The Significance of Revolution Waves?

SEE HERE Delancey Place today features a short excerpt on the significance of waves of revolutions. I put it up for your consideration because thinking of revolutions as coming in "waves" isn't my first instinct, but it's clear that there is something to it. A while back all the liberals were making fun of George Bush the younger for statements he'd made about the infectious effects of democracy. I didn't pay all that much attention at the time. For one thing I have a distinct distaste for the word "democracy." It arises from the fact that democracy = mob rule. Aristotle and Plato were neither of them big fans of mob rule and the founders of the United States were not either.

Somehow the schools have been teaching that we're a democracy and we are not and I hope we don't become one. We are a representative republic and that is a very different thing. We have checks and balances to defend the rights of the minority. If we lose those we will indeed become a democracy and shortly thereafter a dictatorship as has happened to every democracy. So stop calling our form of government a democracy. Nevertheless, freedom is infectious, but is what we are seeing in the Middle East in all these uprisings something that has anything to do with freedom or is it just one set of thugs moving in to kick out the last set of thugs? We may not know for a while. Most Westerners have absolutely no idea of what motivates the people in the Middle East. They are Islamic. They tend to still exhibit tribal characteristics. They belong to factions that are mutually horrifically violent towards one another (the Sunnis and the Shia) and I know not very much at all about these and what I do know I know at a sort of intellectual level not at any kind of a visceral level. I generally don't view disagreement, even disagreement about religious issues I consider important, to be an adequate motivation for violence. These people do. So I think this idea of "revolution" may be quite an oversimplification of what is going on. LIBYA