Roy Casagranda - Dreams & Genocide: Yemen (2019)

Roy Casagranda: This talk is Dreams and Genocide, Yemen. It is actually part four of a series that we started last year. What happened was the Austin School, the student club, asked me to do a series on the Middle East. And we ended up picking four states. Actually, technically it was five, but we jettisoned one of them. We ended up with four states, Egypt, Iran Iraq and then Syria and then last semester when I got to the Syria talk I couldn't do it and it's because I have vicarious trauma apparently this is a real condition for people who study who are in academia who study this stuff from a distance and you know all we're doing is reading accounts and then looking at pictures and video and Apparently, your body reacts very similarly to if you were actually in the same situation. And I just got to the point where I couldn't do Syria. I had actually done multiple talks on Syria. So it really would have just been an update talk as opposed to a new talk. And so I jettisoned that talk. And then I decided to do Yemen. So I'll probably still do the Syria talk, but next semester as I pace the trauma I expose myself to. Anyway, hopefully you guys will pick a better profession than mine. I'm thinking art historian in my next life or something like that, or physicist. Maybe I can design nicks for a living. That sounds like it would be less traumatic than political science with an eye towards international relations. So having said that, all of these talks are intended to be essentially standalone. So there's probably, if you've seen my previous talks, there's probably going to be a little bit of overlap, a little bit of redundancy, because I want to make sure that the foundation is there. And then I'm going to focus strongly on Yemen. So to start the talk, what I want to do is start with 1919. And the reason is because 1919, 100 years ago this year, there was a really important event that took place in Egypt that actually framed much of what ends up happening in the Middle East over the course of the next 100 years. And that event is a revolution. Egypt went into a state of revolution in 1880. The British took advantage of Egypt's, the chaos that Egypt was in in the 1880 revolution and invaded Egypt in 1882 and conquered it and annexed it to the British Empire. And 37 years later, Egypt goes into a second revolution. This time, it's explicitly to try to get the British out. And what the Egyptians did was they knew that they couldn't do it alone, that Egypt versus Britain, there was no way Britain could be defeated. And so they began talking to the Irish and the Indians, who also wanted independence from the British Empire. And India, Ireland, and Egypt went into rebellion at the same time. In fact, as legend has it, and all this stuff is at some level a little bit legendary, it's why India and Ireland's flags are the same. One is vertical, one is horizontal, but the colors are the same. They're green, white, orange, because in the case of India, it was supposed to be green for Islam, orange for Hinduism. In the case of Ireland, it was green for Catholicism, orange for Protestantism. So they were showing that there were multi-religious states going forward and they were part of the same movement which was to break away from the British Empire. What ended up happening was sort of a mixed bag. Gandhi decided that the Indian Revolution was too violent and he didn't want India to break away from the British Empire violently. And so he went on a hunger strike. And he basically forced the revolutionaries to choose between Gandhi dying or their independence. And they chose that they didn't want Gandhi to die. And so they quit the revolution. And as a result, it'll take another quarter century for India to get its independence from the British Empire. Egypt and Ireland, on the other hand, had success. They pulled this off. But when dealing with the British Empire, you never, ever fully pull it off. So when the United States got its independence, part of the British Surrender Treaty at the Treaty of Paris was that we would become a vassal state of the British Empire. We didn't get true independence. We pretend. We're really good at lies and lying to ourselves. But economically, we would remain essentially a part of the British Empire. When it came to foreign policy, we had limits put on us. So we were not fully, truly independent. The same, of course, happens for Ireland, Egypt, and even India, when it finally does get independence because of the British partition it, in this one last ditch effort to hurt India, they break it up. In the case of Ireland, they partition it too. They take most of Ulster away and make Northern Ireland, and that province remains in the United Kingdom when the rest of Ireland gets its independence. In the case of Egypt, they do the same thing. They go, okay, you want more autonomy, you want more independence, that's cool, but we're going to maintain a permanent military presence, and we're going to keep the Suez Canal. You don't get to completely go independent. And, of course, you're going to compromise because if you're Ireland or you're Egypt, you know the only way to get full independence might be decades more of fighting. And so you just sort of, okay, good enough. We're close enough. The reason that the 1919 Revolution matters so much, though, is because it created or at least illustrated the directions in which the Arab world was about to go down, or at least attempt to go down. To make the revolution successful, it wasn't enough to just want the British gone, or at least partially gone. Egyptians needed to create an ideology that motivated people to go into the streets and be willing to die to fight the British. Independence wasn't enough. They needed something else. And a group of Christian Egyptians, the Coptic Orthodox Church is the Christian church in Egypt, a group of Coptic Egyptians actually ended up creating the dominant ideology for the 1919 revolution. And that revolution's ideology was pan-Arab secular socialism. The idea, the pan-Arab part, is that everything from Morocco to Iraq should be unified into a single Arab state. The secular part was that it would not be religiously motivated. and it would be tolerant towards the minority religions that existed within that new republic. And then the socialism was socialism, not communism, but socialism, as in something resembling what Sweden is. Pan-Arab secular socialists dominated the revolution, and as a result, they planted the seed for its eventual future successes. Having said that, then there's a reaction against it. So the Pan-Arab secular socialism becomes the dominant ideology in Egypt. So two new ideologies pop up to push back against that new ideology. One of them is what we now call the Falul. The Falul are actually a group of Egyptians. They're not truly an ideology because they don't have a coherent set of beliefs. They just sort of change their beliefs as necessary. They're not necessarily secular. They don't really care about separation between mosque and state. But at the same time, They don't mind it either. They're not attached to having a religion mixed with the state, but they're not attached to having a secular state either. When it's convenient, they bring up religion. When it's not convenient, they reject religion. What they are is they are capitalists. What they've concluded, what the Falul believe, is that Egyptians are inherently by their nature socialists. That is to say that Egyptians have a strong community tie to each other, that they think of their neighbors and their family members first, and then they think about themselves and their own greedy ambitions last. So what the Falul believe, that's terrible. That if you're going to modernize, what you need to do is create the liberal model of capitalism where everybody is sort of dog-eat-dog rational self-interest, always motivated about yourself and your own economic interests. You never care about anybody else. So what the Falil believe is the only way to achieve that in Egypt is to create tyranny and then shove this down the throat of their population. You have to break Arab culture, and you have to make Arabs more like Americans, where it's just isolated little bubbles, where you don't have contact with each other. You don't have strong family ties. You kind of hate your family, and you'd rather just binge watch Netflix and shop in malls and never actually have human experiences. That's their model. That's what they think would be a utopia. The third group were the Islamists. And they were, of course, encapsulated in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood. The idea there was that they didn't care whether it was Arab or not Arab. What they wanted was Muslim. So everything from Morocco to Indonesia should be unified into a single state, if you got to that. But they didn't really care. That wasn't really a motive of theirs. The real motive was that in every Muslim state, the laws should reflect the religion, and there should be no separation between mosque and state. So 1919 is this breakout moment for the Middle East because it creates the three dominant ideologies. Having said that, there's another vector. So there's that plane, but then there's another vector. And it's also three. And it's what type of political system should you have? Should you be a democracy? Should you be a monarchy? Should you be a republic? And by republic, it's a euphemism for a benevolent tyranny. In other words, do you need to have a heavy-handed ruler who will transition your state? Like the Falil believe, you need a heavy-handed ruler who will transition the state into a capitalist system. Or do you want to open it up to the public? Or do you want to just have a monarchy in charge? And at the point where Egypt gets essentially its autonomy in 1920, in the aftermath of the 1919 revolution, it's a monarchy. It has a king. And so the assumption is that Egypt will kind of go down a full path with this monarch at the head, even though The dominant people of the revolution were these pan-Arab secular socialists who don't want that. What they wanted to do is create a republic, not have a monarchy. But that's the path they're on. This is sort of the British compromise. And so that's the background for Egypt's role in this. What it does, though, is it inspires other Arab states. And one of those other Arab states, really it's a country at this point because it's actually divided into two pieces, is Yemen. So North Yemen had broken away broke away from the Ottoman Empire about 150 years ago and became a kingdom. The chunk of land that's North Yemen, so if you think of the Arabian Peninsula, it's the southwest corner, that's Yemen. North Yemen is the northern piece of it. It's where the bulk of the Yemenese population lives. So it's probably about 80, 85% of the Yemenese population lives in North Yemen. It's extremely mountainous. There's two relatively big cities there, Taiz and Sana'at. Sana'at was the obvious location for a capital, but they actually did do a dual capital for a while. And then there was South Yemen. South Yemen is mostly desert. It does green up during the monsoons. There's one big city, Aden, and that's about it. South Yemen got captured by the British Empire and was actually attached to India, even though geographically it's clearly not India. They made it politically part of India, so they sort of ruled it together with the rest of that part of the empire. And the reason was is because they saw it as the point. So Yemen is where Bab al-Mandab is. So if you think of the Red Sea, The very top is the Suez Canal in Egypt. The very bottom is Djibouti and Yemen. The way the British saw it was by controlling Aden, they were making sure that ships could flow through Bab-el-Mandeb on their way to India. So that's one of the reasons why they just attached it to India, even though culturally and geographically it had nothing to do with India. They're brown people. Lump them together. No big deal. It's the British Empire. They can do whatever they want. What ends up happening is The British know the writing's on the wall. The empire is starting to come apart, it seems. There's a matter of time before they're going to lose South Yemen. While that's taking place, Pan-Arab secular socialism gets this huge victory. 1952, Egypt does another revolution. So in 72 years, Egypt has three revolutions. We're talking about a seriously revolutionary population. They just can't get enough of revolution. In the middle of the revolution, the army A part of the army is very heavily interested in pan-Arab secular socialism. That part of the army includes four colonels from the Sudan. So just a really weird thing. Egypt invades and conquers the Sudan. Then Egypt gets conquered by the British Empire. And then the British Empire goes, oh, we really want to exploit the resources of the Sudan, but we want you Egyptians to keep running it as if it was part of Egypt. So Egypt basically was stuck. doing Britain's dirty work in the Sudan. And the British actually named it Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to show that it was a jointly held operation. So as Egypt gets its independence, its nominal independence in 1920, it ends up Instilled still with ownership of the Sudan so Egyptian soldiers would be stationed in the Sudan four of them became friends They got part of this pan-arab secular socialism in 1952 They end up in charge of the army coup d'etat so the army actually does a coup on the on the monarchy and overthrows the king of Egypt when that happens a A guy named Gamal Abdel Nasser more or less ends up in charge of Egypt. He's not officially the president. There's a guy named Mohammed Najib who's the president. The irony of Mohammed Najib being the president was he was half Sudanese. So in 1952, Egypt became the first white country on earth to have a black president. I know you want it to be the United States. Sorry, Egypt beat you twice. Egypt has two black presidents. In 1970, Sadat becomes president of Egypt. You just missed it. Next. Oh, I know you can do first woman. Oh, no. We can't, because everybody's had a woman now. Oh, oh, oh. We could be the last country on Earth to have a woman president. There. That's cool. That's something to brag about, don't you think? Yeah? No? Some of you don't seem to be on board. Anyway, so what happens is Muhammad Najib is literally, the CIA walks into his office with suitcases of money. And Nasser, the colonel, he wasn't even a general, who was basically in charge of the coup that overthrew the monarchy. just simply disappears, Mohamed Najib takes the money, and then he has a constitutional convention, holds elections, and in 1956 he becomes president of Egypt, and they bring in a new constitution. That constitution is a pan-Arab secular socialist constitution. It sets it up so that Nasser is going to be the tyrant. It's not a democracy, it's not a monarchy, it's going to be a tyrant, but benevolent tyrants. Like if the United States gave up its democracy tomorrow, which it basically has anyway, and we ended up with Nasser as our president, we'd be okay. It's not the worst thing to ever happen to a people. There is such a thing as benevolent tyrants, and Nasser was definitely that. Having said that, He's also crazy ambitious because he really likes this pan-Arab peace. He really does want everything from Morocco to Iraq to get unified. In 1958, two things happen that are basically earthquakes for Egypt. One, Sudan comes and goes, we're done. We don't want to be part of Egypt anymore. We're going our own way. We don't care about your pan-Arab dreams. We're sick of your tyranny, Egypt. We're out of here. And Nasser goes, OK. And they break away. It's just that simple. That same year, though, the exact opposite happened. Syria, the Syrian state, was on the brink of collapse. The reason why Syria was in so much trouble is when it got its independence from France after World War II, it got its independence as a democracy. It's one of the few Arab states to start off as a democracy. Most of them get their independence from European states as a monarchy or a tyranny. Here's Syria with its vibrant, brand new, shiny democracy. Everything is looking great. 1946. World is new, alive. Syria is rich. And then we overthrow the democracy in 1949. The CIA goes in, does a coup, punks them, and it plunges Syria into a nightmare hell chaos. For the next nine years, Syria cycles through 11 different leaders. There is a coup, and then there's a coup against the coup, and then there's a coup. It's madness. The Syrian state basically is on the verge of collapse. Ironically enough, al-Kuwatli, the guy who got couped, the first president, first elected president in 46, the guy who got coup d'etat by the CIA in 1949, ends up back in charge of Syria. He manages to get into the position of president and takes over. He then sends Nasser a message. He goes, look, Syria's done. Our state is about to collapse. We're about to become a failed state. But worse yet, there's a high probability that the communists are going to prevail in the chaos that follows, and they're going to take over in Syria. I desperately hate the communists. I want nothing to do with them. I'm a socialist. I'm a pan-Arab secular socialist at heart. I think this is the way forward, not communism. You've got to save us. Nasser's like, yeah, of course. What can I do? What can I do? And al-Kuatli goes, annex Syria. Annex it right now. Nasser goes, wait a minute, what? He goes, yeah, we're done. Let's do it. You want to do a pan-Arab secular state? Right now. Syria and Egypt, merge. I'm the president of Syria. I'm going to sign Syria over to you. You're going to become the president of Syria. And Nasser goes, we're not ready. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the political sense. I've been running Egypt for six years now. I don't have any experience. Nobody knows what they're doing. We're still figuring this out. We just got out from underneath the British Empire. I'm letting Sudan go its own way. You want us to annex you? And al-Kuwatli goes, you have a choice. I'm putting it to you. You annex us, or we go communist. And Nasser hated the communists. They went, all right. Annexation it is. The two presidents sit next to each other. They sign over a treaty. Egypt and Syria merge. They officially lose the name Egypt and Syria, and they become United Arab Republic. Cairo is the capital of the United Arab Republic. Governor Abdel Nasser is the president of the United Arab Republic. It's done. This truly inspires. The same year, 1958, Iraq goes into revolution. It was conquered by the British in 1920. They installed a monarchy. King Faisal I and then King Faisal II. Faisal II is killed in the revolution in 1958. And the Iraqi parliament is taken over by the pan-Arab secular socialists. They immediately want to merge Iraq with Syria and Egypt and create a single state. If you look at Syria, Egypt, and Iraq's flag, it's all red, white, black. Red stripe, white stripe, black stripe. Because this is what they wanted to do, was merge into a single pan-Arab secular state. Having said that, the United States knew that that's what the pan-Arab secular socialists wanted to do in Iraq. So what they did was, what we did was, we interrupted it by funding the communists. That was our strategy in the Middle East, that wherever we could, no matter what, no matter whom we hurt, we would always go ahead and side with the other guy against the pan-Arab secular socialists. So in Egypt, we funded the Muslim Brotherhood. In Iraq, we funded the communists. The Soviet Union and I sent money to the same people in Iraq. And what we did was we made it so that the executive branch of the new Iraqi government, the new Iraqi democracy that emerges from the revolution, the 1958 revolution, we made it so that that part was actually communist. And because they were the executive branch, they didn't then ask to join. Don't worry, the guy we got into power, we killed him five years later in a CIA assassination. So it all worked out in the end. Oh, and if the United States ever offers to help you and you're a revolutionary, never take the help. You will be killed later. So just lessons to learn. The reason all of this matters for Yemen is Yemen catches the fever. In 1962, in the Kingdom of Yemen, which is North Yemen, the Yemenis decide they want to go down the same path, and they overthrow their monarchy. So they do a repeat of the 1958 overthrow in Iraq. The Kingdom of Yemen now becomes the Republic of Yemen. And then they're immediately in trouble. And the reason is because the monarchists take to the field and begin a civil war. They don't accept the overthrow of the monarchy. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States begin pumping supplies, weapons, money, special forces into North Yemen on the side of the monarchists fighting the guys who are trying to create a republic, a pan-Arab secular socialist republic in Yemen. So just to make sure we're clear, today, There is a civil war in Yemen, and the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are again on the same exact side in the contemporary Yemeni civil war as they were in 1962. The newly established president of North Yemen realizes he doesn't have the ability to fight the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia on his own. And so he goes to Egypt and he says, we desperately need your help. Just to add a twist to the whole thing, the previous year, 1961, Syria felt abused by Egypt. And Syria was. Nasser really messed that up. And Syria broke away. So the United Arab Republic lasted a whole of three years. So the next year, 1962, Yemen invites Egypt to jump in to side with the secular socialist rebels against the monarchies. Nasser sends the Egyptian military in. Now, historians will say this was Egypt's Vietnam. Since the Tonkin Gulf Resolution didn't happen until 65, it's historically more accurate to say that Vietnam was the United States' Yemen, because Egypt does Yemen in 62. It beat the United States by three years. But I guess the United States had been sending soldiers to Vietnam for decades. by 62 for probably about three or four years, so it's whatever. There is a huge difference though, and that is that the United States' side was defeated in Vietnam, whereas in the case of Yemen, the Egypt side actually prevails. But, in the sense that you don't know who the enemy is, it's a guerrilla war, it's village to village fighting, it's complete chaos, there's no front line, and it's a terrible drain on the economy, and the country that's fighting, in this case Egypt and the United States, as the outsider, feels demoralized, then yeah, Yemen is Egypt's Vietnam. It is a disaster. The Egyptian military doesn't know who to shoot. They don't know where the front line is. And it's just eight years of this, which is interesting because according to the United States government, we did Vietnam for eight years, right? 65 to 73. According to the United States Army, it's 61 to 75. But who cares? The army, the government, who's going to be more honest? The army. The army is always more honest than the government. It's just sad, sad, right? Jeez, how did we get here? We've always been here. That's the thing. It's just it always, we look at it, we're like, how did I get here? No, dude, you've always been there. You didn't get anywhere. Nothing's changed. It's always been like this. You're just not good at paying attention to your surroundings. You just notice now that you're here. That's all. In any case, Egypt goes in, and it's this nightmare mess. It's insane. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel putting everything they got into the monarchists. And then the next year, 63, South Yemen breaks away from the British Empire. South Yemen at first doesn't know what direction to take. Eventually, it goes communist. South Yemen is the only Arab state to ever go communist. The South Yemenis government renames themselves the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. They immediately establish links with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union starts pumping money into South Yemen to prop it up because it's going to be this grand communist experiment in the Arab world. And it does kind of OK, I guess. To make a long story short, the civil war in Yemen ends up ending because of basically Israel attacking Egypt. In 1967, Israel attacks Egypt. Egypt had three quarters of its military assets in Yemen. And in six days, Israel defeats Egypt, mostly because Egypt just didn't have any military assets to fight with. Egypt was caught with its pants down around its ankle. In the days leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War, Nasser was trying to negotiate out a way to prevent the war. And he had actually contacted LBJ and said, look, I think the Israelis are going to attack me. I need to start pulling assets up from Yemen if that's the case. Can you assure me that they're not going to attack? And LBJ said, I swear Israel isn't going to attack you. You're fine. Don't worry about it. And so Nasser doesn't pull up assets because he believed the president of the United States. Oh, that's dumb. And, of course, the Israelis punk Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in this humiliating, catastrophic rout. Egypt had a 222-plane air force, and the whole thing was caught on the ground and annihilated before a single plane got in the air. Just a catastrophe. At that point, Egypt's no longer interested in fighting the Yemeni civil war. It just doesn't know how to extract itself. And so the war lingers for another three years. Finally, in 1970, kind of on a whim, Saudi Arabia says, hey, Egypt, do you want to come to Saudi Arabia and negotiate out a deal, an end deal? And Nasser's like, I am there. Whatever we can do to get out of this disaster. They go. They meet. And within a couple of days, they sign a deal. And the deal ends the civil war. It allows Yemen, through referendum, to choose whether it's going to become a monarchy or remain a republic. The Yemenese people vote. They vote for republic. So the Egyptian side wins. The Saudi-Israeli-US side loses in a popular vote. And Yemen becomes a republic. Well, it had been since 62, North Yemen anyway. So fast forward just a little bit. Well, before we fast forward, in 1972, North and South Yemen immediately began talking about unification in 70. Once the civil war was over, North and South Yemen go, OK, let's talk about unifying. Two years later, they attack each other. They have a little border dispute. They fight a little war over the border. It gets resolved. They quit fighting each other. It doesn't last. This battle between North and South Yemen doesn't last. The border dispute isn't fully resolved, but it's resolved good enough that they can move on. In 1978, Ali Abdullah Saleh becomes the president of North Yemen. He is, on paper, a pan-Arab secular socialist. That's the stock, the ideological stock he's from. There's another guy like him who becomes the president of Iraq. Same time, and his name is Saddam Hussein, he also on paper is a pan-Arab secular socialist. But the reason I'm saying on paper is because in reality, the only thing they care about is their own power and ruling their own state. In other words, yeah, they would love to do this grand scheme that makes for liberty and improves the quality of life for the entire Arab world, but they've sort of given up. And one of the reasons is because of what happens in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. So Egypt attacks Israel for the first time. This is the first time an Arab state attacked Israel. Up until then, Israel was always the aggressor. In 1973, and the reason why Egypt does finally attack Israel is because they wanted the Sinai back. Israel captured the Sinai in the Six-Day War, and it's a catastrophe for Egypt. in part because most of its natural gas and all of its oil was in the Sinai. So it immediately cut off Egypt, an oil poor, natural gas poor state, from its energy resources. Another reason why they want the Sinai back so desperately is as long as the Israeli military is on one side of the Suez Canal and the Egyptian military is on the other side of the Suez Canal, it's shut down. The Israelis actually sank ships in the Suez Canal to prevent any traffic from going through. As long as no traffic is going through, Egypt isn't getting that revenue because all the ships that go through have to pay Egypt for passage. And so without that revenue, it's actually stifling Egypt's economy. So Egypt has to attack Israel to get that territory back because it's a matter of life and death economically. And they do. During the war, Egypt basically destroys the Israeli Sinai military in two days. It's a catastrophe for the Israelis. It's a repeat of the 1967 war, except it's reverse. It's the Israelis getting punked this time. Kissinger calls up Israel and says, hey, I'm here for you. We're going to be there side by side during your surrender negotiations as you give up the Sinai to Egypt. Israel went, absolutely not, under no circumstances will we ever negotiate from a position of weakness. If you want us to negotiate, you have to help us militarily first. So we literally fly every tank that we have available, we spray off, we used to put white stars on a tank, we spray them off, the Israelis put on a triangle, and we fly these tanks to Israel and we immediately rearm Israel with a tank army. The Israelis jump in the tanks, Kissinger calls them up and goes, all right, now you're in a position of strength, let's negotiate. Israel goes, no, no, no, we have to punk Egypt first. We can't have been losing the war and be in a position of strength. We have to be winning the war. And so they counterattack. They cut the Egyptian Sinai army in half. They cross the Suez Canal. And they're charging into Egypt proper. The Soviet Union calls the United States. I just want you to know, the Israeli army is getting way too close to Damascus and way too close to Cairo. If they go any further, if the Israelis cross the 100 kilometer mark inside Egypt proper, on the west side of the Suez Canal, we're going in. And they had a line for Damascus as well. We're going in. Kissinger calls up Israel. Hey, got to tell you, it's really sad, but the Soviets have told us they're going to go in. You should know we're not coming in after them. This is just going to be you against the Soviet Union. Probably not going to work out real well for you, but we're not going to start World War III over this. You should have surrendered. You tricked me, and now I've given you this army, and now you're using it in a way I didn't mean for you to use, and now you're about to start World War III. We're not going to do this. You're on your own. So the Israelis, when they got to the 100-kilometer mark, they brought a road cutter with them. You've seen them. They've got the big... And they cut a strip of highway out of the road at the 100 kilometer mark and took it back to a museum in Israel to show that they had been in 100 kilometers. And then they stopped. Just as the Soviet paratroopers were loading into the airplanes, the Israelis stopped. Kissinger goes, all right, now let's negotiate. So the Israelis go, yep. We're ready. It's good. So Kissinger then flies to Syria. He goes to President Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian tyrant. He goes to Hafez al-Assad and he says, look, I want to make a comprehensive peace deal. I want to make it so there's never another Arab-Israeli war. I want to make it so that the Middle East becomes the stable beacon of hope for the whole planet. What I want to do is I want to make a comprehensive deal that includes Israel, the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, Lebanon, everybody. We're going to get everybody a table, we're going to sit them down, and we're going to make some kind of deal that sets up the Palestinians so that they're not a stateless people stuck in refugee camps for all eternity. We're going to do something that makes the Israelis feel secure. We're going to get you the Golan Heights back. We're going to get Egypt the Sinai back. We're going to figure out what Jordan's water rights are to the Jordan River. All of this. The whole thing. And Hafez al-Assad is like, wow, you're going to do this for real? This is incredible. I'm on board. I will support the United States any way I can. This is remarkable. Kissinger's like, thank you so much. Jumps on an airplane. Flies to Egypt. Kissinger sits down with Sadat and says, I've been talking to everybody. I've talked to the Palestinians, I've talked to the Israelis, I've talked to the Syrians, I've talked to the Jordanians. I've got to tell you, it's grim. It's grim. The Syrians don't want to cooperate. The Jordanians don't want to cooperate. The Palestinians don't want to cooperate. Look, the only way forward is to abandon everybody and make a separate peace deal with the Israelis. Just Egypt and Israel. Because nobody else is going to work with you. They're all only thinking about themselves. They're going to backstab you. It's bad. Isn't this amazing? This is US diplomacy at its finest. Sadat goes, OK, I guess. What am I going to do? I can't fight the United States. I had to fight the United States military. We were defeated. We beat the Israeli military. It took us two days. But who can fight the United States? I'm going to surrender. I'm going to make a separate peace deal. Hafez al-Assad hears what Kissinger has done, that Egypt's going to make a separate peace deal. He freaks out. He feels betrayed, backstabbed. He can't believe it. Kissinger came with all these promises, and the next thing you know, he's doing the opposite. It is cemented. Syria hates the United States. The Syrian government hates the United States. The Syrian government is going to be pro-Soviet and later pro-Russian for all eternity because in the mind of the president and then later his son, there is no way to work with the United States because we are liars and manipulators. The reason why Kissinger did it was Kissinger believed that the way you created security for the United States was you created chaos in the rest of the world. Your goal was to upend the global system, shake it, break it, make it so there was so much chaos that nobody could have a coherent foreign policy. And then the United States could operate in that chaos, get countries pitted against each other, split alliances. He split the Egyptian-Syrian alliance. Egypt was never a real full-fledged ally of the Soviet Union, but it was the Soviet Union that armed Egypt. It was the Soviet Union that was willing to back up Egypt, to step up when Egypt was in trouble. Kissinger wanted to break that, too. And what he wanted to do was peel Egypt out of this pan-Arab secular socialist thing and bring it into the US camp. When they finally get the peace deal going, and then later on the Carter administration picks it up and runs with it, one of the things they promise Egypt is that Egypt will work with Israel, it will trade with Israel, it will normalize relations with Israel. Egypt will never fight Israel again. In return, whatever the United States is giving Israel in official foreign aid, it will give Egypt half of that in foreign aid. So to this day, Egypt and Israel combined get one third of the entire US foreign aid package. Two countries get one third. Israel gets two shares for every Egyptian share, but the whole thing is based on the role that Israel plays in creating chaos in the Middle East, and the role that the United States then doesn't have to play because it's Israel that's doing the chaos. The reason all of this matters is by 1978, when Saddam Hussein is taking over Iraq and when Ali Abdullah Saleh is taking over Yemen, they know they're up against the United States because the United States is doing everything it can to prevent pan-Arab secular socialism from taking hold, including funding the Muslim Brotherhood, including funding communists. including funding everything and anything it can, including doing bloody civil wars like the civil war in Yemen. And so they become pragmatists. And that pragmatism means that they're just tyrants, right? They're visionless tyrants who aren't actually trying to achieve some greater goal. Like their tyranny doesn't lead to liberty for their people, their tyranny just keeps them in power. But then, Yemen begins to seriously talk about unification. It has a brief civil war that lasts a month in 1986. It's gone. Wow, I love that. Why can't we do that? Our civil war took four years and killed 622,000 people. Why can't everybody just have a one month long civil war? It's fantastic. Syria is in year eight of its civil war. The charm wears off, I think. You know what I mean? In the beginning, it's so exciting. And then by the time you get to year eight, you just really want it to be done. I still can't believe anybody is still fighting in the Syrian Civil War. Because I know, right? They're thinking, if I surrender, I'll be executed. Dude, you're going to die anyway. Just get it over with and save everybody's life in the process. Like, Bashar al-Assad has won. It's over. Walk away. Walk over to the hanging gallows and go. You're on the wrong side. It didn't work out for you. That's the way civil wars are. It sucks. I'm so sorry. But stop getting civilians killed just so that you can live a few more days. This doesn't make sense to me. In any case, in 1990, The Eastern Bloc has fallen apart, right? 1989, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Berlin Wall comes down, Hungary, Poland, the whole thing is crumbled. The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen decides it's time for serious talks with Yemen about unification. In 1990, they sit down in May 22, and they sign unification, and North and South Yemen merge. The Republic of Yemen, the Socialist Republic of Yemen, and the Communist People's Democratic Republic of Yemen come together, and they become the Republic of Yemen. They move the capital to Sana'a, the capital of North Yemen. And Ali Abdullah Saleh becomes the president of Yemen. the combined Yemen. And then something really strange starts to happen. South Yemenis politicians start to get assassinated. And then they realize it's a clear pattern. Somebody is actually going out of their way to look for a target and execute South Yemenis politicians. They don't know who. It's probably the CIA working with Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. He probably gave them a list, and then the CIA went and did his dirty work. How do you prove that? Where's the documentation? So nobody knows exactly, but by 1994, South Yemen had had enough. South Yemen declares its independence. In other words, the unification between North and South Yemen lasted four freaking years. They declare their independence. North Yemen goes, no. They militarily occupy South Yemen and don't let it break away. So from 1994 until 2014, for 20 years, Yemen was a single state, but only because the north had militarily occupied the south and prevented its breakaway. And then the era of spring happens. in 2000, December 2010 is when the Arab Spring breaks out in Tunisia. And it spreads, initially across North Africa. The first three states to do the Arab Spring are Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. The king of Morocco quickly runs to his people and go, what do you want? I'll give you more democracy. You want more democracy, more liberty? Done. New constitution? Let's do some amendments to the old constitution. Wouldn't that be great? And he hands more power over to people. The people leave the streets. The Arab Spring in Morocco is really quick. Algeria, the tyrant Bouteflika, comes down brutally and just starts massacring the people in the streets. He goes, we are not doing this. And they don't. This year, they did it again. They went into Arab Spring mode this year. And the Algerian people toppled Bouteflika. He's out of power. So what he did was he managed to extend the length of time he stayed in power for eight years. But they eventually got him. Tunisia, their tyrant goes down. He had been the tyrant of Tunisia for 18 years. It took him 30 days to bring him down. Egypt then, the Egyptian population had been watching what happened in Tunisia patiently, quietly. when the tunisian government goes down the egyptian people go oh my god i think we can do this and on january 25th 2011 egypt goes into high gear and joins the arab spring it takes egypt 18 days to take out their 30-year-long tyranny where they do it they bring down hosni mubarak's government when that happens then the whole Arab world thinks, oh my god, we can do this. We can get rid of these monarchies or these tyrants. We can get rid of the CIA-controlled tyrants who slaughter us in the streets. We can do this. The Arab Spring spreads to essentially every Arab state. The United Arab Emirates just goes, here's money, here's money, please don't, no, you don't need to protest. Here, didn't you want to buy a silver BMW? Solid silver, not the color silver. Here, here's some money. Money, money, and then people leave the streets. Bahrain and Kuwait, the people are actually quite brutalized. Nobody's going to do much in Saudi Arabia, but there is a little bit. And then, of course, Syria ends up disintegrating into a civil war. Libya ends up disintegrating into a civil war. Libya is such a catastrophic failed state, there is now the distinct possibility that Libya will break up. that Libya won't exist as a state anymore. It'll go the direction of Somalia. Somalia's broken up into technically three states, but it's four because al-Shabaab rules a piece of Somalia also. So it's basically broken up into four states. Syria is eventually going to get put back together. The Syrian regime has survived, but it's just a matter of time before they clean up. They're working on the Idlib province It's a catastrophe, but it's done. Yemen also jumps in to the Arab Spring. So Ali Abdullah Saleh is still president of Yemen in 2011. He became president of North Yemen in 1978. So how many years is that? Let's see. It was 12 years as president of North Yemen, and then it's 21 years at the point the Arab Spring arrives as president of the combined Yemen. So that's 33 years this guy has been in control of Yemen. And it's such a knock-down, drag-out fight. At one point, Ali Abdullah Saleh gets hit in the face with a rocket. They fire. an RPG at this guy. The rocket hits him in the face, tears off half of his face. They don't have a hospital in Yemen that can help him. They put him on an airplane. They fly him to Saudi Arabia. Everybody's thinking he's done. If he even survives, he's in Saudi Arabia. He's in the wrong country. He can't come back. Oh my God, I think Ben Ali, did Ben Ali just die? I think he did. The dictator of Tunisia just died last week in Saudi Arabia where he's been in exile. I think I got that right. I could have misheard the news, but I think last week he died. So anyway, Ali Abdullah Saleh is in Saudi Arabia. They put his face back on, but obviously it's not quite right. And he flies back to Yemen. Who is this person? You can't help but admire it, right? He's now been dictator of Yemen for 34 years. His face was torn off. He flies back to Yemen. He's like, I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. Hold on. It keeps slipping. They didn't quite get it attached. Where's the super glue when you need it? He goes down, though, that year. He gets back to Yemen. He's still in the trenches fighting. He's got this thing. He doesn't. It falls apart. His government does collapse. And a new democratic government replaces it. They hold elections. Everybody's thinking, oh, Yemen might make it like Tunisia made it. By 2012, Egypt is going to have democratic elections. It looks like Egypt may have made it. They elect Morsi, and then it becomes apparent Egypt didn't make it because the Egyptian people didn't vote for a very good candidate. And then there's a year after Morsi, 365 days after Morsi is inaugurated, he's taken out in another revolution, and he's replaced by Sisi because, again, Egyptians suck at voting. They're like Americans, really terrible at voting. We should unify, just have the same bad leaders together, make life better. Anyway, and then Sisi, of course, is Donald Trump's favorite dictator. Sisi showed up at the G7 to give a speech, and Donald Trump got up and said, where's my favorite dictator? And then he said, oh, I know, Sisi isn't the best guy, but, you know, things are so hard in Egypt, he has to be kind of tough. And it's like, he's committing crimes against humanity, like... Maybe you don't have favorite dictators. I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there. But maybe if you were aspiring, you could look at role models to imitate. CC isn't the worst. He's not. He's just not the worst. I mean, he's done some bad things, but who hasn't? Like maybe Modi or President Xi, concentration camps in China and India. Anyway. Ah, I remember 25 years ago having so much hope. The world is gone, exactly the wrong direction of pretty much every vector. So this new, brand new Yemeni's democracy is going. It's plugging along, but it's weak. It's fragile. All outside observers are going, oh my god, I don't know if this thing's going to make it. 2014, the Houthi revolution begins. Majority of Yemenis were Shia. The Houthis represent the Shia. And by the majority of Yemenis are Shia, I'm not sure of the exact number, but it's probably like three-quarters Shia, one-quarter Sunni. So it's not even close. The Shia outnumber the Sunni by a very significant margin. Somewhere around three to one. The Houthis, as the representative of the Shia, attack North Yemen. That's where the Shia are. They're mostly in North Yemen. And they capture Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, almost instantaneously. Like it's one of the first things that falls. And before you know it, they've captured almost all of North Yemen, what used to be North Yemen. The government then grabs whatever military assets it has left, and it retreats to South Yemen and creates a temporary capital in Aden. Aden is the capital of the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. So the irony of ironies is that in the opening moves of the Houthi uprising, the Houthis end up in control of North Yemen, and the government that is the descendant government of Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Arab Spring, ends up in exile in Aden, the capital of South Yemen. Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel back the guys in the south in Aden. The UAE is backing a faction in the south as well, but it's a different faction. So that's the coalition. So if you hear Americans talk about or the military talk about the coalition, it's Saudi Arabia, It's the government in the south that used to be in the north. It's Saudi Arabia, the United States, the UAE, those are those guys. They also have, ironically enough, as allies, co-belligerents. Not allies, sorry, I misspoke. They have as co-belligerents, because the coalition isn't made up of allies, officially, just for the record. Saudi Arabia is not a US ally. We have no alliance treaty with them. They are our friend, they are our partner, but there's no official alliance between us. Israel, the United States don't have an official alliance. Israel is not officially an ally of the United States. They are our friend, they are our partner, but there's no alliance. Don't call them allies, it's incorrect. I misspoke earlier when I said this. Co-belligerents, just like Finland was with Germany in World War II. Finland was very clear that they were not a German ally. They just had a common enemy, the Soviet Union. Just for the record. Having said that, ISIL, the guys we hate so much in Syria and in Iraq, are also fighting alongside the government that's in exile in the south against the Houthis. And so is al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. So the guys that we've been hunting for how many years now, those guys are actually on our side in the Yemen civil war, just for the record. The reason that's so incredibly ironic is we're fighting those very same forces in Syria and Iraq. So in Iraq, where we've been fighting ISIL, we've been allied with Iran against ISIL. In Yemen, where we're fighting the Houthis, we've been allied with ISIL against the Iranian-backed Houthis. That's just Kissinger's policy of chaos. Make a completely incoherent world where everything's chaos, and one warrior on the same side and the next warrior fighting each other, and just make it so it's impossible for anybody to have a coherent foreign policy but the United States. That's the goal. Sow chaos. Kill Arabs. Create genocide. Arabs are 6% of the world's population. The United States is 4.5%, just from perspective. And Arabs are 50% of the world's refugees. We are currently in the world's worst ever refugee crisis. This is worse than what happened after World War II. Turkey is the largest refugee host country on Earth. It has four million refugees. Germany got to a million, and Angela Merkel's government almost toppled. Turkey has four million. Turkey's a third world country. Germany is one of the richest countries on earth. Germany had a hard time handling a million refugees. You can imagine what a third world country is doing with four million refugees. This is madness. It's the world we live in. And of course most of them are from Iraq and Syria because we destroyed Iraq and then when the Arab Spring happened in Syria and it devolved into a civil war, a lot of the Iraqis who had fled Iraq to Syria joined in and many of them became ISIL members and the next thing you know we basically caused the chaos in Iraq to spread to Syria and we collapsed them and we created a refugee crisis that now Turkey has to manage. Isn't that wild? One third of Yemen's population now, after five years of civil war, one third, 10 million people, are food insecure. What that means is, as things currently stand, it's just a matter of time before those 10 million people begin to starve to death. Mass starvation is coming. It's a done deal. It's imminent. There's no way to stop it except to stop the civil war. UN attempts to bring in food are constantly disrupted because there is a civil war going on. And one side will capture a port, another side will blockade a port. The Saudi-led coalition, the coalition, has indiscriminately bombed the living hell out of Yemen. Qatar, one of our allies, is on the side of the Houthis. So it's North Korea, Iran, Qatar, and Syria on the side of the Houthis. against the coalition partners. It's one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia last year blockaded Qatar, right? Was it last year or 2017? I've lost track. Ever since Trump got elected, everything blurs together. It feels like I'm in constant chaos and I can't have a coherent policy. Anyway, wait a minute. Is Trump Kissinger? Maybe he read his book. Kissinger admits this. This isn't like a secret. Kissinger says, this is the Kissinger doctrine. So chaos everywhere. Make the world crazy. And then you can be the sane person in the midst of the madness. So Yemen is in this crisis where it's being bombed in the civil war, where the Houthis control 80% of the population. The government in exile controls 20% of the population. There's no chance for the government in exile to get back into power at this point. So we've been fighting the civil war. We've been on the wrong side of civil war, helping commit war crimes against the Yemenis population. The Yemenis population is on the verge of starvation, all for five years. It's cost millions of dollars. Thousands of lives hundreds of thousands of lives for nothing right at this point, but here's the really ironic twist last month I Think it was I think it was August. I'm gonna go with August What the coalition broke up just a little bit the UAE has been backing a faction of Yemenis of the Yemenis coalition the for the government in exile What they are is they're South Yemenese independence fighters. Their goal is to break up Yemen and have an independent South Yemen and then jettison North Yemen. Their goal has been that since 1994. It's just they realized about 2015, 2016, as the civil war was unfolding, that this might be their opportunity. The UAE-backed independence fighters for South Yemen just captured Aden, the capital in the south. So now the coalition government in exile has no functioning capital to operate out of. Because the coalition is now split with the UAE and the pro-independence guys owning Owning the capital in the south so the so the coalition is is beginning to crumb. There's just no two ways about it so again, we've picked the wrong side in the conflict and It's created total madness I Was being signaled so I got distracted in any case I That's where we are. That's where we are today. So there's this civil war that's unlike the previous one, because it's unclear how it gets resolved. The previous civil war, the 1962 to 70 civil war, got resolved by a referendum. But how do you do a referendum like this? The result is a done deal. Do you keep Yemen together, or do you go ahead and let it break up? If you keep Yemen together, the Houthis win the referendum. They're 80% of the population. If you break up Yemen, the Elites win the referendum because they're 99% of North Yemen. You know what I mean? This is a done deal. The question is, are we, the Saudis, the Israelis, the other members of the coalition, willing to go, okay, we accept defeat, like the coalition was willing to do in 1970? when people realized this made no sense. Anyway, I'm gonna stop it there and open up for questions. You have to ask questions or else I won't let you leave. Ever. It's gonna suck. Okay, so the question is, is there a current capital? Yeah, Sana'a is the capital that the Houthis have. That was the official capital of the unified Yemen as of 1990. The coalition backed government that had to flee the capital when the capital was captured by the Houthis in 2014 fled to Aden, which was the capital of South Yemen when South Yemen was independent. What happened was the UAE-backed separatists, South Yemeni separatists, captured that capital. I believe it was last month. It might have been July. And as a result now, the coalition-backed government is ungrounded. Hold on just a second. I know this is rude because I'm in the middle of this livestream. And you'll hear me talk, but just a sec. All right, one more question and then I'll let you go. I remember there was a mute button. Not mute, moot. This is irrelevant. All right. One more, you didn't think that was funny? I tried. Yes. Oh. So the question is if I've heard anything about rumors of Al-Qaeda or ISIL using Yemen to ship weapons to South America. So I haven't heard anything about that. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me by any means, but it's still a pretty long journey to go around Africa. So are they going through Africa then? Like through Somalia? I mean, there are definitely paths. From Somalia, it'd be a little bit tricky to get through Ethiopia. But once you got to Central African Republic or South Sudan, South Sudan is in a civil war. It's in crisis. If you get through there, Chad has some instability. And then you get to Nigeria, where Boko Haram is running amok. I mean, it's totally plausible. I'm not sure if you've got the weapons to South America. I don't know what you would do with them. It seems to me like... It'd be better just to link up the Sahel region, which is where the Sahara meets sub-Saharan Africa, into one big jihad and a fight like that. I mean, there was an attempt to do that at one point. That's what happened to Mali. Mali got captured by Salafist Islamists. And then in a really strange move, France decided, no, this isn't going to happen. And they invaded Mali and put down the Salafist Islamists. And I'm still baffled that France cared enough about its former colony that it actually did something. So yeah, so I can't confirm or deny, but that's because I have no knowledge. It's not because I'm hiding something. As opposed to a politician would say, I can't confirm or deny because they're hiding something. Yeah? So that's a great question. So the question is, is there any hope Yemen will be stable in 25 years? So there's a lot of reason to have no hope. And the reason I'm saying that is, The world is trending in a direction where there are more and more failed states, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Libya now, Afghanistan. There are these states that can't be put back together. Once the state apparatus collapses, it doesn't have the wealth, the infrastructure, or the inclination to rebuild the state apparatus, and as a result, can't control its own territory. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, there are states that are relatively stable that have lost control over territory. For example, Vietnam and the Philippines have both descended into this sort of gang controlled system. Mexico has descended into this gang controlled system. And so we've got what used to be relatively stable states that are losing territorial integrity to gangs. And then we have states that are just outright collapsing. And that seems to be the trend. More and more states seem to be heading that direction, not fewer and fewer states. I mean, I can imagine a future where the United States does this because we're just so angry at each other and hate each other's guts so much and so unwilling to face the truth on a daily basis. Those are the ingredients that lead to civil war. You don't want to be here. This is not good. The last time we were this divided, it was 1860. So that makes me not happy. That makes me think that this is unresolvable. Having said that, I think it's entirely possible that the United States, Saudi Arabia, the coalition partners will simply lose the will to fight. It's too expensive. It's cost too many lives. It's bad public. Relations, it makes the United States look not good. And if that happens, it's entirely possible that the Houthis will then simply take over Yemen. Maybe Yemen will split. If Yemen splits or the Houthis simply manage to take over, I could totally see that leading to stability. Having said that, there is Syria. Syria has, except for the Idlib province, put itself back together. Syria has recovered from the civil war. Bashar al-Assad is a tyrant, plain, pure, and simple. He's not probably somebody you're hoping will rule your country, but he's ending the civil war and he's restoring order, so that gives me hope. It's tyranny, it's nasty, he's done really ugly things. But then compared to having the Hobbesian nightmare of no civil society, maybe it's better to be ruled by a tyrant. I'm at that point where I'm starting to think my old ideals of people can rule themselves rationally and intelligently, that's going away. It's also possible that I have vicarious trauma from reading all this stuff all the time, because one of the symptoms of vicarious trauma You're irritable. You're angry. You're a little paranoid. And you see the world in a negative light all the time. And constantly studying this stuff, I think, has a toll. What's really interesting is academia is now finally starting to admit that this is the truth. And there's actually now a little bit of a conversation amongst academicians. Because as an academician, I'm inclined to put down any trauma that I'm experiencing from studying this stuff and say, oh, I'm not experiencing it. I must be some kind of ivory tower weenie for feeling so bad. But it turns out that psychologically, watching trauma, reading about trauma, or seeing trauma in photos actually triggers the same places in your brain that experiencing the trauma does too. By the way, playing the video games does this too. If you play these first-person shooters on a regular basis, you will end up with PTSD. Your mind can't differentiate this from reality, just for the record. So just note that. If you find it hard to get into The Guardian and read it every day, and you're a little worn out, there's a reason. Constantly being bombarded with negative news will take a toll on you. So I'm saying all that to say that I might be incapable of being fully objective. And maybe there is more hope than I think there is. One of the things we do know is that climate change, you know I had to bring this in, that climate change is destabilizing the planet. It was a major contributing factor in the Syrian civil war. It is undoubtedly going to be a major factor in Yemen because Yemen is one of the super vulnerable places. One of the reasons for that is Yemen's pretty hot. Now, it's mountainous, too. So once you get up in elevation, it cools down dramatically. But most of the arable land is really hot. Photosynthesis stops at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you're already at 125, It doesn't take a wild imagination to realize that at some point, Yemen is going to be in trouble. Especially when you consider that Yemen used to be one of the world's major coffee producers. There's a province in Yemen called Mocha. Yemen is where the Arabica bean was from. And in a few years, coffee won't be able to grow in Yemen. The coffee bean was originally from Ethiopia. What happened was Yemeni traders went to Ethiopia, found it, brought it to Yemen. It grew great in Yemeni's climate. And then they marketed it from Yemen. And so the irony of ironies is the place where we think of as coffee might not be able to grow in mocha. That's just wrong. But it seems to be a very likely future. I don't want to say certain, because I want you guys to have hopes that you'll go fight, save yourselves, my children. But it's great. So the answer is, I can see a scenario where Yemen stabilizes. I think part of that is you putting pressure on your government to get us out of the coalition, because the coalition is on the wrong side. Not that the Houthis are great, it's just What is our side? It's not like our side is standing for first amendment rights or something, or our side is standing for freedom of religion, or our side is trying to end some kind of genocide. We're just fighting because we don't want the Iranian side to win. Well, that's not a thing. And so that's part of it. A major part of it would be you putting pressure on your government. Now, you'd have to have a responsive government for that to work, a government that actually cared what the public thought. But one way you can make a government that even doesn't like you, that has contempt for you, cares to protest, like Egypt is doing again. Egypt is now on day three of another round of protests So think about it, 1880, 1919, 1952, 2011, 2013, and now it looks like 2019. That's six revolutions in 139 years. That's intense.