Revolution: A Look Through History

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's slapdown of MSNBC'S Mika Brzezinski is making the rounds in the blogosphere today, with good reason:

In this interview, Ferguson pointed out that:

If you look at history . . . most revolutions lead not to happy-clappy democracies, but to periods of internal turmoil, often to periods of terror, and they also lead to external aggression because the simplest way to mobilize people in a relatively poor and not very well-educated country like Egypt is to point to the alleged enemy within and then, of course, the enemy abroad.

Hyphenated American, a Jewish-Russian-Chinese Cossack who got his history lesson by living through two revolutions, also is looking at Egypt through the lens of history:

[I]t requires sophistication to see that Hollywood Happy Ending is a rather rare thing in real life - particularly when you leave the civilized world and move to the rest of the planet. What are chances that the latest commotion in Egypt will end well? There were plenty of revolutions in the last few hundred years, and only very few of them had a happy ending. It is quite typical to hear of a revolution which starts as a popular uprising against the oppressive regime and ends up with a bunch of psychopaths taking over the country and building an even more oppressive regime - so oppressive indeed that the people wish they never revolted against the previous oppressive regime. Let's go through the memory lane, and take a look at a dozen of significant revolutions.

Hyphenated American argues that the American public have been conditioned by Hollywood and the entertainment industry to expect a happy ending. You will want to read his thoughts on the puzzlingly blithe willingness of many Americans to believe and even celebrate the appealing fiction that democracies can spring up naturally and bloodlessly in Islamic gardens where no democracy of any kind has ever bloomed.

That kind of unguarded optimism is very dangerous indeed for Americans who should know by now that, by virtue of their country's success, they are counted chief among "the enemies abroad" by every dictator on the planet looking to point the finger at somebody else.
__________