What role the hairpin turns of fate in a mass movement? What power human agency? And what if revolt becomes revolution off an accident of history?

Two decades ago, separated by a year and a continent, two scintillating surges of people's power sought freedom from their respective repressive systems. Both ignited off the microscopic and tipped into the monumental. Both saw fear turn into mass defiance. Both froze their governments into paralysis.Vast collective euphoria seemed in each a portent of victory.
But there fate bifurcated. One regime turned and bit back, mowing down the crowds with impunity and with a force that froze its people into permanent pain and nostalgia for that one brief shining moment in Burma when change almost, just about, nearly, then never, came to pass.
The second fell and along with it crashed an empire. The Berlin Wall tumbled, defeated by a storm of East Germans on the wings of an accident. A bureaucrat misspoke, suggesting an immediate liberalization of travel across the East-West divide. And the people, their energy coiled back like a spring across years of oppression, made a run for it en masse. Down tumbled the bricks, picked apart, hammered, smashed to bits in a fury, their graffitied chunks scattered to the winds as relics of a vanquished era.

What if a single Stasi agent or GDR soldier had panicked and opened fire? Would the Berlin Wall have turned instead into a mass gravestone for swarms of protesters? What if the soldiers in Burma had refused to follow orders?

Fast forward twenty years. Rangoon, to visitors, appears frozen as if by a magic spell. Another mass protest in Aug-Sept. 2007 tried anew the recipe that worked so well for Eastern Europe in 1989 but failed so conclusively for Burma in 1988. Again it ended in a bloodletting.
And so today, on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 years after Burma's own botched pro-democracy uprising and two years after the monk-steered protests that we all prematurely dubbed the Saffron Revolution, the question bears asking: what role luck in a mass protest? Do you unfurl again a banner, confident that the whole country will rise behind you? Do you risk another life lost in a vain show of martyrdom? Or do you cut your losses and pour your creative energies into long-term strategies of subversion, less dramatic, more incremental, a legacy for future generations ?
Not so much philosophical abstractions in a country where dreams of change land you in jail.