Iraq, and this has led me on to some thoughts about that word and what it imports. Let's start with basics - all the "ocracy" words derive from the Greek "kratos" meaning power or strength, and thereby the right to rule. So we have "autocracy" meaning power in the hands of one person (autos = self), "theocracy" meaning government according to the rules of some religion or other (theos = god), "meritocracy" meaning rule by those who have proved their ability (from the Latin this time - merere, to deserve), and of course "democracy" meaning rule by the people (demos = the ordinary people). So in a true democracy everybody has a right to their say, and everybody's say carries equal weight. The closest mankind ever got to this was in ancient Athens, where all citizens could go to the Assembly (which by all accounts was just an open hilltop) and speak their piece and vote on what laws should or shouldn't be made - at least in theory. In fact this wasn't as open as might first appear. For starters, you had to be a citizen, which ruled out slaves and women, for instance. Then if you weren't a good orator, or didn't have a particularly powerful voice, your chance of being heard (or more to the point, of being taken any notice of) was slim. In any event, such a system could only work where you had a small population, and so it was quickly taken over by the concept of "representative democracy", where people elected representatives to speak and vote for them. And that is essentially the system which has developed here in the UK, where Parliament is the modern equivalent of the Assembly. But just how democratic a system is this? More later.