It didn’t work well with the Iranians in 1977–1979 either. Originally the overthrow of the Shah was supported by a wide variety of factions in society, including secular ones, and it may well have led to a secular country. But once there was a power vacuum, Khomeini returned from exile in France and managed to install the present Islamic republic.

It sort of, kind of worked with Romania in 1989, though. But in spite of massive popular discontent with the dictator, the actual overthrow of Ceausescu was largely the regime’s elites seeking to get rid of the boss so that they could rule the roost themselves. That Romania eventually became a democratic European nation feels like a happy accident.

Are you Romanian? If you think Romania is or should be a democratic European nation, can you offer your perspective on what could stop the ongoing verbal, legal and sometimes physical harassment of the Hungarian minority? Some of which is described in the last paragraphs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanianization#Recent_events

I am Romanian. I don't think there is an "ongoing verbal, legal and sometimes physical harassment of the Hungarian minority". There were isolated conflicts, mainly artificially perpetuated by radicals for (pretty small) political gains. Also, the Hungarian minority political party (UDMR) is currently a part of the government coalition (not the first time it happens).

That Romania still struggles with a number of flaws – some a holdover from the socialist era, some new after ’89 – is why I wrote "sort of, kind of". Still, even with the grievances of the Hungarian minority, it nevertheless became a multiparty system after violently overthrowing the old dictator instead of another single-party dictatorship.

Unfortunately, in several European countries today ethnic minorities fail to get the recognition and treatment they seek, so Romania’s actions towards the Hungarian minority don’t hinder it from being called today a "modern European state" or whatever.

The proper way to evaluate how successful throwing out leaders is as a way towards peace is not to list cases you can think of where it failed, but to list every place leaders were thrown out with a goal of peace, and seeing how well that fared.

Then to be really honest, see how well that fared against other options.

Then you may reach a different, but demonstrably more accurate, conclusion.

I was curious about how this'd look without the cherry-picking, so I took a look at Wikipedia's list of revolutions from the 1900s on and sampled a few dozen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebell...

Results from the period of 1900-1910 (19 revolutions; I don't have time to do more) is that 12 were outright failures: the revolution was crushed, the leaders executed, oftentimes with significant loss of life for the revolutionaries and nearby civilians. 5 were temporary successes: they led to some reforms or a new government, but the government collapsed within 15 years anyway, leading to either anarchy, dictatorship, or conquest by a foreign power. 2 were an "eventual success" (Young Turk revolution, and revolution in the Kingdom of Poland), where the revolution had modest success but later events achieved "peaceful" (if you can count WW1 & WW2 as peaceful) independence. 1 was a success, the Theriso Revolt that broke Crete away from the Ottoman empire and led to its eventual union with Greece.

I'd come to a bleaker conclusion: most revolutions fail, and lead to the deaths of their leaders and most of the people who support them. Then of the subset that "succeed" (in the sense of not being crushed), a majority lead to government or lack thereof that is just as bad or worse than what came before.

> Then you may reach a different, but demonstrably more accurate, conclusion.

For that to have much weight, you'd need to list somewhere that a government overthrow actually went well. History suggests that it rarely ever does.

Yep, cherry picking is the fallacy here for those interested.

It kind of worked for us Romanians after executing our dictator and his dimwit wife in '89, by scaring them into fleeing, then a fast capture, followed very quick - slightly unfair - trial and then firing squad, on Christmas Day of all days (and all these recorded).

Of course, afterwards, the new elected president was a former communist party member who tricked everyone that he had changed, and of course his anti-west (and east) propaganda helped secure him his win (because "we should not listen to anybody anymore, so vote for me"), and of course, because of his win, the pseudo-communists still ruled/destroyed the country for the majority of the next 32 years but, anyway, I still say it was a win and I am very proud of our revolution.

Sure, there are those who say that most people died in vein for the revolution but such transitions take a lot of time and it would have taken even more if we waited another 5-10-15 years. It did not help that we were right between east and west either.

Now we celebrate 14 years of being in the E.U., which helped a lot, although we mismanaged tens of billions (sorry E.U.), while we are still many years away from managing so much money correctly and without illegal shenanigans... Also around 17 years in the NATO, which helped a lot I'd say (see our neighbor Ukraine for the contrary; Moldova is also behind us by some 15 years, at least).

But, technologically, the new freedom brought us some very interesting 90's and 2000's, catapulting our internet speeds to number one (sometimes two) in Europe [1] due to our giant nation-wide interconnected LAN-party networks, fueled mainly by piracy (or lets call it "hunger for information and everything that we missed before"). But there is a long reddit post which explains those years much better: [2]. Today everybody and their parents have at least 100 Mbps. Our main ISP doesn't include a 100 Mbps plan anymore anyway. Only 300 Mbps up. Even my parents in a small poor city have fiber since 5 years. Welcome to Romania.

These generated a lot of English speaking young people, me included. Lots of us becoming very good at electronics or IT. Sadly, many self-educated IT engineers left for other countries. We even had a running joke (urban legend mainly) that the second language at Microsoft was Romanian, which of course is said by other countries too (e.g. India) but somehow everybody knows somebody at Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. While many of us are still (thinking about) leaving, placing us 2nd after Syria when it comes to mass emigration, still... executing those two bastards was for the best.

[1] https://i.redd.it/79y3efbig4551.png [2] https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...

After you eat the rich you don’t eat.