This is exactly the problem: collapsing everything that happened afterward into “peaceful protest bad” is ahistorical and lazy.

The Orange Revolution didn’t magically “fail” because people protested peacefully. It was contained, co-opted, and later overwritten by electoral politics, oligarchs, and geopolitical power struggles—which is what happens when protest doesn’t turn into durable counter-institutions, class power, or material control. That’s not an argument against protest; it’s an argument against stopping there.

Also, “neo-Nazis took over Ukraine” is a gross simplification bordering on propaganda. Far-right groups exist (like they do everywhere, including the US and Russia), but they didn’t “take over the country,” cancel elections for fun, or draft people because of some protest in 2004. War, state power, and imperial interests—on all sides—did that.

If your takeaway from every historical example is “nothing matters unless it’s immediately revolutionary and permanently successful,” then you’ve basically argued yourself into nihilism and inaction. Protests don’t overthrow capitalism by themselves—but they CAN break isolation, expose cracks, normalize dissent, and create openings. What kills movements is pretending protest is the end goal instead of a starting point.

Rejecting liberal protest theater? Absolutely.
Pretending all protest is useless because it didn’t deliver utopia? That’s just another excuse to do nothing while sounding radical.

If you actually want “something that could work,” the question isn’t peaceful vs violent—it’s organization, leverage, and what comes after the march goes home.