We study and talk about revolutions that have changed the world. From tribal uprisings to bloody social tremors that led to revived nationhood and new beginnings, from military coups to electoral deceit, the history of the modern world is replete with them. All of them, distant or recent flashpoints, lay bare both humanity’s virtues and vices.

We are now living the biggest one of all. The electronic revolution of instant and graphic communication and relentless social networking has been roaring over us with a vengeance. It has already changed many of our traditional ways of doing things. Shops no longer need to be frequented, distances don’t mean anything anymore and a cause, a deeply felt cause, can be ignited and driven across continents within days.

Perhaps the most effective consequence has been that dealt to politics as we have always known them. Politicians no longer feel safe. They can ride the very dragon of the revolution until they reach their short-term goals, but they also soon find that the dragon is suddenly looking their way and just about to point its nostrils of fire at them. The perfect example is Barak Obama, the first black US President who expertly rode the dragon to the White House but is now desperately shielding himself from it.

The time is certainly up for all the dictators of the Right or the Left, the military intruders, the economic knights in armour coolly plying the international markets, the fascists in democratic clothing and the extremists parading as defenders of the faith and traditional values. The electronic revolution has disrobed them all, because it finally gives those who matter, the tax-paying citizens, a simple way of almost instantly congregating, protesting and showing the world not only their dissatisfaction but also their very victimisation at the hands of corrupt, power-hungry rulers and their hangers-on reacting in the hope of retaining their champagne lifestyle.

What is happening in the Arab World has already occurred in places like the Ukraine with the Orange Revolution and other Eastern European countries, but what makes the current events so fascinating is that they are the Arab peoples themselves who are instigating the wondrous reforms. For too long, the Arabs had been thought to be too submissive, too inclined to accept the status quo, as long as they knew who kept their toast well and truly buttered. Now we know this was an unnecessarily long historical hiatus. The Bedouin tribes of the desert, those morose, self-catering nomads who eventually got T.E. Lawrence to help them carve out a nationhood – that was soon sadly squashed by the colonial powers of Europe – are back to the drawing board in cyber concert with their urban brothers and sisters.

Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait are in the throes. Hopefully down with them will go the likes of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other Westernised fake democracies run by no less corrupt and power-manipulating monarchs and princes and their families. And while they do so, it would be nice to watch them being joined by Iran where religion continues to be used as a convenient excuse for bloodshed and death.

The Arabs need to shake themselves out of their religious stupor to look forward to a new world of opportunity based on human rights, religious toleration, real democratic practice and a belief in themselves as descendants of a great culture that does not have to be denigrated and thrown into the gutter because of the fundamentalists, the corrupt monarchies and obsolete sheikhdoms.

In so saying, however, the electronic revolution is happily blind to national territories and electoral boundaries. Like Obama’s administration, governments in Europe, and the other continents, led by arrogant politicians and their fat party cats need to be mindful of the raging fury. Electoral success by devious means and the retention of power by the effective use of financial empires do work for some time, but the electronic dragon’s fire will eventually reach them too.

While the Arabs have been out in the streets reclaiming their rights, the Italians, for example, have been out showing their disgust at a prime minister who has brought both shame and ridicule on their nation. So lost and wrapped up in its own self-satisfaction and parliamentary comfort zone is the Berlusconi Administration that it had to be the country’s top comedian, Roberto Benigni, to force-elbow it last week into accepting to mark the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy with a public holiday on 17 March.

Benigni’s magnificent performance at the San Remo Festival (where else for Italians?!) had the audience and millions of televiewers in stitches. Except for one man in the front row, Berlusconi’s neo-fascist Minister La Russa whose sardonic smile and see-I’m-not-clapping posture revealed yet another touch of the political arrogance that can inhibit even what is wrongly perceived as a democratic ambience. But time is up.

The same goes for our hapless government, caught as it is with its half-seat majority, refusing to declare details of public spending incurred in suspicious deals, contracts and consultancies, threatening jobs, making a mockery of parliamentary practice, imposing unjust price hikes and generally behaving like a drugged elephant in a baby’s crib.

The time is up for all of us, really. The electronic revolution will not stop or fade away. It may be fiddled with for some time, but the dragon will gnaw its way out of the cage in no time at all. Ask Mubarak. Ask Ben Ali. Ask Gaddafi. Ask the pathetic, trembling kings and queens of all Arabia.

I still hope we won’t have to ask Obama, for as a neutral I believe in the man and his politics, but it is a question of how many Americans will continue to believe in him. The tea-party villains have already put the saddle on the dragon and it could just be a question of time before the Electronic Revolution starts blowing in the opposite direction.

Now, for those who believe Nostradamus and his so-called prophecy that the time is after all up for the whole world next year, well there is only one thing to do. The dragon provides many little electronic games and gadgets to use while we wait it out...