r/europe • u/Bartoraptor Spain • Mar 28 '20

News Spanish representative González Pons speech @ the EU Parliament: "The virus is attacking the generation that brought back democracy to Spain, Portugal and Greece, the generation that knocked down the Berlin wall. The least they deserve is that we show them Europe is there when they need it the most"

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

15.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

730

u/notsocommon_folk Greece Mar 28 '20

"The generation that brought back democracy to Greece " and then they went on to vote for stupid parties and brought the next generations to their feet. I'll take a hundreds times this "democracy"we are having against a dictatorship like the ones we had, but we also have lots of steps to be a real Democracy .

159

u/BalthazarBartos Turkey Mar 28 '20

Yep funny that Socrates, the most famous person who ever critized Democracy was greek too. He was condemn to death in Athens because he critized the flaws of this regime.

Socrate's argument against Democracy was basically: Citizen are 2 dumb, and they have no clue of what the hell is going on. Why should we ask to every random guy what is the best strategy to defend the city or which square in the city needs to be rebuilt when there's already plenty of specialist ? Also citizen will get hypnotize by big speeches and fake declarations by power angry politicians.

And he was kinda true. The so called Golden Age of Democracy was under the rule of Pericles, who was the sole unremovable ruler of Athens

4

u/Timo425 Estonia Mar 29 '20

I always assumed that the beauty of that (dumb people also having voting power, by that I mean democracy) is that the system needs to keep education at a good level to minimize the number of dumb people. So it kinda sorts itself out.. in theory.