Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 2: That's the name of the show. I just forget the
Speaker 2: name of the podcast. No, did you forget the name
Speaker 2: of a podcast?
Speaker 1: Because you did the thing where you don't write your
Speaker 1: intro into your script and then you think you can
Speaker 1: handle it, and then you get there and you're.
Speaker 2: Like, whoa, I have to do this thing? Yeah. Yes,
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy And this is a podcast
Speaker 2: about history and some of the people in it that
Speaker 2: I think were cool. And this is like extra Cool
Speaker 2: Special Week because it's the first half of a four
Speaker 2: parter about the people who are the reason I started
Speaker 2: doing the show, or rather specifically, the reason I like
Speaker 2: got really interested in history is this because of this
Speaker 2: particular story. But the other person who really likes history, well,
Speaker 2: there's actually two other people like history on this here
Speaker 2: recording one of them. I'm not even going to tell
Speaker 2: you the guest is yet first, and we tell you
Speaker 2: about the producer, because why is the producer always after
Speaker 2: the guest question? That's Sophie. Sophie's the produce. I have seniority.
Speaker 2: I should be introduced. I know you should be before me.
Speaker 2: But our guest is Mia, Amya, Hello, glad to be
Speaker 2: back for more of this. I'm very very excited. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: so it's oh and our audio engineer is Ian. Everyone's
Speaker 2: to say hi to Ian Ian. Our theme music was
Speaker 2: written for us by a un woman. And this is
Speaker 2: the part two and it'll maybe make sense if you
Speaker 2: don't listen to part one, but not really. And if
Speaker 2: you have a brain like me, like like I can't
Speaker 2: even watch I can't read comic books or watch anime
Speaker 2: because there's too much of it and I have to
Speaker 2: start at the beginning of things, and if there's no
Speaker 2: actual through line, it's it's over. Like I can't read
Speaker 2: a comic book because there's no start because it goes
Speaker 2: multi versus to break my head? Is this? I think
Speaker 2: I'm unique in this. But linear your history with Martyr Kiljoy. Okay,
Speaker 2: maybe you have a different brain and you want to
Speaker 2: listen to only part two. You know what you could do?
Speaker 2: Put down this next week, start with part three, and
Speaker 2: then go to part one, and then part four and
Speaker 2: then part two. If you want to have an anime experience,
Speaker 2: everyone's going to get so mad at me for talking shit.
Speaker 2: Anemy is great. It's beautiful and there's nothing wrong with it.
Speaker 2: If this is the experience you're seeking out, go watch Boccado. Okay, great,
Speaker 2: we'll get this experience exactly. So we are talking about
Speaker 2: Argentinian anarchists and the labor movement, and we're building up
Speaker 2: to a wild strike from nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: two in the rural parts of Argentina and Patagonia. But
Speaker 2: we are building up because there's so much cool shit
Speaker 2: that came before it. Last time, we talked about the
Speaker 2: Baker's Union to sell little cannons that are that you
Speaker 2: can eat their pastries. I wonder if they make vegan versions.
Speaker 2: I wonder if there's anyone in the US anyway. I
Speaker 2: got really distracted because I haven't eaten enough pastries today.
Speaker 2: But where we last left off, there was a guy
Speaker 2: who just exploded, and now we're gonna go back in
Speaker 2: time to talk about how he got exploded. His name
Speaker 2: was Falcon, and the person who blew him up his
Speaker 2: name is Simon Simon Radowitski. This is not the pacifist bomber.
Speaker 2: I promised you at the very beginning of this episode
Speaker 2: on Monday that guy is still coming. This is another
Speaker 2: coolest fuck bomber is. This is really the great thing
Speaker 2: about early twentieth century anarchis it was like, you get,
Speaker 2: there is no conceivable world in which you can say
Speaker 2: the bomber and it's a specific guy. Yeah, totally. And
Speaker 2: it's funny too, because like the tiniest percentage of anarchists
Speaker 2: in the early twentieth century were actually bombers, and then not,
Speaker 2: an incredibly large percentage of the archists nearly twenty century
Speaker 2: were cool with the bombers. Yeah, but this one everyone
Speaker 2: was cool with. And I think everyone will understand why
Speaker 2: as I go through his story. Simon Radowitski is a
Speaker 2: Ukrainian Jew. He was born in Ukraine in eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: His dad wanted him to get a good education, so
Speaker 2: send him off to school. So he got a good education.
Speaker 2: There was a problem. They were poor as fuck, so
Speaker 2: by the time he was ten, he had to drop
Speaker 2: out of school. He dropped out of school, he went
Speaker 2: and become an apprentice blacksmith. By fourteen he was a
Speaker 2: factory worker. I don't actually know what happened with the blacksmith.
Speaker 2: I'm like, he feels like apprentice to a blacksmith is
Speaker 2: a better line of work than factory worker. It might
Speaker 2: have just been the industrial revolution and poverty and whatever.
Speaker 2: It worked out well for him because the factory workers
Speaker 2: they were unionized. So he is fourteen when he goes
Speaker 2: to his first strike, and you know what happens when
Speaker 2: you strike in Ukraine in you know, nineteen oh four
Speaker 2: or whatever. They shoot everyone. Question. Well, okay, so think
Speaker 2: a little more medieval. Oh, cavalry charges. He got cut
Speaker 2: across the chest with a saber by a cossack when
Speaker 2: he's fourteen years old.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who was probably on a horse, Yeah, or at
Speaker 3: least famously they were horse related folks.
Speaker 2: It took him six months of bed rest to recover.
Speaker 2: I would argue that it's not the kind of shit
Speaker 2: you forget being cut across the chest while trying to strike.
Speaker 2: Then still like fourteen or fifteen or something, he gets
Speaker 2: out and he's like, you can't keep this man down.
Speaker 2: That is the one thing that you will learn about
Speaker 2: this man. He gets out, you know, he recovers six
Speaker 2: months bed rest, fourteen or fifteen years old. He does
Speaker 2: four months in prison for passing out leaflets being incredible
Speaker 2: incredible government over here, by the way, like real great stuff. Happening.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, we put this guy in prison for
Speaker 2: four months for passing out leaflets.
Speaker 1: He was checked notes fourteen. Great great things happening in Ukraine. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And there's some blurriness with this next chunk of timeline
Speaker 1: because it says he was born in eighteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: and then like it kind of implies he was like
Speaker 1: eighteen by the time the nineteen oh five revolution, which
Speaker 1: does not line up. The math does not work on that.
Speaker 1: He was probably fourteen or fifteen by this time of
Speaker 1: the nineteen oh five revolution. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: we've covered that particular revolution. It's one of the closest
Speaker 1: revolutions in history, but the when you have a like close,
Speaker 1: when you have a successful one, like twelve years later,
Speaker 1: people don't remember the almost as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also just like a deep like okay, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna do it various my tangent one of the weird
Speaker 2: revolutions that was originally led by a police informant whoa
Speaker 2: really yeah, yeah, I got I haven't covered this deeply
Speaker 2: enough yet. It is it is wild. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Sometimes police and sometimes police informants screw up and accidentally
Speaker 2: do the revolution anyways, So yeah, the agent who like
Speaker 2: throws a brick and then the brick causes the entire part.
Speaker 2: It's one of these things where it's like this is
Speaker 2: like the other thing, you know. It's like, like why
Speaker 2: everyone really wanted to burn down the office's a secret
Speaker 2: police in nineteen seventeen. It's like, partially it is because
Speaker 2: people hated him, and partially because a lot of people
Speaker 2: were like, oh shit, we need to destroy the records
Speaker 2: that show that I was collaborating this whole time, because
Speaker 2: now now we've actually done this thing. They actually changed
Speaker 2: they actually it wasn't a provoctur working for the government
Speaker 2: that brought down the government. It was a provocateur who
Speaker 2: was like, never mind, have changed my mind? Overthrow the
Speaker 2: fucking Oh no, no, no, sorry, this this is different. This
Speaker 2: actually was someone who was working with the government and
Speaker 2: they were trying to like do a protest to like
Speaker 2: let off steam, and then that just ah, I didn't
Speaker 2: want to get caught. Okay, okay, I one of these days,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to ruin it by telling the plot
Speaker 2: of the story that I've wanted to write for twenty years.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be about tubervocteurs, one of whom is a
Speaker 2: FED and one of whom is a local cop, and
Speaker 2: then they fall in love and then they convince each
Speaker 2: other of anarchism, and then they die in a horrible
Speaker 2: Romeo and Juliet style like a gunfight with the police,
Speaker 2: because like they finally admit that they're cops to each other,
Speaker 2: but then it's like too late, the Feds are onto
Speaker 2: them anyway. One day. Let me, since Netflix listens to
Speaker 2: this show the entity Netflix listens on a regular basis,
Speaker 2: let me write this as a TV show. So nineteen
Speaker 2: oh five Revolution does not work. Rentraw behind me is
Speaker 2: growling upset about the failure of that revolution and he
Speaker 2: is forced into exile at eighteen years old because of
Speaker 2: his role in the nineteen oh five revolution. I don't
Speaker 2: know whether he like, I don't. I don't, like I said,
Speaker 2: don't know the math here, So also just like not
Speaker 2: you do not want to be Jewish in anywhere controlled
Speaker 2: by Russia after that revolution? Terrible time. Yeah, getting out,
Speaker 2: good idea. Yeah, Yeah, we're gonna don't worry. There's gonna
Speaker 2: be anti semitism in this episode. However, it's not left
Speaker 2: anti Semitism. This time, unlike some of the pogrums that
Speaker 2: were the result of the nineteen by Revolution. He goes
Speaker 2: to Argentina, he finds the anarchists, and he gets to
Speaker 2: work as a mechanic. He was in the crowd on
Speaker 2: May first when Falcon's guys were like, hey, let's like
Speaker 2: murder a bunch of people and like shot the crowd up, right,
Speaker 2: So he survived this massacre. And then Falcon was like,
Speaker 2: you know whose fault this is? Can you guess we
Speaker 2: just talked about it? No, the Jews, Jew's fault. Oh okay,
Speaker 2: you know that that? Yeah, okay, I've I was being
Speaker 2: too optimistic about Yeah, the police specifically, it's the Jews
Speaker 2: from Russia. And so you have this Russophobia. I don't
Speaker 2: know if that's a word that ties into the anti Semitism.
Speaker 2: They're entirely conflated at this point. So as a Jew
Speaker 2: from Russia, Simon is like, oh, fuck, no, fuck this guy, right.
Speaker 2: And it did not help that Ramon Falcon gave his
Speaker 2: cops fucking sabers and called them cossacks.
Speaker 3: Ah, out of the frying pan, this kid went hack.
Speaker 2: You cannot escape the saber wielding Cossacks. If you're a
Speaker 2: Ukrainian Jewish anarchist at the turn of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Now he's not a violence for violence kind of guy
Speaker 2: or kid. Really, he's eighteen or nineteen at this point.
Speaker 2: He regularly talks about how anarchist should use as little
Speaker 2: violence as possible, which is overall, but not universally, the
Speaker 2: style for anarchists at the time, not that they are pacifists,
Speaker 2: but and not that they should use no violence, but
Speaker 2: the violence should be used as little as possible. And
Speaker 2: about this, I want to quote Malatesta because whenever I
Speaker 2: have an excuse, I like to quote Malatesta. This is
Speaker 2: Maltesta in about thirteen years earlier, but I think it
Speaker 2: sets a lot of the tone and understanding for seventeen
Speaker 2: years earlier. So quote. We must do as the surgeon
Speaker 2: who cuts when he must, but avoids inflicting unnecessary suffering.
Speaker 2: In a word, we must be inspired by the sentiment
Speaker 2: of love for people, for all people. It appears to
Speaker 2: us that the sentiment of love is the moral source,
Speaker 2: the source of our program. It appears to us that
Speaker 2: only by conceiving the revolution as the Grand human Jubilee,
Speaker 2: as the liberation and fratnization of all no matter what
Speaker 2: class or what party they have belonged to. Can our
Speaker 2: ideal be realized? That's the page that Simon Radowisky is on,
Speaker 2: as best as I can tell, because he's not. It
Speaker 2: comes up a bunch of times that he's like, he's
Speaker 2: not a like bomb is first option? Guy? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I want to say we were talking about earlier
Speaker 2: anarchists have this reputation being like the mad bombers of history.
Speaker 2: But I would like to invite the listener to compare
Speaker 2: the number of bombs used by the advocates of nation
Speaker 2: states versus the number of bombs used by the opponents
Speaker 2: of nation states. Like, yeah, like there are individual like
Speaker 2: there have been individual bombing runs in the past decade
Speaker 2: that I dropped more bombs in every anarchist in history.
Speaker 2: Like it's I will bet money that the Israeli government
Speaker 2: did so in the last week while we were recording this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: there are absolutely unethical bombings by anarchists in Argentina around
Speaker 2: this time. I read about one, and but then again
Speaker 2: I read this from a very right wing source, and
Speaker 2: it so it's hard to know. Right, There's like one
Speaker 2: where they claim that the anarchists tricked a kid into
Speaker 2: bombing themselves. I don't know, because there's no other real
Speaker 2: evidence of like suicide bombing or anything like that being
Speaker 2: used by anarchists. Yeah, and that's like not a and
Speaker 2: that's a thing, but like SUSI, bombing is a is
Speaker 2: a relatively recent thing. Like it's not really an anarchist thing.
Speaker 2: If you're anarchist, you're trying to throw the bomb and
Speaker 2: get away, assuming you're doing bomb throwing. Yeah, actually except
Speaker 2: our passive but we'll talk about him. But he wasn't
Speaker 2: a state side pommer either. He was like a like
Speaker 2: non violence it was his obedience guy only in violence.
Speaker 2: But he's later. We'll talk about Kurt Wilkins next week.
Speaker 2: So Siemon he waited. Falcon was at this like funeral
Speaker 2: for some state guy, and Semon was like, all right,
Speaker 2: I'm waiting along this route he knew he would be
Speaker 2: traveling on, and he threw a bomb into Falcon's coach,
Speaker 2: killing Falcon. And his secretary's like not the administrative assistant,
Speaker 2: but you know the whatever as adjunct. Yeah, there was
Speaker 2: some The official name here is secretary, but he's like
Speaker 2: another military commander guy. I should have written down his
Speaker 2: title besides that, but I didn't. Semon did not make
Speaker 2: it far before he was caught, and the state wanted
Speaker 2: to execute him. Understandably, so I get why the state
Speaker 2: wants to fill out like, but his defense finds his
Speaker 2: birth certificate and they're like, hey, he's only eighteen. He
Speaker 2: is not eligible for the death penalty in Argentina, just
Speaker 2: life in prison, which means nineteen oh nine. Argentina has
Speaker 2: more humane treatment of young offenders. Yeah. Three In the
Speaker 2: United States, a god whoh, he gets life in prison
Speaker 2: and each year and he has ay, they they fuck
Speaker 2: with him each year. Near the anniversary of his assassination,
Speaker 2: he's put into solitary with only bread and water, and
Speaker 2: the government flips the fuck out and they stop pretending
Speaker 2: to be any sort of democracy. They declare a state
Speaker 2: of emergency over one fucking guy. Well, I guess two
Speaker 2: fucking guys. They fill the jails, they shut down every
Speaker 2: union they can, and whenever this shit happens, whenever I
Speaker 2: read about this stuff in history goes one of two
Speaker 2: ways right away. Most often people get scared away from
Speaker 2: radical politics, and people get mad at the bomber and
Speaker 2: are like, hey, you fucked up the movement by exploding
Speaker 2: a guy who kind of deserved exploding, but it still
Speaker 2: wasn't a good idea and fuck you, right, that is
Speaker 2: like the most common result of people explosion. Not the
Speaker 2: workers of Argentina in nineteen oh nine. They're like, this
Speaker 2: is our guy, the La Protesta, the newspaper. They're forced underground,
Speaker 2: but they publish a moral justification illegally fora The the
Speaker 2: Syndicalist Union is also now underground, and they put out
Speaker 2: a pamphlet called or they're not syndicalist or in our
Speaker 2: communist Sorry, someone's gonna be mad. They put out a
Speaker 2: pamphlet called our Defense, and then they defend Radowitzki there
Speaker 2: and this is the big Federation of Labor Unions, right,
Speaker 2: this is like of the afl CIO is like, no,
Speaker 2: it's our guy about like or whatever. And so they
Speaker 2: refuse to let him become isolated, and they refuse to
Speaker 2: disclaim him, and by doing this they make their movement stronger.
Speaker 2: Through a period of repression, he becomes a central figure
Speaker 2: in the movement. While he's in prison, there's rallies and
Speaker 2: campaigns to free him, some of which are the let's
Speaker 2: ask nicely variety, other which others are the we're gonna
Speaker 2: revolt and throw general strikes until you free him variety,
Speaker 2: and some of them are like, well, we're just gonna
Speaker 2: break him out of prison variety, diversity of tactics everyone. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all three combine to spoiler, they get him out of
Speaker 2: prison eventually, and I think it takes all three. And
Speaker 2: I'll talk about why he spends his time in prison.
Speaker 2: He doesn't like keep his head down right. He's not like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's time to study and you know. No, he's like
Speaker 2: he is at the front of every prisoner strike and demonstration.
Speaker 2: He's in the worst prison in the Yeah. No, he's
Speaker 2: I always I like Kurt Wilkins, the bomber we're gonna
Speaker 2: talk about next week, so much that I've always kind
Speaker 2: of been like a Simon, He's just another guy whatever,
Speaker 2: you know. And then like when I deep dived him,
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, this guy fucking rules.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he's in Argentina's side, which is a tier de fuego,
Speaker 2: the bottom, and it's bad and it's the place where
Speaker 2: literally most prisoners die. They're like, hey, go here and
Speaker 2: fuck off and die. You know, he doesn't die. He
Speaker 2: is routinely sexually assaulted by the warden. When comrades send
Speaker 2: him money, he immediately just gives it freely to all
Speaker 2: of his fellow prisoners. So all of his fellow prisoners
Speaker 2: like him because he's helping them all out. He's at
Speaker 2: the front of everything. He's like everyone's commissaries. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I just want to follow his story to its conclusion.
Speaker 2: He's not central to the strike, but I think having
Speaker 2: a sense of the Argentinian movement is really useful. At
Speaker 2: one point, the anarchists smuggle him onto a ship and
Speaker 2: get him out of Argentinian waters, like a small smugglers
Speaker 2: sailing ship, right, But the Chilean navy catches them and
Speaker 2: he goes back to prison and he spends two I know,
Speaker 2: he spends two years in a windowless sell on half
Speaker 2: rations as a result of this. After twenty years in
Speaker 2: prison in nineteen third, the movement kept going for twenty
Speaker 2: fucking years. He's released because of all the pressure and
Speaker 2: then gets deported. They're like they're like, get him to
Speaker 2: get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 1: But like.
Speaker 2: The constant pressure and the streets and the media made it.
Speaker 2: The government was like, we just want to get rid
Speaker 2: of you instead of having this living martyr on our hands, right,
Speaker 2: and one woman, more than anyone else, is responsible for
Speaker 2: freeing him, and we're gonna talk about her. We're going
Speaker 2: to a whole separate section on her because she rules
Speaker 2: so much too. This is just like, this is just
Speaker 2: like the fucking two weeks of like all my favorite characters,
Speaker 2: they're just all in this fucking story. And now he
Speaker 2: wasn't like, oh man, I got out of prison and
Speaker 2: got supported, It's time to live a quiet life. Oh god, no, no,
Speaker 2: not Simon. He you know, he's now probably thirty eight
Speaker 2: or so. He's deported to Udaguay and and then he
Speaker 2: gets deported to tim Yeah, and then he gets deported
Speaker 2: from there. Yeah. Yeah, that seems like that seems like
Speaker 2: a terrible idea if you, oh, we got we got
Speaker 2: to send a revolutionary somewhere. We're gonna sumem to Uruguays. Yeah, amazing,
Speaker 2: good great work, guys, Like nothing could possibly incredible repressive
Speaker 2: mapparatus and that this is actually uh, there's a whole
Speaker 2: lot of like cross especially Argentina and Notaguay and also
Speaker 2: Chile or there's like a lot of revolutionaries moving back
Speaker 2: and forth, especially in the like like one day we're
Speaker 2: going to do a whole thing after the like nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two thing. Then there's this whole period where
Speaker 2: like all the anarchist bank robbers are having there, like heyday,
Speaker 2: and you have all this like yes, like Robin Hood
Speaker 2: shit happening everywhere, and it's all cross border. But that
Speaker 2: is not even that's a one day we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about that. So Egos Utuguay and he gets deported
Speaker 2: from there from trying to overthrow their dictator, and then
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty six happens, where famously nothing happened of interest
Speaker 2: to the anarchists and or a friend of the pod
Speaker 2: the Spanish Civil War. Don't worry, you know I was
Speaker 2: going to bring up the Spanish Civil War. Maybe I
Speaker 2: already did last week. I can't remember. He's like, all right,
Speaker 2: let's fucking go right. He's in his forties and he's
Speaker 2: he goes there and he doesn't just like go be like, hey,
Speaker 2: I spent twenty years in prison. I can just happily
Speaker 2: live in an anarchist city for a while, like maybe
Speaker 2: help with some of the organizations. No, he like immediately
Speaker 2: goes to the front and he volunteers with the Anarchist
Speaker 2: twenty eighth Division, and he goes to the front. And
Speaker 2: I've read a couple different versions of this, the one
Speaker 2: that I find the most convincing. They're not really like contradicting,
Speaker 2: but there's like different little weird details. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: piece together the best I can tell. He's like, I
Speaker 2: don't want to kill people anymore. I killed two people.
Speaker 2: I'm good. So I'm going to become a truck driver
Speaker 2: and drive food to the front and like straight up
Speaker 2: into the trenches, still absolutely putting himself a harm's way,
Speaker 2: and you know what, will also deliver food directly to
Speaker 2: where you're struggling against cap This is actually technically true.
Speaker 2: They were absolutely deliver food to where you're struggling against capitalism.
Speaker 2: If you I don't know who the ads are going
Speaker 2: to be. If one of them is a food delivery service,
Speaker 2: you can use it or not use it like whatever,
Speaker 2: like we've had, so that'd be they should be pleased
Speaker 2: with this. Yeah, they're exactly like Simon Simon Radowitsky. Well,
Speaker 2: actually I would say that the like Uber drivers and
Speaker 2: ups drivers and shit are all ratis shit. So yeah,
Speaker 2: there's there's a bunch of or at least last night
Speaker 2: checked out half a decade ago, there were a bunch
Speaker 2: of Synicholas uber drivers in Indonesia. So I don't know
Speaker 2: if any of you are listening. Hell yeah yeah uh.
Speaker 2: And then if there's any ads for anything else, they
Speaker 2: were a mistake, and please direct all complaints to our
Speaker 2: complaint department at Irate. Okay, on X? Is it more
Speaker 2: fun to call it? See? In my mind, I like
Speaker 2: every time I say X, I feel like I'm making
Speaker 2: fun of Elon Musk because it's such a fucking crappy name.
Speaker 2: Or is it more fun to dead name X by
Speaker 2: calling it Twitter so that he can for a fit
Speaker 2: and be like, how come no one, we'll call it
Speaker 2: by chosen name, even though he's a transpher who hates
Speaker 2: his kid. Website. Okay, on that one fucking website, that's
Speaker 2: where a complaint department is. Here's some ads, and we're back,
Speaker 2: and we were just saying a bunch of legally actionable
Speaker 2: stuff that we're going to cut out of the podcast.
Speaker 2: Say all right, So he survives the warm, he flees
Speaker 2: to France and where he's imprisoned in a concentration camp
Speaker 2: like all the other Republicans fleeing. And this is, by
Speaker 2: the way, not not the Nazi collaborationist government. This is
Speaker 2: the France before it's surrendered. However, isn't this the popular Front?
Speaker 2: A little bit mixed? And it's it's a little bit
Speaker 2: messy because the word concentration camp has it's not it's bad,
Speaker 2: it's always bad. But there is a scale here, right,
Speaker 2: there's a put everyone in one place thing where we God,
Speaker 2: I'm really not trying to defend this. And then there's
Speaker 2: the Nazi thing, right, anyway, he's put in a fuck
Speaker 2: it's not good what happens to him, but it's not
Speaker 2: he's not specifically escaping a Nazi death camp, right. He
Speaker 2: somehow gets the fuck out of this. I don't know
Speaker 2: if they let him go or what. And he gets
Speaker 2: himself off to Mexico where he spends the rest of
Speaker 2: his life, not just like like he's not. He spends
Speaker 2: the rest of his life where he writes for anarchist papers.
Speaker 2: He spends about half the time in the hospital because
Speaker 2: my man had a fucking hard life, right yeah, And
Speaker 2: he spends the rest of his time organizing mutual aid
Speaker 2: and he works sending care packages to refugees who are
Speaker 2: escaping Europe right and or internally displaced within Europe because
Speaker 2: of World War Two. He works in a toy factory
Speaker 2: and he lives in a bear attic, and he dies
Speaker 2: of a heart attack on the factory floor on February
Speaker 2: twenty ninth, nineteen fifty six. He's in his late sixties.
Speaker 2: But you know what they say, and by they, I
Speaker 2: mean me and making this up right now. But it's true.
Speaker 2: Anyone who dies on leap Yer day doesn't really die.
Speaker 2: So I'm sure he's still out there passing out toys
Speaker 2: to kids, giving money to prisoners, avoiding killing someone unless
Speaker 2: they really really just need to get exploded. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's Simon Redowitski. I really like him. There's someone else
Speaker 2: I really like too. This would be a good transition
Speaker 2: to like plugs, but it's not. It's just another historical person.
Speaker 2: This is about one of the people who fought for
Speaker 2: his freedom. This is probably the woman who secured his freedom.
Speaker 2: And her name is Salvadora Carmen Medina and Rubia. Salvadora
Speaker 2: was bored in Buenos Aires in eighteen ninety four to
Speaker 2: Spanish immigrants. Her father's job, which is a classic nineteenth
Speaker 2: century working class job, is died young. Her mother's job,
Speaker 2: Oh no, yeah, I would like funny, thanks, I'm proud
Speaker 2: of that one. And her mother's job was rural school mistress.
Speaker 2: She moved to the city of Rosario and gets involved
Speaker 2: into her two main lifelong interests, which are anarchism in theater.
Speaker 2: She also becomes a teenage single mom. By the time
Speaker 2: she's nineteen, she goes to Buenos Aires and she's working
Speaker 2: at the anarchist newspaper La Protesta that I keep talking about,
Speaker 2: and she's publishing her writing in a bunch of other
Speaker 2: papers and gets involved in nineteen fourteen in the free
Speaker 2: Radowitsky campaign. By the time she's twenty, she marries his
Speaker 2: other writer guy. She's just like, oh, I like, we're
Speaker 2: both like cool writers, and we're in low We're going
Speaker 2: to totally get married and he's actually good. This is
Speaker 2: usually this is what a woman say, Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 2: he's okay, he's like not as cool as her, but
Speaker 2: she keeps him in line. But then instead something happens.
Speaker 2: This is why she's one of my favorite historical anarchists
Speaker 2: to talk about to some of my friends. This guy
Speaker 2: that she marries soon starts in his run the most
Speaker 2: popular daily paper in the city called Critica, which at
Speaker 2: its peak is selling seven hundred thousand papers a day. Jesus,
Speaker 2: this isn't the anarchist paper. This is just like basically,
Speaker 2: she marries the guy who starts The New York Times, right,
Speaker 2: and she just becomes this like rich bitch anarchist, and
Speaker 2: she stays an anarchist her whole life, despite her success,
Speaker 2: and I fucking love it for her. So she's just
Speaker 2: like helping the cause whenever anarchists and like, so like
Speaker 2: anarchist papers get shut down all the time, like Le
Speaker 2: Pretesta is like constantly being shut down, right, So she
Speaker 2: hires the editors, all the anarchist editors over at Critica.
Speaker 2: So this is amazing. The daily paper is like half
Speaker 2: run by anarchists, which, as someone who works for Higheart Radio,
Speaker 2: I feel like we might all appreciate. One time, a
Speaker 2: bunch of seamstresses are like economically fucked. I think they
Speaker 2: lose a strike or something. So she drives her rolls
Speaker 2: froys down to where they live and just starts handing
Speaker 2: out sewing machines to the women in the crowd out
Speaker 2: of her rules. Rice amazing, and her husband is like
Speaker 2: radical on his own right, but he's kind of like
Speaker 2: catch all radical right when he's like and so he's
Speaker 2: like at one point he's like, oh, let's let Critica
Speaker 2: become a communist party paper, and she just shuts that
Speaker 2: shit down. No, we will not do that. I am
Speaker 2: an anarchist. And she regularly runs feminist columns, the occasional
Speaker 2: anarchist piece in the papers. It does not become an
Speaker 2: anarchist paper, right, And then during the Tragic Week, which
Speaker 2: we'll get to sadly, she's like standing on top of
Speaker 2: coffins of dead anarchists screaming to crowds when the police
Speaker 2: break up their funeral. And this is like one of
Speaker 2: the most powerful women in the country, you know. All
Speaker 2: the while she's getting famous as a poet and a playwright.
Speaker 2: She writes Hit, an arc of feminist plays, and she
Speaker 2: writes an aristocratic romance novel that's like a feminist critique
Speaker 2: of society. And also she's just really into getting high
Speaker 2: on ether. Just nothing has changed about anarchists, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like the feminist when getting high, Like nothing has
Speaker 2: ever changed. Yeah, yeah, I used to shoot tin types,
Speaker 2: which means I used to get high on ether a lot,
Speaker 2: not on purpose. But I was always like, why don't
Speaker 2: I feel so relaxed after a day of shooting tin types?
Speaker 2: And the answer is, I stick my head into this
Speaker 2: light because you have to develop them on the spot,
Speaker 2: you know. And I used to go to these steampunk
Speaker 2: conventions and like shoot photo like tin type portraits, and
Speaker 2: that's how I made my money for a while. And
Speaker 2: and so you like stick your head into a steamer
Speaker 2: trunk with like a hood over it, and just like,
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna live very long. I don't even like drugs.
Speaker 2: That's the funniest thing about all this shit. But anyway,
Speaker 2: so and during all of this, she does not drop
Speaker 2: out of the campaign for Simon Redowhisky. She also doesn't
Speaker 2: change your tune about how it should get done. I
Speaker 2: can't find exactly how she orchestrated the following two escape attempts.
Speaker 2: All I have is this quote from a libcom article quote.
Speaker 2: On two separate occasions, Salvadora dispatched employees of the paper
Speaker 2: to orchestrate his escape from Isshuia.
Speaker 4: Literally the paper employees, not even like a random anarchist
Speaker 4: like get paid for that wor imagine being that employee
Speaker 4: is like, yeah, hey, my boss, my boss just told
Speaker 4: me to go free this anarchist from prison is like,
Speaker 4: oh you you two, You're the second person.
Speaker 2: Who's got ask to do this this time. Good luck.
Speaker 2: I like, I assume I want to offer her the
Speaker 2: benefit of the doubt. I assume it was some of
Speaker 2: the anarchists employees, right yeah, and I spose they wanted
Speaker 2: to do it. If they didn't, she's being a little sketchy,
Speaker 2: but or she's just like planning other escape attempts and
Speaker 2: she's sending them the employees to be like go interview
Speaker 2: the chief of police today and I'm not gonna tell
Speaker 2: you why, or you know, like I don't know. Both
Speaker 2: of these ventures are discovered and Simon has left to
Speaker 2: languish behind bars. I have no information about whether or
Speaker 2: not the employees were arrested or if they were paid
Speaker 2: up paide hazard pay. But where direct action failed, constant pressure,
Speaker 2: which I believe included all this direct action, succeeded. It
Speaker 2: helps when the woman who half runs the country's most
Speaker 2: popular newspaper has been involved in your campaign since she
Speaker 2: was a fucking teenager. It was her direct pressure on
Speaker 2: the president that got him to set Radowitzki free, and
Speaker 2: it was a relative of her husband. This is why
Speaker 2: I'm like, her husband's still cool, right, who received the
Speaker 2: living martyr upon his exile in Uruguay. So it was like, go,
Speaker 2: when you go to Uruguay, go hang out with our family.
Speaker 3: We'll take you in.
Speaker 2: You know, Oh that's really cool. Yeah. During the Spanish
Speaker 2: Civil War, the couple went down to the docks to
Speaker 2: personally help Spanish exiles into the country, and they sent
Speaker 2: money to orphaned Republican children. And she just she lived
Speaker 2: a pretty long life. She outlived her husband, this classic
Speaker 2: form that you know, oh yeah, women are pretty good
Speaker 2: at pulling that off. She died in obscurity thanks to
Speaker 2: the Vagaries of Argentina in twentieth century politics, which get
Speaker 2: so complex, and whenever I talk about like, oh, I'm
Speaker 2: doing the same about Argentina, my friends are like, oh god,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, no, it's before all that, And they're like, wow,
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about Argentina before all that. And
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about the all that that I'm
Speaker 2: talking about vaguely, like the Piran and all that shit.
Speaker 2: I haven't researched enough yet. If you ever want someone
Speaker 2: to die, ask someone who knows what paronism is, and
Speaker 2: you will watch someone's head explode. It's he was like
Speaker 2: a lefty fascist, right. Oh god, there is a total
Speaker 2: aside that I don't just say yes or.
Speaker 3: Now and move on.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, I am Okay, Yeah, I have two grudges
Speaker 2: I need to settle right now. Which is that okay, okay,
Speaker 2: me is about to make actionable claims against living existing people. No,
Speaker 2: the I think they're both dead, Okay, okay, So I
Speaker 2: have I have a grudge. I have a very specific
Speaker 2: grudge against two academics. One of them is Argentina and academic.
Speaker 2: One of them is not On Ernesto Leclow and Chantelle Mouf,
Speaker 2: who are both these are They're like they're they're the
Speaker 2: first of like the so called like post Marxists, theorists.
Speaker 2: They're like the people who who They're thing is we
Speaker 2: want left populism, And I fucking hate these people. Their
Speaker 2: work sucks, the writing is bad, their tactics are bad.
Speaker 2: And these people started as left parhists. Yeah, worst idea,
Speaker 2: literally the worst idea anyone had. Like after about nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: This is this is the worst idea anyone on the
Speaker 2: left has ever had. It's awful. They are they are
Speaker 2: like almost single handedly responsible for like what happened to podemos,
Speaker 2: Like they are there. They are like the premier theorist
Speaker 2: of like twentiest of failed twentieth century left electoral movements.
Speaker 2: Like everyone that didn't work you can find move and
Speaker 2: Leclow you can find their work behind it. I hate
Speaker 2: these people. I'm doing this now because I might never
Speaker 2: get another chance my agrievances. But I've been here this
Speaker 2: for a long time. Yeah, like this is complete, total aside.
Speaker 2: I apologize for derailing the show from my project. But however, no,
Speaker 2: uh you know, okay, let's get back to Argentine after
Speaker 2: the assassination. Yeah sorry, no, no, I literally asked. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, when I learn more about this other shit,
Speaker 2: like I think every now and then people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: Margaret knows all history. I feel like every person who's
Speaker 2: history podcast gets this, and I'm like, no, I everything
Speaker 2: I know about history I've already said on air and
Speaker 2: then forgotten. So yep, all that's left is like a
Speaker 2: vague whatever. I don't think I'm like, okay, So nineteen ten,
Speaker 2: the year after the explodees, that's what they called that
Speaker 2: period of time. That's not what they called it. By
Speaker 2: nineteen ten, Argentina declares herself in a state of internal war,
Speaker 2: basically to stop the worker's movement. This is not actually
Speaker 2: a response to the assassination. It's a response to all
Speaker 2: these other major strikes and shit. They keep happening, and
Speaker 2: you start getting these far right militias of rich people
Speaker 2: who like burn the anarchists and socialist newspaper offices. The
Speaker 2: government suspends free speech, they suspend free press, they suspend
Speaker 2: free assembly. Formally, they're like, now we're done right. You
Speaker 2: all had your chance of freedom, and you blew it.
Speaker 2: Two thousand anarchists are arrested or or deported, and that
Speaker 2: doesn't stop more and more radicals from showing up and
Speaker 2: throwing down. That's the lesson I thought it was going
Speaker 2: to be. So that's that. God, we're going to get
Speaker 2: to some higher numbers of virus. Oh later, okay, nine
Speaker 2: years later, in the tragic week. So I'll just keep
Speaker 2: cliffhangering that. But don't worry, that's actually going to be today.
Speaker 2: I don't have to wait till next week for that.
Speaker 2: I don't know why you're excited about it? What's wrong
Speaker 2: with you? Why are you excited about the tragic Week?
Speaker 2: It's other nickname is the bloody Week? What do you do?
Speaker 2: Why are you so violence minded? Person who listens to
Speaker 2: a podcast about people who do good things and the
Speaker 2: usually die. Well. Anyway, they don't stop the movement completely,
Speaker 2: but they fuck up the movement. The government does, and
Speaker 2: everything goes underground for a couple of years. La Protesta
Speaker 2: tries to publish anyhow. I think this is when like,
Speaker 2: this is one of the many times when the protests
Speaker 2: to get shut down and all the people end up
Speaker 2: working for critica. I think both times the police raid
Speaker 2: and shut it down and arrest the editors whenever they
Speaker 2: try and publish anyhow. Other editors got that shit going
Speaker 2: by nineteen thirteen, and it stayed going, and then other
Speaker 2: papers keep it going all along. But basically there's a
Speaker 2: period where you're like, all right, it's my turn to
Speaker 2: goo edit an episode an issue of La Protesta and
Speaker 2: then get deported. Argentina is the most immigrant full country
Speaker 2: in the world at this point. In nineteen fourteen, foreigners
Speaker 2: make up forty six point one percent of the economically
Speaker 2: active population, of which only one point four percent had
Speaker 2: become citizens. Wow. Meanwhile, there's the less radical syndicalist Union, right,
Speaker 2: and they finally joined the Anarchist Union. And for a
Speaker 2: little while you're like, hooray, like we're all friends again. No,
Speaker 2: they do it doing a classic thing called entryism. They
Speaker 2: did as a specific tactic to come and fuck it up,
Speaker 2: and they succeeded at that. They were absolutely the minority,
Speaker 2: but they did a bunch of weird bureaucratic shit and
Speaker 2: got fora to move away from its explicit anarchists communism
Speaker 2: stance to end up becoming their neutral syndicalism stance, the
Speaker 2: thing that hadn't won them any followers because no one
Speaker 2: wanted to do it. They were like, well, well's go
Speaker 2: where there are followers and force them to be like us.
Speaker 2: So the anarchists split off. This time, they leave FURA
Speaker 2: and they form an organization called You probably can't, but
Speaker 2: can you guess what they name the organization? I actually
Speaker 2: I actually know this, okay, Altholthough I did, I didn't
Speaker 2: actually know that that was what happened with the FA split.
Speaker 2: I just had heard there was a split, and I
Speaker 2: was like, huh, yeah, they So the anarchists split off
Speaker 2: and they form an organization called FORA. Yeah, because they
Speaker 2: are some salty motherfuckers. The original for A people, the anarchists.
Speaker 2: They're now a minority of them for the moments. The
Speaker 2: anarchists actually become a majority of the working class again
Speaker 2: soon in Argentina. But and they call themselves We're not
Speaker 2: gonna reference. You don't have to. If you're like I
Speaker 2: don't want to keep track of these weird splits, don't worry,
Speaker 2: you don't have to. I'm just gonna complain about some shit.
Speaker 2: So the anarchists split off. They call themselves four A
Speaker 2: five after the fifth Congress in nineteen oh five, when
Speaker 2: they decided to become Reading this history is so annoying,
Speaker 2: I know, because it's all anyone wants to talk about,
Speaker 2: is like, yeah, yeah, no, and don't worry, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I'm gonna spare you all of that because this is
Speaker 2: a pop history. That is what this podcast is, because
Speaker 2: that's the way my brain works. And so then the
Speaker 2: liberal ish FORA calls usself four A nine after the
Speaker 2: ninth Congress when they decide to be come neutral. I
Speaker 2: think that's also the one where they go into space.
Speaker 2: No way that's Fast and Furious. But whenever four X happens,
Speaker 2: this is like my pop culture reference of the day
Speaker 2: because I've actually only I've only seen the first seven
Speaker 2: Fast and Furious movies. I'm not caught up. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I've had weird conversations about masculinity and transition of the
Speaker 2: Fast and Furious movies. But that's not for here. There
Speaker 2: is an episode of a podcast called an Arco Geek
Speaker 2: Power Hour that talks about that. If you want to
Speaker 2: hear two queer people talk about the Fast and Furious
Speaker 2: movies and how it reflects on masculinity and things like that.
Speaker 2: So the two fouras, there are some major and important
Speaker 2: ideological differences. It's not just we're salty, right. The Anarchist Federation,
Speaker 2: they're mostly the older folks and or their immigrants. The
Speaker 2: Neutral Federation at this point more of them are native born,
Speaker 2: and they allow their member unions to ban immigrants from joining.
Speaker 2: So you start seeing this thing where the unions are
Speaker 2: capable of being reactionary, they're capable of being nativist, whereas
Speaker 2: that shit wouldn't fly under original fora all this ties
Speaker 2: into the country's politics. For about thirty years, basically since
Speaker 2: Argentina was recognizably Argentina, there have been one party in charge,
Speaker 2: the National Autonomist Party. And you know that whenever you
Speaker 2: take a word that's kind of cool, like socialism or autonomism,
Speaker 2: and then you add national in the beginning, you know,
Speaker 2: you get something better.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, Basically they're the let's like rob indigenous people, exploit
Speaker 2: the workers and get rich as fuck. Party. That's that's
Speaker 2: who started Argentina, much like who started the United States
Speaker 2: of America. Right, And so for some weird reason, this
Speaker 2: isn't very popular with the working class. But you know
Speaker 2: what is popular with the working class meum, is it
Speaker 2: the products and services to support the show. That's right,
Speaker 2: unless you can't afford them, in which case, steal them
Speaker 2: and we're back. So in the early nineteen tens, there's
Speaker 2: universal mail suffrage and all the men can suddenly vote,
Speaker 2: and so they're like, let's get rid of the fucking
Speaker 2: autonomous right or the National Autonomius. I hate calling him
Speaker 2: autonomous because there's like cool people call themselves autonomous, right,
Speaker 2: be like, let's get rid of the fucking Nazis. Those socialists,
Speaker 2: you know, so the radical Civil Union Civic Union, which
Speaker 2: also does not deserve its name. But they're better, right,
Speaker 2: they're not whatever anyway, Yeah, the lefties get in. The
Speaker 2: liberals get in is a better way to put it.
Speaker 2: The middle class liberals. They are the main opposition party.
Speaker 2: They win by a landslide in nineteen sixteen. They win
Speaker 2: by thirty three points, which is a lot. Wow points.
Speaker 2: That's right, wild Yeah, and that's a multi party system too, right,
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer. No, I don't know. You mean,
Speaker 2: is there like more than two parties running? Like there's
Speaker 2: more than Yeah, yeah, I think I think there are,
Speaker 2: But I got hudos. It's I would leave you. And
Speaker 2: this is the middle class party. It is the party
Speaker 2: for urban professionals and small business owners. And they're like, well,
Speaker 2: we need to win over the working class and or
Speaker 2: they just actually wanted to make things better for the
Speaker 2: working class. Either one of these as possible. So they
Speaker 2: start throwing all these free parties and they're like feeding
Speaker 2: people and they open medical clinics and these are good things, right,
Speaker 2: but they're still the government. And when the chips are down,
Speaker 2: they're going to do what governments do and So the
Speaker 2: reason this is so important to the story, these are
Speaker 2: the people who are going to repress all of the
Speaker 2: wildest shit that's going to get repressed in Argentina over
Speaker 2: the next couple of years. Like it's basically if Biden
Speaker 2: decided to murder a ton of people, so they start
Speaker 2: coosing up. The government starts closing up to the less
Speaker 2: cool fora. That's how I'm gonna refer to them instead
Speaker 2: of I can't if you mentioned two numbers to me,
Speaker 2: they're the same number. So the less cool fora. And
Speaker 2: soon the liberal run strikes stop having so much police repression,
Speaker 2: will radical run strikes get just as much repression? Ah,
Speaker 2: the decade goes on. It's hard as fuck for everyone,
Speaker 2: but you know who else as hard as fuck as
Speaker 2: the Argentinian radicals. And then you get the Tragic Week.
Speaker 2: You know shit is bad when the two names for
Speaker 2: it in history are the Tragic Week and the Bloody Week.
Speaker 2: Late nineteen eighteen like December, good good month. All the
Speaker 2: best stuff happens in December. People now know what astrological
Speaker 2: sign I am.
Speaker 1: Fuck.
Speaker 2: Okay, A bunch of anarchist metal workers go on straight.
Speaker 2: Their demands are incredibly minor by today's standards. These anarchists,
Speaker 2: they want wild shit. Do you know what they want?
Speaker 2: They want to only work eight hours a day for
Speaker 2: six days a week. Wow, incredible, instead of what they're
Speaker 2: supposed to work, eleven hour workdays for seven goddamn days
Speaker 2: a week. So they want that, and they want decent pay,
Speaker 2: and they want the re They want the fired organizers there,
Speaker 2: the people who organize the strike, they want them hired back. Right,
Speaker 2: Those are their fucking wild, crazy demands. I mean, they
Speaker 2: actually also want society to be to restructured completely without
Speaker 2: a state or capitalism. But this is what they're fighting for.
Speaker 2: This is what their demands are. The supposedly radical government
Speaker 2: at this point is fucking terrified of the Russian revolution
Speaker 2: that's happening, and they're fucking terrified of it happening in Argentina.
Speaker 2: They are as fiercely the liberal government is as fiercely
Speaker 2: anti communist as anyone. And I'm pretty sure that the
Speaker 2: anti Russian sentiment that they have was often specifically and
Speaker 2: directly anti Semitic. There is this terror happening in Argentina
Speaker 2: of Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, the dreaded Russian Jew the
Speaker 2: right wing conflated the two so completely that they would
Speaker 2: just say death to the Russians, to mean kill all
Speaker 2: the Jews Jesus Christ. About eighty percent of the Russian
Speaker 2: population in Argentina at that time was Jewish. Who were
Speaker 2: you know, they'd fucking led Russia because of the Brahms, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So when the company that the metal workers are striking
Speaker 2: against right higher scabs, the company is able to use
Speaker 2: its connections with the government, the liberal government, to get
Speaker 2: weapons permits to arm the scabs, jees, the metal workers.
Speaker 2: They have the city's workers on their side. Railway workers
Speaker 2: stop unloading raw materials, local shopkeepers start donating food and
Speaker 2: coal to the strikers. Because one thing that I keep
Speaker 2: running across an anarchist history is that, like, when you
Speaker 2: don't have the like specific, weird class categorization obsession of Marxism,
Speaker 2: people are like, that's cool, small business owners are whatever.
Speaker 2: I mean, it'd be better if they treat their employees, okay,
Speaker 2: but like they're not our enemies, you know, And so
Speaker 2: I just I run across this in history. I'm not
Speaker 2: trying to make a specific well whatever, I clearly like
Speaker 2: I think workers, cooperators are great, but whatever. Anyway, local
Speaker 2: businesses donating. There is a stand still with the strike
Speaker 2: because both sides are fucking powerful, right, one side has
Speaker 2: the government arming them and the other side has the people.
Speaker 2: On January seventh, nineteen oh, nineteen nineteen, police escorted scabs
Speaker 2: to the factory. The only way to have a strike
Speaker 2: is to stop scabs from working, so the strikers tried
Speaker 2: to stop the scabs from working. They also probably overturned
Speaker 2: the chief of Police's car and set it on fire.
Speaker 2: That is the right wing account of the story, and
Speaker 2: I don't care. Nothing has ever changed about anarchists, right totally.
Speaker 2: The police fired into the crowd and killed either four
Speaker 2: or five people, I've read both, and the city pours
Speaker 2: into the street for the funerals for these workers. For
Speaker 2: the anarchist one, they call a general strike, and all
Speaker 2: the workers in the city are like, yeah, obviously, we're
Speaker 2: not going to fucking work for capitalist focks who fucking murder. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: this is the most complete general strike in all the
Speaker 2: general strikes of Argentina's history up to this point. I
Speaker 2: don't know as much about I never people are like,
Speaker 2: what's your opinion on twenty first century politics? And I'm like,
Speaker 2: I don't know. Everyone should do what they want because
Speaker 2: I don't know, because I read history books all day,
Speaker 2: because I've made good decisions of my life. So they
Speaker 2: kind of take over Buenos Aires. Barricades fly up and
Speaker 2: for a brief moment the city is in the hands
Speaker 2: of its workers, and no one doubted that it was
Speaker 2: a revolutionary moment on each side. So the ostensible liberal
Speaker 2: government is like, we don't want a revolutionary moment. So
Speaker 2: they just worked with the far right immediately hand in
Speaker 2: hand to well, it's called the Bloody Week. Wherever in
Speaker 2: history you've got labor unions, it's not just the government
Speaker 2: doing the repression. It's right wing goon squads of like civilians. Right,
Speaker 2: we've got the patriot We've got Patriot Front and the
Speaker 2: Proud Boys. Argentina nineteen had Lega Patriotica, the Patriotic League.
Speaker 2: This was an upper class militia supported by the military,
Speaker 2: like directly supported a real admiral personally, and they did
Speaker 2: a program. They went into the Jewish quarter and they
Speaker 2: raped and murdered, They burned books, they burned houses, They
Speaker 2: did a bunch of really specific, humiliating and bad things.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to repeat on this show. They also
Speaker 2: joined the cops in the military and the rest of
Speaker 2: the city fighting against the workers, which is these are
Speaker 2: mixed up, right, because the Jews are workers too, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but it was a specific anti Semitic attack. With the
Speaker 2: government's approval, they did a program. And I'm actually kind
Speaker 2: of mad at a lot of the anarchist history about this.
Speaker 2: When you talk when you read that Tragic Week from
Speaker 2: a lot of the like mid nineteenth century sorry, mid
Speaker 2: twentieth century history books about it, they don't mention the
Speaker 2: anti semitism of the program, and that's fucked up. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this was the first time I'd heard of it, and
Speaker 2: I'd read a few things about it. Yeah. They However,
Speaker 2: the main source of history outside of that, if you
Speaker 2: want to learn about the Tragic Week, is from folks
Speaker 2: who fight anti Semitism, who've referred to this as Argentine's
Speaker 2: first program. It wasn't just the right wing focks who
Speaker 2: were doing this. The liberal government arrested one of the
Speaker 2: heads of the Jewish Labor Bund and tortured him and
Speaker 2: forced him to like confess his Bolshevik plans of evil,
Speaker 2: where the Jews were going to take over Argentina in
Speaker 2: the New Russian Revolution or whatever. His wife was arrested
Speaker 2: and her charges were, as best as I can tell,
Speaker 2: her charges were being the fiance of the future president
Speaker 2: of the local Soviet, having too many books, and being Russian. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the only thing that kept Buenos Aires from becoming
Speaker 2: a worker run horizontal society in nineteen nineteen was the
Speaker 2: raw and brutal mass murder and arrest one that used
Speaker 2: the oldest trick in the book Anti Semitism to rile
Speaker 2: people up for reactionary violence. Program was called La Casa
Speaker 2: delos Rosos the Hunting of the Russians, and this is
Speaker 2: the birth of the nationalist movement that later takes power.
Speaker 2: What Argentine is like way more famous for I wish
Speaker 2: Argentina was more famous for having one of the most
Speaker 2: kicks anarchist, fucking movements in the history of the world.
Speaker 2: The death toll from this week was estimated by conservatives
Speaker 2: at one hundred and forty one. It was estimated at
Speaker 2: seven hundred by the leftists. The US Embassy says fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred people. Most historians seem to stick around seven hundred
Speaker 2: unless you look at like specifically right wing stuff. I
Speaker 2: don't know why the US embassy overestimated over everyone else.
Speaker 2: They do that a lot, okay, And I don't know
Speaker 2: because this is the thing. I've ran into this randomly
Speaker 2: with like a lot of other things where the American
Speaker 2: numbers will just randomly be high and I don't know
Speaker 2: what's going on. They might just be incompetent. Because this
Speaker 2: is the everything's bigger and sid exists, it's death toll. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was like this period from like here is you
Speaker 2: like the end of the forties is a thing where
Speaker 2: you get very weird numbers from the Americans for reasons.
Speaker 2: I died, who knows, I know, run by cowboys, like yeah,
Speaker 2: and there's like I'm sure the Americans had some specific
Speaker 2: plan that's like outside the scope of what I was
Speaker 2: able to research, you know. Yeah, Okay, So about seven
Speaker 2: hundred people were killed, almost all of them workers. The
Speaker 2: couple cops were killed. Most of the workers who were
Speaker 2: killed were Jewish, and a lot of the people who
Speaker 2: were killed who were Jewish were not necessarily leftists. Also,
Speaker 2: over fifty thousand people were arrested during this week. Argentina.
Speaker 2: During this time period, it's not a populous country. There
Speaker 2: were about eight million people in the country total. I
Speaker 2: couldn't figure out the population of Buenos Aires at the time,
Speaker 2: but fifty thousand people is a fucking army. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I've been in some mass arrests. They were in order
Speaker 2: of magnitude two orders of magnitude lower than that, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like the thing I was thinking was like my immediate
Speaker 2: thing for like, Okay, how large is the mass arrest
Speaker 2: was there was an arrest of like a I think
Speaker 2: like a pretty similar size number of people get arrested,
Speaker 2: like the end of the seventies in Italy, ok because
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of stuff, like anarchist stuff going on
Speaker 2: there too, and they arrest a similar number of people,
Speaker 2: but Italy has like like Italy has like fifty million people.
Speaker 2: Yeah at that point. Yeah, so it's like it's like
Speaker 2: the equivalent yeah yeah, yeah. Like so they just arrest
Speaker 2: Buenos Aires is what they do. Yeah. And for decades
Speaker 2: the government held the position that they had averted a
Speaker 2: Bolshevik anarchist takeover by killing all these people. And at
Speaker 2: first that was like Bolshevik anarchists takeover, and then I'm like,
Speaker 2: well that early on in the Bolshevik Revolution, okay, whatever,
Speaker 2: those those two sides were on the same side for
Speaker 2: a little while. But yeah, they they were like, we
Speaker 2: saved the country from communism, and I mean whatever. It
Speaker 2: didn't help that the Catholic Church had been spent decades
Speaker 2: spreading anti Semitic propaganda in the country, including writing it
Speaker 2: directly into the textbooks for schools. Oh, which is funny
Speaker 2: because the Catholic the Catholic Church's books were like, Jews
Speaker 2: are all usurers and money lenders, right, and then the
Speaker 2: Catholic street preachers were like, all the Jews are bad
Speaker 2: because they're all Bolsheviks. Because you can't fucking win. You're
Speaker 2: either an anti capitalist or a capitalist. You're a Schrodinger's capital.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's bad. It anti Semitism is bad.
Speaker 2: Of course, the one hundred and fifty thousand Jews in
Speaker 2: Argentina at that time were all over the map politically
Speaker 2: because they were people, and people famously all over the
Speaker 2: map politically. There were even a bunch of you agree
Speaker 2: with each other, Yeah, there were a bunch who after
Speaker 2: this joined lega Patriotica like, and all the other Jews
Speaker 2: were like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: every other part of the political spectrum was like you're
Speaker 2: you're dead to us, right yeah, anyway, uh, In case
Speaker 2: you're wondering this tragic week which was really bad, surely
Speaker 2: all the weird propaganda about that's over now, right, oh god?
Speaker 2: Enter English language Wikipedia article about tragic weeks. Ooh oh no,
Speaker 2: it is all the workers had it coming, and it
Speaker 2: like lists all the like the anarchists must have been,
Speaker 2: must be stopped. You know, it is completely useless as
Speaker 2: a source. Some of my favorite lines include quote A
Speaker 2: company of the seventh Infantry Regiment is forced to use
Speaker 2: their Vickers machine guns in order to keep demonstrators at
Speaker 2: bay and buenous eires. They were forced machine gun a crowd.
Speaker 1: Ooh.
Speaker 2: And also as the toll of dead and wounded amount
Speaker 2: to the mobs became more frantic and destructive, No shit,
Speaker 2: you killed all my friends. I'm gonna get angrier.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is one of those things where you know, looking
Speaker 2: at like, okay, this is this is the liberal government
Speaker 2: doing this, And you get to this point where it
Speaker 2: becomes incredibly clear that, like beneath everything else, these people
Speaker 2: have exactly one political principle, and that political principle is
Speaker 2: that capitalist should own factories you should have to work
Speaker 2: in them totally, And you know they will start writing
Speaker 2: about like like they will start doing justifications of people
Speaker 2: like machine gunning workers in the streets. They will start
Speaker 2: doing programs they will like yeh literally anything. Yeah, like
Speaker 2: you know, we're regardless of what they're sort of previous
Speaker 2: political principles where everything just flies out the window of
Speaker 2: the moment. Anyone is like, hey, maybe like we should
Speaker 2: have the factories the people who work in them instead
Speaker 2: of the people who own them. Yeah, totally, we might
Speaker 2: do a better job. The economy would literally go up.
Speaker 2: And people are like, yeah, but I have like one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand acres and I want to keep it. So
Speaker 2: I know, I said I was center left, but these
Speaker 2: far right guys will just go kill you because of
Speaker 2: your ethnicity, and I get to keep my factory. That's
Speaker 2: the tragic clink, and it sucks, and it it lays
Speaker 2: down the groundwork for what's to come when the rebellion
Speaker 2: goes rural off to the steps, where we get to
Speaker 2: see even more wildly interesting folks do wildly interesting things,
Speaker 2: which we'll talk about next week. H The Fanger Part three.
Speaker 2: Even the cliff, You're still hanging from it. I know
Speaker 2: you think you've gotten off, but no, still there's still
Speaker 2: more cliff. I'm just sitting there with the two by
Speaker 2: four like that meme where of the actors like, ah,
Speaker 2: fuck you no, wait, no, I want people hanging on
Speaker 2: the cliff. I don't want to drop into the rocks below.
Speaker 2: Never mind. What is the metaphor of cliffhangers? Weird? Oh,
Speaker 2: it's because at the end of that, right, if I
Speaker 2: was like, and then he's hanging on a cliff. Will
Speaker 2: he survive? That's the traditional. Well, during the Tragic Weeks,
Speaker 2: Simon Radowitsky broke out of prison and was literally hanging
Speaker 2: from a cliff. Will he survive? We will find out
Speaker 2: next week on cool people who did cool stuff. But
Speaker 2: what we'll find out first is more about you and
Speaker 2: your podcast or anything else that you feel like plugging.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah I do. I do have another podcast
Speaker 2: that I'm mostly doing. It's called It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 2: It's about stuff that happens here, you know I really
Speaker 2: need in the broader sense. Yeah, I mean sometimes it
Speaker 2: is about similar stuff to this too. But yeah, you
Speaker 2: can find us wherever there are podcasts, you can find
Speaker 2: us that happen here a Twitter Instagram. I realize I've
Speaker 2: never actually plugged the thing where there's an Apple podcast
Speaker 2: thing or if we don't want to listen to ads,
Speaker 2: you can get that in the cooler zone. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you can do that cool zone media. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: hear Reagan coins anymore. Yeah, that's what I got. Other
Speaker 2: than I guess I fear the hour of the machine
Speaker 2: gun that comes when you and your bosses have a
Speaker 2: disagreement about who should control factories. Yeah, they did lout
Speaker 2: a bunch of sports stores to get guns at the
Speaker 2: very beginning of it all. That's like part of the
Speaker 2: justification too, Right, what do I have to plug? I
Speaker 2: want to plug that in any conflict between an oppressed
Speaker 2: and oppressor, it is important to understand which side is
Speaker 2: the oppressed and understand their actions through that lens. And yes,
Speaker 2: I'm not even vaguely talking about the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about it explicitly because it is harder and
Speaker 2: harder to talk about that explicitly. And I want to
Speaker 2: say that explicitly, and I want to say that you
Speaker 2: do not have to condone and you can even condemn
Speaker 2: the actions some specific actions by oppressed people without dropping
Speaker 2: support for pressed people who are fighting for freedom, and
Speaker 2: specifically if you are in a place that is safe
Speaker 2: and you can financially can there's a lot of different
Speaker 2: charities that specifically work for the people who are being
Speaker 2: even further dispossessed within the gaza strip. And you know,
Speaker 2: like literally just getting food to children, and that is
Speaker 2: a fundamentally good thing to do, regardless of anything else.
Speaker 2: Is that the literal point of children is that they
Speaker 2: are innocent and need to be fed. So I would
Speaker 2: direct anyone who cares about this kind of stuff. I
Speaker 2: just kind of wanted to say that explicitly in case
Speaker 2: anyone there's like some confusion on the left about which
Speaker 2: side is the oppressed and which side is the oppressor,
Speaker 2: and that is an incorrect confusion to have. And if
Speaker 2: you want to listen more about that, you can listen
Speaker 2: to content from this network that Sharen does on MIA's podcast.
Speaker 2: It could happen here. That's what I want to plug.
Speaker 2: So if you what you got, cool nothing, see y'all
Speaker 2: next week. By Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Speaker 2: is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.