For many centuries, however, Yemen remained outside the cultural and economic development established by Islam. In the 15th century, the territory of today’s Yemen began to gain strategic value. In their desire for commercial expansion, the European rulers began the domination of territories throughout the planet. The first European conquerors to arrive in the region came from Portugal. They dominated the country in order to control the sea route, which allowed them to trade spices from Asia to Europe through the Red Sea.

In the 16th century, the Ottoman empire, whose capital was Constantinople (now Istanbul), began its conquest with the occupation of places on the Red Sea coast, while the interior of the country and the southern coast remained independent, governed by an imam. Shortly after, the English made their appearance in the area, installing a post of the East India Company in the port of Mokha on the Red Sea.

In the 19th century, the British expanded their presence by occupying the entire southwestern tip of current Yemen, settling in Aden in 1839 — the best seaport in the region. At the same time, in 1872, the Ottoman Turks managed to consolidate their dominance in the interior of the country, for which they installed de facto a hereditary monarchy in the name of a local imam. This division effectively split Yemen into two countries.

Around 1870, with the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the consolidation of Turkish rule over northern Yemen, Aden acquired new importance for British global strategy: It was the key to the Red Sea and, therefore, to the new canal.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Türkiye and Britain marked a border between the territories they controlled, which became known as North Yemen and South Yemen, respectively. In 1934, British imperialism secured control of the entire south of the country, up to the border with Oman.

During World War I, the Imam of Yemen allied with the Ottoman Empire and remained loyal to it until the end of the war, when the defeat of the Turks allowed Yemen to regain its independence in November 1918. However, Britain, after recognizing the independence of Yemen in 1928, converted Aden into a protectorate and in 1937 into a colony.

Once again, the Yemenis had to resort to an armed struggle for independence. In 1940 the nationalist movement Free Yemen emerged to fight against the control of the country by the imams, who had allied themselves with Britain.

The fighting took separate paths in the north and south. In 1962, the Yemen Arab Republic was created in the north. In the south, the National Liberation Front, created in 1963, took over Aden in 1967 and proclaimed its independence, declaring a socialist revolution.

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He visitied USSR many times and knew Russian well. He rejected communism after he saw the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. The intervention took less than 300 hundred lives on both sides, but McCarthy choose to support republicans, a fascist regime responsible for thousands of victims all over the World.

Edit: Wikipedia says: "he distanced himself after making visits to the Soviet Bloc, which led to him becoming a conservative Republican." but it seems that this particular intervention changed his mind, not the earlier multiple visits in Soviet Union. Wikipedia is biased as fuck.

This resulted in over 3 million being massacred and 700.000 sent to labour camps.

In the United States declassified recording a conversation between Yeltsin and Clinton (September 21, 1993).

President Yeltsin: The Supreme Soviet has totally gone out of control. It no longer supports the reform process. They have become communist.

President Clinton: Are the military and security services with you?

President Yeltsin: Yes.

President Clinton: That's good. The Senate will act this week on the $2.5 billion assistance package for Russia and the other states.

Declassified Documents Concerning Russian President Boris Yeltsin

By sunrise on 4 October 1993, the Russian army encircled the parliament building, and a few hours later army tanks began to shell the Russian parliament.

In fact, according to the review of Allende’s autopsy report of September 1973, which remained unknown until the year 2000 and which journalist Monica Gonzalez inserted as an annex in her book La Conjura. The Thousand and One Days of the Coup, it was found that Allende’s skull showed two bullet wounds from two different weapons.

The first of them is associated with a shot from a short gun that leaves a perfect hole in the back of the cranial vault and a second wound, with a high-powered weapon that causes skull bursting, applied in the submental area. The apparent purpose of the latter is to simulate suicide. This report caused worldwide impact and brought the issue of the causes of Allende’s death back into the public debate.

This first inquiry by Dr. Ravanal has never been scientifically disputed and, in fact, this forensic physician was awarded at the World Congress of Forensic Medicine (Seoul, October 2014) as the best speaker for his report on the causes of Allende’s death. Unfortunately, this distinction, the highest that can be awarded by forensic science worldwide, was never highlighted by the Chilean and international press, as it has happened with all the antecedents that point to prove that Allende did not commit suicide.

In addition to the suppression of their right to strike and access trade union benefits, the workers on the coast of the Atacama Desert were accused of being both ‘communists’ (without it being the case), and ‘Indians’. In this context of racialization, ‘communist’ and ‘Indian’ were practically synonymous in the mining semantics. Accusations were thus used to stop workers’ mobilizations to improve working conditions. The derogatory labelling of ‘communist Indians’ in the context of mining colonization can be understood as a ‘phobic and obsessive figure’^1^ (Mbembe, 2013, p. 37).

[…]

The imprisoned trade unionists and thermoelectric workers were sent to the coastal town of Pisagua, located 400 kilometres north of Tocopilla. Pisagua was an ‘unhappy, abandoned, narrow and dirty port. Ruinous, dead . . . ’ (Bucat, 2016, p. 221). According to González Videla himself, Pisagua, being surrounded by the ocean and the desert, ‘made it easier for the Armed Forces to control the surveillance of the relegated communists’ (González Videla, 1975, p. 1273).

The processes of brutalization reached their maximum expression through a policy of death, a barbarism applied to workers’ bodies. In Mbembe’s words, an articulation emerged between the ‘state of exception and the relationship of enmity’ (Mbembe, 2011, p. 21), resulting in the regulation of a certain right to imprison, to torture and to kill. A military prison complex was created to not affect the company’s productivity rates.

Before the Cold War (perhaps even as early as the late 1930s), capitalists were interested in possessing nuclear weapons for anticommunist purposes, and by late 1945 they devised their first formal plans for committing nuclear strikes against the U.S.S.R.[156] After four decades, the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project finally admitted this in 1985:

During one such conversation Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. (Whatever his exact words, his real meaning was clear.) […] Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent [an Axis] victory, and now I was told that the weapon [that] we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim. […] When it became evident, toward the end of 1944, that the [Axis] had abandoned their bomb project, […] I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain.

—Joseph Rotblat, [157]

A former military analyst and the U.S.’s highest‐ranking civilian with a military equivalency rank, somebody who had more access to war plans than even the head of state, confirmed this in the 2010s:

• The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities. The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of “first use”—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.
• The required U.S. strategic capabilities have always been for a first-strike force: not, under any president, for a U.S. surprise attack, unprovoked or “a bolt out of the blue,” but not, either, with an aim of striking “second” under any circumstances, if that can be avoided by preemption. Though officially denied, preemptive “launch on warning” (LOW)—either on tactical warning of an incoming attack or strategic warning that nuclear escalation is probably impending—has always been at the heart of our strategic alert.

—Daniel Ellsberg (emphasis original), [158]

Simply put, first the anticommunists launch, and then their missile defense mops up any retaliation from the few surviving launch sites. Missile defense could not stop a first strike from the U.S.S.R., therefore a highly capable missile defense system in the hands of the anticommunists was a first strike weapon. A common misconception is that the Soviets’ own work on atomic weapons would have been impossible had they not stolen from the Anglosphere. This is an exaggeration.

When a couple of Berlin’s scientists discovered nuclear fission in December 1938, the Soviets were as quick to react as the liberal states were, but the Soviets were too busy catching up with modernity to prioritize their own nuclear research. When four million anticommunists reinvaded Soviet Eurasia, the Soviets had to temporarily suspend all of their atomic research until a Soviet physicist persuaded Moscow otherwise in 1942, having noticed the extreme secrecy of the Anglosphere’s own atomic research.[159] Then the Soviets witnessed what their Western allies did to Hiroshima:

[T]he news had an acutely depressing effect on everybody. It was clearly realized that this was a New Fact in the world’s power politics, that the bomb constituted a threat to [the Soviet Union], and some Russian pessimists I talked to that day dismally remarked that the [Soviet Union]’s desperately hard victory over the [Third Reich] was now “as good as wasted”.

—Alexander Werth, [160]

Of course, these are by no means the only arguments against the myth that the atomic bombings were military necessities, but one could argue that they are the strongest.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1443411

Part 2 is here

An in-depth look at Historiography across the African continent.