Comment by notbingo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notbingo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What about North Korea? Why does it last there? Why don't they revolt? But actually, a more relevant question would be, why haven't they already? How much suffering can they take? I'm Romanian too. The censorship, oppression, and whatever other bad thing you might want to refer to, will last as long as the powers that be want it to last. When our "revolution" happened, people didn't even know what to think of it when they heard the news and really many thought it was a joke, and that's because they could not believe it was possible. There was no buildup that "took more than 40 years", a lot of people were satisfied with their lives, the ones that were not were quieted, and the rest were ignorant and didn't really care just like people now under pretty much any regime around the world. Hell, some older people that I have met even say they liked it better back then. Real population driven revolutions can't really happen anymore, if they ever could.

Dude, you're too pessimistic, much like all of our Romanian brethren :)

Not to glorify our own revolution, because there isn't much to glorify about it, but the spark triggering a revolution is never conscious and it's by definition a violent process, so of course people do not want revolutions. It's not like they were speaking about it on forums, it's not like they woke up one day and decided to have it. And yes, you'll always have people satisfied with their lives, or ignorant. Doesn't matter though and you know as well as I do that Radio Free Europe was the most popular radio station, as a form of civil unrest, in spite of people actually fearing the secret service for listening to it. What happened in Bucharest wasn't an isolated event. It started earlier with Brașov in 1986. It was bound to happen, trying to hide the events from Timișoara being just what broke the camel's back.

> some older people that I have met even say they liked it better back then

Old people always say that. It's an inherent bias in how our memory works. We tend to forget the bad and our attention deficit only grows as we get older.

Did you know that in the past years we've had the lowest levels of sickness and that global poverty is at an all times low? We are probably living the best years in history and when I'll be old I'll be able to say that as well and regret year 2016 and say to youngsters that "in my days not that many people died of hunger".

I kinda agree with him, I find it hard to believe revolutions can really happen in today's world, people are becoming very comfortable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com