The New Republic's Anne Applebaum: The Cautionary Lessons From History Regarding Revolutions that, in Part, Played Out in the Streets

Anne Applebaum's article at The New Republic is linked below.

Lessons About Revolutionary Fervor in the Streets

"Yet a successful street revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive, positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya. Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors. Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917."

---Anne Applebaum, The New Republic