Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff,
Speaker 2: your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's good things,
Speaker 2: like the rainbow after the storm, only in this case,
Speaker 2: it's more like the rainbow before the storm that's usually
Speaker 2: destroyed by the storm, like in this week's episode where
Speaker 2: everything is going to end terribly. But you all kind
Speaker 2: of knew that.
Speaker 1: Great, you couldn't have lied just like once.
Speaker 2: Okay, sorry, I could be the birds before the storm,
Speaker 2: how about that?
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the name of my website that's broken
Speaker 2: because it got hacked a while ago and I haven't
Speaker 2: fixed it yet.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Our guest today is Mia Himya.
Speaker 1: Hello.
Speaker 3: You know I was thinking about because I sort of
Speaker 3: know how this story ends, and I think the very
Speaker 3: very long range ending of this story is that the
Speaker 3: original President Bush throws up on the Prime Minister of
Speaker 3: Japan and that's the revenge that we get for this. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I think you're going to know more about parts
Speaker 3: of this than me, and I'm very very excited for that.
Speaker 2: As you might have guessed, Mia already knows the subject
Speaker 2: and that's a deviation from tradition, but we thought it
Speaker 2: was best and by that I mean I needed to
Speaker 2: nerd out while I was researching this because it took
Speaker 2: me so long to research this. I spent so much
Speaker 2: time researching this, and I needed to nerd out at
Speaker 2: least a little bit. The other voice you're hearing is Sophie,
Speaker 2: our producer, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Hi, mac Pie Himya.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 2: For those who don't know Mia Wong's work, Mia is
Speaker 2: one of the hosts of It Could Happen Here, and
Speaker 2: you can listen to her talk about things on that
Speaker 2: daily podcast. And oh, I almost forgot. Our audio engineers
Speaker 2: Rory Hi, Rory, Hi, Ri Hi Rory, and our theme
Speaker 2: music was written for us by n Woman. This week
Speaker 2: and next is a four parter. We're going to be
Speaker 2: diving into a subject I've wanted to know more about
Speaker 2: four years. This is one of the main things that
Speaker 2: I was like, one day I'm going to cover on
Speaker 2: this show. Verry first started Korean anarchism, specifically Korean anarchism
Speaker 2: before World War two, so Korean anarchism while Korea was
Speaker 2: a Japanese colony, and specifically me, I'm gonna present this
Speaker 2: as if you've no idea what I'm talking about, but
Speaker 2: you know more about what I'm talking about than almost
Speaker 2: anyone in North America.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure I go that far, but it's definitely
Speaker 3: above average for anarchists. I guess.
Speaker 2: There's this rumor that floats around that is trueish, and
Speaker 2: I'm curious where you land on it being true as
Speaker 2: is presented when people list off the examples of anarchist
Speaker 2: societies that got off the ground in the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: they talk about two of the ones that we've covered
Speaker 2: on this podcast. They talk about Eastern Spain from nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty six to nineteen thirty nine or so during the
Speaker 2: Spanish Civil War, And they talk about a good chunk
Speaker 2: of Ukraine from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one, the
Speaker 2: sort of Makno controlled area of Ukraine during the Russian
Speaker 2: Civil War, sometimes almost in whispers, not because they're like
Speaker 2: afraid they're going to get in trouble for saying it,
Speaker 2: but because they're not sure if they're right about what
Speaker 2: they're talking about. People talk about the Korean People's Association
Speaker 2: of Manchuria, which ran from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one.
Speaker 3: And I've known the.
Speaker 2: Cliff notes version of this story for a very long
Speaker 2: time now, and I've always wanted to know more. This
Speaker 2: is the I wasn't just like I need to do
Speaker 2: Korean anarchism, although that was true, but it was specifically
Speaker 2: I need to do the Korean People's Association of Manchuria.
Speaker 2: Do you hear people talking about this much? I know
Speaker 2: this isn't like what people normally talk about at parties,
Speaker 2: except when they want.
Speaker 3: Everyone else to leave them alone. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 3: think it kind of in the last I don't know,
Speaker 3: half a decade, kind of got added to the canon
Speaker 3: of like the Big the Big three anarchist revolutions. Although
Speaker 3: it's one of these weird things where the place it
Speaker 3: pops up the most is you'll get a few paragraphs,
Speaker 3: maybe a couple of pages about it in a book
Speaker 3: that's about like here anarchist movements in every country, and
Speaker 3: it gets it usually has like a similar length of
Speaker 3: material to like, I don't know, like Chile or something,
Speaker 3: or Brazil or like write sometimes Bolivia. If you're dealing
Speaker 3: with a really in depth one, it doesn't. It very
Speaker 3: rarely gets really really long and systemic treatments. I think
Speaker 3: because and I think, yeah, you've run into this. The
Speaker 3: sourcing on it is so hard, yes, because I mean,
Speaker 3: we're gonna get into this, but like it's it's you're
Speaker 3: dealing with sources that would have to be in three
Speaker 3: languages because I'm technically multiple Chinese, multiple Chinese dialects, Japanese
Speaker 3: and Korean in sort of like and English so I
Speaker 3: can read it. Yeah, yeah, that has to be found.
Speaker 3: You have to get this into English. And it's in
Speaker 3: this sort of like shatter point of all of these
Speaker 3: different sort of empires, and it's and the main book
Speaker 3: on it is really unreadable. I the first time I
Speaker 3: ran into this was so, this is this is this
Speaker 3: is my mea origin theory, origin of story. So like
Speaker 3: I had like kind of been doing anarchisty stuff before
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen, but in twenty seventeen, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: things are really bad. I'm going to go sit down
Speaker 3: and read a bunch of theory. Yeah, and I was
Speaker 3: in college. I love that for you. That's not the
Speaker 3: way my brain works, but I love that for you. No.
Speaker 3: I so like, I like checked out a bunch of
Speaker 3: books and anarchism like my So this is the University
Speaker 3: of Chicago Library. They apparently have an autographed copy of
Speaker 3: krop Hopkin's Conquest of Bread. Holy She was like yeah.
Speaker 3: I was like wow. But they had a bunch of
Speaker 3: books and I picked out the ones. That I remember
Speaker 3: was that I don't think I checked out that one
Speaker 3: because I was like, this is I should not be
Speaker 3: taking this out of the stacks, like this is they
Speaker 3: should just stay here. But uh, yeah, I picked it
Speaker 3: was it was a book on It was like one
Speaker 3: of the books I'm assuming it's one of the sources
Speaker 3: for this. It was like one of the books on
Speaker 3: Korean anarchism, and then how to Shoozo and Purre Anarchism
Speaker 3: into Ward Japan, which is much more readable and much
Speaker 3: more fun. And that's the one that like took me.
Speaker 3: But the Korean anarchism what I was like, Oh no,
Speaker 3: this is so.
Speaker 2: Impenetrable, we're actually gonna I actually added because of exactly
Speaker 2: what you're talking about. I really like this way of
Speaker 2: phrasing it, that it's in the shatter zone. Because of
Speaker 2: how complicated the historiography of this is, I added a
Speaker 2: little histiography section. Even though I don't know how to
Speaker 2: pronounce that word. I still added the section. And that
Speaker 2: didn't occur to me until just now that I don't
Speaker 2: know how to produce it. So for people who are
Speaker 2: listening who are like, what the fuck are these ladies
Speaker 2: talking about, the cliff notes version is that there were
Speaker 2: about two million Korean people living in Manchuria, which is
Speaker 2: the region of China immediately north of the Korean Peninsula
Speaker 2: at the end of the nineteen twenties. They were living
Speaker 2: there because they'd been forced into exile by the harsh
Speaker 2: Japanese occupation of Korea, and some chunk of them lived
Speaker 2: under explicitly anarchistic values because they were like, fuck, how
Speaker 2: do we organize ourselves so we don't starve but also
Speaker 2: can fight off Japanese imperialists? And the people who offered
Speaker 2: a decent idea of how to do that were a
Speaker 2: bunch of anarchists, veterans of the anti imperialist gorilla struggle.
Speaker 2: This formation, this non state is still the cliff Notes
Speaker 2: version it lasted about. This is about as much as
Speaker 2: you get in the average treatment of it, right, And
Speaker 2: this is like mostly what I knew and mostly what
Speaker 2: people knew about it, because I'm somehow representative of everybody.
Speaker 2: Everyone knows about the Korean People Association of Manchuria just anyway,
Speaker 2: I know who some pop stars are. Chap ol' ron
Speaker 2: was in a nights uniform on TV and multiple people
Speaker 2: send it to me. I know pop culture anyway, who
Speaker 2: is she she? I know a little bit about her
Speaker 2: because like some of my friends are, you know, queer
Speaker 2: sex workers. So they made sure I knew about this
Speaker 2: a long time ago because that Ping Pony Club song,
Speaker 2: so I know slightly more about her. I know she's queer,
Speaker 2: and she wrote Ping Pony Club and she sounds like
Speaker 2: modern Kate Bush, and I like it.
Speaker 3: That's what I got. That's about all I know.
Speaker 1: It's a great analysis.
Speaker 3: You did it, okay.
Speaker 2: But the Korean People's Association of Manchuria, I know about
Speaker 2: ten thousand words of most of it's how it happened.
Speaker 2: This non state lasted about two years, but Japanese imperial
Speaker 2: forces kept assassinating their leaders, and the Communist Party of
Speaker 2: China also kept assassinating their leaders, and the project fell
Speaker 2: apart and Japan conquered Manchuria, which means that once again
Speaker 2: a large scale anarchist or anarchistic project fell apart because
Speaker 2: of the combined forces of reaction the imperialist Japan and
Speaker 2: authoritarian communism both used violence to stop them. It happened
Speaker 2: in Ukraine, it happened in Spain, and it happened in
Speaker 2: between those two in Manchuria. So how did a bunch
Speaker 2: of Korean peasants living in exile wind up living as anarchists?
Speaker 2: How did that go for them?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: This weekend next we're going to try and answer that question,
Speaker 2: and frustratingly, we're not going to completely succeed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's funny. The closest I've ever gotten
Speaker 3: to like a first hand account of this was a
Speaker 3: I sort of knew someone who's like grandma had been
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, that's cool.
Speaker 3: But the ideology is so weird. Yeah, it's so deeply weird.
Speaker 3: There's also and I think there's something we're gonna get
Speaker 3: you too, is it's also deeply sort of connected to
Speaker 3: Korean nationalist movements because this is because this is an
Speaker 3: anti imperialist movement, and it there's some frankly baffling ideological
Speaker 3: stuff that happens here that you couldn't get into.
Speaker 2: And I suspect that there was not anywhere near a
Speaker 2: real consensus about what that ideology meant. There was like
Speaker 2: practical ideas This wasn't just like, oh, you know, if
Speaker 2: you're listening to this is for the very first time,
Speaker 2: you have no idea what talking about. When we say anarchism,
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about being like there wasn't a government.
Speaker 2: Everymber just kind of did stuff like it was a
Speaker 2: system that was created that was an attempt at a
Speaker 2: bottom up structure where like people's councils got together in villages,
Speaker 2: passed delegates up to higher levels and made decisions collectively
Speaker 2: and built a ton of schools and trained militarily and
Speaker 2: fought against the imperialism of Japan. But beyond like those ideas, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: the people all over the place in terms of what
Speaker 2: people like really thought what was going on? You know,
Speaker 2: in a weird way, it's like sort of the most
Speaker 2: anarchic of all of the anarchists struggles I've read about
Speaker 2: in that it's like in the almost like negative sense,
Speaker 2: not the negative sense, but the like complicated, messy, multi
Speaker 2: ideo logical sense. Anyway, along the way, what we learn
Speaker 2: about this imperfectly, we're going to learn a fun time
Speaker 2: about Korean in Japanese and Chinese politics. And when I
Speaker 2: say we, I mean I guess you the audience. I
Speaker 2: learned it all while reading this stuff. And we're going
Speaker 2: to learn about anti colonial struggle, and we're going to
Speaker 2: learn about a whole bunch of groups with really cool names.
Speaker 2: They're all like called like the Black Friends Society and.
Speaker 3: Those like so good.
Speaker 2: They're all these like friends societies. It's really it's really sweet,
Speaker 2: and all those grips are going to come and go
Speaker 2: because of oppression. So come with me if you will.
Speaker 2: On Korean anarchism. This is my working title, anti colonial,
Speaker 2: anti authoritarian, and awesome because I need another a word.
Speaker 3: I love it. This is great, ten thousand, this is this. Okay,
Speaker 3: I gotta go behind the scenes for a second. The
Speaker 3: apps people think that the hardest part of writing an
Speaker 3: episode is doing research, and they are wrong. It is not.
Speaker 3: It's not the actual podcasting itself. The single hardest part
Speaker 3: is writing the title of description.
Speaker 1: To me, is the show you work on perhaps daily?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm believably difficult. Oh my god, it's so annoying.
Speaker 3: You've written so many titles.
Speaker 1: If we could just call the episode episode and then
Speaker 1: like fifty two.
Speaker 2: Or whatever, Oh yeah, it'd be more like five seven
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty four or something. At this point, probably,
Speaker 2: but well, yeah.
Speaker 3: I gotta say I remember when I uh, oh my god,
Speaker 3: I'm blinking. His name, Zack Snyder.
Speaker 2: That one the director I don't know names.
Speaker 3: Sophie helped me here. I can't remember which one's Timothy
Speaker 3: Snyder's the historian, Zack Snyder is the director d Snyder.
Speaker 3: I know that one.
Speaker 1: Zack Snyder's the filmmaker.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, he released a movie called Rebel Mood Part
Speaker 3: two Scargiver, and it made me feel so much better
Speaker 3: about myself because, like, so many people got paid so
Speaker 3: much money to come up with the title for that movie,
Speaker 3: and they came up with that, and I had just
Speaker 3: come up with an episode, the title of which was
Speaker 3: The Cheapest Land Is Bought in Blood, and I was like,
Speaker 3: I'm so good at this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I would watch a movie called The Cheapest
Speaker 2: Land Is Bought in Blood. It could be almost any
Speaker 2: of the episodes I've done with the shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that one was a Palis side episode for I
Speaker 2: think obvious reasons. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: so histy or factal section, Wow, historiographical section, historiographical section,
Speaker 2: how about that? Historiographical? Does that sound right?
Speaker 3: I think it's historiography.
Speaker 2: I think, I figure, okay, historiography if I get enough
Speaker 2: of the English words wrong. Then the fact that I
Speaker 2: looked up basically every Korean name in this and not
Speaker 2: all of them could I find pronunciations for.
Speaker 3: I am so sorry. I can I help it all
Speaker 3: about this? I know no Korean. It's okay. So it's okay,
Speaker 3: completely useless here, I'm apologizing to Koreate advance.
Speaker 2: I looked them up, and also all of them are
Speaker 2: being transliterated in different ways in different sources. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: I want to do this thing that might become a
Speaker 2: regular segment on the show. Maybe you'll end up at
Speaker 2: the end, maybe you'll end up at the beginning. For
Speaker 2: right now, because of this particular complicated story, it's here
Speaker 2: at the beginning. History is, of course, the study of history. Historiography,
Speaker 2: however it's pronounced, is the study of studying history. By
Speaker 2: the way, if you're one of the fifteen people who's
Speaker 2: currently opening up a messaging app to tell me how
Speaker 2: to pronounce it, I don't care. I don't want you
Speaker 2: to tell me.
Speaker 1: I also don't care. Yeah, they don't care.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Historiography is studying history. It's how we talk about history,
Speaker 2: and I want to start talking a bit more explicitly
Speaker 2: about how people talk about what they talk about, because
Speaker 2: this is one of the things that bothers me about
Speaker 2: my own genre of pop history, right because I'm a
Speaker 2: pop historian. You know, I'm not a historian. I don't
Speaker 2: do the research. I look at the research. I look
Speaker 2: at second hand sources primarily. You know. One of the
Speaker 2: things that bothers me is that it's like really easy
Speaker 2: to create these sort of like here's a fun story
Speaker 2: that's like completely uncomplicated, because that's like the easier way
Speaker 2: to get yeah, clicks or whatever you call downloads, I
Speaker 2: don't know whatever, listeners. I am constantly trying to piece
Speaker 2: together stories that are a bit hard to piece together.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the stories are hard to piece together because they're
Speaker 2: so widely known that they're sort of mythologized and misrepresented
Speaker 2: and there's just like a million little like listical articles
Speaker 2: about them or whatever. Sometimes stories are hard to piece
Speaker 2: together because they're obscure as fuck and people involved didn't
Speaker 2: take notes because they were all criminals. This story is
Speaker 2: somehow hard for both reasons. Because Korea is one of
Speaker 2: the few countries in the world that simply cannot hide
Speaker 2: from its anarchist past. Instead, its anarchist heroes have become
Speaker 2: national heroes, and those people's anarchism is a quirky side note,
Speaker 2: or it is wrapped up in the national flag. You'll
Speaker 2: see this some in Mexico and Ukraine and Spain, and
Speaker 2: I've also seen it in Argentina, and I suspect there's
Speaker 2: some other countries that kind of can't get away from it,
Speaker 2: so they have to figure out how to cope with
Speaker 2: the fact that they're like, yeah, you know, heroes were anarchists.
Speaker 2: In Korea, it's extra complicated because of what me had
Speaker 2: talked about a good number of the anti colonial heroes
Speaker 2: of Korea were anarchists. And sometimes that anarchism has talked
Speaker 2: about and sometimes it isn't. But Korean anarchism, because it
Speaker 2: was built on an anti colonial movement, has a nationalistic
Speaker 2: character that you don't find elsewhere.
Speaker 3: I mean you do.
Speaker 2: You find different versions of it elsewhere, right, But it's
Speaker 2: different everywhere because it's different nations. That's part of nationalism.
Speaker 2: I read a lot of long and short essays and
Speaker 2: most of a book for this episode. I stopped the
Speaker 2: book once I got well passed where it was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, once I got past World.
Speaker 2: War Two, I was like, that's not what I'm covering
Speaker 2: right now. You know, I still haven't read everything I
Speaker 2: can about the Mancharian Anarchist Project because most of the
Speaker 2: things that talk about this era aren't talking about the
Speaker 2: anarchist project. They're talking about Korean independence separately, or they
Speaker 2: like write in the other major characters of the twentieth
Speaker 2: century instead. You know, basically, more work needs to be
Speaker 2: done to make available in English information about the Korean
Speaker 2: People's Association of Manchuria, and I would have needed half
Speaker 2: a year instead of the two weeks I got in
Speaker 2: order to like really break like do historian work instead
Speaker 2: of what I do. But don't worry. I still think
Speaker 2: these episodes are going to be really good and we're
Speaker 2: going to learn a ton, and I'm just expressing upfront
Speaker 2: there's more work to be done. Some of the sources
Speaker 2: I used the History of the Korean Anarchist Movement by
Speaker 2: Hockey Rock, which was written in nineteen eighty six by
Speaker 2: Korean anarchist who's part of Korean Anarchist Federation. This was
Speaker 2: the kind of first English language thing. It's been suggested
Speaker 2: by other sources that this has a bias towards nationalist
Speaker 2: and a more reformist look at anarchism, because Korean anarchism
Speaker 2: has a different character than it does in most places,
Speaker 2: and it has more both reformism and nationalism than it
Speaker 2: does elsewhere. Then there's the book that both me and
Speaker 2: I read called Anarchism in Korea by Dong Yon Huong,
Speaker 2: which was published in twenty sixteen, and in many ways
Speaker 2: it's a refutation of the nationalism presented by Hockey Rock.
Speaker 2: Neither of these are very accessibly written. I don't want
Speaker 2: to let go on at length because like, good on
Speaker 2: you historians, thank you for doing this work, but these
Speaker 2: are not written in ways that are entertaining.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's one of the hardest things I've ever tried
Speaker 3: to read, which is sort of wild considering how much
Speaker 3: stuff I got handed by way professors in college.
Speaker 2: And like, I felt so much better when you told
Speaker 2: me that, because it is the hardest book I've probably
Speaker 2: ever read for this show in terms of just like
Speaker 2: it's not particularly chronological, and it is making arguments about
Speaker 2: ideology that aren't directly relevant to It's very direct relevant
Speaker 2: to the subject matter, but it's not necessarily relevant to
Speaker 2: like conversations that I'm usually part of, you know, anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to go on about it. And then
Speaker 2: there's another source called The Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism by
Speaker 2: Michael Schmidt, which talks about the Korean People's Association more accessibly.
Speaker 2: Michael Schmidt is a disgraced author because he's this white
Speaker 2: South African guy who it turns out he went from
Speaker 2: anarchism to national anarchism to regular old nationalism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, real fiasco.
Speaker 2: And then okay, almost known of my sources, there's another
Speaker 2: summary available on libcom called Summary of the Symonym Prefecture.
Speaker 2: It's basically by anonymous. It's like by a Twitter handle
Speaker 2: that doesn't exist anymore, and it is, sadly mostly a summary.
Speaker 2: It is a summary of a book in Korean that
Speaker 2: I want to read, but I don't read Korean, which
Speaker 2: is not anyone in Korea's fault.
Speaker 3: It is my fault.
Speaker 2: I feel confident about what I'm going to tell you well,
Speaker 2: but I wish I could tell you even more because
Speaker 2: there's just so much here. There is as much history
Speaker 2: here as there is in Western Europe, and we just
Speaker 2: focus not on the wrong shit, but we just need
Speaker 2: to focus on more shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I have a thesis that I'm public going
Speaker 3: to do in like part four of this, which is
Speaker 3: that I actually think this event is really important to
Speaker 3: understanding the history of Japanese fascism. And I think the
Speaker 3: fact that everyone has forgotten about this whole incident is
Speaker 3: actually part of why all of the Western scholars who
Speaker 3: you read going like, ah, Japan wasn't fascist, it was
Speaker 3: just like anulter nationalist monarchy or whatever. I think that's
Speaker 3: part of why they screwed up, because this is the
Speaker 3: missing It's like one of the arguments that like fascism
Speaker 3: scholars make because fascism is a direct reaction to sort
Speaker 3: of like leftist revolutionary movements, right, And the thing in
Speaker 3: Japan is that there kind of wasn't one, right, and
Speaker 3: like on this scale of something like like the two
Speaker 3: Red Years in Italy were like anarchist neely took over
Speaker 3: the country. There isn't one, but there is. It's just
Speaker 3: that it was in Manchuria and not in Japan. And
Speaker 3: this has caused generations of fascism scholars like including like Paxton,
Speaker 3: whose work is usually pretty good, I think, to just
Speaker 3: fundamentally misunderstand what was happening in Japan. So this is
Speaker 3: my thesis I will present at the very very end
Speaker 3: of this whole thing. I'm excited to hear it.
Speaker 2: But you know what I'm even more excited to hear
Speaker 2: is it the products and services that support this podcast?
Speaker 3: I am.
Speaker 2: I'm just always so curious what will happen when I
Speaker 2: As soon as the little jingle music cuts in.
Speaker 3: Who knows back. So let's say about Korea.
Speaker 2: I'm going to speed run a little bit of Korea,
Speaker 2: although most of our story isn't going to take place
Speaker 2: in Korea.
Speaker 3: That's one of the things about Korean anarchism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the wild part of this. There's a place
Speaker 2: called Korea. Currently, quite famously, it is divided into sort
Speaker 2: of the easiest encapsulation of the Cold War left on
Speaker 2: the planet. The North, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
Speaker 2: is a communist hotalitarian society, and the South, the Republic
Speaker 2: of Korea, is a capitalist society, and they are in
Speaker 2: a Cold war still because both claim to be the
Speaker 2: rightful rulers of the entire peninsula. This division between North
Speaker 2: and South, I think it's really important for people to
Speaker 2: understand it's not fostered by like some deep ideological cultural
Speaker 2: split between North Korean people and South Korean people. The
Speaker 2: dividing line between the two countries, roughly the thirty eighth parallel,
Speaker 2: was just where the USSR and the USA decided to
Speaker 2: divide up their spoils after they drove the Japanese out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's kind of funny because it's like there
Speaker 3: are places in East Asia where it would have made
Speaker 3: sense for that to happen, Like if that had happened
Speaker 3: in China, it's like, well, yeah, okay, so like so
Speaker 3: then China endure. Then China have had you know, I
Speaker 3: mean different even different parts of it, but like I've
Speaker 3: had enormous sort of cultural and social problems with each
Speaker 3: other for like hundreds of years. But no, it happened
Speaker 3: to Korea, where like that's kind of not a thing.
Speaker 3: It's it's we got we got the most Like any
Speaker 3: division like that is obviously going to be arbitrary, but
Speaker 3: we got the most arbitrary one conceivable based on a
Speaker 3: bunch of imperialists being evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it didn't make it into my script, but I
Speaker 2: was listening to this. That's a bunch of history of
Speaker 2: Korea podcast just for the like broadest possible context. And
Speaker 2: one of them and I didn't write this down and
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, was like two random American guys just were like,
Speaker 2: oh no, what about that line? And people are like,
Speaker 2: that's it, that's the line that sucks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like eighty this is like eight how
Speaker 3: eighty percent of the border centers were drawn. Yeah, just
Speaker 3: totally some British guy, I guess this is technically would
Speaker 3: have been an American guy, but like, yeah, some some
Speaker 3: random English speaking dude wentz scribbled on a map and
Speaker 3: now there's like two rbs on either side of.
Speaker 2: The Korean Peninsula. People have been there for tens of
Speaker 2: thousands of years at least, and you've got the Three
Speaker 2: Kingdoms period starting at like fifty seven BC, and then
Speaker 2: by the end of the tenth century AD, you've got
Speaker 2: the dynasties kicking in that have unified the place. Most
Speaker 2: of these dynasties haven't been fully independent, but instead under
Speaker 2: the influence of the Mongol Empire and various Chinese dynasties,
Speaker 2: and Japan also like to invade a lot, so Korea
Speaker 2: seems to be like one of those. Like to use
Speaker 2: a European comparison, because I know more about the history
Speaker 2: of Finland coming into it.
Speaker 3: Like it's a Finland.
Speaker 2: It's a place that other places just trade back and
Speaker 2: forth and treat like shit, but then there's still a
Speaker 2: like culture and some Actually I think I had more
Speaker 2: home rule than Finland ever did. Anyway, the last of
Speaker 2: these dynasties was the Josian dynasty, which lasted for five
Speaker 2: hundred and five years, which, for those keeping track at home,
Speaker 2: is more than two ussays and more than one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty five confederacies.
Speaker 3: I think that's such a long dynasty. Like, I think
Speaker 3: that's way longer for any of the Chinese dynasties. I'm
Speaker 3: pretty sure. Unless I'm really screwing up my Chinese dynasty history,
Speaker 3: I think it's like twice as long as any of
Speaker 3: though maybe more.
Speaker 2: That's impressive. It's a really long time. It is the
Speaker 2: longest I've ever read about at anywhere. But I haven't
Speaker 2: read a ton of it, right, but I do. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I don't know history, and I'm like, okay, I do.
Speaker 2: I read more history books than the average person, and
Speaker 2: I want to replaced which I didn't write down the
Speaker 2: name and I'm very sorry. Also lasted for almost five
Speaker 2: hundred years, like cheese. Like, so when this one fell,
Speaker 2: people were like they didn't see it coming because they're like, nah,
Speaker 2: it's just there. That's just like the fucking like, that's
Speaker 2: as long as white people have been in North America,
Speaker 2: you know, Like, yeah, it's wild. Yeah, when power would
Speaker 2: change hands between these dynasties, it's always got it bad.
Speaker 2: The Josian dynasty sometimes called the Lee dynasty. If you're
Speaker 2: reading some sources and get confused, like I did, that's
Speaker 2: because it's referred to by different names by different sources,
Speaker 2: but it's the same thing. The Josian Dynasty use neo
Speaker 2: confusion ideology to rob the shit out of the working class, which,
Speaker 2: in this case, since it's an agricultural society, is the peasants.
Speaker 2: People were paying more than half their yield and taxes,
Speaker 2: while officials paid no taxes at all. This is totally
Speaker 2: not familiar to the modern reader. I don't know what
Speaker 2: you're talking about. Yeah, a cast system was introduced. Taxes
Speaker 2: were so bad that a lot of people abandoned their
Speaker 2: land entirely to become drifters. Lots of people either became rebels,
Speaker 2: or robbers, and I'm willing to bet the line between
Speaker 2: these two things was not clearcut. So the Josian dynasty
Speaker 2: was not like a happy great time, and therefore that
Speaker 2: makes the colonization and imperialization of it totally justified, says
Speaker 2: some people that you can still read writing today. God,
Speaker 2: when I talk to you about how I was going
Speaker 2: to do this episode, you said a thing to me.
Speaker 2: You said, Oh, I'm excited I'm finally going to learn
Speaker 2: about Korean anarchism before nineteen twenty. Well, yes and no,
Speaker 2: because I'm going to talk about some of the precursors
Speaker 2: to anarchism in Korea that have been marked by modern
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists as precursors. Our main subject is the anarchist
Speaker 2: movement in Korea, and the Korean anarchist historian Hockey Rack
Speaker 2: presents a sort of interesting precedent to it, one that
Speaker 2: got all the more interesting once you look at the
Speaker 2: larger context around it. This precursor is strictly ideological, but
Speaker 2: I love how basically anarchist communism has come up as
Speaker 2: an ideological concept over and over again all throughout history.
Speaker 2: You can read about whether it's the diggers or whether
Speaker 2: it's like Siberian peasants or like just over and over again,
Speaker 2: especially in religious movements actually, because that's just kind of
Speaker 2: what philosophy was called. That in the day more or
Speaker 2: less you find people being like, what if anarchist communism,
Speaker 2: They just don't have those words.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a really famous one in China called the
Speaker 3: Movement of the Tillers, where there's a lot of dispute
Speaker 3: over what they believed because.
Speaker 2: Because everyone wants to claim him, well, because because all
Speaker 2: of their actual direct writing was immediately destroyed when Hambudi
Speaker 2: took power, because he except for their agricultural manuals, which
Speaker 2: were so good that like the empire like just kept
Speaker 2: using them.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of dispute over exactly what they believed.
Speaker 3: But there's a version of it where it's like they're
Speaker 3: basically an anarchist society, but they have one guy who's
Speaker 3: a king, but he's just he doesn't do anything different.
Speaker 2: He's just also in the fields and they call him
Speaker 2: the king. Oh my god, this is just Tolkien. This
Speaker 2: is what Tolkien wants. Yeah, this is the future Tolkien wants.
Speaker 2: The the the In the Tolkien version, the king is
Speaker 2: supposed to handle politics. This guy, I think, is just
Speaker 2: supposed to be like yeah, it's it's almost war. It's
Speaker 2: it's almost more of like a chieftain thing where he's.
Speaker 3: Just like, yeah, okay, I'm going to convince it to
Speaker 3: go to the fields and waking up early and shaming everyone.
Speaker 3: It's going to work because you gotta get out.
Speaker 2: So the Sophie, they need a sophie. They need someone
Speaker 2: to actually get people to do the things. I need
Speaker 2: a Sophie. I'm glad I have one.
Speaker 3: Thank you me too. Thank you. So there was a
Speaker 3: man who his name is.
Speaker 2: A million names depends on which source you read, but
Speaker 2: overall his name is Dsan or Trung da Son or
Speaker 2: a bunch of other things.
Speaker 1: It's kind of my favorite man. When you're like, what's
Speaker 1: his name, we don't know.
Speaker 2: He's great. Yeah, he has a lot of fucking names,
Speaker 2: and I mean what it is is that he has
Speaker 2: like names that are transliterated in different ways. And then
Speaker 2: he also has an art name, which is Dasan, which
Speaker 2: is like mono name.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's a man with a personality in hobbies. Yeah extinct.
Speaker 4: The song was his art name, which is a phrase
Speaker 4: that I run across all the time he is extinct
Speaker 4: this particular one as well.
Speaker 3: I think I wounded.
Speaker 2: If this is a pop culture reference that's gone over
Speaker 2: my head, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Okay, cool a joke that I don't think you heard
Speaker 3: me say.
Speaker 2: Okay, he was born in seventeen sixty two, so now
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to figure what that sho'd ask what
Speaker 2: the joke is. No, it'd be funnier if I don't know.
Speaker 2: Okay to the audience, he was born in seventeen sixty two,
Speaker 2: so like a long ass time ago. He was this
Speaker 2: sort of super famous and influential philosopher and poet, and
Speaker 2: he was an advisor to the king, like he was
Speaker 2: super high up a guy. And then in eighteen hundred
Speaker 2: or so, he was forced into exile because his family
Speaker 2: was Catholic. Was he Catholic? It depends on the source
Speaker 2: you read. Ah. Some sources are very specific that he
Speaker 2: was Catholic. Some sources are very specific that he was
Speaker 2: not Catholic. So he's very much one or the other.
Speaker 2: I suspect he's somehow both. His family was very Catholic,
Speaker 2: you know that much. While he was in exile, he
Speaker 2: was forced to live among the peasants, and he saw
Speaker 2: how bad they had it, and he was like, we
Speaker 2: should have a better way to run things. And this
Speaker 2: to me, I don't know a ton about Confucism, but
Speaker 2: I read a fair amount for this. This seems like
Speaker 2: a very confusion way to like be like, oh, let's
Speaker 2: find better ways to run things, Like I am going
Speaker 2: to create a system that is going to be very
Speaker 2: specific and run things, you know, so in your return
Speaker 2: to court. He had all these ideas and he was
Speaker 2: part of what gets called the realist movement or the
Speaker 2: Silhac movement. Wikipedia argues that the Silhac movement is part
Speaker 2: of neo Confucism. The Korean historian Hockey Rock suggests that
Speaker 2: the movement was heavily influenced by Catholicism and that most
Speaker 2: of its major people were Catholics. I don't know, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I this is we're getting into the parts
Speaker 2: of create istory.
Speaker 3: I don't know very well. I will say later like
Speaker 3: Christianity in Korea is really really syncretic, even even sorted
Speaker 3: by the standards of Catholicism, which gets syncretic really really fast, right,
Speaker 3: and it leaves Europe. But yeah, it I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, it could just be both and every side
Speaker 3: was angry about it. It could have just been I
Speaker 3: don't know, I suspect it's.
Speaker 2: Both in every side is angry about it, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of syncretic, and like, I find it fascinating. You know,
Speaker 2: you're like, Okay, let's take some of the social teachings
Speaker 2: of Catholicism and some of the let's try to have
Speaker 2: a good theory of government from Confucism, and you end
Speaker 2: up with this, And then you take some particular thinkers
Speaker 2: is not guaranteed to happen, and you wind up with this.
Speaker 2: Like proto anarchist communism, the realist movement advocated for land
Speaker 2: reform that would divide the land up into basically village
Speaker 2: collective ownership of about thirty families, called the eogion system,
Speaker 2: and they would cultivate land collectively. Those who farm the
Speaker 2: land would get a share of the produce, and those
Speaker 2: who don't farm the land won't. But then you like
Speaker 2: have sort of free exchange between those people. Crafts people
Speaker 2: would trade their work for grain. Intellectuals and aristocrats would
Speaker 2: have to help with productive activities as well, whether through
Speaker 2: the direct application of intellectual labor to like this is
Speaker 2: how we could try and grow things better or just
Speaker 2: going out and helping grow things like you can't. You
Speaker 2: can't just be a thinker. That's not a job that
Speaker 2: this movement agrees with. Dassan wrote, quote, why should the
Speaker 2: man who has the title of saw the aristocrats try
Speaker 2: to grab the products of the land and swallow the
Speaker 2: fruits of labor without toil. Because the men with the
Speaker 2: title saw eat without doing any work, the benefits coming
Speaker 2: from the land are not developed to their full extent,
Speaker 2: and the ill of the society continues to accumulate. Is
Speaker 2: just very similar to like Russian philosophy, like Russian communist
Speaker 2: philosophy in like the nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have developed land to the tillers. We have
Speaker 3: done it very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He wrote about methods by which these societies could self
Speaker 2: regulate without enforcement from above. This is where the anarcho
Speaker 2: part comes in. Everyone has free will, and it is
Speaker 2: by encouraging people's free will and the best development of
Speaker 2: their own desires and things like that that we can
Speaker 2: allow society to organize organically. That's an interesting thing because
Speaker 2: if like it's kind of it's almost like Smithian to
Speaker 2: me in the sense that, Yeah, I could see that.
Speaker 2: It's this argument that like people.
Speaker 3: Following their own will will inevitably sort of like self
Speaker 3: organizing to a system. But like the sort of Smith
Speaker 3: argument is that this will form a market and that
Speaker 3: God will sort of like come in and help them.
Speaker 3: They take out God leader. But right, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 3: It's like it's that same kind of argument but for
Speaker 3: a very very different system. No, you're right, that's actually
Speaker 3: really interesting because there is always a like it's always
Speaker 3: a little sketchy when anyone describing a political system gets
Speaker 3: hand wavy, and it's like and then it'll work, and
Speaker 3: you're like by what it means and you're like hocus focus,
Speaker 3: you know, and like and sometimes it's just sometimes that's true,
Speaker 3: but usually you.
Speaker 2: Kind of have to set things up in motion to
Speaker 2: get things to work that way, you know. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I know it's a it's an interesting system, and I
Speaker 2: see why. It's like not just like this doesn't become
Speaker 2: the platform of Korean anarchism, right, but they like recognize
Speaker 2: it as proto anarchism or at least this, you know,
Speaker 2: hockey rock does. Dassan wrote about leadership, describing basically a
Speaker 2: federation model familiar to those who study like democratic and
Speaker 2: federalism or different federated anarchist structures or democratic structures. He
Speaker 2: wrote quote, if there are sixty four dancers in the yard,
Speaker 2: we select a man among them as the conductor to
Speaker 2: lead the dance party. If he accomplishes his work successfully,
Speaker 2: the audience will applaud him as our conductor. If he
Speaker 2: fails to do so, he will be dragged out and
Speaker 2: replaced by another able one. A representative of a group
Speaker 2: is the same hmmm. And this is like the idea
Speaker 2: of like a delegate with mandates is, for example, how
Speaker 2: the Spanish anarchists organize their society during the revolution. Historian
Speaker 2: Hockey Rock wrote about this quote, we find an ideology
Speaker 2: of self liberation in Dissan. However, his age was not
Speaker 2: right to accept his ideas. His voice remained as an
Speaker 2: empty echo of a scholar in exile. It took another
Speaker 2: century for his theory to receive the proper social response.
Speaker 2: And you know what the proper social response to ideas
Speaker 2: is market them for profit and then advertise them. So
Speaker 2: this show is brought to you by the YogiOn system.
Speaker 2: Go out and get thirty families and start a commune.
Speaker 2: But it only works if you federate it up.
Speaker 3: Here, you go and we're back. I hope all of
Speaker 3: the ads were for weird communes, only good weird communes,
Speaker 3: So we're actually bad weird communes. Let's be real.
Speaker 2: Communes in general don't have a really good history. Like, hey,
Speaker 2: the parish one was Okay, that's true, that's true, didn't
Speaker 2: last super long. But yeah, I think overall, like all
Speaker 2: of the attempts at like utopian society things that I
Speaker 2: think they don't work as they're like outside of society.
Speaker 2: I think that they don't work because they're like it
Speaker 2: actually kind of takes all of us to do these
Speaker 2: things together, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which, which which is why when you found your commune,
Speaker 3: it has to be the whole. It has to be
Speaker 3: named after the city you need to get like the
Speaker 3: another mohawk in commune. And once you get it named
Speaker 3: after the full city that you've that you're now running,
Speaker 3: it'll it'll work. Then you got a chance. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't want to dox myself by saying how small
Speaker 2: the town I live in is, but I'm like, you know,
Speaker 2: I have a chance. So the dynasty continues. People didn't
Speaker 2: like living under oppressive conditions, and by the nineteenth century
Speaker 2: it's unstable as fuck. By the eighteen sixties you've got
Speaker 2: all these peasant revolts throughout Korea. I think you're named.
Speaker 2: Chue Ju was like, let's do something new. His new
Speaker 2: idea was called dong Hawk or Eastern Study, and it's
Speaker 2: sort of a religious political ideology that eventually became a
Speaker 2: proper religion of its own.
Speaker 3: Have you heard of this? No, I don't think you've
Speaker 3: run into it.
Speaker 2: So this is the like religion behind the major uprisings
Speaker 2: in the second half of the nineteenth century in Korea,
Speaker 2: which is like one of those things when if you
Speaker 2: say the whole thing out it sounds very minor, but
Speaker 2: if you live in Korea, it's a really big If
Speaker 2: you're in Korea in eighteen sixties, this is a big deal.
Speaker 2: You know. Some of the basic ideas of this Eastern
Speaker 2: Study of Donghak is fighting against Western religious colonization by
Speaker 2: the Catholics and against the Confucism that's also being shitty
Speaker 2: to us, although depending on who you read, it's either
Speaker 2: anti Confucianism or it's a reform of Confucianism. Also, it's
Speaker 2: kind of just Christianity with the serial numbers scraped off.
Speaker 2: But they're like, we want to get rid of inequality,
Speaker 2: whether it's feudalism or slavery, or patriarchy or agism or
Speaker 2: class differences. They are like listing it out, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that rules. We love this. This is great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it seems as though this is Christianity syncretized
Speaker 2: with Korean traditional beliefs. Chue himself said, quote, the meanings
Speaker 2: are the same, only the words are different. Like that's
Speaker 2: why we think it's it's this. It's because he said
Speaker 2: it is, you know, but it is different. It is
Speaker 2: like a very like every person is heaven, you know,
Speaker 2: all people are themselves part of Heaven. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: be able to.
Speaker 3: Do That's cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it's an interesting idea. And once again,
Speaker 2: I've seen it called both christian and Confucism, and it's
Speaker 2: also against both of those things. And so that's just
Speaker 2: kind of the history of before before the anarchists get
Speaker 2: on the scene under the name anarchism.
Speaker 3: That's just all of it. It kind of reminds you
Speaker 3: of these things where it's like everyone's arguing about like
Speaker 3: a really obscure Marxist reformist movement or something where it's
Speaker 3: like you're you're on like branch seventeen of like a
Speaker 3: Trotskyite faction, and it's like, are they Trotskyites? Are they neocons?
Speaker 3: Have they renounced Marxism? Is this a critique of Marxism?
Speaker 3: Is this who knows? We're unable to discern?
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Like, and you know, it's like I suspect
Speaker 2: that at the end of the day, it was people
Speaker 2: who were like, man, you know, it would be cool
Speaker 2: if we weren't being oppressed. Yeah, this seems like an
Speaker 2: all right method of doing it. We're all part of Heaven. Fuck, yeah,
Speaker 2: let's go. Like the first thing that the religion tried
Speaker 2: to do was overthrow the government, which is cool and good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they had some success. They took over parts of
Speaker 2: South Korea or Southern Korea, but not South Korea.
Speaker 3: Whatever.
Speaker 2: This didn't last, and Chuey himself got executed pretty much
Speaker 2: right off the bat. But this didn't like just die
Speaker 2: with him, because it wasn't actually just a charismatic leader movement.
Speaker 2: As best as I can tell, I don't know, one
Speaker 2: day I'm going to do a deep dive and do
Speaker 2: a whole series on this thing maybe and I'll learn
Speaker 2: more about it. This sort of democratic nationalist religious movement transformed.
Speaker 2: It's actually still around as a religion called Cheonduism, and
Speaker 2: it's a pantheistic religion that I know basically nothing about
Speaker 2: except what I've just said. Nineteenth century it changed the
Speaker 2: shit out of the world, as we've talked about a lot,
Speaker 2: and Korea didn't modernize really, which left them pretty vulnerable.
Speaker 2: So Japan started bringing the under its influence. China also
Speaker 2: hadn't super modernized and it was under Chinese influence, but
Speaker 2: Japan was stronger, so they were like, yeah, but we
Speaker 2: want this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, China has this, Like there's a whole history there.
Speaker 3: I like, China attempts to modernize and it just doesn't
Speaker 3: work it okay, Yeah, I mean they're fucking country. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's that. And also, like the thing about Japan is
Speaker 3: the degree of imperial pressure was under is really less
Speaker 3: because I mean, one of the other things that's probably
Speaker 3: probably gonna talk about a bit in this story, it
Speaker 3: was like one of the other countries that is a
Speaker 3: big imperial influence in Korea's Russia. Because Russia is pressing
Speaker 3: so hard on China from the north that like there,
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, you know, like China at this point
Speaker 3: is like in the process of being split up of
Speaker 3: like all these concessions and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about the
Speaker 2: Russian imperial influence on Korea, but not a ton, but yeah,
Speaker 2: like overall, it's like worth knowing that, you know, the
Speaker 2: Czar is being like, oh, I'm not going to annex Korea,
Speaker 2: but he's like kind of moving to annex Korea and like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like the fact that Russia can do that
Speaker 3: is sort of a side of like the weakness of
Speaker 3: the Chinese government at this point, because yeah, this is
Speaker 3: still the dice the dynasties.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, So by eighteen seventy six, Korea is
Speaker 2: firmly under Japanese economic influence, which the Qing dynasty of
Speaker 2: China isn't excited about because it was supposed to be
Speaker 2: under their influence, and it is still politically more under
Speaker 2: their influence, I believe at this time. By the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 2: the Korean government not doing so hot, and so government
Speaker 2: posts are just being sold. They're like, h you want
Speaker 2: to be a minister or whatever, like just give me
Speaker 2: a bunch of money, and so that you have these
Speaker 2: new officials and then they would be like, oh, I
Speaker 2: just paid a bunch of money for it. I know
Speaker 2: I can get that money back. I will tax the
Speaker 2: shit out of everyone. The Roman system terrible way to
Speaker 2: road taxes. Oh no, zero of ten maybe the worst
Speaker 2: way ever. And so those in addition to all these
Speaker 2: droughts that are hitting, there's riots and there's suddenly bandits everywhere,
Speaker 2: and there's minor uprisings that are turning to armed revolts,
Speaker 2: and you know, the Center is not doing so much
Speaker 2: holding and that Pesky Dong Hack movement is still around
Speaker 2: and they've mostly been doing non violence for a couple decades.
Speaker 2: But then they were like, let's go back to what
Speaker 2: we started with. Let's go back to the violence part,
Speaker 2: going back to the old bee. Yeah, yeah, totally the
Speaker 2: midlife crisis, you know, like I gotta be going again.
Speaker 2: They buy a motorcycle and they like, okay, you might
Speaker 2: know is better than me. It seems like Korea is
Speaker 2: kind of a powder keg that, like East Asia, is
Speaker 2: not the same because of what happens in Korea rather
Speaker 2: than it being like a hinter land. It seems like
Speaker 2: it's like, because it's this place where everyone's having proxy
Speaker 2: wars constantly. Anyway, I'll I'll just explain what happens. They're like,
Speaker 2: all right, we want self governance, and we want an
Speaker 2: end to exploitation, and we want no more super rich
Speaker 2: assholes telling us what to do, and we want fucking
Speaker 2: decent treatment. So let's fucking go. By January eighteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: they started to take parts of the Cuntree by force,
Speaker 2: and they grew as they went. They just snowballed. Everyone
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, that seems better because everywhere they would
Speaker 2: go they would like get rid of the corrupt officials
Speaker 2: and be like, hey, what if we're all good to
Speaker 2: each other and like it actually seems like I haven't
Speaker 2: read anything negative about them yet.
Speaker 3: I'll put it that way. Great pitch, Yeah, that's the rules.
Speaker 3: We love to see it.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like by April there were ten thousand of them
Speaker 2: in their army and there can eventually there's gona be
Speaker 2: one hundred thousand of them, and they're controlling half the
Speaker 2: grain producing land in the country.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And they formed farmer self rule committees everywhere they went,
Speaker 2: so they're also like not crazy top down because actually
Speaker 2: the idea of bottom up things is as natural as
Speaker 2: top down things. And they would defeat the army again
Speaker 2: and again, and they would try to be super moral
Speaker 2: about it every time they did. They would not slaughter
Speaker 2: retreating enemies, they would treat prisoners well, all that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, right, and they did land reform everywhere they
Speaker 2: went so that small farmers would have a better chance.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is just like the revolutionary shit that
Speaker 2: everyone dreams of. Yeah, and the regular army the reason
Speaker 2: they kept winning these military engagements as best as I
Speaker 2: can tell, because later it's not gonna go well form,
Speaker 2: but for a while it goes really well formed, because
Speaker 2: when they're against the Korean military, there's mass desertions, like
Speaker 2: at one point the army loses half of its numbers
Speaker 2: before it gets into combat. Yeah, because everyone's like, nah,
Speaker 2: I don't want to fight them, I don't want to
Speaker 2: do this.
Speaker 3: It sucks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so dog Hack Rebellion of eighteen ninety four
Speaker 2: seems really solidly cool. People did cool stuff. I hope
Speaker 2: one day gets its own episodes. By May seventh, they
Speaker 2: reached a tentative peace treaty. They were like, no more slavery,
Speaker 2: I actually don't know nearly enough about East Asian slavery
Speaker 2: as I would like to. But it's gonna come up
Speaker 2: a couple times in this episode that anarchists and also
Speaker 2: the dong Hack people are abolitionists, abolish the caste system,
Speaker 2: forgive all debts, and redistribute the land. And the government
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, we're gonna lose if we don't say yeah,
Speaker 2: so yeah, we're into that. But then the government, this
Speaker 2: is going to shock you. They didn't stay true to
Speaker 2: their word.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: They were like, what if instead of creating heaven on earth,
Speaker 2: which is I think how dong Hak was like presenting
Speaker 2: it basically right, because we're all heaven and so we're
Speaker 2: all living equally, and you know, yeah, what if instead
Speaker 2: we talked to our buddies in the Ching dynasty and
Speaker 2: they sent soldiers over and then we like, shoot you
Speaker 2: a bunch. But then Japan was like, well, what if
Speaker 2: actually we use this moment to invade and overthrow you entirely?
Speaker 2: Oh no, And so both those things happened. Oh and
Speaker 2: this kicks off the First Sino Japanese War. This is
Speaker 2: what I'm talking about, but like the powder keg shit, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this peasant rebellion destabilized enough that Japan was like sweet ours.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I never realized that that was that this was
Speaker 3: kicked off by a peasant rebellion, huh.
Speaker 2: I know. And then even then within that, like a
Speaker 2: lot of what I've read isn't necessarily playing up the
Speaker 2: religious aspects of the peasant rebellion, and so I like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like part of why I want to know more
Speaker 2: about it. Like I have red sources that are very
Speaker 2: credible that are like this is the Donghak peasant rebellion,
Speaker 2: and other ones that are like the peasant rebellion, you know,
Speaker 2: So I don't know whether they're all like religiously converting
Speaker 2: as they go.
Speaker 3: I guess this is yeah, and yeah.
Speaker 2: The Sino Japanese War of eighteen ninety four eighteen ninety
Speaker 2: five firmly cements Korea at its current position of the
Speaker 2: territory where huge imperialist powers have proxy wars YEP, Japan.
Speaker 2: They just come in and murder the shit out of
Speaker 2: the entire peasant army. That's the way that the peasant
Speaker 2: rebellion gets put down. I've read of one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: people being slaughtered by like machine gun and mortar.
Speaker 3: I mean that sounds like the Japanese Army. They do
Speaker 3: this a lot. They're gonna keep doing it until. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really like if you like Jeppanese build or history,
Speaker 3: it's really like it's it's an entire series of them
Speaker 3: fighting in a bunch of countries who don't have it
Speaker 3: industrial based the size of theirs until they finally pissed off,
Speaker 3: like the only country on Earth that had an industrial
Speaker 3: based the size of a continent that could just simply
Speaker 3: like just just drop ships on them until they drowned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like my grandfather fought in the Pacific Theater
Speaker 2: as a torpedo, and like, you know, there's very few
Speaker 2: times with the US is the good guys, but this
Speaker 2: is among them as far as I can tell.
Speaker 3: Ye, I did bad stuff too, but oh they definitely did.
Speaker 3: I'm more sympathetic to the US of the Pacific than
Speaker 3: a lot of people are because like, yeah, my family
Speaker 3: was like, like my grandma thought that she was an
Speaker 3: orphan because her mom like picked up her sister and
Speaker 3: like ran on foot across the country and they couldn't
Speaker 3: take my grandma with her because she was too young
Speaker 3: to like move. So like you know, I good, good,
Speaker 3: good on the US.
Speaker 2: Maybe do less war crimes, but I don't know, yeh,
Speaker 2: steal less stuff while you're doing it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's what you get with the US is
Speaker 3: helping you unfortunately. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that a lot of people, like again,
Speaker 2: like I'm not I'm not being like, oh, the US
Speaker 2: was moral when they did the following things, but like,
Speaker 2: I think a lot of it is that people don't
Speaker 2: pay enough attention to the scale of murder that the
Speaker 2: Japanese were doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they killed like thirty million people. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: like it's an unfathomable atrocity, except for the fact that
Speaker 3: there was an even more unfathomable atrocity happening on the
Speaker 3: other side of the world at the same time, right,
Speaker 3: Like it's it's yeah, and so anyway, in one battle,
Speaker 3: the Battle of Ugumchi, about forty thousand peasants soldiers went
Speaker 3: up against a thousand professional soldiers. After a few days,
Speaker 3: culminating on November eleventh, eighteen ninety four, five hundred of
Speaker 3: the forty thousand people survived. Jesus, Yeah, and a handful
Speaker 3: of soldiers on the Japanese side died like a small
Speaker 3: enough number that it's not tracked. It's like, ah, couple,
Speaker 3: I don't know, Yeah, John died like whatever, you know,
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's just it's just a modernized army versus
Speaker 3: a peasant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and a really a very quite good modernized army
Speaker 2: like this. You see, like this is a Prussian trained army.
Speaker 3: It is very in a period. We're Prussian ball. I guess.
Speaker 3: I guess technically they Russians down. I mean, I guess
Speaker 3: technically by this point they are now Germany. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a it's a very very effective and brutal army.
Speaker 3: Wait who trained Japan at this point? Oh well, I
Speaker 3: mean they've been getting a lot of when they modeled
Speaker 3: their military reforms. They originally modeled on the French, and
Speaker 3: then the French lost Frank of Russian War, and so
Speaker 3: they brought in the Germans.
Speaker 2: Oh and they're like never mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is funny because later on the Chinese are
Speaker 3: also going to bring in the Germans, which leads to
Speaker 3: the Nazis and Japan fighting each other in the thirty
Speaker 3: seven in Chigaio're like, there's like Nazi officers who are
Speaker 3: like military advisors, who are like have field command fighting
Speaker 3: Japan baffling, baffling place. Everything is so weird in this
Speaker 3: part of the world. But yeah, yeah, this has been
Speaker 3: by diversion. So leaders were hanged in mass in March
Speaker 3: eighteen ninety five and their rebellions done. Yeah, this war
Speaker 3: not only ended dynastic rule in Korea, it was kind of,
Speaker 3: according to one source, the Domino that ended dynastic rule
Speaker 3: in China, which fell apart in the nineteen eleven Revolution
Speaker 3: that I don't know a quarter about as much as
Speaker 3: i'd like to or should so, comparing the destruction of
Speaker 3: the Korean peasant movement and how that helped spur imperial
Speaker 3: Japan to oh, this is kind of like what you
Speaker 3: were talking about actually, to how the destruction of the
Speaker 3: Spanish Republic helped Western fascism. That historian that I'm quoting
Speaker 3: a lot, Hockey Rick, put it like this. Even though
Speaker 3: there was a lag of about forty years in the
Speaker 3: beginnings of these struggles and in the tempo of their
Speaker 3: subsequent interventions, we can evaluate that the eighteen ninety four
Speaker 3: Korean Peasant Revolution and the nineteen thirty seven Spanish Revolution
Speaker 3: were of the same world historical significance in terms of
Speaker 3: their characteristics as people's liberation fronts against feudalism and exploitation,
Speaker 3: and that they were international wars into feared with by
Speaker 3: foreign military services. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like this is also the Spanish Republic part, you know,
Speaker 2: because the thing that we're going to talk about later
Speaker 2: is going to be compared to the Spanish Republic a lot, right,
Speaker 2: But this one also is basically what this person's saying.
Speaker 2: And so the rebellion fell, But don't worry because that's
Speaker 2: just part one of four. There's gonna be so many
Speaker 2: rebellions still to come.
Speaker 3: I'm so excited.
Speaker 2: And there's also schools. They're gonna build schools. There's gonna
Speaker 2: be an anarchist hospital. And it's not like just like
Speaker 2: I don't know, I trust, I have a lot of
Speaker 2: anarchist doctor and medic friends, but I mean like it's
Speaker 2: like a hospital as it got building, and like people
Speaker 2: go there like because their kids sick.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists are going to do a ton of things
Speaker 2: really well, and one of those things is build schools
Speaker 2: and at least one hospital, although well I guess it
Speaker 2: was Korean people work to the hospitals in China whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 2: it's really complicated, and we'll talk about it in part
Speaker 2: two or maybe three or four, but first let's talk about, uh,
Speaker 2: what you do? Who are you?
Speaker 3: How'd you get here? I walked into my closet where
Speaker 3: I'm recorded.
Speaker 2: Podcast podcasting is putting trans people back in the closets,
Speaker 2: fucked up. Actually very funny because I came out here first.
Speaker 2: Before I came out it real life to a lot
Speaker 2: of people. But yeah, yeah, I have a podcast called
Speaker 2: It Could Appen Here. I'm one of the hosts. We
Speaker 2: put out episodes every single day except for the weekend.
Speaker 2: I get that's not even true anymore because we.
Speaker 3: Have one of them on the weekend. Yeah, which is great. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you could find us wherever find podcasts or distributed. Yeah,
Speaker 3: wherever you found this one, Yeah, it'll it'll be there.
Speaker 3: It's it could Happen here. And yeah, I have no
Speaker 3: idea what we're going to be doing when this comes out,
Speaker 3: but it'll be something good. Hell yeah, I want to plug.
Speaker 3: Let's see.
Speaker 2: I have been binging all the other cools on media
Speaker 2: podcasts so hard this past week because whenever I'm doing
Speaker 2: like work around them, I live on I just listened
Speaker 2: to Jamie and Prop and Molly Conger and everyone, and
Speaker 2: it's so good. And if you haven't heard Weird Little
Speaker 2: Guys yet, I binged all of Weird Little Guys, which
Speaker 2: is the new podcast from Cool Zone Media by Molly
Speaker 2: Conger and it's like the weird Little Nazis who are
Speaker 2: just somehow everywhere and how annoying they are and it's
Speaker 2: really entertaining.
Speaker 3: And so she listened to it.
Speaker 2: And also Hood Politics with Prop. There's a recent episode.
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly when this will come out, but
Speaker 2: like there's a pretty recent episode that's explaining the economic policies.
Speaker 2: I think it's called The Hammer and the Finesser and
Speaker 2: it's really good. And that is one of my favorite teachers,
Speaker 2: is Prop. And so check out all the Cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media podcasts. Those are two of them, as well as
Speaker 2: this one. They're already listening to. And I have a
Speaker 2: book coming out. Sorry, there's more plugs than I thought
Speaker 2: it was going to be. I have a book coming
Speaker 2: out like really soon. It's called The Sapling Cage and
Speaker 2: there's an audiobook version and you can listen to the
Speaker 2: first chapter of the audiobook more or less because I
Speaker 2: got the audio book narrator to come on to the
Speaker 2: cool Zone Media book Club and read it to me
Speaker 2: and so you can listen to that. There's so many
Speaker 2: things you can do, including build society as a mutual
Speaker 2: aid in thirty roughly families. But make sure it's not
Speaker 2: just thirty of you total. You have to actually do
Speaker 2: with millions of people.
Speaker 3: I believe in you.
Speaker 1: Bye everyone, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and goal
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check
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