Americans love revolutions, Niall Ferguson notes, but they should stick to loving their own rather unusual revolution, and not every uprising that comes along. He asks us to remember these three things about non-American revolutions:
They take years to unfold. It may have seemed like glad confident morning in 1789, 1917, and 1949. Four years later it was darkness at noon.
They begin by challenging an existing political order, but the more violence is needed to achieve that end, the more the initiative passes to men of violence — Robespierre, Stalin, and the supremely callous Mao himself.
Because neighboring countries feel challenged by the revolution, internal violence is soon followed by external violence, either because the revolution is genuinely threatened by foreigners (as in the French and Russian cases) or because it suits the revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems (as when China intervened in the Korean War).