What is democracy?

One of the significant distinctions between Dictatorships and Democracies seems to be, which people you treat badly.

Dictatorship - foremost you own.

If you were a little Stalinist dictator, let's say, you would torture, imprison, and kill inside your country. The majority would live in fear and/or take part in the actions. Communist dictatorship insisted that they are internationalists, meaning there were no exclusive rights and niceties reserved for the locals.

To confuse everybody still left one later called the whole thing socialist democracy.

Fascist dictatorships or Autocrats usually praised the ideal Nation of a genetically pure race, (often consisting of the majority) and then found local and far away scapegoats for unity reasons (jews, gypsies, foreigners, gays - everybody would do)

Usually, they had free markets, which often gets equated with democracy

"People had to go to jail so that markets can stay free" Eduardo Galeano

In a democracy, you mostly went out to "liberated" often violently other countries to force freedom to vote for your preferred candidate or at least free markets on them.

Or you abused, brainwashed, and often killed the indigenous populations to get them “civilized.” Often you would subordinate people of different colors or if not available somebody of a distinctly different culture would do.

So, what is Democracy? Perhaps we need to figure this out together and write a whole new book on how we want to live.