[pdonis]

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s

And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically nobody in those countries wanted Soviet rule anyway. This has been true for few if any other revolutions in history.

[UncleMeat]

That still sounds like a revolution to me.

If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!

[pdonis]

> That still sounds like a revolution to me.

The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.

[vkou]

And by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

This is absolutely a case of survivorship bias.

[pdonis]

> by definition, the bloody revolutions would not have been bloody if the people in charge just acquiesced to the demands of the revolutionaries, and gave up without a fight.

In other words, if the actual facts had been different, we would use a different word to describe what happened. Yes, indeed. That's why we have different words: to capture meaningful differences in the facts we are using the words to describe. If we simply called every change in government a "revolution", the word would be useless.

[vkou]

My point is that when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless. If you're going to condemn revolutions as a whole, you have to condemn the bloodless ones as well, for that same reason.

[pdonis]

> when a revolution starts, the participants have zero idea of whether or not its going to be bloody or relatively bloodless.

I think that's rarely the case, at least not when the people starting the revolution are reasonably sane (by which I mean they have a reasonably good grasp of reality and use that to guide their actions). I think the people in Eastern Europe who started "revolutions" when the Soviet Union fell had a pretty good idea that little or no bloodshed would be required.

It's quite possible that the people who started the French Revolution didn't realize how much blood would be shed, but to me that just means those people were not reasonably sane. And there is plenty of other evidence that they were disconnected from reality.

(By contrast, I think the people who started the Russian Revolution, and the Communist revolution in China, were well aware that much bloodshed would be required, and they were perfectly OK with that. That makes them reasonably sane by my definition, but it does make them "insane" by other definitions--psychopathic or sociopathic, for example.)