What is Citizen Democracy?
Wikipedia defines it as the 'political concept of average citizens engaging as representatives of a country or cause either inadvertently or by design. Citizen diplomacy does not have to be direct negotiations between two parties, but can take the form of: scientific exchanges, cultural exchanges, and international athletic events.'
As a youth in New Delhi, in the mid Nineteen Seventies, I became involved in Citizen Diplomacy when a Bulgarian class-mate suggested we put up notices in his native language at various tourist attractions so as to discourage the culturally insensitive practice, prevalent amongst visiting dignatories from his country, of using Muslim 'Minars' and Hindu 'Stambhas' for the reprehensible purpose of anally pleasuring themselves. Purporting to be members of the Youth Congress, acting on the orders of Ambika Soni, we were successful in our task. Soon, the practice spread to other Schools and Colleges and a brief golden age of Citizen Diplomacy was inaugurated during which them filthy foreigners visiting Ind's sacred tourist attractions were properly instructed by notices written in their own obscene lingo to kindly desist from shoving our ancient monuments up their own capacious arses.
Something similar seems to be happening on the website, Open Democracy, except all the signposts are written by pointy headed PhD types and so I don't understand which ancient monument it is that I'm not supposed to be stuffing up me jaxie.
Under Communism, people who went abroad as part of a delegation had to be careful of Police spies. They had to show they were not impressed by what they were seeing. So they'd say things like -'I shit a bigger monument than this every morning'- to show they were good proletarians.
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