"foam on the surface of the historical torrent"

Last night I was reading the collected works of Trotsky -- a depressing read if I ever saw one.

The increasingly mendacious articles culminate in commentary from Mexico just prior to Trotsky's murder by Stalin.

All that said, in an early work, "Two Faces - Internal Forces of the Russian Revolution" (1917) Trotsky said something that struck me as applicable to the situation in Pakistan (and elsewhere) today:

"There are clever people on both the stock exchange and among bourgeois newspapermen. Yet that are all amazingly stupid when they come to deal with mass movements... . [T]hey notice only the foam on the surface of the historical torrent".

Something very significant is going on in the world. I do not understand it -- a powerful religious revival does not really explain it -- but I sense that all I can see is the "foam on the surface".