Destroying Yemen¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Isa Blumi
- ASIN: B077GRB21B
- ISBN: 978-0520296138
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077GRB21B
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
Those targeted by this UN-sanctioned alliance are loosely associated groups representing a broad sweep of Yemeni society—almost 80 percent of the country’s population currently lives under these groups’ authority. — location: 152 ^ref-50945
The removal in late 2014 of Hadi’s ineffective interim administration was deemed by most Yemenis as entirely justified. — location: 157 ^ref-58243
AnsarAllah not only threw out a corrupt foreign imposed government filled with crooks and Islamist bigots, but they also reversed the selling of Yemen’s economic future. — location: 178 ^ref-43105
the constant reference to events in Yemen as a “civil war.” Framing events in this manner attempts to place the blame for these catastrophes on Yemenis themselves, a way of reading events that is not politically neutral. — location: 186 ^ref-50392
international organizations work overtime to confuse and cover up with clichés about Yemeni tribalism and Iranian-backed rebels. — location: 198 ^ref-32698
Until recently, Yemen could accommodate all comers, whether prophet or profiteer. — location: 234 ^ref-17812
Crucially, in as much as empire secures leverage by way of financially overwhelming targeted polities and when needed military coercion, it also harvested technology and the social sciences — location: 263 ^ref-56037
through its cultivation of higher education, in particular, that this modern empire produced the analytical frameworks to complement its violent methods of financial domination. With the establishment of the disciplines of economics, sociology, social anthropology, and political science, empire had the tools to indoctrinate generations of ambitious agents with theories of modernization, globalization, and neoliberalism. — location: 265 ^ref-51689
collusion between the major oil producers (OPEC) and empire assured the Federal Reserve Bank, a coalition of private banks, monopolized the means of exchange in the world (Hudson 2005). This constituted a power almost unique in human history, one Yemenis still resist well into the new millennium. — location: 276 ^ref-62449
Empire in the last two centuries is thus a product of a coalition of finance capitalists who have forged a global regime that until recently has been able to build, with virtually unlimited amounts of debt financing, the most powerful military machine ever known. — location: 278 ^ref-61067
a conflict that had, in some remarkable ways, originated as a mere land use dispute between local farmers and the Yemeni/Saudi states seeking to forcibly integrate the region’s assets into the global economy — location: 293 ^ref-14933
it was the ascendant Zaydi Imamate in North and Middle Yemen that resisted such encroachments of finance capitalism most. Their principled resistance resulted in one of the unique cases of indigenous, independent political order to survive World War II. — location: 306 ^ref-18089
That modernization theory, practiced with different levels of fanaticism, also required a generic image of the recipient as decidedly unmodern also plays itself out in dangerous ways in this story. — location: 376 ^ref-9686
The persistent reference to “the village” in anti-Soviet Cold War rhetoric almost entirely framed the social organization of the clear majority of poor people in the world as the quintessential den of communist recruitment. — location: 415 ^ref-42062
progressive Islamists whose agenda was a unification of a transregional struggle to defend the poor from capitalism — location: 436 ^ref-52681
the rise of Arab nationalism, which manifested in a productive, revolutionary way in the 1950s, was mediated as much as nurtured by Nasserism. — location: 438 ^ref-36263
In some ways, Nasser’s rise laid the foundations for the subsequent collapse of progressive resistance to global capitalism. — location: 441 ^ref-48271
Basically, more than 200,000 Yemenis would die over grudges between Egyptians and various Arabian princes. — location: 445 ^ref-31328
The other side was the imbrication of Islam, at the time still understood by many progressive Muslims as the best moral and socioeconomic framework to fight global capitalism. — location: 472 ^ref-4200
the partnership between empire and “conservative” Middle Eastern monarchies ultimately served the exploitative capitalist interests rather than protecting the global poor. — location: 475 ^ref-28742
the incremental uprooting of a radical, progressive, and perhaps even Islamic anti-imperialism — location: 477 ^ref-54911
this connection between empire and the rise of takfiri violence is lost in the scholarship as Yemen’s many crises are too often explained by the persistence of traditional behaviors, beliefs, and practices. — location: 494 ^ref-1110
In fact, for any “backward” society to change required that the residuals of a bygone era be quite literally wiped out. — location: 497 ^ref-26324
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the agenda was to encourage “decentralization” and push for privatizing state services and national resources that had only a generation earlier been violently nationalized at the behest of those same North Atlantic powers. — location: 514 ^ref-47358
the belief was that a radically transformed Muslim polity could become a useful coercive tool against noncompliant regimes like those found in both North Yemen and the recently independent South — location: 537 ^ref-30774
Those well-armed units unleashing death and destruction, almost entirely on fellow Muslims in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen itself, need scrutiny beyond serviceable phrases that instill fear in all the politically right places. — location: 545 ^ref-32686
the consequences of various countries harvesting this breed of terrorism has been most fully felt in Yemen itself. — location: 546 ^ref-15901
war on Yemen since March 2015 is not treated as a “civil war” but a by-product of finance capitalists’ mobilization of human and financial assets to assist in plundering Yemen’s wealth. — location: 562 ^ref-49161
The frustrations of these Yemeni masses with the failures of the Hadi interim government induced the well-armed, politically savvy, morally secure partisans of AnsarAllah, who also believed that they had no recourse but to take direct action on behalf of an unrepresented people. — location: 575 ^ref-13841
The resulting scramble for Africa in the 1870s and 1880s is, therefore, a byproduct of those earlier campaigns to secure political/commercial alliances with indigenous actors willing to diversify their own revenue streams — location: 691 ^ref-5777
the BEIC “outsourced” the expensive task of militarily subordinating locals to a British imperial state whose primary policy makers also became shareholders in the company — location: 695 ^ref-13122
starving Yemenis into submission has been a weapon since World War I, a fact informing Imam Yahya’s mistrust of the British ever since — location: 771 ^ref-54155
we appreciate the importance of local agency in the evolution of Yemen’s place in the larger world through the willingness of some Yemenis to collaborate with an emerging empire. — location: 778 ^ref-27664
it is clear Imam Yahya was no longer just a Zaydi imam. Many a community leader deep in so-called Shafi‘i Sunni territories in Middle Yemen identified Yahya’s expansive state as the best solution to what was promising to become an ugly power vacuum with the Ottoman departure. — location: 786 ^ref-18592
Unlike the post–Cold War period, as we see next with the Italians, rulers like Imam Yahya and Idrisi could still balance one suitor against another. — location: 797 ^ref-49197
the Kingdom of Italy, administering colonies on the East African coast since at least the 1880s — location: 820 ^ref-50776
By fortifying a treaty with the Italians, after perhaps years of cultivating a sense of mutual trust, the imam had secured North Yemen’s independence. — location: 830 ^ref-25459
The conclusions these expeditions starting in 1920 drew acknowledged that Yemen was enormously wealthy. Agriculturally rich and loaded with minerals, including petroleum, North Yemen deserved the immediate attention of the US government. — location: 876 ^ref-38732
North Yemen’s elites saw from their frequent interactions with the Americans and British that they were two sides of the same coin minted by empire. — location: 910 ^ref-22246
the most important tool of empire cultivated by British representatives of global capital since 1902 was the alliance forged with Saudi Arabia, an alliance at play then as today. — location: 914 ^ref-12322
Appreciating the origins of this conflict in the misappropriation of peoples’ livelihoods along the frontier is crucial to understanding Yemen today. — location: 1033 ^ref-30047
While the Bolsheviks and Italians were the most useful in countering British efforts of sabotage in the interwar period, — location: 1099 ^ref-25893
within months of the formal transfer of sovereignty over Najran and ‘Asir to the Saudis, Najdi colonialists began to push out natives, first by way of stealing prime land and then undermining local businesses by favoring to trade exclusively with those from the Saudi heartland. — location: 1124 ^ref-32647
another case of some Yemenis marketing their own relative significance, a con job that remains a career choice in the Middle East, from Syria’s “moderate opposition,” Yemen’s own Islah crowd populated by MB apparatchiks, to those riding the Hadi coattail in exile since 2015. — location: 2227 ^ref-2041
Largely driven by corrupted ideals now entirely justified in neoliberal jargon, the surrogates of empire delivering so much death and destruction on Yemen today have no other means to rationalize their actions than by simplistic references to Iran or evoking international law; the protection of minorities, women, and children; and most cynically, the need for “democracy” to flourish. — location: 3941 ^ref-37310
increasingly forced to face open war or accept brutal austerity as global economic elites scramble for one last pillage. — location: 3965 ^ref-27588
The “they are at war with themselves” trope continuously repeated in various media and academic circles ultimately obfuscates who are guilty, laying blame on eighty percent of a country’s population currently being starved to death. — location: 3997 ^ref-57436
these same “Islamic” states also paid for tens of thousands of Contra-like mercenaries—in the past neo-fascist anti-communists, Al-Qaeda or ISIS these days—expected since World War II to enforce order in zones of resistance like Yemen. — location: 4017 ^ref-19669
the current war, far from being a response to growing “Iranian” influence, a theme marketed heavily in both Arabic and Western media, was in fact a direct response to a changing political economic dynamic in Yemen. — location: 4019 ^ref-57205
What is impossible to ignore and why Yemen will survive is that these regional players mobilizing such destructive forces are at war with each other. — location: 4031 ^ref-9952
The extent to which many of the development projects mentioned throughout also had links to a boom in sex tourism, the desecration of Yemeni heritage, and even extensive environmental destruction explains a great deal of the kind of violence we are observing in Yemen. While this nefarious side of the globalization of Yemen has remained under the radar of scholars, until the war at least, many young men from the GCC had come to know Yemen as the Tijuana of Arabia. This, perhaps, is ultimately why Yemen’s neighbors are so willing to subject millions of Yemenis to an endless war: they have no empathy for them for they have exploited them, especially their children, for so long. — location: 4035 ^ref-59352
It is a matter of time before Yemenis across a broad coalition put together the kind of organized resistance that will ultimately address their security problems. — location: 4051 ^ref-1236
While it was possible to continue to divert the savings of the West’s working classes or inflate the global bond market for a short period longer, the real redeemer of empire, the wealth of the Third World, is increasingly no longer so cheaply plundered. — location: 4059 ^ref-23860
a growing power of a small clan of monopolistic financiers whose machinations have transformed how human communities self-govern, trade culture and commodities with each other, and even spiritually position themselves in the universe. — location: 4134 ^ref-23946
Tipps (1973: 199–226). — location: 4265 ^ref-11062
“From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s Man Behind Brutal Police Squads,” — location: 4284 ^ref-13345
This enterprise could, through educating migrant Muslims, impose a doctrinal uniformity on a billion Muslims whose complex history and dynamic, progressive ideas of what their faith teaches them had previously resisted Western-style materialism — location: 4301 ^ref-37642