Elections and this thing called democracy 2

Thus a nation with hordes of hungry, homeless, untended sick, barely literate, unemployed and/ or tortured people, whose loved ones are being dissapeared and/ or murdered with state connivance, can be said to living in democracy” its literal Greek meaning of “rule of the people” implying that this is the kind of life the people actually want – provided that every two years or four years they have the right to go to a designated place and put an X next to the name of one or another individual who promises to relieve their miserable condition, but who will typically, do virtually nothing of the kind; and provided further that in this society there is at least a certain minimum of freedom – how much being in large measure a function of one's wealth – for no one's to express one' views about the power that be and the workings of the society, without undue fear of punishment, regardless of whether expressing these views has any influence whatsoever over the way things are.
It is not by chance that the United States has defined democracy in this narrow manner. Throughout the Cold War, the absence of “free and fair” multi party elections and adequate civil liberties was what marked the Soviet foe and its satellites- These nations, however provided their citizens with a relatively decent standard of living in terms of unemployment, food, health care, education, etc., without omnipresent Brazilian torture or Guatemalan death squads. At the same time, many of America's Third World allies in the Cold War – members of what Washington liked to refer to as “The Free World” - were human rights disaster areas, who could boast of little other than the 60 second democracy of the polling booth and tolerance for dissenting opinion so long as it didn't cut too close to the bone or threaten to turn into a movement.
Naturally. The only way to win Cold War propaganda points with team lineups like these was to extol your team's brand of virtue and damn the enmy's lack of it, designating the former “democracy” and the latter “totalitarianism”.
From the book 'Rogue State' by William Blum