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Speaker 2: talking about complicated things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy And
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Speaker 2: I know it's been like we've every now and then
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Speaker 2: Oh my god, there's this fucking random Instagram video I
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Speaker 2: to me. Could Yeah anyway. Our audio engineers Rory Hi,
Speaker 2: Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Rory, and our theme musical was
Speaker 2: written for Spyan Woman. And this is part two out
Speaker 2: of four talking about the history of Korean anarchism as
Speaker 2: eventually builds up to the Korean People's Association of Manchuria
Speaker 2: and where we last left off, the people of Korea
Speaker 2: had tried for big old peasant revolt that seemed really
Speaker 2: cool and rebolt, by the way, is what happens when
Speaker 2: you start saying rebellion and then switch it to a revolt.
Speaker 2: Because you look at your script about halfway through.
Speaker 1: It's about to be like, did we come up with
Speaker 1: a new word because I'd like it?
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, Yeah, it's a halfway between a revolt and
Speaker 2: a rebellion. What's the difference. I don't know. They're probably synonyms.
Speaker 1: I like it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they all got slaughtered because it's.
Speaker 2: Bad when people with fucking in the same way that
Speaker 2: you shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight, you shouldn't
Speaker 2: bring a regular gun to a machine gun fight.
Speaker 3: Terrible idea.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Uh, maybe there's nowhere to go but up for them.
Speaker 2: Just kidding. Japanese imperialism. In the immediate aftermath of this
Speaker 2: war eighteen ninety five, you've got the short lived Korean Empire,
Speaker 2: which was ostensibly independent for a while, it had close
Speaker 2: ties with Russia. This is the aforementioned promise Russian imperialism section,
Speaker 2: who didn't want the Japanese to take over, so that's
Speaker 2: why they were doing their thing. Korea was like, we
Speaker 2: better modernize. We're in trouble, especially our military. We should
Speaker 2: modernize our military. Doesn't it seem like we should. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think it seems like we should. But they're pretty
Speaker 2: geographically fucked because they are just right in the middle
Speaker 2: of the three huge imperial powers China, Japan, and Russia.
Speaker 2: They're all right there. Just kidding. Only the United States
Speaker 2: is capable period that to everyone that Japan colonized anyway.
Speaker 2: Then Russia and Japan got into a pissing match and
Speaker 2: Japan beat the shit out of Russia. And this changes
Speaker 2: the course of history, and like leads in some ways.
Speaker 2: The downfall of this are very least leads to the
Speaker 2: revolution in nineteen oh five that doesn't work, but which
Speaker 2: leads to the nineteen seventeen revolution it does work. Whatever.
Speaker 2: As a result, Japan takes Korea as a protectorate state
Speaker 2: in nineteen oh five. By nineteen oh seven, Japan just
Speaker 2: dissolves Korea's military or starts too. And then it was
Speaker 2: formally annexed as a colony in nineteen ten. And the
Speaker 2: first resistance to this colonization were what get called the
Speaker 2: righteous Armies, which is a good name, yeah, good pr Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like which side is the right side? I don't know,
Speaker 2: Probably the righteous ones, yeah yeah. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: you can justify a lot when you call yourself a
Speaker 2: righteous army.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: But I mean I haven't done a ton of research
Speaker 2: on the righteous armies. Like overall, they're actually they're doing
Speaker 2: pretty good. Well morally, militarily they're not doing good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean they are someone who is fighting Japan
Speaker 3: before nineteen forty one. Yeah, by definition, they're going to
Speaker 3: be doing pretty badly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Before Like my granddad, a hobo from Iowa gets
Speaker 2: into a funning offin you know, not that my granddad
Speaker 2: saved the day, but I just mean before the US
Speaker 2: was like we have a really big with a lot
Speaker 2: of fucking torpedoes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, the Righteous Armies don't succeed. They mostly ran around.
Speaker 2: They were like their peak was nineteen oh five to
Speaker 2: nineteen twelve. But the idea is going to stick around
Speaker 2: as long as colonization is. And the Japanese colonial government
Speaker 2: just sucked. It was oppressive as hell, especially right out
Speaker 2: of the gate. Japan rapidly modernized Korea. Hey, you finally
Speaker 2: get modernization, you know everything, but the military weird, weird
Speaker 2: how that happened?
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: And one side effect of Japan modernizing Korea is that
Speaker 2: one hundred years later there are people who are apologists
Speaker 2: for the fucking colonization of Korea because they're like, well,
Speaker 2: at least they got modernized.
Speaker 3: There are dudes who run South Korea who are apologists
Speaker 3: for college Yeah, pro japad.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. That does not surprise me. I was like,
Speaker 2: I bet it's all white people, and I was like, no,
Speaker 2: I bet it's not. You know, it was really bad.
Speaker 2: It was a really oppressive colonial region. Obviously, colonial regimes
Speaker 2: are bad. Everything I've read puts this in the like
Speaker 2: it's not Belgian Congo. Yeah, but it's not nice. It's
Speaker 2: in the like medium to extra bad. You know. That's
Speaker 2: my that's my take. I didn't deep dive it. I
Speaker 2: could be wrong.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the like I think the thing with
Speaker 3: Jeopanese superialism is that there's a marked shift where it
Speaker 3: gets worse, and this is before the shift where it
Speaker 3: gets worse.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, so what's interesting is one of the things
Speaker 2: that I was reading was it was saying that this
Speaker 2: nineteen ten to nineteen nineteen is like the period of
Speaker 2: the saber, and then they get a little bit more
Speaker 2: subtle but also more economically destructive. But then I suspect
Speaker 2: that it then also continues to get militarily worse also
Speaker 2: on top of.
Speaker 3: That, yeah, because it accelerates. Once you get like to
Speaker 3: about nineteen thirty seven nineteen thirty eight, everything gets dramatically worse.
Speaker 3: For like, you know, if this is the period of
Speaker 3: the saber, like once you get to about thirty six
Speaker 3: thirty seven, like that's that's when they are building the
Speaker 3: concentration camps and yep. Okay, Well I guess I guess
Speaker 3: they're doing it a bit in the slightly earlier thirties,
Speaker 3: depending on where you are in China.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it re escalates, No, that makes sense. I
Speaker 2: did most of my reading, like I read like in
Speaker 2: detail up to about like nineteen thirty four or so,
Speaker 2: you know, and then that like, yeah, I read the
Speaker 2: like summary type stuff of the after.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Overall, the goal was to extract as much value out
Speaker 2: of the place as possible, as fast as possible, especially Japan.
Speaker 2: Right now they've had like these rice riots I think
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about later pretty recently. Well, actually
Speaker 2: they happened in nineteen eighteen. But you know, people are
Speaker 2: hungry in Japan, and Japan is less and less an
Speaker 2: agricultural state, but Korea is, and so they're like, let's
Speaker 2: get as much out of there as we can. A
Speaker 2: lot of people from Japan moved to Korea, especially more
Speaker 2: later after nineteen nineteen or so. I've seen it referred
Speaker 2: to as like a lot of the like fail sons
Speaker 2: of Japan and then a lot of the like people
Speaker 2: trying to come up. Yeah, from Japan are the two
Speaker 2: groups of people who move there. Maybe because of my bias.
Speaker 2: The most immediate comparison I can make is the English
Speaker 2: colonization of Ireland in how they like they're like, oh
Speaker 2: here right next door are a bunch of non modern
Speaker 2: backwards people. This is August Air quotes that we can
Speaker 2: extract value out of, even though we're gonna have to
Speaker 2: do a lot of really intense work to build racial
Speaker 2: categorization in order to oppress them.
Speaker 3: Yeap, yep.
Speaker 2: I only a little bit understand the like racialization of Koreans,
Speaker 2: you know, as relates to Japan, but it it seems
Speaker 2: like they had to do a lot of work specifically
Speaker 2: to be like, let's come up with how they're different,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's like there's a whole I know
Speaker 3: less about this in Korea, more about it in China.
Speaker 3: But it's like it gets to a point where they
Speaker 3: have these like I mean, they're doing just straight up
Speaker 3: sort of European style race science. They have like they
Speaker 3: have like guys with like they're not calipers. They have
Speaker 3: their own system of like racial measure bit things of
Speaker 3: like how you measure something's face to determine their characteristics,
Speaker 3: and they're trying to like base their like forced labor
Speaker 3: system off of that of like who they think is
Speaker 3: gonna be the most effective worker by like face shape stuff,
Speaker 3: and it's it's real bad. They are unbelievably racist.
Speaker 2: God, which is like we're gonna talk later about the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty three earthquake in Japan where oh yeah, Japan's
Speaker 2: gonna run around and kill a lot of Korean immigrants.
Speaker 2: Six thousand people are gonna get slaughtered. Yeah, And the
Speaker 2: way that they did it is because they couldn't tell
Speaker 2: Korean people apart necessarily, so they made them pronounce I
Speaker 2: don't remember what word, and then if you pronounce it wrong,
Speaker 2: they'd kill you. And it's also like, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: obviously it's wrong to go around and kill people because
Speaker 2: of racial characteristics or like national origin, but like it
Speaker 2: caught up a lot of people from like the boonies
Speaker 2: of Japan, you know, because they had like different accents.
Speaker 3: Like this is this is a country who's like the
Speaker 3: shinzo Abe, their longtime prime minister, like couldn't write in
Speaker 3: one of their writing systems, So like, you know, there's
Speaker 3: there's a lot going on there in terms of like
Speaker 3: the difficulty of language and sort of class.
Speaker 2: Dynamics, okay, And so Korea is being oppressed and there's
Speaker 2: this gorilla resistance going on, especially Korean folks who fled
Speaker 2: into Manchuria, which is the chunk of China immediately north
Speaker 2: of the Peninsula. As we talked about before, folks up
Speaker 2: there organizing gorilla bands and raiding Japanese forces regularly in Korea.
Speaker 2: But this is still not the like major resistance. The
Speaker 2: first like major resistance that people talk about is the
Speaker 2: March First Movement. And I bet you can figure out
Speaker 2: what part of the year the March First Movement happens
Speaker 2: and July close. It's March. I mean it actually it
Speaker 2: actually is also I think still happening in July. Like
Speaker 2: it doesn't all like happen on one day.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing, though, history is so dumb that in
Speaker 1: July would not be that far vegetive an answer.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean you got the like fucking February
Speaker 2: Revolution in Russia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything, all the dates in Russia are like this, yes,
Speaker 3: like no, it's all different buds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't worries orthodox here. So it's fine. Most of
Speaker 2: the history I've read for this episode starts basically in
Speaker 2: the aftermath of the March First Movement. World War One,
Speaker 2: of course, matters everywhere. When it ended, President Woodrow Wilson
Speaker 2: was like, here are the fourteen points for peace, and
Speaker 2: some of those points were like Poland gets to be
Speaker 2: independent of colonial rule, and the Korean people were like, cool,
Speaker 2: what about us? Can we be independent of colonial rule?
Speaker 2: And obviously the Western powers were like no, no, not you.
Speaker 2: Where did you come from? I think after the war
Speaker 2: they like send Korean representatives to the League of Nations
Speaker 2: and they're like, nah, you can't come in. We don't care,
Speaker 2: we're racist.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, wood Wilson's like, I belong to the KKK.
Speaker 3: Come on, you thought you guys thought you were going
Speaker 3: to get independence, Like go on, what are you doing here?
Speaker 2: Yeah. But despite not being accepted by the Western powers,
Speaker 2: the people of Korea are like, nah, let's fucking go.
Speaker 2: Let's do it. Let's have a mass, peaceful movement. This
Speaker 2: is called the March First Movement because it kicked off
Speaker 2: on March first, nineteen nineteen, and this is a huge
Speaker 2: mass movement. It is about two million people. There's not
Speaker 2: even twenty million people in the whole of the country
Speaker 2: at that point. And Japan reacted strongly. This is the
Speaker 2: period of the saber death and arrest numbers very real,
Speaker 2: wildly because a lot of those numbers come from the
Speaker 2: Japanese government, and then other numbers come from like Korean nationalism.
Speaker 2: And no one hasn't any interest in telling the truth, right,
Speaker 2: I mean many of the people do. But whatever, we're
Speaker 2: going to go with seven thousand people killed and likely
Speaker 2: about forty thousand people arrested. Jeez. Despite being crushed really badly,
Speaker 2: the March First movement did make some gains. The imperial
Speaker 2: form switched from will kill the shit out of you
Speaker 2: if you do anything we don't like to. We'll try
Speaker 2: to ask nicely first, and then we'll kill the shit
Speaker 2: out of you. That's my paraphrasing of the stuff I've
Speaker 2: read about the transition to like different methods of rule.
Speaker 2: And this is what opened Korea up for settler colonialism,
Speaker 2: and Japanese folks started moving there. They got tons of
Speaker 2: financial incentives paid for by the Japanese government, so it
Speaker 2: becomes a settler project as well as a colonial extractive project.
Speaker 2: It's in the wake of this movement that Korean anarchism
Speaker 2: really got its start, especially under the name anarchism and
Speaker 2: when it got started, it immediately went hard. Interestingly, most
Speaker 2: of its most impactful work, though, didn't happen in Korea.
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists during this period had the most dramatic and
Speaker 2: immediate impact in Japan and China, because in the wake
Speaker 2: of the March First Movement, a ton of radicals had
Speaker 2: to go into exile, mostly into China. I think the
Speaker 2: most of them just went into Manchuria because it's right there, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but a lot of folks went much further to Shanghai
Speaker 2: and Beijing and a city called Guangcho, which is more
Speaker 2: in southern China.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, students who could afford to went to Japan because
Speaker 2: there were I was like, oh, they must have just
Speaker 2: been like, oh, that's like the nice place to go
Speaker 2: to college is the only place to go to college
Speaker 2: if you're a Korean student. There are literally zero colleges
Speaker 2: in Korea under early japan Uese rule until nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, oh my god. And so even when
Speaker 2: you hear about like all of the like like all
Speaker 2: these anarchists are gonna be set up all these schools
Speaker 2: and stuff, right, they're coming out of a time when
Speaker 2: there was no schools in their country, yeah, or no
Speaker 2: colleges in their country. The first college in Korea in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty four is a Japanese Imperial University.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So most of the students who moved to Japan, they
Speaker 2: had to work constantly their work study students. And so
Speaker 2: when I say the people who are like rich enough
Speaker 2: to go there, these are poor people, but they're like
Speaker 2: able to get to Japan, and they're absolutely the underclass
Speaker 2: when they get to Japan, and they're doing really shit
Speaker 2: jobs in order to get by. And in Tokyo, where
Speaker 2: most these students went, they fell into academic Japanese leftist circles,
Speaker 2: especially among anarchists, which appeared to be, at least by
Speaker 2: the reading that I did, the primary leftist thing going
Speaker 2: on there at that time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a I kind of want to take a
Speaker 3: second talk about what's going on more broadly. And this
Speaker 3: like literally in like within a few months of the
Speaker 3: March first movement, because like two months later there's the
Speaker 3: May fourth movement in China, which is a very very
Speaker 3: similar movement. And if you look at the historiography of
Speaker 3: you know, like Chinese anarchism, even Chinese communism, this is
Speaker 3: sort of the place where a lot of that starts.
Speaker 3: Where because there's this giant student uprising, that's the point
Speaker 3: where sort of like Western leftist ideologies like really starting
Speaker 3: to take hold. And this is like this whole period
Speaker 3: is this real like from here until like really kind
Speaker 3: of mentioned twenty seven, is this whole period of like
Speaker 3: almost continuous uprising like in China, I mean particularly intensifies
Speaker 3: in China like mention twenty four and twenty five, but
Speaker 3: like this is this is a period where like the
Speaker 3: Chinese left is also emerging really rapidly. But it's also
Speaker 3: fascinating because none of the stuff I've ever read about
Speaker 3: the May the Fourth Movement ever talks about the fact
Speaker 3: that the first one was in Korean. That's what I
Speaker 3: was like two months early.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was trying to figure that out because I
Speaker 2: was like, this seems related, you know, it has to
Speaker 2: be like a bunch of people from it, like clearly
Speaker 2: we're in China when yeah, they all went there.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's just one of these things where
Speaker 3: like because it's yeah, it's like it's all the nationalists
Speaker 3: his geographies. Yeah, like because it's the main of the
Speaker 3: Fourth Movement is really really important to both the Chinese
Speaker 3: Nationalist Party and to the Communists, but when they're writing
Speaker 3: their history, they don't really want to. I guess you're
Speaker 3: biden of one of the fact that they were like
Speaker 3: two months late. Yeah, because Koreans went first. Well, that's
Speaker 3: even kind of what to talk about about.
Speaker 2: Like Korea seems to be like I mean, it's this
Speaker 2: like place, this is constantly colonized by everyone, like kick
Speaker 2: back and forth, but it has all of these things
Speaker 2: where like are very very impactful on regional politics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost hadisque where stuff moves there first.
Speaker 2: Totally Okay, And we're gonna talk a little bit more.
Speaker 2: And this is good because you're gonna fill in a
Speaker 2: lot of gaps for me when we gets it's the
Speaker 2: Chinese part of this, because I'm like, because everything talks
Speaker 2: about everything siloed off. You read about like ye ye
Speaker 2: yeah oh, and then the Korea anarchists in China did
Speaker 2: the following and you're like, there's a war on in China,
Speaker 2: like how does that relate to it? And it's like, well,
Speaker 2: we're just talking about the Koreans, and I'm like, there's
Speaker 2: a war where they went that is clearly going to
Speaker 2: influence things. And I think what it is is that
Speaker 2: a lot of it's like writing for people who like
Speaker 2: know that, right, Yeah, But it's like if I read
Speaker 2: something that happens in the eighteen sixties in the US,
Speaker 2: it's like, should we talk about the fact that there's
Speaker 2: a civil war happening?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: Like anyway, So in Japan, you know, there's the students,
Speaker 2: they go to Tokyo, and then there's a ton of
Speaker 2: Korean workers moving elsewhere in Japan, especially to Osaka, and
Speaker 2: they were doing migrant labor under terrible working conditions because
Speaker 2: their economy had just been destroyed. In Korea, there's nothing
Speaker 2: else that they could do. And these folks ended up
Speaker 2: being part, a major part of the anarchist led labor
Speaker 2: movements that were happening in the industrial districts. And so
Speaker 2: you have five distinct Korean anarchist movements all happening at
Speaker 2: the same time. One is in Korean and it is
Speaker 2: underground as fuck and it is constantly repressed. It is
Speaker 2: the worst place to be an anarchist. Out of these, yeah,
Speaker 2: one is in Manchuria, which is waging a gorilla war.
Speaker 2: One is in the rest of China and they're heavily
Speaker 2: involved in Chinese politics and really fascinating and complicated ways,
Speaker 2: like hanging out with the communists less and the nationalists
Speaker 2: more and all this weird shit. But then be clear,
Speaker 2: the communist and nationalists were also hanging out together, so
Speaker 2: you can't just use this tankies.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then also in Tokyo whole different movement that's like
Speaker 2: working class academic anarchist movement that is like involved in
Speaker 2: all of this, like assassination plots and all of this,
Speaker 2: like trying to build up things back in Korea, and
Speaker 2: is like maybe the most like deeply watching a lot
Speaker 2: of them. They're all deeply anti colonial. And then in
Speaker 2: Osaka you have the Labor movement. Five different fucking Korean
Speaker 2: anarchist movements. It's impressive. That's a lot for one country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 2: There's so much of it. And we're going to start
Speaker 2: with what happened in China. But first, even before we
Speaker 2: talk about China, we'll talk about if I say products
Speaker 2: and services, this is gonna yep, here's ads, and we're back.
Speaker 2: I hope everyone enjoys those products and services. To talk
Speaker 2: about Korean anarchism in China, I'm going to start with
Speaker 2: a man and a manifesto. See what I did. There's
Speaker 2: man's in the word manifesto. And I've read like five
Speaker 2: different versions of this fucking guy's story. Like no, because
Speaker 2: he's super important outside of his anarchism, both to the
Speaker 2: Korean independence movement and also to like Korean literature and
Speaker 2: all this other stuff. Right, so his anarchism, of course
Speaker 2: is like only sometimes included. This man's name is shin Chweho,
Speaker 2: ironic to how many versions of his history I've seen.
Speaker 2: He was a historian and a journalist. He started out
Speaker 2: working with a group called the New People's Association, which
Speaker 2: is one of these first It wasn't one of the
Speaker 2: Righteous Armies, but they were like kind of the people
Speaker 2: doing a lot of the intellectual work of like trying
Speaker 2: to justify the Righteous Armies. Start in nineteen oh six,
Speaker 2: and it's basically advocating for creating a republican Korea. And
Speaker 2: they are supporting the various righteous armies. And they're also
Speaker 2: opening schools, and I think this is where that style
Speaker 2: comes from, but I'm not one hundred percent certain. They
Speaker 2: are opening schools for both military training and for regular education.
Speaker 2: They're separate schools, so it's not like you go to
Speaker 2: it's like you get both. Yeah, it's cool, but they're separate.
Speaker 2: Also important. Later around nineteen ten, they have to fuck
Speaker 2: off to Manchuria and eventually they're dissolved, and our guy
Speaker 2: Shin just starts wandering. He writes for newspapers in Russia
Speaker 2: and then China. He kind of settles in China. It
Speaker 2: seems like after the March First movement, suddenly all of
Speaker 2: these exiles pour into China and the Korean Provisional Government
Speaker 2: formed in Shanghai in nineteen nineteen, and soon Chin is
Speaker 2: part of it. And this is I think the funniest
Speaker 2: thing I've read in an anarchist history. You know how
Speaker 2: like sometimes we cover anarchists who then later joined the government.
Speaker 3: Oh no, is he one of the wait know what
Speaker 3: government isn't even it's the inverse.
Speaker 2: What you know, where Korean anarchism comes from. It comes
Speaker 2: from the Korean Provisional Government, about half of them deciding
Speaker 2: they're anarchists and split it off.
Speaker 3: Is that rule? It's they've They've done an even funnier
Speaker 3: version of the Portita liber Ati Mexico thing, where the
Speaker 3: Liberal Party became anarchists. But this is even funnier because
Speaker 3: of their provisional government.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that rules. A whole crew of the Korean provisional
Speaker 2: government started off republicans and wound up anarchists, Shin included.
Speaker 2: And the way that I've heard this described is they
Speaker 2: basically looked at all the political party bullshit that was happening,
Speaker 2: all of the fighting between political factions, and were like, well,
Speaker 2: this ain't it now. Granted, obviously there's a lot of
Speaker 2: infighting and anarchism, but it's not political parties fighting for
Speaker 2: domination over each other, right, Yeah. And then they looked
Speaker 2: at what the Bolsheviks were doing, crushing their fellow leftists,
Speaker 2: and we're like, well, that's not it either. Also, this
Speaker 2: is during the peak of Chinese anarchism, like roughly, so
Speaker 2: this is the leftism that they're you know, sort of
Speaker 2: that or Bolshevism is like the things that they can see.
Speaker 2: And the inference I get from these texts is that
Speaker 2: also they looked back at traditional Korean ideals, whether from
Speaker 2: the Silhak movement or the dong Hak movement, and they
Speaker 2: were like, yeah, anarchism seems way closer to that stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, which is a thing that we've also
Speaker 2: seen elsewhere across the world, where, for example, the you know,
Speaker 2: the democratic and federalists in Roshava come out of a
Speaker 2: communist leader who was like, wait, I just read a
Speaker 2: bunch of anarchist texts, and now that I'm thinking about
Speaker 2: traditional Kurdish life, that makes more sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: Peter Czarro wrote that in the mid nineteen tens to
Speaker 2: about nineteen fifteen was the heyday of Chinese anarchism, and
Speaker 2: I think this means like the heyday of it coming up,
Speaker 2: but I'm not one hundred percent certain where you would
Speaker 2: see quote a good deal of organizational activism, especially in narcosyndicalism,
Speaker 2: as well as ideological refinement. And in all of this,
Speaker 2: in both Japan and China, the main i explicitly anarchist
Speaker 2: ideological influence seems to be friend of the pod. Peter
Speaker 2: Kerpotkin specifically around the idea of societies built on mutual aid.
Speaker 2: This is like, you know, newspapers that weren't even anarchists,
Speaker 2: like covering his funeral will kind of like lead a
Speaker 2: lot of people like Shin does that Actually he's like
Speaker 2: covers the funeral or whatever, you know. And here's where
Speaker 2: we run into one of the splits I've seen between
Speaker 2: the two main Korean anarchist historical texts I read, hockey
Speaker 2: Rack is focusing on the nationalist aspects of Korean anarchism
Speaker 2: and a lot of how it ties into these older
Speaker 2: Korean religious movements. Dongwong Hoong, meanwhile, does a really good
Speaker 2: job of showing just how explicitly transnational this movement is.
Speaker 2: So basically it's like the way that people look at
Speaker 2: all of this is like either Koreans were building a
Speaker 2: Korean thing even if they weren't at home. And I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to say this is like Hockey Wreck is
Speaker 2: like specifically supernationalists, but rather Dong Wo Huong is saying
Speaker 2: their goal is a cosmopolitan world. And he wrote an
Speaker 2: entire book that is basically just showing evidence of the
Speaker 2: fact that Korean anarchists, while they were fighting for nationalism,
Speaker 2: they were fighting for the liberation of their country, were
Speaker 2: fighting very explicitly for a cosmopolitan world, not Korea for Koreans,
Speaker 2: but instead to end imperialism, destroy borders, and in order
Speaker 2: to do that you start by liberating colonized people like
Speaker 2: us in Korea. I have a strong bias towards the
Speaker 2: latter position if that didn't come across. Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 2: the evidence is pretty strong. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and I think also, like I don't know how,
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess it is possible to develop extremely
Speaker 3: national politics by a bunch of people who were spread
Speaker 3: out between a bunch of different countries. But it seems
Speaker 3: it seems kind of difficult to have a really really
Speaker 3: nationalist movement when like half of your people are in
Speaker 3: one of like five anarchist circles in Japan, or are
Speaker 3: like in Shanghai or Maturia or like in all of
Speaker 3: these places that are very very different and also have
Speaker 3: their own sort of like anarchist traditions and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: It seems hard to just have that turned into a
Speaker 3: peer like I mean, admittedly, like I'm saying this, and
Speaker 3: this is kind of how nationalism came to China to
Speaker 3: the extent that it was like imported back from like
Speaker 3: a bunch of intellectuals who've been in Paris for a
Speaker 3: bunch of time. But yeah, you know, it's it's kind
Speaker 3: of hard for an anarchist but it's really function like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like and it causes I mean, it is
Speaker 2: an interesting tension, right that they are all dealing with
Speaker 2: and they're all covering all the different anarchist papers and
Speaker 2: things are all covering, like there's a paper that's covering
Speaker 2: how Chinese women workers are treated at a British owned
Speaker 2: factory in Shanghai, and how the liberation of all oppressed
Speaker 2: people is the same. Another person writing at the time,
Speaker 2: Simyong Chio said Korean anarchists, since they were slaves who
Speaker 2: lost their country, had to rely with affection on nationalism
Speaker 2: and patriotism, and thus had difficulties in practice discerning which
Speaker 2: was their main idea and which was their secondary idea.
Speaker 2: The reason for the difficulties was due to that their
Speaker 2: enemy was only the one Japanese imperialism. My life is
Speaker 2: one that has drifted along with this kind of contradiction inside,
Speaker 2: and so they're just like, yeah, like I'm a nationalist
Speaker 2: and an anarchist, but not a national anarchist, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's one of those words that you have lots of meanings. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And you've got all these exiles and they've started a
Speaker 2: government and then half, I don't know what percent a
Speaker 2: chunk of the government splits away to become anarchists. Everyone's
Speaker 2: starting newspapers, some of them are all Koreans, some of
Speaker 2: them are mixed Korean and Japanese. The journalist and historian
Speaker 2: I mentioned Shin Chui how he was a prominent author
Speaker 2: of this era. He ran a newspaper called New Greater Korea,
Speaker 2: as well as another one focused on forming alliances with
Speaker 2: China called heavenlye Drum. And I think it was for
Speaker 2: Heavenly Drum that he covered the death of Krapakin. And
Speaker 2: I love God, I love the names in this. You know,
Speaker 2: Yeither's so good. And he became an anarchist, and he
Speaker 2: did a few things of note immediately. There's a part
Speaker 2: that I know more about, which is that he wrote
Speaker 2: a manifesto, and a part that I wish I knew
Speaker 2: more about. He became a gorilla.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, or at.
Speaker 2: Least was probably counterfeiting money and bringing it to the gorillas.
Speaker 2: But I'm not rules. Yeah, but he wrote a manifesto,
Speaker 2: and it's what comes down to us. One hundred and
Speaker 2: one years later, he wrote in nineteen twenty three, and
Speaker 2: this becomes I'll talk about how important it becomes, but
Speaker 2: it is like not just a like random Reddit post,
Speaker 2: you know, it's a very influential document. A manifesto called
Speaker 2: the Declaration of a Korean Revolution in nineteen twenty and
Speaker 2: according to some accounts, although they're the less convincing accounts,
Speaker 2: writing it will be the death of him. That manifesto
Speaker 2: opens quote, to sustain the Korean people's survival, we need
Speaker 2: to wipe out Robert Japan. The expulsion of Robert Japan
Speaker 2: can only be accomplished by a revolution. But where do
Speaker 2: we begin to engage in a revolution? After the revolutions
Speaker 2: of the old days, people used to become the slaves
Speaker 2: of the state, and above them there used to be
Speaker 2: lords and masters, a privileged group dominating them. Consequently, the
Speaker 2: so called revolution was nothing but an altered name for
Speaker 2: the privileged group. In other words, a revolution used to
Speaker 2: just replace one privileged group with another. Accordingly, a slogan
Speaker 2: such as behead the king console the people became the
Speaker 2: sole goal of the revolution. However, today's revolution is one
Speaker 2: that the masses make for themselves, and for that reason
Speaker 2: we call it a revolution of the masses and a
Speaker 2: direct revolution. I'm going to keep reading from me because
Speaker 2: I like it and it is very impactful to everything
Speaker 2: we're talking about. From later in it, quote, the road
Speaker 2: to revolution shall we opened through destruction. However, we destroy
Speaker 2: in order not just to destroy, but to construct. If
Speaker 2: we do not know how to construct, that means we
Speaker 2: do not know how to destroy. And if we do
Speaker 2: not know how to destroy, that means we do not
Speaker 2: know how to construct. Construction is distinguishable from destruction only
Speaker 2: in its form, but in spirit, destruction means construction. And
Speaker 2: then they list the five things that they want to destroy,
Speaker 2: the rule of a foreign race, a privileged class, the
Speaker 2: system of economic exploitation, social inequality, and servile cultural thoughts,
Speaker 2: and it ends quote the masses are the supreme headquarters
Speaker 2: of our revolution. Violence is our only weapon for our revolution.
Speaker 2: We go to the masses and go hand in hand
Speaker 2: with the masses with ceaseless violence, assassination, destruct and rebellion.
Speaker 2: We will overthrow the rule of Robert Japan, transform all
Speaker 2: the absurd systems in our life, and construct an ideal
Speaker 2: Korea in which one human being will not be able
Speaker 2: to oppress other human beings and one society will not
Speaker 2: be able to exploit other societies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this rules, This is great, This is yeah. I
Speaker 3: think that the way that he talks about construction and
Speaker 3: destruction is really interesting because you know, there's the sort
Speaker 3: of echo of the Bakunin like our creative destruction stuff,
Speaker 3: but it's a more thought out.
Speaker 2: Version of it. Yeah, totally, because it's not just like, hey,
Speaker 2: destroying is cool too, it's like, well, yeah, actually have
Speaker 2: to destroy. But if you don't know how to create things,
Speaker 2: you don't know how to destroy things. I really like
Speaker 2: that part of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's true also on like a tactical level too,
Speaker 3: where you know, I mean like, there's obviously the strategic level,
Speaker 3: but on a practical level, it's you know, the best
Speaker 3: way to destroy something is by knowing how it works,
Speaker 3: and you know obviously like but by being the person
Speaker 3: who bakes it work in the first place. So that
Speaker 3: lets you understand the most effective way to de shore
Speaker 3: it and the most effective way to recreate something better
Speaker 3: out of it.
Speaker 2: I like that because it ties that what you just
Speaker 2: said ties into both the like famous Druty quote that
Speaker 2: might not be a druity quote. There's a general during
Speaker 2: the Spanish Civil War who said, we are not in
Speaker 2: the least bit afraid of ruins. We are the workers
Speaker 2: built these palaces here in Spain, and we can build
Speaker 2: them again. Basically, you know, it ties into that and
Speaker 2: the like sun Zoo art of war, like you know,
Speaker 2: if you know your enemy and know yourself, you don't
Speaker 2: have to fear in a thousand battles or whatever. Cool.
Speaker 2: I like what you're saying about it. But what I
Speaker 2: also is destructive to the flow of this conversation is advertising.
Speaker 2: But what at the same time constructs our ability to
Speaker 2: have this conversation within the framework of a capitalist society
Speaker 2: are these advertisers. So they too know how to build,
Speaker 2: destroy and create. And that's why we let them advertise.
Speaker 2: We actually make them prove that they can both destroy
Speaker 2: and create. We do not that's true.
Speaker 3: We do not.
Speaker 2: Thing that I said wasn't true.
Speaker 1: We have no idea who they are.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's some stuff we think and we're back. So
Speaker 2: the author of this is Shin He. I've read some
Speaker 2: versions of his history where he dies in jail, like
Speaker 2: more or less the next year for writing this. I
Speaker 2: think those are not true. More of the versions say
Speaker 2: that he still dies in jail. It's not good for him.
Speaker 2: Other versions where he's arrested by Japanese police in either
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty eight or nineteen twenty nine, and he's not
Speaker 2: arrested for writing this. He's arrested for running counterfeit money
Speaker 2: across a border. I tend to believe those versions, and
Speaker 2: so in those versions he died in solitary confinement nineteenth six.
Speaker 2: He's received numerous awards and recognitions from the South Korean
Speaker 2: government in the century that followed well. At the same time,
Speaker 2: he's sometimes credited for being the founder of the jew
Speaker 2: Cha philosophy of self reliance that guides North Korea. I
Speaker 2: don't think he would have anything nice to say about
Speaker 2: North Korea or South Korea if he was alive. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: what a like that to me? Like that almost sums
Speaker 2: up all of this, right, is like he's a national
Speaker 2: hero to these completely. There's like a triangle of ideologies here, right,
Speaker 2: and he's at one corner at North Korea is at
Speaker 2: a different corner, and South Korea is at a different corner.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's weird because it reminds me of the way
Speaker 3: that like both the okay, how do you actually put this,
Speaker 3: both the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists like both
Speaker 3: claimed Son yet Sen as like their great hero because
Speaker 3: he was the guy who was running the Nationalist party
Speaker 3: before the Nationalist and Community to split okay, but Sonny
Speaker 3: at Sen at least like ideologically, I mean, she's a
Speaker 3: mess ideologically one of the weirdest guys who has ever
Speaker 3: had a major role in history, like ideologically, but at
Speaker 3: least you can sort of understand how his ideology could
Speaker 3: lead to either of these other two groups. Ideology, where's
Speaker 3: this guy, It's like, this is an anarchist, Like all
Speaker 3: of you people have just sort of like, you know,
Speaker 3: you were stripping these Although I admittedly I have actually
Speaker 3: heard the sort of like anarchist Juja thing before. It
Speaker 3: was interesting. Yeah, well it's like and I mean, this
Speaker 3: is this is part of what's what's weird about like
Speaker 3: ju Cha as an ideology about like sort of the
Speaker 3: North Korean version of it is that it's a really
Speaker 3: really deeply weird kind of Marxism. Like it's not normal.
Speaker 3: It's not like an import of Soviet Marxism. It's like
Speaker 3: that faction is its own distinct faction that sort of
Speaker 3: like wiped out the pro Sovia factions and like was
Speaker 3: different than the pro Chinese factions, and so like it
Speaker 3: does I guess it kind of makes sense that they
Speaker 3: kind of took in a similar way to like there's
Speaker 3: elements of Maoism that were taken from earlier Chinese anarchism.
Speaker 3: Like I guess it would make sense that they would
Speaker 3: absorb it, but it's also so unbelievably not the same thing.
Speaker 2: No, I mean it makes sense. I mean, I mean
Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks took an awful lot from the anarchists during
Speaker 2: the like October Revolution, and like you know, like yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, fascism takes from you know, everyone takes from Anicus.
Speaker 3: Like it as good as good ideas and good critiques,
Speaker 3: and that's it turns out like it's much much better
Speaker 3: at producing critiques of other societies than most other people,
Speaker 3: like basically the other ideologies. So other ideologies take the
Speaker 3: critique and then leave the politics out of it.
Speaker 2: That yeah, that tracks. I got called a tanky on
Speaker 2: Twitter the other day by a liberal and I was
Speaker 2: just like what. And I think it's because I had
Speaker 2: used the word imperialism or whatever, and I'm like, my god,
Speaker 2: what did every tankies hate me? Yeah? Anyway, so he
Speaker 2: wrote that manifesto. He also probably smuggled counterfeit money, and
Speaker 2: he wrote a ton of like novels and shit which
Speaker 2: I really want to read, and I did not successfully
Speaker 2: find any English translations of them. They might exist. I
Speaker 2: didn't find any of my looking, but they are still
Speaker 2: in print, some of his books in Korea. When I'm
Speaker 2: rich as hell, I'm going to pay translators to translate
Speaker 2: all the great novels and shit written by anarchists that
Speaker 2: never made it into English. And what's fascinating about this manifesto?
Speaker 2: SiZ is cool and I like it is that one.
Speaker 2: It is one of the more important documents of the
Speaker 2: Korean independence movement. Two. In April nineteen twenty four, a
Speaker 2: group called the Eastern Anarchist Federation got started, and this
Speaker 2: brings together anarchists from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
Speaker 2: And when they got together, they adopted a platform. And
Speaker 2: the platform the anarchists of these five different countries, all
Speaker 2: very different positions within the world stage, they adopted the
Speaker 2: platform those based on the declaration of the Korean Revolution.
Speaker 2: And that is fucking cool, yeah, because it's basically all
Speaker 2: of these anarchists from all of these different places they
Speaker 2: look at this document about national liberation and are like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we want career to be free. That's like kind of
Speaker 2: the you know, like we can build from there. You know.
Speaker 2: Also cool about this the Eastern Anarchists Federation. I don't
Speaker 2: know if you've heard this. Their newspaper. The title translates
Speaker 2: to the East. And this makes me happy because there's
Speaker 2: this really mid movie called The East from about ten
Speaker 2: years ago or something. Have you all seen this movie?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Oh my god, have y'all not even heard of this movie?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Oh my god. It has that he was the only
Speaker 2: famous transactor, trans masculine actor.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say Hunter Shaffer, but clearly.
Speaker 2: Not Elliott Page.
Speaker 3: Yeah, huh.
Speaker 2: It has Elliott Page in it, and they're like an
Speaker 2: anarchist cell that's like a terror cell in the US.
Speaker 2: It's like clearly based on crime thing.
Speaker 1: This was his fucking face in it. Who's super famous?
Speaker 1: What's the name Alexander Skarsgard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, I've never heard this.
Speaker 1: I've quite literally never heard of this, and I like
Speaker 1: both of those actors.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's a most it did it clearly didn't do
Speaker 2: super well.
Speaker 1: But then again, you called it a mid movie, so
Speaker 1: I don't need to care.
Speaker 2: It got it well. Me calling it a mid movie
Speaker 2: is saying I like it more than any of my friends.
Speaker 2: Valid but they don't like it because it's a reflection
Speaker 2: of a specific time of anarchist culture as seen from
Speaker 2: an outsider in a way that is like not always
Speaker 2: reflective in a positive way, because it's a little culty.
Speaker 2: It is very culty. It's a movie about an anarchist
Speaker 2: cult that does good things, but like clearly it's made
Speaker 2: by someone who's sympathetic but disagrees at the end. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that group is called the East, and it makes
Speaker 2: me happy that there's a real group called the East.
Speaker 3: Why would the group why would the American one be
Speaker 3: called the East?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 3: Because there's no way that these directors.
Speaker 2: No, I don't know. I don't think they knew about it.
Speaker 3: Korean Americast newspaper.
Speaker 2: I think that they named it that. I get the
Speaker 2: impression because they wanted to use like sort of like
Speaker 2: a compass, like are you lost, find your way from,
Speaker 2: like you know, a guiding star, find the East. They
Speaker 2: just wanted a cardinal direction.
Speaker 3: I think they could have made it more realistic by
Speaker 3: just saying the word black and picking a random object
Speaker 3: like this worst black flag, black wave, black mask, black tide.
Speaker 2: I know, but that style doesn't work as well in
Speaker 2: the US. People still do it in the US, but
Speaker 2: like overall, calling something black something has just different connotations
Speaker 2: in the US.
Speaker 3: That's true, that's true.
Speaker 2: I thought the East was a pretty evocative name, and
Speaker 2: I'm just really excited that it's clearly based on the
Speaker 2: Eastern Anarchist Federation.
Speaker 3: It's newspaper.
Speaker 2: Also, a random thing that I learned about the Eastern
Speaker 2: Anarchist Federation that at least one conference. This is how
Speaker 2: I know that there's an anarchist run hospital because one
Speaker 2: of the years they met and had their conf at
Speaker 2: the hospital. Huh that anarchists had formed and were running
Speaker 2: at rules, Yeah, in nineteen twenty eight, that's where their
Speaker 2: conference was. These first few years, like nineteen twenty nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five are sort of seen as the early period
Speaker 2: of Korean anarchism, which groups were formed and works started
Speaker 2: to get done, and in order to kind of understand
Speaker 2: what they were doing in China, here's my attempt to
Speaker 2: as best as I can understand what's going on in China.
Speaker 2: There's a fuck ton going on in China during this time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so much. In nineteen eleven, the two hundred year Qing
Speaker 2: dynasty was like, what if we got overthrown by a revolution?
Speaker 2: We'll call it the nineteen eleven revolution, and then they
Speaker 2: did nineteen twelve, you get the Republic of China, and
Speaker 2: it's been that way ever since the end, except that actually, instead,
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifteen the monarchy blipped back on the scene
Speaker 2: and got overthrown. In nineteen sixteen, the Republic came back,
Speaker 2: and then by the time our story happened, it seems
Speaker 2: to be get called the warlord era. Yeah, it's never
Speaker 2: a good time to be alive. Actually, I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't know. It might be fun, it's not a good
Speaker 2: time to live A long time.
Speaker 3: It sucked. Yeah, So if you want a really really
Speaker 3: exhaustive breakdown of this, I did it that. The first
Speaker 3: Bastards episode I ever did was about this guy and
Speaker 3: David Jong Jong Chong, who's one of the warlords in
Speaker 3: this period.
Speaker 2: He's the dog beat general.
Speaker 3: If you go listen to that episode about that, I
Speaker 3: actually learned all of the factions, and that episode has
Speaker 3: exhaustive detail on it, and I left out like four
Speaker 3: of the big factional fights because like all of the
Speaker 3: literally the moment the nineteen eleven revolution happens, like there's
Speaker 3: all of these different factions based on like the existing
Speaker 3: armies and they all break up, and they're all constantly
Speaker 3: fighting each other at different Woolard clicks, so like moving
Speaker 3: around the country, seizing territory and losing territory. And it's
Speaker 3: one of the most politically complicated periods I have ever encountered.
Speaker 3: It's like, Yeah, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing this
Speaker 3: applies to three people on Earth. But if you've ever
Speaker 3: to do a really, really in depth micro look at
Speaker 3: who controls one in Yemen, it's like that but across
Speaker 3: a continent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: It's so convoluted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's funny because the next paragraph says confused yet,
Speaker 2: well me, it probably isn't confused, but the listener might be,
Speaker 2: and I might be. Yeah, And what I had is that,
Speaker 2: you know, the warlord era. Warlordism starts to end when
Speaker 2: the Nationalist Party eventually under Chen Kai Shek, but not
Speaker 2: yet and the brand new Communist Party joined forces to
Speaker 2: create the National Revolutionary Army, and the anarchists are kind
Speaker 2: of working with this, and it's complicated. This lasts not
Speaker 2: very long that them getting along. In nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 2: Chen Kai Shek was like, fuck all the commis, they
Speaker 2: started fighting each other until once again they formed a
Speaker 2: United Front nineteen thirty six because Japan was going to
Speaker 2: invade further into China. That's my my speed run of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think there's one really important moment.
Speaker 3: Definitely kind of neither of the the nationalists were I mean,
Speaker 3: the Coyist the Communists are kind of involved in it,
Speaker 3: but in nineteen twenty five there are these so nuetely
Speaker 3: twenty four is when the nationalists who are still under
Speaker 3: Sun yet Sen and the communiststart working together and the communists,
Speaker 3: like the like literals becically the Bolsheviks rebuild the entire
Speaker 3: nationalist party basically into a party that's built in their image.
Speaker 3: It's really interesting because they're the first really I think,
Speaker 3: like proper like well they're doing this a little bit
Speaker 3: before this, Like this is the first real like communist
Speaker 3: party built in the image of like of specifically the Bolsheviks.
Speaker 3: And then they immediately get taken over by a proto
Speaker 3: fascist and who kills all of them.
Speaker 2: Is that Shan Kai shak as the proto fascist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Shan Kai Shack.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the sort of proto fascist drug lord cartel guy.
Speaker 2: Okay, I heard him Pretisenta as the centrist of the
Speaker 2: three people who could have taken over. Yeah. So, but
Speaker 2: I trust you more than I trust this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The thing about Shinkai Shek is that so he's trained
Speaker 3: in by rushed by Russian military academies. Right when when
Speaker 3: the Bolsheviks rebuild the nationalist army, he's one of the
Speaker 3: guys who goes through their military thing. And the Russians
Speaker 3: like think that he's a communist, but he's not a communist.
Speaker 3: He is an organized crime guy and he's been in
Speaker 3: his that's been his whole thing from the beginning, is
Speaker 3: that he's very very He's like he's a sworn brother
Speaker 3: of this thing called the Green Gang, which is one
Speaker 3: of the massive like Chinese organized crime cartels.
Speaker 2: Ok.
Speaker 3: And he basically the moment he like takes power, he
Speaker 3: starts turning on both left wing of the nationalists and
Speaker 3: the communists and eventually just exterminates them all, kills something
Speaker 3: like a million people.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's he's the guy who puts an end
Speaker 3: to sort of the this period that starts in nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty five where there are these mass uprisings against against
Speaker 3: the warlords, like in every single Chinese City. There are
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people in the streets.
Speaker 3: I mean, this enormous general strike. This spreads into like
Speaker 3: Hong Kong, like every every one of these cities has
Speaker 3: these unbelievably massive uprisings. I I haven't like directly read
Speaker 3: about the Korean anarchists being involved in this, but there's
Speaker 3: no way they wouldn't have been in the streets because
Speaker 3: this was this is like an antiperialist uprising too, because
Speaker 3: like the inciting incident is that I think it was
Speaker 3: actually specifically Japanese troops open a fire and striking workers, okay,
Speaker 3: and everyone just goes up. And so there's this giant
Speaker 3: sort of like super revolutionary period between nineteen twenty five
Speaker 3: and nineteen twenty seven where the entire country of China
Speaker 3: is just going up and the nationalist army's marketing across
Speaker 3: the country and then Chang Kai Shek hijackson and kills
Speaker 3: them all. So that's that's the brief thing of the
Speaker 3: situation in China, which is, yeah, there's this massive revolution
Speaker 3: and then Chang Kai Shek slaughters everyone.
Speaker 2: And that's the kind of thing that like when you
Speaker 2: present here's Korean anarchism, and they happen to I'll be
Speaker 2: in China. Something's happening in China. This is not a
Speaker 2: blank slate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess like I shall also
Speaker 3: mention the Chinese anarchist movement is split because there's a
Speaker 3: lot of so they're kind of they're kind of in
Speaker 3: the nationalist coalition because the nationalist coalition includes everyone from
Speaker 3: the nationals coalition stretches from on the one end, like
Speaker 3: almost monarchist landlords to Mao. So this is this is
Speaker 3: not a viable political coalition, right in the long run.
Speaker 3: This is this is the it's it's everyone who actually
Speaker 3: is trying to do politics in China fighting like the
Speaker 3: war lords. Yeah, so the anarchists are involved in this,
Speaker 3: but some of them, I don't know. There's a lot
Speaker 3: going on, partially because by this point everyone has started
Speaker 3: to realize that the Bolsheviks are killing anarchists, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And also a lot of these people have close personal
Speaker 3: relationship Shankaishek. Yeah, for reasons. They're just like friends with him.
Speaker 3: So when the split happens, some of them break with
Speaker 3: a nationalists and some of them kind of break towards
Speaker 3: neither because both the communists and the nationalists start killing them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got the uh kind of remember which source
Speaker 2: it was. One of the things I was reading was
Speaker 2: saying that, like the split between the anarchists who supported
Speaker 2: the nationalists after everything started breaking up and the ones
Speaker 2: who are like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah,
Speaker 2: that split is something that Chinese anarchisms just kind of
Speaker 2: never recovered from.
Speaker 3: No, it doesn't.
Speaker 2: And that's like when it stopped being one of the
Speaker 2: primary political ideologies of the area.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and the second problem is that they don't
Speaker 3: have an army, right, both of the Like, the nationalists
Speaker 3: have this army that was trained by the Bolsheviks, which
Speaker 3: is the best non imperialist army in China. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then the communists have the other part of this army
Speaker 3: that was trained by the Bolsheviks, which is.
Speaker 2: Well, what's interesting, and I think I have a little Okay, Well,
Speaker 2: the thing I want to say is just like a
Speaker 2: couple paragraphs down, So I'm just going to keep going.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, Korean and Chinese and Japanese anarchists in China,
Speaker 2: they start setting up schools everywhere, and this is like
Speaker 2: kind of what they're doing, right, and they're like full
Speaker 2: on primary and secondary schools, and they're also setting up
Speaker 2: military schools, and specifically they're doing this thing where they're
Speaker 2: trying to train peasants into these peasants militias as a
Speaker 2: way to help them drive off both like warlords and
Speaker 2: bandits and also the Chinese Communist Party. Yep. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: this movement is particularly large in Guangzhou, a city in
Speaker 2: southern China, and they raise people's militias because they figured
Speaker 2: people's militias would be harder to recuperate into one of
Speaker 2: these large militaries. So the impression I get from what
Speaker 2: you just said and the sources that I've been looking
Speaker 2: at was it sounds like the anarchists didn't have an
Speaker 2: army on purpose, which might not have worked out for
Speaker 2: them in the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and it's it's also a mess because Guangzhou,
Speaker 3: so Guangzho is is like very it's very close to
Speaker 3: both sort of Shenzhen, and well, Shenzen is not really
Speaker 3: a real city at that point, like it's it's not
Speaker 3: the city that is now, but it's really close to
Speaker 3: Hong Kong. And this is sort of unfortunate because this
Speaker 3: is that's like the nationalist heartland.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, and so.
Speaker 3: It's it's kind of trying to wager insurgency from there,
Speaker 3: is a bit like you're trying to wage an insurgency
Speaker 3: from Texas, where it's.
Speaker 2: Like, well, and so what happened is the these schools
Speaker 2: were largely funded by the nationalists. Yeah, but eventually the
Speaker 2: nationalists are like, fuck this, We're going to force you
Speaker 2: to dissolve all this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have so many drugs to sell, we do
Speaker 3: not have time to run schools. Like, yeah, we are
Speaker 3: too busy getting unbelievably rich off the opium trade to
Speaker 3: have your peudy anarchist teaching children how to read thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, that doesn't surprise me. Overall, the vibe I
Speaker 2: got from reading about Chinese anarchism through this lens of
Speaker 2: what the Korean anarchists were doing in China was that
Speaker 2: the vibe was like, we're going to build schools and
Speaker 2: I guess hospitals, and raise people's militias and help peasants
Speaker 2: defend themselves and educate themselves, which is a good vibe.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In the schools that they built, faculty and students lived
Speaker 2: eight and worked together. They intentionally included Korean anarchists as
Speaker 2: well as Chinese anarchist teachers, I believe also Japanese anarchist
Speaker 2: teachers I was reading about. They would teach social movements,
Speaker 2: they'd teach critiques of communism, they'd teach how to organize
Speaker 2: rural societies, they teach critiques of capitalism. And they had
Speaker 2: three goals, a free and autonomous life, a cooperative laboring life,
Speaker 2: and a cooperative defensive life. And then the Nationalist Party
Speaker 2: ordered it dissolved after less than a year. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: really really did their hard right turn. But they keep
Speaker 2: doing all this shit. And the reason that this part
Speaker 2: is important, this seems to be the vibe that causes
Speaker 2: Manchuria do its thing that we're going to talk about later,
Speaker 2: you know, because it's a similar this idea, this idea
Speaker 2: of free autonomous life, a cooperative laboring life, and a
Speaker 2: cooperative defensive life. Yeah, as like paired together. Like I'm
Speaker 2: down with that. I mean, obviously it has. It clearly
Speaker 2: didn't work out militarily in this particular, you know. But
Speaker 2: we're not going to talk about Manchuria yet because we've
Speaker 2: still got Japanese Korean anarchists to talk about. In labor
Speaker 2: unions and assassination plots, and also we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about Korean Korean anarchists who are desperately trying to organize underground.
Speaker 2: And on top of that, we're going to eventually talk
Speaker 2: about two million people who built a bottom up peasant
Speaker 2: society to fight imperialism and live their best lives. And
Speaker 2: we'll talk about it all next week, but first we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about it could happen here or whatever
Speaker 2: you want to talk about. Whatever you want to talk about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well let's look like what I could happen here.
Speaker 3: It's I've realized I haven't actually mentioned what this podcast
Speaker 3: is about. Our tagline is things falling apart and how
Speaker 3: to put them back together again. So we do a
Speaker 3: lot of I don't know we do. We do a
Speaker 3: lot of of history stuff. We do a lot of
Speaker 3: I guess news labor. I do a lot of labor
Speaker 3: reporting also good history. Yeah, I was about to say
Speaker 3: I had I had you on the show. I don't
Speaker 3: remember how long ago it was, but to talk about
Speaker 3: Japanese anarchism. So if that, if that's the thing that
Speaker 3: you want to talk about, Yeah, there's some episode about
Speaker 3: it in the In the Misty Past that was that
Speaker 3: was That was a really good time.
Speaker 2: Yep. And if you want to hear what I have
Speaker 2: to say about random ship, God, I'm really selling myself
Speaker 2: right now. I am so hungry. We're recording this a
Speaker 2: little bit later than we usually record, and it is showing.
Speaker 2: But I have a substack called whatever it's called. Just
Speaker 2: google Margaret Kiljoy substack and you'll find it and then
Speaker 2: you'll hear me write about politics and history and all
Speaker 2: the stuff. And some of it's personal and some of
Speaker 2: it's not. And the most recent piece I wrote is
Speaker 2: called I Hate Election Years, and it's about why I
Speaker 2: hate election years. Yea, and yeah, no, it's great. It's
Speaker 2: like designed to piss off all the people who are like,
Speaker 2: no vote for the lesser evil, or like no voting's
Speaker 2: bad or just I'm just like it's how I'm tired
Speaker 2: of it, all hate it. I'm tired of it. I
Speaker 2: can't wait till next year. I mean, I'm sure everything's
Speaker 2: gonna be worse next year. But anyway, that's me, Sophia.
Speaker 2: Gu anything you want to plug.
Speaker 1: Oh, I just gonna talk about the importance of voting. No,
Speaker 1: I'm kidding, whatever, No, just follow at Coolson media. We
Speaker 1: got a bunch of shows that are really really interesting
Speaker 1: and well researched, and I just can't recommend them enough
Speaker 1: to look out for that, including it could happen here
Speaker 1: featuring Mia.
Speaker 2: And if you're ever like how do I make the
Speaker 2: world better but you don't know how. There's two things
Speaker 2: that are almost never bad, feeding people and rescuing animals.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, yeah, one of those better be
Speaker 1: a pet.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, yeah, no, I was. I was like watching
Speaker 2: a just Twitter video of someone rescuing a straight dog
Speaker 2: and saving it and befriending it, and you know, like
Speaker 2: there's there's certain things that you're like almost never in
Speaker 2: the wrong when you feed people, yeah, and you're almost
Speaker 2: never in the wrong when you find and rescue animals.
Speaker 2: Someone's gonna be like, what do you mean almost never,
Speaker 2: And I'll be like I hate discourse by I see
Speaker 2: you all next week. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: That's the end, And that's the end of this podcast.
Speaker 1: Because my rescue dog is looking at me like excuse me, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's my time, it's why are we not paying attention
Speaker 1: to me? And she is correct, Yeah, So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go pay attention to her.
Speaker 2: Dog times see y'all next week. Bye.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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Speaker 3: You get your podcasts.