Reply #10: My interest has always been to learn about how it all started.

[tabatha]

When I asked an influential Benghazi businessman, Sami Bubtaina, why the revolution had not produced a leader, he said, “Everything was so fast! By the second week, the shabab were in Ras Lanuf.” Bubtaina, who is in his fifties, told me that the leaders of his generation were terrorized and coöpted by the regime. In the mid-seventies, dissidents in Benghazi were hanged on the university grounds, with students and faculty forced to attend, and on the steps of the old Italian cathedral. There had been an economic opening in the past few years, he said, but the promise of political reform was a sham. “In the last three or four years, we’ve had satellite television and the Internet, but we still couldn’t communicate our feelings,” he said. “If we did anything to communicate with the political opposition, we’d go to jail, or be disappeared.”

It was his children’s generation that had seen an opportunity. “The young people watched what happened in Egypt and Tunisia on the Internet, and they said, ‘Why can’t we do the same here?’ But there was no plan for a war, or even a real plan to overthrow Qaddafi. There was no leadership; just some people who went out and threw things at the police, and then the police used weapons to kill the kids. So this started when the first martyr came to the hospital.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/09/110509fa_fact_anderson#ixzz1LdlFJP6U

On edit: It is similar to what happened South Africa; the adults were cowed and repressed. It was the kids that started the demonstrations, which turned bloody as the police fired back.

"When high-school students in Soweto started protesting for better education on 16 June 1976, police responded with teargas and live bullets. It is commemorated today by a South African national holiday, Youth day, which honors all the young people who lost their lives in the struggle against Apartheid and Bantu Education."