The point Sor J made MH which is valid and you did not respond to is there has been no change in political systems in what you pointed out. Nothing changed in Egypt, Tunisia, etc. Not a damn thing. Thousands of students were killed in Iran and many more will be before that fascist regime is overthrown. Turkey is now even more of a fascist dictatorship crushing any uprisings it had. Likewise Tunisia, Algeria, on and on.
The fact is the Middle East is one large pit of fascism surrounding Israel. There is not one country in the Middle East other than Israel with democratic institutions, an independent court system, and a free press. The reason for that is simple -Islam and sharia law prevent democracy. As for the rest of the world if you think twitter or internet will result in regime changes in Russia or China you are mistaken.
George Bush was naïve thinking without democratic institutions like independent courts, free press, there could be democracies in Iraq, etc. In fact Obama's Muslim Brotherhood troika with Erdogan and Morsi was never about democracy, it was a pathetic attempt to create a Muslim power network built on mimicking the Masonic lodge structure to control Muslim nations. It failed. The Muslim Brotherhood was not about democracy it was about a political network of elitist control by a few rich Muslims seeking to replace corrupted colonial monarchies of yester year with their own fat cats.
Today If anything the internet is being used to control the masses no different than tagging us. People voluntarily agree to be tagged with their cell phones and use of the internet. We are all now under control of interests whose needs use the internet as a method to captivate and gain access to us. There is nothing conspiratorial about it. Its called marketing. Every move, every purchase you make, someone is logging it and quantifying it to use to better understand you to control your decision making. You are given the illusion of free choice but every decision is being influenced right down to the next purchase. Its the price of info technology. It does away with privacy.
In the next few years the US is going to replace the Social Security card with a chip implant inserted in one's arm by needle and this will spread across the world and we will volunteer to do it thinking its a great way to keep children safe, track consumer spending, diseases, terrorists, criminals. Welcome to the world of the Mark of the Beast as some conspiracy buffs like to call it. Its reality. Its called info technology and it does not create freedom, it creates the illusion of freedom and knowledge.
Get back to me when you can explain one spring uprising that changed anything.
That said, I do believe in the next five years uprisings in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, let alone Europe, China, Russia, the US could of course happen. How effective they would be in changing anything will be hard to know. Usually uprisings lead to backlashes where more control by the state against individuals is then justified. That has been the pattern in history.
We take down Hitler and overnight Stalin moved in and filled the vacuum across Europe. China has been under state control since 1949. India controls its masses by a caste system and a complex web of having to pay civil servants each step of the way in any procedure to do anything.
There's ways to control. In Canada we get taxed up the wazoo and we have people on this forum welcoming the increased taxes by Trudeau seeing no contradiction in his b.s. agenda of claiming to represent the Middle Class.
Trump? He's a puppet figure head. Does anyone really think he controls anything? He's a loud fart in the foreground to distract from what is transpiring. The only thing it looks like is that all the centralized regulatory schemes of Obama are being dismantled in terms of financial market places, certainly no increase of individual liberties. Let's get real. Obama started the wall with Mexico not Trump. Obama the alleged leftist had no problem with Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, etc. In fact its Trump if anyone questioning them but does anyone think Trump is a libertarian or a promoter of individual rights?
I sound like Ron Paul. I better stop. My point is the uprisings were brief burps and in the grand scheme of things NOTHING.