Speaker 1: M hmm. It's up cast uh pod today Robert Evans
Speaker 1: me behind the Bastards. This podcast we talk about bad people,
Speaker 1: and I don't do a very good job of introducing
Speaker 1: the show. That is the entirety of my job to
Speaker 1: do and also to introduce UM. I apologize for that.
Speaker 1: Today we have a little bit of a special episode
Speaker 1: for y'all. We're talking about the Golden Age of terrorism
Speaker 1: and I'll explain what that is in a minute. And
Speaker 1: my guests are a couple of of of friends and
Speaker 1: colleagues of mine from the the real world, UM and
Speaker 1: in the mean streets of Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: To two of the people, I get repeatedly tear gassed
Speaker 1: and grenaded and threatened with firearms, sometimes with being a lane. Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: how are y'all doing tonight? I'm doing okay. I'm not
Speaker 1: getting threatened with grenades or tear guests. Yeah, that's some
Speaker 1: always a fun thing to do, especially since probably some
Speaker 1: of our friends will get threatened with grenades into your
Speaker 1: guest tonight more likely than not. Yeah, that's most most night. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you want to you want to tell the listeners a
Speaker 1: little bit about yourself since you're not you're not comming
Speaker 1: into this as as as as a big time stand
Speaker 1: up comedians like most of our guests, or is local
Speaker 1: youths like Garrison. Oh um, Yeah, So my name is
Speaker 1: b Um and I am half of Surtists were journalists
Speaker 1: collective that started as a ship posting account and then
Speaker 1: there was a curfew and our friend Robert wanted some backup,
Speaker 1: so we went and started reporting on stuff. And now
Speaker 1: three months later we're still reporting on stuff and we've
Speaker 1: been shot with a lot more tear grass and grenades
Speaker 1: and pepperballs since then. Yeah, and an amount that seems
Speaker 1: almost impossible when you try to take stock of it.
Speaker 1: I have now Vintier guest with you more times than
Speaker 1: I can count. Yes, yes, that is very accurate, but
Speaker 1: certainly I can confirm north of a hundred times. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's that's be in a lane. And today
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the Golden age of terrorism?
Speaker 1: Do you do you know? What? What do do you do?
Speaker 1: You know anything about the golden age of terrorism? Is
Speaker 1: that a term you've heard prior to tonight? I assume
Speaker 1: it involves bell bottoms and just massive quantities of cocaine
Speaker 1: in a K fort Yes to everything, but the A
Speaker 1: K forty seven. So this is a fascinating period because
Speaker 1: when when you were talking about the golden age of
Speaker 1: terrorism is like the sixties up through the late seventies,
Speaker 1: and some people would say into the eighties. One of
Speaker 1: the things that's fascinating about it is that modern body
Speaker 1: armor didn't really exist. Like you you had some you know,
Speaker 1: some flak vests and stuff. You had some stuff that
Speaker 1: can maybe stop some pistol rounds, but like it was
Speaker 1: very uncommon and it didn't work well. So fucking everybody
Speaker 1: in terrorism uses machine pistols so like, which are like
Speaker 1: like little handguns the fire a bunch of rounds really fast,
Speaker 1: so you can just jam in like the door of
Speaker 1: a building and just spray it down with gunfire. So
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of fucking scorpion machine pistols and stuff.
Speaker 1: Nine Mills and Toko ReBs. Yeah, all of the all
Speaker 1: of the eighties action movies and every good James Bond
Speaker 1: and every good. That's why I'm excited to talk about
Speaker 1: today because like terrorism real bummer these days, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's mostly you're gonna kill a lot of innocent people.
Speaker 1: You're gonna specifically try to just kill innocent people most
Speaker 1: of the time. And usually if you're a terrorist now,
Speaker 1: like one way or the other, you want to kill
Speaker 1: everyone in the world, pretty much like your isis and
Speaker 1: you want to kill all the people who aren't Muslims.
Speaker 1: You're some Nazi and you want to kill everybody who's
Speaker 1: not like you're kind of white like whatever, whatever kind
Speaker 1: of terrorists you are, it's a bleak ass kind of terrorists.
Speaker 1: Whereas in the sixties and seventies there were some fun terrorists, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, they killed a lot of people, Like, but
Speaker 1: did any of them want to drown Silicon Valley to
Speaker 1: make France the new hub of technology? Not no, but
Speaker 1: that that would have been That would have been fun.
Speaker 1: There is there, there is. There is a pretty good
Speaker 1: attack on OPEC though. Um. Yeah, so it was like
Speaker 1: you you've got in this period of time, number one,
Speaker 1: the world wasn't quite so bleak, so terrorism was like
Speaker 1: a lot more fun, um and it's a lot cooler.
Speaker 1: Everybody's like walking random machine pistols. They got like fucking
Speaker 1: bell bottoms, great great outfits. You've got all these cool
Speaker 1: like different you know, liberation movements that aren't all religious
Speaker 1: extremists and stuff. It's a fun time to talk about terrorism. Um,
Speaker 1: and the main thing people do isn't just suicide bomb
Speaker 1: others too and fire randomly into businesses full of people. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk a lot about plane hijackings, skyjackings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just keep thinking of now Saturday Night Live episodes
Speaker 1: from my childhood. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of those eighties episodes make jokes, and there's like the
Speaker 1: movie Airplane, there's a joke. But we'll talk about We're
Speaker 1: all that in a second. So we're gonna talk abou
Speaker 1: the Golden Age of terrorism, and that's mostly gonna be
Speaker 1: part one. We're mostly going to talk about sky jackings
Speaker 1: and the Japanese Red Army, which is a fun group.
Speaker 1: And then part two was going to be all Carlos
Speaker 1: the Jackal, who used to be the most wanted terrorists
Speaker 1: in the world and is a neat guy, I mean,
Speaker 1: a monster. Maybe he was definitely the one in the
Speaker 1: Day of the Jackal. Well that's actually where his name
Speaker 1: came from, but when they made the movie about it, it
Speaker 1: it was pretty inspired. But anyway, Yeah, Carlos the Jackal,
Speaker 1: um who as you can tell by his incredible nickname,
Speaker 1: um one of the coolest terrorists. A lot about it
Speaker 1: probably and sucks out the morrow somewhere he was he was,
Speaker 1: he was one of the guys who was like there
Speaker 1: for all of Black September. So he may have had
Speaker 1: to eat a couple of bones out in the deserts
Speaker 1: of Jordan's. This is lots of things I'll be new
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah. So, but before we get into anything else,
Speaker 1: I want to start by talking about the phenomenon that
Speaker 1: most defined the golden age of terrorism, which is skyjacking.
Speaker 1: And no, that does not refer to masturbating on an aircraft,
Speaker 1: because masturbating on an aircraft isn't a crime, and in
Speaker 1: some cases it's actually mandatory. I don't know they're aware
Speaker 1: of that, Um, I've seen a very specific movie from
Speaker 1: the seventies that implies that. Right. Oh yep, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't opening INVESTI Beethoven. There's a lot of mandatory sex
Speaker 1: on airplanes. Well, I'm very supportive of skyjacking. That kind
Speaker 1: of skyjacking and the other kind of skyjacking. Actually both
Speaker 1: kinds of skyjacking. So the kind of skyjacking that we're
Speaker 1: talking about today involves the hijacking of planes, which was
Speaker 1: a thing that used to happen back in the day
Speaker 1: before al Qaeda kind of ruined it forever. Um, nobody
Speaker 1: gets to enjoy an air It used to be fun.
Speaker 1: Hijacking airplanes used to be a joyful affair. Um, and
Speaker 1: they ruined. That's really the crime. Okay, I probably shouldn't.
Speaker 1: So the first recorded skyjacking occurred on February eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: one and are to keep up Peru when a group
Speaker 1: of passenger plans they were really like one of the
Speaker 1: crazy things when you study aviations, like how fucking quick.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, now we're just flying these things
Speaker 1: all over the damn place. Yeah, it was paying hijacking
Speaker 1: and now we're sky skyjacking, skyjacking, very hijacking. So the
Speaker 1: first one, yeah, a keeper our equippa whatever. Peru, when
Speaker 1: a group of rebel soldiers accosted two American pilots and
Speaker 1: tried to force them at gunpoint to drop profit propaganda
Speaker 1: leaflets over Lima. Um. So the pilot said no, and
Speaker 1: so the rebels occupied their plane and kind of sat
Speaker 1: around for two weeks. Basically, Um, no one was good
Speaker 1: at it yet flying no they were just kind of
Speaker 1: sitting there on the tarmac being like fly drop. These
Speaker 1: pamphlets flu around and the pilots were like no. And
Speaker 1: then we were like okay, yes, yeah, they weren't dicks
Speaker 1: like they were going to murder them, but they really
Speaker 1: like less of a skyjacking and more of a sit in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was an attempted skyjacking. Um, no one was good
Speaker 1: at it yet, but yeah, that was the first attempt
Speaker 1: at a skyjacking anywhere in the world that that is
Speaker 1: on record as far as I can, as far as
Speaker 1: I can find um. And yeah, they didn't get what
Speaker 1: they wanted in the end. The pilots were just kind
Speaker 1: of like no, and like, no one else knows how
Speaker 1: to fly planes because it's nineteen thirty one, so you
Speaker 1: really have no other options right now. I'm just also
Speaker 1: in that two weeks, they weren't like how else can
Speaker 1: we distribute pamphlets? You know how it is when you
Speaker 1: kind of like get your heart set on something, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're already there with a gun pointed at the
Speaker 1: pilot and you're Timac and bro there's like military surrounding
Speaker 1: you at the airport or something, it's never mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I don't know how much attention it drew, but um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the first one. Now, the first US no SA,
Speaker 1: someone would have to know about it. And it's the thirties. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: The first U S skyjacker was a failed carney named
Speaker 1: Ernest Pledge um and in nineteen thirty nine he he
Speaker 1: shot his flight instructor in the back of the head
Speaker 1: during a during a training flight while in mid air
Speaker 1: and very nearly crashed because he shot his instructor in
Speaker 1: the head it was flying at Also what a career trajectory. Yes,
Speaker 1: failed Carny to sky jack to first American sky jack.
Speaker 1: I'm no good at operating this ferris wheel. Perhaps I'll
Speaker 1: try stealing at airplane. I mean, you know, we all
Speaker 1: that's life. I'm just saying, there's one lever on the
Speaker 1: ferris wheel. It's a little bit more complicated with the airplane.
Speaker 1: So the Yeah, so Ernest, yeah, shoots his flight instructor,
Speaker 1: manages to like I think, throw his corpse out of
Speaker 1: the plane and like take control. Um, and then he
Speaker 1: kind of goes on the run with this stolen plane. Um.
Speaker 1: But almost immediately before he can really get into being
Speaker 1: on the run, he stops for Hamburgers. I'm sorry, but
Speaker 1: he stops for hamburgers. Like he lands the plane, lands
Speaker 1: the plane. No, he lands the plane outside of a town,
Speaker 1: and then he walks into town to get hamburgers. Well,
Speaker 1: if you're going to go on the run, you need
Speaker 1: to be fortified. He should have packed a lunch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he gets caught by police immediately because he's covered
Speaker 1: in blood, and the people at the Hamburger restaurant are like,
Speaker 1: this guy seems like he might have done something. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: where was this? Um, let's see the I forget exactly
Speaker 1: where Pletch was when he put some like some in
Speaker 1: the middle of America, Right, So yeah, you know, sheriff
Speaker 1: was like, hey, there's a plane and that guy is
Speaker 1: covered in blood. Caper solved. That's good police work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Pletch case essentially invented a lot of early
Speaker 1: legal codes for air piracy, which is what it's called
Speaker 1: when you commit crimes like this in the air, and
Speaker 1: it's the coolest crime you can get charged with. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: if I had to go commit federal crimes that we're
Speaker 1: going to put me in prison, I would want it
Speaker 1: to be air piracy because then people like, what are
Speaker 1: you in here for well, I was an air pirate
Speaker 1: and you wear a little leather hat and monocle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a scar one Oh yeah, yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: get a scar on one cheek. That's something you request
Speaker 1: from law enforcement during the standoff. Now, I'll let these
Speaker 1: people live, but you need to wound me so in
Speaker 1: such a way that I have exactly one Rakish scar
Speaker 1: on my right cheek. That way, twenty years from now,
Speaker 1: when Nicolas Cage comes to get me released on prison
Speaker 1: in a special deal with the federal government because I
Speaker 1: need to hijack a plane in order to get an alcatrat. Whatever. Wait,
Speaker 1: that's just my pitch for about Nicolas with Nicholas Cage.
Speaker 1: Isn't that the rocks like the rock but in the
Speaker 1: air the time? Oh yeah, it's all it's a sky prison.
Speaker 1: All the ground prisons are full, so they have sky prisons.
Speaker 1: So it's like escape from anyway. Yeah. So uh yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Pledge case invents a lot of the early
Speaker 1: legal code for sky crime air piracy um. But by
Speaker 1: the time the federal government started to oversee aviation in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight, hijacking a plane that still was not
Speaker 1: technically a crime nobody really thought they'd need to put
Speaker 1: that in the lackers. So as long as you're not
Speaker 1: on the ground or the water, it's fine. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was fine. There were no laws in the sky in
Speaker 1: nineteen beautiful time. It must have been perfect. So airports
Speaker 1: had no security measures in place. There was just nobody
Speaker 1: did anything about airplanes. Everyone was like, well, why would
Speaker 1: we why would we even think for a second about
Speaker 1: airports security. It was it was, it was like an
Speaker 1: aggressive disregard for wanting to take like any precautions. You're saying,
Speaker 1: it's like when we drive past the National Guard car lot, Yeah,
Speaker 1: drive tanks and they just leave all the tanks sitting
Speaker 1: there and they're just push button ignitions, which, yeah, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't talk too much about that, but it's a thing
Speaker 1: you should know. And Tullio Ortiz is the first guy
Speaker 1: uh to hijack a plane successful, And he gets on
Speaker 1: a flight bound for Key West and he locks himself
Speaker 1: in the bathroom. Then he slips a note underneath the
Speaker 1: door and he warns everyone he's got a bomb and
Speaker 1: he says he'll detonate it if the flight isn't rerouted
Speaker 1: to Havana. Now, Ortiz timed his attempt, well, because the
Speaker 1: Bay of Pigs had happened just a couple of weeks earlier,
Speaker 1: tensions were high between the United States and Cuba, and
Speaker 1: Castro basically was like, oh, ship, Like this is a
Speaker 1: great opportunity to say funk you to the United States, um,
Speaker 1: and not actually risk anything. So he offers Ortiz political
Speaker 1: Sanctuary's super romantic though, because he's locked in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: he is threatening the plane. He's locked in the back
Speaker 1: with the bomb. Right. Yeah, you wonder like a number
Speaker 1: of things about this, um okay, And my only other
Speaker 1: question is it he just want to lift to Cuba
Speaker 1: or was he taking the plane there for some reason
Speaker 1: or because he just wanted to lift to Cuba. He
Speaker 1: just wanted to go to Cuba the way way he
Speaker 1: could kind of worked at that point. Really yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the Bay of Pigs had just happened. But you
Speaker 1: go to another country and like just round a little bit.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was that easy in that time.
Speaker 1: You could lock yourself in the bathroom and slip whatever
Speaker 1: the reasoning or Teaz decides this is the way he's
Speaker 1: going to Cuba. Um, and he doesn't like it there.
Speaker 1: He actually tries to leave and then gets put in
Speaker 1: prison in Cuba. It takes him like fifteen years to
Speaker 1: get back to the United States. Um, So he regrets
Speaker 1: his decision very soon quickly. Sometimes you make your bed
Speaker 1: and then you lie in it. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 1: gotta live in Cuba, which I don't know right now,
Speaker 1: maybe not the worst bed in the world. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so or tease. It doesn't work out well for him.
Speaker 1: He's not super happy with the decision that he made
Speaker 1: to hijack a plane and get to Cuba. UM. But
Speaker 1: a lot of people suddenly realize once he's done it,
Speaker 1: like it's that easy, Like, well, all you gotta do,
Speaker 1: I want to go to Cuba. So three more US
Speaker 1: planes were hijacked and taken to Cuba over the course
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty one. UM And afterwards it becomes it
Speaker 1: becomes a meme. UM. In the next like eight years,
Speaker 1: a hundred and seventies seven skyjackings were committed worldwide, and
Speaker 1: more than seventy percent of them involved an attempt to
Speaker 1: divert a plane to Cuba. So Cuba is the place
Speaker 1: to the place to go if you are jacking a plane,
Speaker 1: if you're an airline or government maybe just let people
Speaker 1: fly to Cuba, right, Yeah, that might have been an option.
Speaker 1: Um you know, there's a number of reasons. It's free essentially,
Speaker 1: like you can get a real cheap ticket and then
Speaker 1: just demand it go to Cuba because you've got a gun.
Speaker 1: But also, it was the seventies. It was real cheap
Speaker 1: to fly do everything. It was the Golden Age, and
Speaker 1: you could smoke on airplane. You could smoke. Everybody's smoking
Speaker 1: the like a hundred percent of the people involved in
Speaker 1: all of these hijackings are smoking the entire time. That
Speaker 1: is something we have to keep in mind. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: Cuba comes like the motherfucking place to go if you're
Speaker 1: hijacking a plane, and the reason to hijack a plane.
Speaker 1: So how Cuba's got like a pretty decent airport set up, right, Like,
Speaker 1: because otherwise I could see this being a problem. I've
Speaker 1: ever heard that it was a problem. I think they
Speaker 1: I don't know much about the Cuban Cuban airport. Just
Speaker 1: imagine air traffic controller in Cuba and like the nightmare
Speaker 1: of like, oh god, we got another one. Not a
Speaker 1: lot of other traffic into Cuba. I don't think in
Speaker 1: this period of time. So I just have one more question, though,
Speaker 1: what did Cuba do with the planes afterwards? They just
Speaker 1: give them that getting to that. So, the reasons why
Speaker 1: people would hijack sky jack planes and take them to
Speaker 1: Cuba were very varied. Everybody had like a different purpose
Speaker 1: behind it. Um, But the del Castro kind of helped
Speaker 1: Um make his country a more desirable destination by letting
Speaker 1: everyone in the world know that Cuba just kind of
Speaker 1: would take in anybody who stole a plane. Like, if
Speaker 1: I'm steal a plane, you can land in Cuba and
Speaker 1: live here. Was like essentially what he told everybody Um.
Speaker 1: And there were a lot of ways in which he
Speaker 1: benefited from the situation. For one thing, it was good propaganda.
Speaker 1: All these people leaving the decade and West like traveled
Speaker 1: to this socialist paradise of Cuba. Um. But more than anything,
Speaker 1: it meant hard currency for Castro. See airlines had to
Speaker 1: pay to get their planes returned, and eventually Cuba settled
Speaker 1: on a standard fee of seventy five hundred dollars per plane,
Speaker 1: So every time a plane got skijacked, they got a
Speaker 1: pile of cash to return it. Um. Yeah, So that's
Speaker 1: that's their little industry develops. I mean of this, you
Speaker 1: build your own commercial airline one plane at a time.
Speaker 1: But I guess that works. And just to crunch the
Speaker 1: numbers here for you said, so there was about a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty or so, well know about like a
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty years something like that trips to Cuba. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so that's not bad money. Up. I do it for
Speaker 1: a living. So uh yeah, Now a number of people. Um,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of reasons people ski jack planes
Speaker 1: for Cuba, including like some folks were just kind of
Speaker 1: mentally ill and decided to do it. Um. Other folks
Speaker 1: chose Castro's capital because they were true believers in communism.
Speaker 1: They convinced themselves that they would be greeted as revolutionary
Speaker 1: heroes if they success. We got a ransom from, you know,
Speaker 1: some government and took it to Cuba. One skyjacker recalled thinking,
Speaker 1: at the start of his endeavor, in a few hours,
Speaker 1: it would be that dawn in a new world. I
Speaker 1: was about to enter paradise. Cuba was creating a true democracy,
Speaker 1: a place where everyone was equal, where violence against blacks
Speaker 1: and justice and racism, where things of the past. I
Speaker 1: had come to Cuba to feel freedom at least once.
Speaker 1: There are a number of non white people whose skyjack
Speaker 1: planes to Cuba because they're just kind of like, fuck
Speaker 1: this bullshit and the United States in the seventies, I'm
Speaker 1: going to Cuba in the Black liberation struggle. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who get broken out of jail and
Speaker 1: get to Cuba somewhere another, so better place than jail,
Speaker 1: that's what people say. Um, yeah, So the reality of
Speaker 1: the situation, UM, I don't know. It differed for everybody,
Speaker 1: but it was less rosy than a lot of skyjackers
Speaker 1: had anticipated. Um. For one thing, just as a general rule,
Speaker 1: governments that put a lot of value on law and
Speaker 1: order don't like people who hijack planes, even if those
Speaker 1: people believe the same fixed they do. So like, thanks
Speaker 1: for the plane, we get dollars out of it, but
Speaker 1: I forgot it was still like at some point two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars or something. But now that you brought
Speaker 1: us this plane, you're also the kind of person who
Speaker 1: steals planes by pointing guns and moms out of them.
Speaker 1: So we don't really trust you, is what we're saying.
Speaker 1: Kind of person who's not one of our highly trained
Speaker 1: doctors in our very good medical system. Yeah, um so.
Speaker 1: According to Wired quote, Castro had a little bit disdained
Speaker 1: for the hijackers themselves, whom he considered undesirable malcontents. After
Speaker 1: lying landing at Jose Martie, which I guess is the airport,
Speaker 1: hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that
Speaker 1: served as the headquarters of G two Cuba secret police.
Speaker 1: There they were interrogated for weeks on end, accused of
Speaker 1: working for the CIA, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Speaker 1: The lucky ones were then sent to live at Cassa
Speaker 1: de Troncitos, the hijackers house decrupt dormitory in southern Havana,
Speaker 1: where each American was allocated sixteen square feet of living space.
Speaker 1: The two story building eventually held as many as sixty hijackers,
Speaker 1: who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of forty
Speaker 1: pesos each skyjackers who rubbed their G two interrogators the
Speaker 1: wrong way. Meanwhile, we're dispatched to squalid sugar harvesting camps
Speaker 1: where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. At these tropical goologs,
Speaker 1: inmates were punished with machette blows. Political agitators were publicly executed,
Speaker 1: and captured escapees were dragged across razor sharp stocks of
Speaker 1: sugarcane until their flesh was stripped away. One American hijacker
Speaker 1: was beaten so badly by prison guards that he lost
Speaker 1: an eye. Another hanged himself in his cell. So it's like, wow,
Speaker 1: kind of a mixed bag. Yeah, he stole a whole
Speaker 1: plane just for that, because sixteen feet of living space,
Speaker 1: that's that's two feet by eight feet. That's like a
Speaker 1: cop back to talking about career trajectories of hijackers. You
Speaker 1: really got to have an end goal in mind. Better,
Speaker 1: jacking itself is not cannot be the end goal. Better
Speaker 1: to be the broker who's arranging the transfer of the
Speaker 1: planes back to their that's the growth industry. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: also funny that a communist country would take the people
Speaker 1: who put in the hard labor and you know, expropriate that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, all governments are kind of the same when
Speaker 1: you get on the other hand, depending on where you
Speaker 1: lived before, at least you're warm now, Yeah, you're warm now.
Speaker 1: It works out for some of them, right, Like, there's
Speaker 1: got to be some people that like getting good with
Speaker 1: the G two folks, and I don't know. I assume
Speaker 1: it worked out for some people, but it's it's a
Speaker 1: rough it's a rough situation for most of them. Now,
Speaker 1: the stories that kind of came out about how not
Speaker 1: ideal it was to become a skyjacker and go to
Speaker 1: Cuba didn't stop people from jacking. One of the jackers
Speaker 1: was a thirty or four year old Cuban exile who
Speaker 1: simply couldn't live any longer without the taste of his
Speaker 1: mother's free holes. He'd apparently like left as a kid
Speaker 1: like the yeah, and like one of his mom's soup,
Speaker 1: which is I hope he got a lot more soup.
Speaker 1: I don't know. A plane, so we had to steal
Speaker 1: a plane. Really, that was That was a decision you
Speaker 1: can make because there were essentially no risks, Like it
Speaker 1: was not dangerous to hijack a planets. Also, I don't
Speaker 1: know what their relationship was like, but after that he
Speaker 1: and his mom got along pretty good, you would have
Speaker 1: to hope, so right. Yeah. Another was a sociology student
Speaker 1: who wanted to study communism. Uh. And of course there
Speaker 1: were non Cuba related jackings. Twenty eight year old Trust
Speaker 1: fund kid hijacked a Delta Airlines flight well dressed as
Speaker 1: a cowboy. He received fifty thou dollars and parachuted out.
Speaker 1: He horribly injured himself upon landing and was immediately caught. Yeah,
Speaker 1: way to go trust fund kids. Yeah, I just got
Speaker 1: into Cuba, buddy. So skyjackings represented a problem for the
Speaker 1: airline industry, but not really a big one. Most ski
Speaker 1: jackings would cost the airline between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Uh.
Speaker 1: And since passengers were basically never harmed, like, there wasn't
Speaker 1: really a lot of desire among like the people buying
Speaker 1: flights for it to be stopped, like it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't a horrible issue from most because to doing business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: got a detour to Cuba. Yeah, yeah, that was the thing.
Speaker 1: Like a skyjacking meant like some excitement for everybody on
Speaker 1: the plane. You might get a free night in Havana
Speaker 1: or something, you know. I assume it wasn't great for everybody,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't Like, it wasn't a big problem. And
Speaker 1: again people basically never got hurt. Proposals were made to
Speaker 1: add X rays to airports and begin scanning passengers but
Speaker 1: this was shot down as an unreasonable violation UM. Basically,
Speaker 1: like airlines were like, people will never submit to this.
Speaker 1: Fortunately we never did, and nobody ever changed about that.
Speaker 1: So kind of one by one, all of the airlines
Speaker 1: like looked at this problem of hijackings every year, many
Speaker 1: many of them, and we're like, I guess we'll just
Speaker 1: kind of right it out. Fuck it. I mean, what's
Speaker 1: the worst outcome you can imagine from people hijacking planes?
Speaker 1: It's fine, No one's gonna like fly them into buildings.
Speaker 1: Uh So the federal government had a little bit more
Speaker 1: on the line and was kind of less willing to
Speaker 1: let this keep happening, being the federal government. All these
Speaker 1: jackings were international embarrassment, and they also helped fund because
Speaker 1: a lot of times people would like the jackers would ransom,
Speaker 1: you know, the passengers and stuff, and this funded terrorist
Speaker 1: organizations around the world, including particularly a lot of like
Speaker 1: Palestinian liberation organizations and stuff. So that was a real
Speaker 1: issue for the State Department UM and a real issue
Speaker 1: for the US government. In a nineteen sixty eight a
Speaker 1: Senate hearing was held on the matter. Irving rip who
Speaker 1: represented the f a A, told the assembled Congressman, it's
Speaker 1: an impossible problem short of searching every passenger. If you've
Speaker 1: got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana
Speaker 1: and he has got a gun, that's all he needs,
Speaker 1: and there's no way to figure out that he has
Speaker 1: that gun. And certainly wouldn't search every single passenger before
Speaker 1: they boarded a plane. That would be madness. Yeah, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's actually the what I'm about. Yes, quote from Wired.
Speaker 1: Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Rips Gloom by raising
Speaker 1: the possibility of using metal detectors or X ray machines
Speaker 1: to screen all passengers. He noted that these relatively new
Speaker 1: technologies were already in place at several maximum security prisons
Speaker 1: and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. I
Speaker 1: see no reason why similar devices couldn't be installed at
Speaker 1: airport checking gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns
Speaker 1: or other weapons, just prior to implaning, Smithers said, But
Speaker 1: Rip dismissed. The senator's suggestion is certain to have a
Speaker 1: bad psychological effect on passengers. It would scare the pants
Speaker 1: off people, plus people would complain about invasion of privacy.
Speaker 1: No one made any further inquiries about electronics. If you
Speaker 1: someone asks you if you have guns before you get on,
Speaker 1: to take a single solitary action to make sure people
Speaker 1: aren't carrying whatever gun they want onto a plane, like
Speaker 1: people will not fly, It will ruin the industry. And
Speaker 1: I think history that I won't get on a plane
Speaker 1: without my scorpion machine pistol. You know, occasionally I think
Speaker 1: about how people believe in this idea of the forward
Speaker 1: progress march of history. This is a solid education that
Speaker 1: we have headed because they were right in the seventies
Speaker 1: by god um so two about absolutely everything, especially cigarettes
Speaker 1: and cocaine, which is not addictive here it's not addictive.
Speaker 1: Mix as well with cigarettes in a way that again
Speaker 1: absolutely not addictive. That's what everyone and smoking. You know,
Speaker 1: it feels really good everything jacking a plane, Yeah, really,
Speaker 1: gripping tightly the handle of a scorpion machine pistol as
Speaker 1: you scream wildly the word havana over and over again
Speaker 1: to the flight attendants. I assume, yeah, huge, yeah, and enormous.
Speaker 1: A leather vest like you wouldn't believe such a leather
Speaker 1: vest called medallion that I could use as a coaster.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, medallion's where you keep the extra bullets too.
Speaker 1: It's like a pez thing. So two weeks after the
Speaker 1: Senate inquiry, a forklift operator named or In Richard's hijacks
Speaker 1: at Delta Airlines flight from a forklift upgrade from a forklift.
Speaker 1: He springs his trap over West Virginia a gun on
Speaker 1: the first man he meets in the aisle after leaving
Speaker 1: a seat, and the first man he met in the
Speaker 1: aisle after leaving a seat wounded up, wound up being
Speaker 1: a sitting senator from Mississippi. Who at that. So the
Speaker 1: whole situation got resolved peacefully in Miami, but it spooked
Speaker 1: the federal government, who suddenly realized that elected officials could
Speaker 1: very easily be skyjacked over like political issues. And like
Speaker 1: we she probably had this motherfucker off at the past, right,
Speaker 1: this might not end well for us, I suppose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the State Department, like again, no one knew what
Speaker 1: to do because you couldn't search people. Look, it's the air,
Speaker 1: there's no laws. The State Department actually seriously proposed offering
Speaker 1: all Americans free one way trips to Cuba in order
Speaker 1: to stop it. Like again, if we just say any
Speaker 1: American can go to Cuba for free once forward is
Speaker 1: a lie because there was a point where we all
Speaker 1: could have just taken a free trial Cuba. Castro actually
Speaker 1: said no to that, with the US just offloading all,
Speaker 1: you know, sucking shitty people. I've never had any reason
Speaker 1: to critique anything Photol Castra has done, but right now,
Speaker 1: this is this is the first thing that I'm aware of.
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, stripping people's flesh off the sugar cane,
Speaker 1: and that was not that, it was a little bit
Speaker 1: of that. I mean, if you're gonna strip people's flesh,
Speaker 1: and if you've got to strip off people's flesh, you
Speaker 1: might as well use sugar exactly. I've always said that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's basically the same thing that like those
Speaker 1: fancy salons do when they make they use the sugar
Speaker 1: to make the thing for depilating here. But but it's
Speaker 1: your muscular chair off of your skeleton. Okay, well we
Speaker 1: don't need to be like, you know, nobody's perfect. Is
Speaker 1: kind of the point here, and that's really what we're
Speaker 1: talking about um today. So yeah, Castra is like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to just take all of the Americans
Speaker 1: who want to go to cute think they might like Cuba.
Speaker 1: Um that there's an alternate timeline where Cuba becomes the
Speaker 1: absolutely like Cuba becomes Silicon Valley because they went with
Speaker 1: that plan. Could it could have could have been pretty sweet,
Speaker 1: actually right? Um? Yeah, So he refuses to accept them,
Speaker 1: so the f a A forms an special Anti Jacking
Speaker 1: task Force instead. Um, and they're I don't understand. They
Speaker 1: are deeply, deeply confused about what their job is from.
Speaker 1: So uh, for reasons I will never understand, they solicit
Speaker 1: American citizens for suggestions on how to solve the problem,
Speaker 1: and they're immediately buried in just awful awful suggestions like
Speaker 1: thousands of letters that are all stupid as shit, including
Speaker 1: installing trapdoors outside cockpits, army stewardess is with tranquilizer darts,
Speaker 1: making passengers wear boxing gloves so should they couldn't grip guns,
Speaker 1: and playing the Cuban national anthem before takeoff, and arresting
Speaker 1: anyone who knew the lyrics. I mean, I have no
Speaker 1: problem with that last one. That's think boxing gloves would
Speaker 1: be fantastic. That would be very funny. I'm also just
Speaker 1: now imagining the movie Airplane, but everyone is wearing boxing
Speaker 1: gloves the entire time and what a bit that would
Speaker 1: be quite funny. Well, they would have to rework some scenes,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't fly to Cuba. That woman would still
Speaker 1: be hysterical in the lineup waiting for it. So not
Speaker 1: all of the suggestions were immediately rejected by the government.
Speaker 1: The most popular one among the f A was the
Speaker 1: idea that they could just build a scale mock replica
Speaker 1: of the airport in Cuba in South Florida, so that
Speaker 1: they could trick skyjackers into thinking they'd reach out, um
Speaker 1: right next to where they staged the moon lie right right,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. But yeah, which, which, of course isn't they
Speaker 1: put in Florida. That's where you put your fake moon.
Speaker 1: They're such similar anyway. Um yeah, So the the f
Speaker 1: A was like, seriously, like what if we just build
Speaker 1: a fake airport, But then they decided it would be
Speaker 1: too expensive. So the airlines meanwhile just decided to make
Speaker 1: like policy be to completely comply with skyjackers. In always,
Speaker 1: they actually banned employees from taking any act and whatsoever
Speaker 1: to scott to stop a sky jack It's like if
Speaker 1: you work in a retail store. The policy about shoplift. Yes,
Speaker 1: and this actually winds up having an impact on nine eleven.
Speaker 1: Happens the way it does because at that time there
Speaker 1: had not been like a plane hijacking where that sort
Speaker 1: of thing had been done, and the wisdom was still
Speaker 1: you know in two thousand one, Oh, they're gonna ransom
Speaker 1: us or take us somewhere. They're gonna fly us somewhere,
Speaker 1: like they want to get money or something. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's part of why people didn't really fight back until
Speaker 1: they started, you know, that last plane kind of realized
Speaker 1: what was happening. On the other hand, no one was like,
Speaker 1: they're not using a gun. Well you couldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: they put some security measures. I'm pretty sure that you
Speaker 1: could no longer do the fish called Wanda and just
Speaker 1: flip the gun around. But it did used to be
Speaker 1: that easy, is it is. It isn't like you just
Speaker 1: would carry a gun onto a plane. Um. So, I know,
Speaker 1: Simonon Lawton ruined it for everybody. He really did that.
Speaker 1: That's his want. No, okay, so the airlines, yeah again,
Speaker 1: decide like everybody's just gotta do whatever the the hijackers say.
Speaker 1: So all plane cockpits in the United States were for
Speaker 1: a period of time equipped with charts of the Caribbean
Speaker 1: c regardless of the flights destination, because it was just
Speaker 1: known like you might have to fly to Cuba, like
Speaker 1: any flight in the country, you might wind up going
Speaker 1: to Cuba. Like you just accessorized that a little bit.
Speaker 1: You get like some palm trees and everybody's got like
Speaker 1: some coconut drinks. Yeah, you could keep a special set
Speaker 1: like yeah, rum like Cuba. Well probably not Cuba libres
Speaker 1: because those won't go over well once you're in Cuba. Um. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: uh so, Yeah, skyjacking. It was a viral meme right
Speaker 1: for eight years or so, and really the year in
Speaker 1: which it hit its height was nineteen sixty nine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: eleven US flights were commandeered in the first six weeks
Speaker 1: of the year alone. Was really excited by the number. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they really were. They wanted to make it count. One
Speaker 1: plane was taken by released mental patient in his three
Speaker 1: year old son, which which the gun. I'm sure it's
Speaker 1: a less fun story than it is think. I think
Speaker 1: saying that a plane was hijacked by anyone and their
Speaker 1: three year old son maybe gives the three year old
Speaker 1: son too much credit. I don't know, have you met
Speaker 1: in those three year olds in the midst of a tantrum?
Speaker 1: They could totally hijack a plane. Because also that sounds
Speaker 1: like a movie. That sounds like a movie with Tom
Speaker 1: Hanks in the eighties where like, you know, he gets
Speaker 1: out of the middle institution and like his kid wants
Speaker 1: to teach him a lesson about had in. I don't know,
Speaker 1: you could make a fun, feel good movie about it.
Speaker 1: Then he falls in love with the stewardess. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then they go to Cuba. Yeah. Yeah, Then they go
Speaker 1: to Cuba, um and help ignite a communist worldwide revolution
Speaker 1: like Tom Hanks has always wanted to do. So yeah.
Speaker 1: One plane in nineteen sixty nine was diverted by a
Speaker 1: college student who was armed with bug spray, so you
Speaker 1: didn't really have to be all that well equipped I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: armed with but I think he did like a flamethrower thing,
Speaker 1: but I'm not really sure. Um. And another was commandeered
Speaker 1: by a retired Green Beret whose plan was specifically to
Speaker 1: beat Castro to death with his fists. So this was
Speaker 1: this is nine six nine, Yes, so this was before
Speaker 1: any of the Rambo movies would have given him that idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the best part of this idea he had
Speaker 1: on his own. I think the best part of that
Speaker 1: is that you've already described what happened once people landed
Speaker 1: in Cuba. Yeah. So, uh, speaking of landing in Cuba,
Speaker 1: you know what Cuba loves rum Yes, not America, but
Speaker 1: broader than that. Cuba. If anyone knows anything, it's that
Speaker 1: they love products and services. Huge fans of corporations, and
Speaker 1: several of those things that I've just listed are in
Speaker 1: facts and services. There might be an ad for rum
Speaker 1: or for cigars, or for having a lot of doctors,
Speaker 1: like a really tremendous amount of doctors, and really good
Speaker 1: hurricane response and just very response. It could be an
Speaker 1: ad for any of those things. Um. So here we go.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back so um. In this period of time,
Speaker 1: there was exactly one reasonable person who worked in the
Speaker 1: entire US government. Uh, and he was a guy named
Speaker 1: John Daily. He was the f a a's chief psychologist,
Speaker 1: and he decided that we should probably do something about
Speaker 1: this problem. And the thing that we should do, rather
Speaker 1: than search every passenger or all that stuff, was trying
Speaker 1: to analyze like all of the different hijackings in the past,
Speaker 1: and particularly all of the people who had committed them,
Speaker 1: to try and determine if there were certain key behaviors
Speaker 1: that might like give away the fact that to hijack
Speaker 1: a plane. So his research convinced him that all these
Speaker 1: people had done things that had marked them out as
Speaker 1: potential hijackers while they were checking in. Uh So, these
Speaker 1: behaviors weren't uniform. But Daily believed that if you trained
Speaker 1: airline employees to watch for a certain range of suspicious
Speaker 1: behaviors and then search the people who seemed like might
Speaker 1: be a plane hijacker, the fact that some of these
Speaker 1: folks would be innocent wouldn't piss anybody off too much
Speaker 1: if it meant less skyjacking. So you like repeatedly checking
Speaker 1: your gun and asking if anyone knew how to get
Speaker 1: to Cuba. Instead of saying that guy is repeatedly checking
Speaker 1: his gun, better better let him get on this plane,
Speaker 1: you say that guy's repeatedly checking his gun, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: ask him if he plans to hijack the plane, but
Speaker 1: not prevent him from bringing the gun onto the plane. Well,
Speaker 1: they tried to, so it actually worked really well. Um,
Speaker 1: mainly it was just the fact that there was now
Speaker 1: a possibility of being searched by the law before a flight.
Speaker 1: That scared off most h that was that was great.
Speaker 1: There was actually there were reports from airports around the
Speaker 1: country in this period of time. For weeks after these plants,
Speaker 1: Like after airports started doing this of like airport security
Speaker 1: finding guns and knives and bombs stashed in the bushes outside,
Speaker 1: they realized and dumped it out. We got to hide
Speaker 1: it in the bushes. They're never gonna let us take
Speaker 1: this to Cuba. Yeah, by nineteen seventy, the skyjacking epidemic
Speaker 1: was mostly over, so it really worked. This is part
Speaker 1: of why, like dB Cooper, that guy in seventy one,
Speaker 1: who I think part of why it was so noteworthy
Speaker 1: is that like they've really gotten a handle on hijacking
Speaker 1: for the most part, and then he managed he does
Speaker 1: it jack um. But this like that, it turns out
Speaker 1: like a lot of people were just hijacking planes because
Speaker 1: there was literally no barrier to hijacking plane. I gotta say,
Speaker 1: if we were playing Minecraft and you were able to
Speaker 1: hijack planes and there was nothing in the game to
Speaker 1: prevent you from hijacking planes, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people playing Minecraft with a hijacking plane. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people would in Minecraft hijack a plane, which
Speaker 1: is not a thing that anyone in the real nobody
Speaker 1: should ever do. Yeah. Um so yeah, by nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: they've kind of gotten a handle on the jackings in
Speaker 1: the sky. Now up to this point, uh on us
Speaker 1: skyjackings because they were very silly, but there were skyjackings
Speaker 1: all around the world, and a lot of them were
Speaker 1: like like I was saying earlier, like a lot of
Speaker 1: different This is kind of like the height of of
Speaker 1: kind of international solidarity with a lot of like Palestinian
Speaker 1: liberation movements. So there are a lot of different groups
Speaker 1: kind of allied with different Palestinian groups who would do
Speaker 1: it to like help fund them and stuff. And this
Speaker 1: is a big deal. They happened in the US, but
Speaker 1: also like all around the world. Um, and it was
Speaker 1: you know, a thing that other groups would do to
Speaker 1: kind of fund their activities or to make political points. Um.
Speaker 1: And this kind of brings me to the story of
Speaker 1: one of the most successful and interesting jackings in all
Speaker 1: of sky history, the story of the Japanese Red Army. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot to this story. This is this
Speaker 1: is a fun one. This is one of the funnest
Speaker 1: stories in all of terrorism. Um. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun stories terrorism. It's really just laughs all the
Speaker 1: way down, um, but this is all the way yeah,
Speaker 1: like that like that falling Man on nine okay. Um.
Speaker 1: So to tell this story, we have to talk a
Speaker 1: bit about Japan in the nineteen sixties. Japan was just
Speaker 1: fifteen years out of World War Two at the start
Speaker 1: of the decade, and thus only fifteen years out of
Speaker 1: like literally centuries of rule by emperors and shogun and
Speaker 1: they didn't have a lot of experience with democracy. It
Speaker 1: had not been an open society. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: then there's a bunch of nukes going off and Douglas
Speaker 1: MacArthur is in charge for like five years that nothing
Speaker 1: could go wrong. Douglas MacArthur, by the way, a few
Speaker 1: years later would suggest so strenuously that he was fired
Speaker 1: for it putting it into the Korean War by nuking
Speaker 1: all of China basically, so not they didn't go with
Speaker 1: that option, huh no, no, not a not the most
Speaker 1: even tempered guy. But he opens Japan up and it's
Speaker 1: his job to like make sure that they democratize and
Speaker 1: stop being authoritarian, so like overnight, Japan's a democracy and
Speaker 1: people who had once lived or died on the words
Speaker 1: of a single man suddenly had the right to go
Speaker 1: and protest the government in the streets. MacArthur also freed
Speaker 1: all political prisoners in Japanese jails. Despite the fact that
Speaker 1: he himself was like a right wing radical, McArthur's hard right.
Speaker 1: He frees all of Japan's in prison left wing radicals,
Speaker 1: including communists. Um. And this is part of why the
Speaker 1: Japanese Communist Party during this period of time is kind
Speaker 1: of known for being more pro democracy than in the
Speaker 1: other party in the country and very different from like
Speaker 1: other communist parties in that part of the world at
Speaker 1: the time. And there's there's some very famous authors from
Speaker 1: from the postwar Japanese period. Uh oh A I know
Speaker 1: is one of them who Yeah, it's like hardline anti
Speaker 1: capitalist communism and also really excited about the post war constitution. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's clearly there's a lot of cool stuff in it, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's one of the reasons MacArthur is such an
Speaker 1: interesting dude to like look at his because he's like
Speaker 1: he has a big impact on the constitution. He's a
Speaker 1: monster also, but like for there's a brief period of
Speaker 1: time where he's like doing what you'd broadly say are
Speaker 1: the right things. And so the Communist Party in Japan
Speaker 1: actually goes from about a thousand members pre war because
Speaker 1: it was illegal, to a hundred and fifty thousand members
Speaker 1: by nineteen fifty, just five years. Another major major change
Speaker 1: in Japan was the education system. The new government extended
Speaker 1: the possibility of higher education to everyone, not just a
Speaker 1: privileged few. The fact that there were now more students
Speaker 1: on campus and more possibilities for political involvement led to
Speaker 1: an explosion in Japanese activist culture, and MacArthur supported this too,
Speaker 1: under the belief that even left wing activism on campus
Speaker 1: would help flush out Japanese instructors who still held lingering
Speaker 1: nationalist beliefs. So that's kind he lets the left rises,
Speaker 1: He's like, so this will flush out the nationalists. He
Speaker 1: hates communists, but he's but he hates the guys. He
Speaker 1: was just fighting and anti fascism, anti told holitarian first
Speaker 1: kind of he was pretty he was. It was more
Speaker 1: he specifically hated the old Japanese government, and he knew
Speaker 1: that they really hated the left, and letting these kids
Speaker 1: march in the street would kind they're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to shut up about exactly. That's more the reason,
Speaker 1: Like McArthur's not doing this because he's a nice dude.
Speaker 1: And and there's there's certainly things to bear that out
Speaker 1: because you have like Maschima and his Shield Society, and
Speaker 1: there's there's some really wild right way uprisings that happen
Speaker 1: in post or Japan, just irate about the idea and
Speaker 1: that like a switch. Yeah, the emperor can't order everyone
Speaker 1: to die anymore, and that is unacceptable, the worst thing
Speaker 1: that's ever happened. Um So, yeah, students self governing associations
Speaker 1: pop up at campuses across Japan, and they functioned kind
Speaker 1: of like unions, um, giving kids a voice on their campus.
Speaker 1: In a bunch of these associations formed up into a
Speaker 1: national league. They called themselves Zenga Kurin, which is short
Speaker 1: for All Japan League of Students Self Government. Now, most
Speaker 1: of these people were communists, but there's you know, you
Speaker 1: know communists, there's a whole lot of different kinds of communists.
Speaker 1: It's like skills there, right, there's there's Lenin, and there
Speaker 1: Trotsky Stalin. At this point most Stalin. Yeah, those are
Speaker 1: all the kids that I know. And at this point,
Speaker 1: you know, even the people who are like Stalinists aren't
Speaker 1: really Stalinists by what we'd call them, like, because if
Speaker 1: you're a Stalinist, then you don't really know most of
Speaker 1: what Stalin did. Being a Stalinist now and denying everything, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well and he hadn't done some of that stuff. He
Speaker 1: had not done all of that stuff. You've done a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Have a goldfish pond, um, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think so, probably, Yeah, so, yeah, these guys started, these
Speaker 1: these students start protesting. Like a big one is US
Speaker 1: bases on Japanese soil, and like the no base movement.
Speaker 1: You'd still see when I was over there, you'd see
Speaker 1: a bunch of graffiti for that, Like that's a big thing, um,
Speaker 1: because the US military presence in Japan is it's massive, Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely on Okinawa. And have a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of fond memories of driving class past like missile silos
Speaker 1: that are just like in the countryside I have Okanawa,
Speaker 1: and my impression is that there's not much too Okinawa
Speaker 1: other than military. Oh no, Okanowa fucking rules. Like there's
Speaker 1: a lounch of cool sh sorry, that's what is Like.
Speaker 1: The bases are big, like it's it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: big and it has a major impact on the local
Speaker 1: culture for sure. Um but there's a like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of cool ship going on another um so yeah,
Speaker 1: so they start protesting US bases on Japanese soil. And
Speaker 1: this is where Douglas MacArthur stops being on board. He wasn't,
Speaker 1: wasn't it wasn't, but yeah, why not? But it won't
Speaker 1: won't the fascists be upset that? Oh they won't be
Speaker 1: upset about that, will they know? That's when MacArthur stops
Speaker 1: being okay with the students speaking their minds. Uh So
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty nine he backs a bill the like
Speaker 1: the the Japanese government puts out that specifically, the Ministry
Speaker 1: of Education pushes introduces this bill that would curtail the
Speaker 1: right to protest. So this really pisses off studentship in Japan,
Speaker 1: who are again able to protest best and organized for
Speaker 1: the first time, and more than two hundred thousand of
Speaker 1: them take to the streets and shut down universities across
Speaker 1: the country. Uh. It was so shocking that the government
Speaker 1: was forced to back pedal and scrap the bill, But
Speaker 1: more attempts followed. In nineteen fifty two, the government tried
Speaker 1: to pass an anti subversives bill that was basically Japanese
Speaker 1: style McCarthy ism. Twenty students attempted to storm the Royal Palace,
Speaker 1: hurling stones that lines of armored riot police, who eventually
Speaker 1: beat them back with such violence that two students died
Speaker 1: in the fighting. Um yeah, heck of a riot. Uh
Speaker 1: So soon mass street battles become the norm. The Japanese
Speaker 1: government's refusal to do anything as a result of these
Speaker 1: protests caused the formation of a new movement in Japanese politics,
Speaker 1: the New Left, who believed that electoral politics were hopeless
Speaker 1: and only revolution could bring progress. Um, which doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like anything that's ever ever come to that. Conclusions based
Speaker 1: on police violence certainly not only happened this one time
Speaker 1: in this one country. Um yeah, I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from a write up in the Asia Pacific Journal. New
Speaker 1: Left street demonstrations steadily escalated into violent clashes resembling medieval battles.
Speaker 1: The students wore color coded crash helmets and blasted with
Speaker 1: the names of their organizations, carried long fighting polls, and
Speaker 1: through stones or fire bombs at the police. They confronted
Speaker 1: squads of riot police wearing medieval style helmets, who battled
Speaker 1: the students with tall aluminum body shields and police batons,
Speaker 1: supported by water cannon trucks that spread fire hoses of
Speaker 1: water laced with tear gas at the students. At the
Speaker 1: peak of the protest cycle in nineteen sixty nine, Japanese
Speaker 1: authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations
Speaker 1: of thousands of students. This turned the tide and in
Speaker 1: part by producing splits within the new left groups. So
Speaker 1: there's part of a reason why Japan is kind of
Speaker 1: so famously disconnected from like politics and and people don't
Speaker 1: like do ship like this anymore. To a large extent,
Speaker 1: arrested because they arrested and beat and yeah that does
Speaker 1: sound cool, and the long sticks and the hurling. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: by the early nineteen seventies, the Zenga Kuran, which are
Speaker 1: again these like student self governing organizations, it started turning
Speaker 1: away from the Japanese Communist Party and mass largely so
Speaker 1: that they could have a chance of influencing electoral politics.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, they decide they don't want to be
Speaker 1: they're not new left right. They want to try and
Speaker 1: actually like make things happen at the ballot box, and
Speaker 1: the radical left is increasingly being like, that's bullshit. It's
Speaker 1: all about fighting cops in the streets and the kind
Speaker 1: of more moderate people are like, but that has horrible
Speaker 1: consequences and I don't want to do it. Um, this
Speaker 1: sounds like a summary of the entire seventies after nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty yep Son, it's a thing that keeps happening. So
Speaker 1: uh yeah, the larger number of moderate liberals broke away
Speaker 1: from the radical left and stopped protesting, and the radical
Speaker 1: left did what the radical left nearly always does and
Speaker 1: devoured itself. Yeah. Yes, is this specific to Japan or
Speaker 1: is this just this is literally any movement that's ever happened,
Speaker 1: and also that's ever happened in the seventies after sixty
Speaker 1: eight occurred. It's the thing that keeps happening. That's why
Speaker 1: the earth will soon be an uninhabitable anyway. Communist radicals
Speaker 1: in Japan decided that non violent resistance was no longer practical.
Speaker 1: Japanese riot police were too good at their jobs, and
Speaker 1: less committed members of the left were no longer trust
Speaker 1: were the allies. The communist chunks of the left began
Speaker 1: to split between those who wanted to continue the old
Speaker 1: methods of protest in propaganda and those who wanted to
Speaker 1: actually wage global war against capitalism, I mean a literal
Speaker 1: war in that sense. Now, these types wound up in
Speaker 1: a number of different groups, the most influential of which
Speaker 1: came to eventually be known as the Japanese Red Army. Now,
Speaker 1: my understanding from the latter twentieth century is any time
Speaker 1: that something's called the Red Army, everything is good from
Speaker 1: there on. Red Army, faction, re army cards, those are
Speaker 1: all reds. Yeah, So Japanese Red Army, everything that's coming up,
Speaker 1: the Soviet Red Army famously no war crimes committed. Um,
Speaker 1: that's why the Polish people we're so happy anyway. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a fascinating rite up an
Speaker 1: Unseen Japan that really goes into these guys, and they do.
Speaker 1: Actually a great multipart essay on the whole history of
Speaker 1: the Japanese Red Army. That's very cool. The leader in
Speaker 1: ideological master of the newly minted Red Army faction was
Speaker 1: one Shiomi Takaya, an avowed Trotskyite for whom a violent
Speaker 1: international revolution was the goal. In Shiomi's eyes, any attempt
Speaker 1: at coexistence with the imperialist West, as was then being
Speaker 1: professed by Soviet Premiere Kruschev following his shocking repudiation of Stalinism,
Speaker 1: where a corruption of true Marxism, world revolution required unflinching
Speaker 1: required unflinching action. Imperialism needed to be purged from the world.
Speaker 1: In Japan was the place to start. If they joined
Speaker 1: hands with other revolutionary forces in Cuba, Palestine, Korea, and Vietnam,
Speaker 1: soon the entire world might glow red. The struggle first
Speaker 1: took the form of an internesting battles with their within
Speaker 1: their parent organization, the Communist League. Hostages were taken and
Speaker 1: the headquarters stormed. One Red Army soldier died after he
Speaker 1: slipped and fell from a high window will escaping being
Speaker 1: held hostage at the League headquarters at Nihon University. Death
Speaker 1: death had become a part of the Red Army mythos
Speaker 1: from its very first days. So so they're they're taking
Speaker 1: hostages from their own in their own headquarters. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: it's going. Well, how can you go and fight the
Speaker 1: capitalists if you cannot even properly purge your own ranks? Exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if there you're going to clean the house, you got
Speaker 1: to clean your cloth. This is a story with a
Speaker 1: real pergy ending to enjoy. The Red Army differed from
Speaker 1: many of its fellow lefties by stating openly their desire
Speaker 1: to commit violent actions against the state. They're propaganda heavily
Speaker 1: sighted ly on Trotsky to make the case that violent
Speaker 1: tactics would help spark a worldwide socialist revolution, which would
Speaker 1: inspire a global revolutionary army to rise up an armed
Speaker 1: revolt with bombs and guns. This is the part that
Speaker 1: I always find delightful is you have all of these
Speaker 1: guys throughout history who keep being like, so, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do this thing, and then when we do this thing,
Speaker 1: a global army is going to materialize, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the thing we want is going to happen.
Speaker 1: I mean as opposed for like, hey guys, you mask
Speaker 1: for like four weeks and it basically being the seat
Speaker 1: of a civil war. Yeah, Like, if there's one thing
Speaker 1: that seems to be true. It's doing one thing doesn't
Speaker 1: lead to unified action across the planet. If there's one
Speaker 1: people thing people hate, it's doing things they really do.
Speaker 1: I don't like it. And this was before Netflix. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is before Yeah, so you had a chance, but
Speaker 1: it still wasn't great. So yeah, they started publicizing this.
Speaker 1: The Red Army faction starts publicizing their desire to spark
Speaker 1: a global armed socialist revolution before they even hold their
Speaker 1: first meeting. And this created a lot of buzz around
Speaker 1: the new organization. Where do you publicize that, by the way,
Speaker 1: is that okay? I'm just wondering if that's like the
Speaker 1: back page of the newspaper and like the help want
Speaker 1: to the ads revolution wanted. Uh yeah, a lot of people.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of a lot of buzz around them.
Speaker 1: As this quote from an article in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Asian Studies by Patricia Steinoff makes clear, the organization's first
Speaker 1: public meeting, held at a public hall in Tokyo in
Speaker 1: early September nineteen sixty nine, featured a massive display of
Speaker 1: state authority. In addition to the ring of uniformed police
Speaker 1: surrounding the building, plain closed police photographed the three hundred
Speaker 1: people who entered, and more police stood around the back
Speaker 1: of the hall watching on stage. Gonna make you maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit less excited about openly calling for violent
Speaker 1: interaction again. They loved this ship. They loved this ship.
Speaker 1: They all made speeches wearing like ski masks and stuff,
Speaker 1: so they couldn't be um. And they didn't get arrested
Speaker 1: that day because it's not people say that stuff. But
Speaker 1: everyone knew they were saying, we're going to break the
Speaker 1: law very soon. Um and so yeah, and they're all
Speaker 1: masked up, and it's pretty good, pretty good propagandic coup
Speaker 1: because people hadn't done anything like that at that point. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: the various cells of the Red Army ran a handful
Speaker 1: of mass gatherings protesting US bases and that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: but the fiery young men and women in the Red
Speaker 1: Army faction proved to have very little patients for such things.
Speaker 1: They moved almost immediately to hijacking vehicles, bombing police stations,
Speaker 1: and robbing banks. Once they hit a few months of
Speaker 1: this under their belt, the leadership cadres of different Red
Speaker 1: Army chapters decided to attempt to spark uprisings in three
Speaker 1: different cities, and keeping with their international revolution obsession, they
Speaker 1: timed this with the Days of Rage planned by the
Speaker 1: Weatherman and a Black Panther rally in Chicago, which is, yeah,
Speaker 1: it'sn't not bad, not necessarily bad. I think that news
Speaker 1: cycle you're gonna you know, you're gonna dominate, You're going
Speaker 1: to dominate in the news cycle. Yeah, maybe a very
Speaker 1: busy year. It was a year to try that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. You gotta give them that. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Patricia stein Off again, uh Seguin, which is
Speaker 1: like was what like? The Red Army factions Japanese name
Speaker 1: organized its fall uprisings with only slightly more secrecy than
Speaker 1: it would have used for a public demonstration. Prior. Publicity
Speaker 1: about the events prompted a series of riot police raids
Speaker 1: on univer Firsty campuses, where local Sekegun chapters were stockpiling
Speaker 1: poles and iron pipes for street fighting and glass bottles
Speaker 1: for making Molotov cocktails. The Osaka and Kyoto raids involved
Speaker 1: over two thousand riot police and resulted in nearly a
Speaker 1: hundred arrests and sixty four indictments. These raids contributed directly
Speaker 1: to a huge increase in student weaponry confiscated by police
Speaker 1: in the second half of nineteen sixty nine. In the end,
Speaker 1: the uprisings turned out to be relatively minor skirmishes in
Speaker 1: which secgun members ran around the streets throwing fire bombs
Speaker 1: at police stations. One area of sekigun innovation. Weaponry was
Speaker 1: handled secretly. From the beginning, Sakegon threatened publicly to use
Speaker 1: more powerful weapons, but the specific details were restricted to
Speaker 1: those directly involved. A small sake Gun research and development
Speaker 1: group composed of physics, chemistry, and medical students quickly invented
Speaker 1: a hand grenade made by packing dynamite, pachinko balls and
Speaker 1: a fuse into round metal containers in which Peace brand
Speaker 1: cigarettes are sold. Soon after, a more powerful hand grenade
Speaker 1: was devised, using a length of iron pipe as the casing.
Speaker 1: Both weapons were designed to be thrown with a lit fuse.
Speaker 1: Small groups of Sakegun members were taught the new technology
Speaker 1: manufactured the bombs as a cottage industry. Yeah, they they
Speaker 1: they get really going so and they I like that
Speaker 1: there's a specific brand of cigarettes where they're like, this
Speaker 1: is this is the grenade. Brandy called him Peace bombs. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they did, and if I don't know, If you don't,
Speaker 1: this won't mean much if you don't know a lot
Speaker 1: about Japan. But if you know Japan, the fact that
Speaker 1: their grenades had pachinko balls in them is the most
Speaker 1: Japanese thing they could have possibly done. Like that's um,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's like what it's like, you know what
Speaker 1: old people in America do when they go to gamble
Speaker 1: in vegas, like Pachinko's that, but like countrywide, it's just
Speaker 1: like a it's like a it's like a like a
Speaker 1: I don't know how to describe it. If they've never
Speaker 1: seen people play pachinko. Yeah, it's kind of like beingo. Um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like bingo, and they use it to
Speaker 1: make grenades, which is very fun. Yeah. So, whatever else
Speaker 1: you can say about the Japanese Red Army, they didn't
Speaker 1: act lack Kutzba Shiomi, the leader and his top officers
Speaker 1: next launched a plan to raid the Prime Minister's home
Speaker 1: and kidnap him in the dead of night in order
Speaker 1: to stop him from reading meeting with Richard Nixon and
Speaker 1: finalizing the are in of Okinawa to Japan. This action
Speaker 1: was disguised as a mass training event in the mountains
Speaker 1: where members would learn to use explosive steering assaults. Now sorry,
Speaker 1: they disguised their plan to kidnap the prime minister as
Speaker 1: we an organization that has repeatedly said that we are
Speaker 1: going to violently overthrow the government. Are going to get
Speaker 1: all our people together up in the mountains to practice
Speaker 1: making bums our cover story. Have you noted an error
Speaker 1: in in their thinking, a tactical shortcoming. I have not,
Speaker 1: but I'm excited to see how it goes. And everyone
Speaker 1: was like, you should go do that. That seems like
Speaker 1: a really good plan. The way you'll be out of
Speaker 1: the way during what and and this was in nine
Speaker 1: sixty nine. I think I can't imagine that less than
Speaker 1: you know, less than thirty years out from World War Two,
Speaker 1: the Japanese government is going to have any problem with
Speaker 1: this whatsoever. Well, you're going to be shocked then, because
Speaker 1: they send hundreds of riots police to bust their loss
Speaker 1: training drill um and enough Uh enough of the group
Speaker 1: gets arrested at this point that the Red Army goes underground.
Speaker 1: Their founder himself got arrested and he lost control of
Speaker 1: the movement. Shortly thereafter, uh and I'm gonna continue quoting
Speaker 1: from that right up in Unseen Japan here. Ironically, the
Speaker 1: discovered materials reveal that the Red Army faction had functioned
Speaker 1: on higher on a hierarchical structure that was anything but revolutionary.
Speaker 1: Those from the most elite universities, such as Tokyo or
Speaker 1: Meiji were selected for the highest level of authority. Secondary
Speaker 1: authority went to those from major public universities, with the
Speaker 1: next level being local establishments, those without a college education
Speaker 1: or those who were in vocational school or high school
Speaker 1: with the grunts of the organization. So this is like
Speaker 1: such typical like yeah, business firm, company man, bullshit, Like
Speaker 1: I don't know, you went to a state school, so
Speaker 1: you get for violent communist insurrection. And you can tell
Speaker 1: that like the people who went to those good schools
Speaker 1: are the ones capable of making the really important good decisions,
Speaker 1: like to disguise kidnapping the Prime Minister as an legal
Speaker 1: bomb building party. Look, when I went to my elite university,
Speaker 1: we did an entire class, and how the Prime Minister
Speaker 1: doesn't care if you say you're going to make bombs
Speaker 1: for a massive insurrection. Now, you did go to Brown
Speaker 1: so I mean I'm just gonna put out there, considering
Speaker 1: that you went to a fancier college than I went to.
Speaker 1: I get to be in charge of the communist insurrection,
Speaker 1: and you have to be a lieutenant. Get because I
Speaker 1: dropped out of college. But you definitely recount to me
Speaker 1: way more ridiculous conversations with people you went to college with,
Speaker 1: as though they were normal. I'm sure that's true, and
Speaker 1: I am equally sure that I have been so broken
Speaker 1: by higher education that I don't know which conversations you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Good country, consistent. We all. So, as time
Speaker 1: went on, the Red Army drew in smaller and smaller
Speaker 1: numbers of very committed communists. Those who were left after
Speaker 1: the disastrous raid attempt were desperate to carry off something
Speaker 1: big and so successful to wash away the townership defeat.
Speaker 1: So they launched another series of bank robberies. And these
Speaker 1: weren't the haphazard affairs from earlier in their history, but
Speaker 1: actually well planned actions whose perpetrators would like switch multiple
Speaker 1: train lines as they fled and disappeared into these networks
Speaker 1: of safe houses. Uh. They they they kind of like
Speaker 1: stuck the landing after a real bad, real bad I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know enough about gymnastics. The Red
Speaker 1: Army kept a careful watching the police, you know, whenever
Speaker 1: the law caught onto one of their properties, and they
Speaker 1: would like became famous for like right as the police
Speaker 1: were about to raid them, they would like close out
Speaker 1: their lease and leave and they would just be the
Speaker 1: spotless apartment behind and they they yeah, that's like if
Speaker 1: you've if you've seen the departed, then like that's the
Speaker 1: little booties on your shoes at the end of just
Speaker 1: just nailing it. Yeah, like we were so ready for
Speaker 1: the fact that we cleaned. Yeah. Um so yeah. The
Speaker 1: switching tactics actually enraged most of the imprisoned founders of
Speaker 1: the group, which saw theft that harmed normal working people
Speaker 1: is and a revolutionary But the remaining but I don't
Speaker 1: know if their banks were, like I don't know what
Speaker 1: any Japanese banking this is. They don't have. This is
Speaker 1: the issue that people had that like that some of
Speaker 1: the imprisoned founders had. Maybe the imprisoned founder should have
Speaker 1: advocated for the fdi C in Japan and then they
Speaker 1: could have been fine. I don't know. So the remaining
Speaker 1: free members of the Red Army saw it more as
Speaker 1: a question of survival. They used the money to buy
Speaker 1: samurai swords and pipe bombs and plane tickets for nine
Speaker 1: men on a March thirtieth, nineteen seventy flight from Tokyo
Speaker 1: to Fukoa. I realized, but you did just say a
Speaker 1: matter of survival and then moved straight to samurai swords
Speaker 1: and pipe bombs, which having taught the necessities, having having
Speaker 1: taught something about survival over the course of my life,
Speaker 1: and I understand that, Yeah, you're going out in the woods,
Speaker 1: first thing, you need samurai swords and pipe well, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how how else are you gonna start a fire? Right?
Speaker 1: And are you gonna hunt that rabbit without a samurai sword?
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to hunt it with the pipe.
Speaker 1: You can hunt anything with whatever. That's the beauty hunting. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they buy, they buy tickets for this flight
Speaker 1: to Focca, And as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude,
Speaker 1: the members of the Red Army stood up and grabbed
Speaker 1: the weird tube, blank pieces of luggage they all stowed
Speaker 1: under their seats. Uh, and they pull out samurai swords.
Speaker 1: I thought it was just really starts searching things. But
Speaker 1: at least one time, under no circumstances should we search things,
Speaker 1: because that way lies totalitarianism. People will get angry, unlike
Speaker 1: these nice young men with other tubes, Let me help you, sir.
Speaker 1: So they pull out samurai swords and bombs, and their
Speaker 1: leaders screams to the other passengers, raise your hands. We're
Speaker 1: going to North Korea, which is not what you want
Speaker 1: to hear on a flight. So in in nineteen this
Speaker 1: is yah, I think seven is we're going to North
Speaker 1: Korea as bad a thing to hear in seventy as
Speaker 1: it is, it's not a great thing to hear. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's not a great thing to hear, not as bad
Speaker 1: for sure. I think that like the mass starvation and
Speaker 1: stuff hadn't really be still around. This is actually kind
Speaker 1: of like what a lot of North Koreans would call
Speaker 1: like a Golden Age sort of period, so like it
Speaker 1: had many tracked any of this people from Japan, part
Speaker 1: of the Korean diaspora that was in Japan, not that
Speaker 1: I'm aware of, no, Yeah, but I you know maybe,
Speaker 1: um but I think these are all like specifically kind
Speaker 1: of like Japanese middle class and upper middle class kids. Um.
Speaker 1: So the problem and problem immediately arose as soon as
Speaker 1: they announced that the destination was North Korea, which is
Speaker 1: that the flight didn't have the fuel necessary to reach
Speaker 1: North Korea. I mean details. Yeah, the pilot pointed this out,
Speaker 1: and he convinced the skyjackers to let him land as
Speaker 1: scheduled and refueled. They took this bait, and of course
Speaker 1: the police had a shipload of people in the tarmac
Speaker 1: there to meet them. H. So there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: tense conversations, uh and a you're like negotiations. They released
Speaker 1: twenty three people from the plane, women, children and the elderly,
Speaker 1: and then the flight takes off again. Um, and the
Speaker 1: pilot starts getting like navigational instructions from a source that's
Speaker 1: like loudly claiming to be from Pyongyang, and so he
Speaker 1: lands the plane again in what is supposed to look
Speaker 1: like the North Korean tarmac with like a bunch of
Speaker 1: soldiers in North Korean uniform. It's a fake airport that
Speaker 1: the Japanese very quickly threw together, which so after the
Speaker 1: US is like, no, we can't depend which says everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could have just had a fake Havannah airport in
Speaker 1: Miami instead of the t s antly. We could have
Speaker 1: had the normal Miami airport look like the Havannah airport.
Speaker 1: Just Miami lives under Cuba law now, like whether or
Speaker 1: not Cuba wants it, and the US is washing its
Speaker 1: hands of the matter. Let's see what happens. Um. So
Speaker 1: the Japan builds an airport in an hour. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: built a fake airport real quickly. Um. And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty good they're fake airport. But they forget to cover
Speaker 1: up the tail markings of a Northwest Airlines flight. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the hijackers Northwest Airlines not flying. You know, they
Speaker 1: didn't do a lot of not a lot of not
Speaker 1: a lot of Seattle to Pyongyang flights at this point.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a big it's a big route now.
Speaker 1: But if it had just been Panama, everything would have
Speaker 1: been fun. Yeah. Um. So yeah, the hijackers realize something
Speaker 1: is wrong because they're pretty smart cookies. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: they refused to let anyone leave the plane before the
Speaker 1: airport officials show them a massive portrait of Kim Il sung,
Speaker 1: like they demand to see. We want to see the
Speaker 1: biggest fucking portrait of Kimmel Song you have, because there's
Speaker 1: no way that a big picture of the leader of
Speaker 1: North Korea could possibly exist outside of North Korea. I
Speaker 1: think more of what it was is that there's no
Speaker 1: way that a picture big enough for it to like
Speaker 1: I think they all knew that, Like if if we
Speaker 1: say a big picture of Kim Il sung in picture
Speaker 1: they bring out if this isn't North Korea, isn't gonna
Speaker 1: be big enough to believably be what North Korean. So
Speaker 1: you want the big picture, it's gonna take. It's actually
Speaker 1: a pretty smart thing to do because they're gonna bring
Speaker 1: out like what normal people would think is a big
Speaker 1: picture maybe, and anyone who knows anything about North Korea's
Speaker 1: gonna be like, that's not a big picture. If Kim suck,
Speaker 1: that's we're not flying right. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a
Speaker 1: pretty smart move. Um. So yeah, they they realize what's
Speaker 1: happening and they refuse to let the passengers off. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah. So eventually the Japanese government is forced to
Speaker 1: compromise with him, and it's actually like kind of an
Speaker 1: impressive compromise, like this is the one member of government
Speaker 1: maybe ever that I'm I'm I'm proud of Japan's Vice
Speaker 1: Minister of Transportation comes out and he's like, what have
Speaker 1: you let everybody else off? And you just take me
Speaker 1: prisoner and you fly me to North Korea. Um. And
Speaker 1: the hijackers are like sure. Uh and that's a good
Speaker 1: thing to do. You say, a politician putting themselves on
Speaker 1: the line in the constituents, Yeah, it happened once. Well,
Speaker 1: this exact time is the one tis well that in
Speaker 1: the Jonestown Congressman. Yeah, yeah, well there's you also said
Speaker 1: this is the guy who's in charge of transfer, vice
Speaker 1: Minister for transportation. So he's also like, this is my
Speaker 1: this is my duty. Yeah, that's better. Yeah and yeah,
Speaker 1: and to their credit, the Red Army guys are like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that works great. Um. And so yeah they
Speaker 1: all fly to North Korea. Um. Didn't did Harrison Ford
Speaker 1: do that in that movie where he was the president? Yes?
Speaker 1: This was actually he did that during the period of
Speaker 1: time where he was the vice Minister of Transportation for Japan.
Speaker 1: That's what I remember about that movie. There's an entire
Speaker 1: problematic anthropology book about this about Harrison Ford being the
Speaker 1: vice Minister of because that was why so many Japanese
Speaker 1: planes crashed that Okay, Um, Harrison, he's not a good pilot. No,
Speaker 1: he's terrible. He's one of the worst. Um So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Red Army, Uh, they succeed. It's a big caper,
Speaker 1: it's big international news. They jack a plane and take
Speaker 1: it to North Korea makes it sound real whimsical. Now
Speaker 1: they're pretty much all miserable in North Korea. So the
Speaker 1: like there. The North Korean government didn't really want them,
Speaker 1: because again North Korea doesn't really trust people who hijack
Speaker 1: planes are from not North Korea, are from not North Korea,
Speaker 1: or are from North Korea. Um And the hijackers, like
Speaker 1: a lot of them wound up wanting to return to
Speaker 1: like they all kind of they all wanted initially to
Speaker 1: return to Japan. Like their goal was to get arms
Speaker 1: in military training from the North Korean military and then
Speaker 1: fly back and launch an insurgency. And North Korea was like,
Speaker 1: we have all these surplus resources which we will give
Speaker 1: to you to take out of the country. Yes, have
Speaker 1: you met us, We're North Korea, We're in North Korea.
Speaker 1: We love to do this. Um So, North Korea didn't
Speaker 1: really like the idea of giving these guys military training,
Speaker 1: and they keep telling them maybe later. Um and a
Speaker 1: bunch of These dudes wound up in Japan decades later,
Speaker 1: so they gave interviews and stuff, and I found a
Speaker 1: really funny article about their experiences. Here's one guy abe
Speaker 1: Kimi Hero discussing their desire to be trained as soldiers
Speaker 1: in how North Korea responded, quote, military training, military training,
Speaker 1: always military training. If we didn't get military training, then
Speaker 1: we had no reason for coming. Because one of our
Speaker 1: motives for coming to North Korea was to receive military training.
Speaker 1: Our daily routine also included running in the mornings. It
Speaker 1: felt very good to run in the fresh early morning air,
Speaker 1: far away from the city. We agreed that we shouldn't
Speaker 1: just run but what but we should run in the
Speaker 1: spirit of activism. So we shattered the still of the
Speaker 1: early Korean mornings by shouting our Red Army slogan of
Speaker 1: achieved the uprising victory in war. However, they were immediately
Speaker 1: obliged to stop this demonstration. They received a message from
Speaker 1: the Workers Party, you can be heard in all the
Speaker 1: neighboring farms. Wouldn't be best if you stopped shouting your slogan.
Speaker 1: So like North Korea is like okay, guys, we get
Speaker 1: but maybe not um And they're all so like the
Speaker 1: Red Army again, their their whole thing is simultaneous worldwide
Speaker 1: revolution and North Korea's get their own things. That's very
Speaker 1: different from that, which is we have a sort of
Speaker 1: semi yea. They seek to be completely autonomous. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: like jucha stuff. So considered leaving us the funk alone? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we would like, well said, they have all these guys shouting,
Speaker 1: So what they do is they forcibly indoctrinate them for
Speaker 1: years until they all agree that jucha is the way
Speaker 1: to go. Fortunately, I have never heard anything bad about
Speaker 1: the detention facilities in North Korea. It was fine for
Speaker 1: those guys. Two of them were trying killed trying to flee. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And a couple of they'd stopped their training, running every
Speaker 1: day yeah uh yeah. And if a couple others made
Speaker 1: it out under the guys of continuing the revolutionary activity,
Speaker 1: four members remained in North Korea, where they spent years
Speaker 1: faking a conversion to Juche philosophy. UM. In two this
Speaker 1: and four they announced their desire to return to Japan.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, it's it's a it's not a perfect
Speaker 1: story and pretty good hijacking. I do like that, you said,
Speaker 1: spent years faking their conversion to juj philosophy, which puts
Speaker 1: them in good company from what I understand with most
Speaker 1: people in North Korea. Yeah yeah, uh so you know
Speaker 1: who doesn't fake their commitment to the ideas of Kim
Speaker 1: Il Sung? I could it possibly be products? It is
Speaker 1: products and service. Yeah, this we're entirely supported by the
Speaker 1: North Korean defense industry. Yeah yeah, so, uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: here's the ads. Uh, We're back. Oh my gosh, how
Speaker 1: good was that? That was all very silly, but it
Speaker 1: was a pretty good hijacking. And it shows that like
Speaker 1: there was some steel in the Japanese Red Army, right,
Speaker 1: Like they did some silly ship but like there's color.
Speaker 1: There's some hardcore motherfucker's in that group. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: they didn't all go to that plane caper. In fact,
Speaker 1: there were thousands and thousands of kids left over in Japan.
Speaker 1: Um and Yeah, the Red Army kind of splintered in
Speaker 1: the absence because like the folks who went to North Korea,
Speaker 1: a lot of them were like the intellectual leaders of
Speaker 1: the movement. UM and one fragment, yes, one fragment of
Speaker 1: the remaining movement decided to really commit to the international
Speaker 1: nature of their political philosophy. They fled to Lebanon, where
Speaker 1: they met up with members of the Popular Front for
Speaker 1: the Liberation of Palestine. UM. So, you know, for people
Speaker 1: who might not know as much about that history, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna do it nearly the justice that it deserves.
Speaker 1: But uh, you know, Israel became a thing. Uh. And
Speaker 1: kind of the term that's used to refer to that
Speaker 1: as the Nakba or catastrophe by the Palestinian people. Um.
Speaker 1: And that word refers to the refers to the forced
Speaker 1: expulsion of Palestinian people from the land that's now the
Speaker 1: nation of Israel, about seven eight hundred thousand people forced out. Um.
Speaker 1: And that had happened about twenty years ago at this point, right,
Speaker 1: So it's really fresh, and the revolutionary movement dedicated to
Speaker 1: taking it back is also really fresh. Um. There's no
Speaker 1: way to talk about this where I won't uh make
Speaker 1: a lot of people angry. UM. So I think I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna say, I think what was done to Palestines
Speaker 1: a real bummer. Uh. And a lot of Palestinians agreed,
Speaker 1: which is why they formed organizations like the Popular Front,
Speaker 1: which was a Marxist Leninist organization in addition to being
Speaker 1: you know, liberation and stuff. We'll talk more about them
Speaker 1: tomorrow because Carlos the Jackal is all real tied up
Speaker 1: in this ship. Um. But the Red Army here about
Speaker 1: like you know, they they they're paying attention to what's
Speaker 1: happening in Palestine. It's like a big cause, particularly on
Speaker 1: the international left at this point, and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna do this international revolution thing, here's a
Speaker 1: great place to do it. Like there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: other armed people. They all want us to go fight
Speaker 1: for them. Let's go leave Japan and go fight in
Speaker 1: the Middle East where the Japanese Red Army and that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do. And that's exactly what they do. Uh.
Speaker 1: They cannot see how this plan would go wrong at all.
Speaker 1: They're actually kind of great at it, actually going to
Speaker 1: say this is I don't yeah, I'm curious to see
Speaker 1: how this plays out. So they go and like unlike
Speaker 1: you know, North Korea, like the Popular Front is like
Speaker 1: we're fucking trained, you guys, we need like we're so
Speaker 1: short on people to go like Palestine, yeah, before like
Speaker 1: before the narc but Palestine is like the size of
Speaker 1: New Jersey. It's not giants. Yeah, they need if they're
Speaker 1: gonna need people, they need not actually a ton of
Speaker 1: people there. Yeah. And these communists, you know, the Japanese
Speaker 1: Red Army guys are all like really smart and really
Speaker 1: dedicated and like they so they might up been Lebanon
Speaker 1: and they get trained by the Popular Front and then
Speaker 1: they go out and they start they start doing shit.
Speaker 1: In May of nineteen seventy two, three Japanese Red Army
Speaker 1: members open fire with automatic rifles at the Tel Aviv airport.
Speaker 1: They fire at random, killing twenty four people in wounding
Speaker 1: seventy six. So not yeah, some pretty serious terrorism right
Speaker 1: out that fucking gate. It's also could you imagine how
Speaker 1: many planes they could have stolen with this? They could
Speaker 1: have stolen it, They could have stolen hundreds of plans
Speaker 1: with us three people when for ever, not great tactics there.
Speaker 1: I don't think that was their goal. I think it
Speaker 1: was more of of what we were, kind of modern terrorism.
Speaker 1: They're kind of like, more this is terrible terror instead
Speaker 1: of yeah, hey look we got a plane. And the
Speaker 1: Japanese Red Army went on to rack up like a
Speaker 1: pretty terrifying pedigree of violence over the course of the
Speaker 1: next few years. They seized foreign embassies, they hijacked aircraft,
Speaker 1: they massacred civilians, kidnapped form dignitaries. On several occasions, the
Speaker 1: government of Japan was forced to release imprisoned Red or
Speaker 1: Red Army members in order to free ransom captives. Um.
Speaker 1: And there's still some Red Army folks out there today,
Speaker 1: although they're all pretty old at this point and not
Speaker 1: super active. Um. But it would be fair to say
Speaker 1: that the chunk of the Japanese Red Army who went
Speaker 1: to Lebanon were like pretty terrifying people. Yeah, and we'll
Speaker 1: get we'll talk about them more tomorrow. But they're like
Speaker 1: a big deal in terrorism this time, Like the Japanese
Speaker 1: Red Army, Um, pretty scary motherfucker's outside of Japan. Now.
Speaker 1: The folks who remained behind in Japan, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: they less committed. No, they were actually more committed, but
Speaker 1: in a real dumb way. Yeah, we're gonna get like
Speaker 1: the dumbest. Some of these people abscribed to slightly different
Speaker 1: versions of communism than other versions of this and just
Speaker 1: just kind of imagine it being the B list. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you get your B list kids. So they're behind in Japan,
Speaker 1: and you know, they don't really have a leadership CADRA
Speaker 1: anymore because those people have all gone on to like
Speaker 1: do better things than you know, in hierarchical communist organizations
Speaker 1: do fine with leadership vacuums. Yeah, like really just great.
Speaker 1: So all of the leadership to the Red Army in
Speaker 1: Japan kind of falls on one dumb kid named Maurice Sunio.
Speaker 1: He was not a great master of communist political theory,
Speaker 1: nor was he an inspiring leader. Um, but he'd done
Speaker 1: his time, and once all of the cool people were
Speaker 1: arrested or in North Korea, he was just kind of
Speaker 1: the guy who was was there, so he just kind
Speaker 1: of aged into it like vice snority. Yeah. I mean, also,
Speaker 1: this doesn't bear any similarity to any other dictators or
Speaker 1: leaders that you have ever mentioned ever before. This is
Speaker 1: a thing that only these specific communists did, and no
Speaker 1: other groups or political preferences in history. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot to be said for standing quietly in the
Speaker 1: background and just letting everyone else go into the adventurous thing.
Speaker 1: Would call it taken to Kennedy. Yeah, um, I was
Speaker 1: speaking about the most recent Kennedy. He just lost his election,
Speaker 1: because that's true he was trying to do anyway, not
Speaker 1: the ones who got shot by Bernie Sanders. Um so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the did both of them. Yeah, oh I thought it
Speaker 1: was I thought it was just j Han sir Han,
Speaker 1: like same number of letters as Bernie pull off his
Speaker 1: face from Tom Cruise style. So uh yeah, the guys, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're going to tell that this is probably honestly, probably
Speaker 1: the dumbest story in the history of terrorism. Um And
Speaker 1: that's that's hard because there's a lot of fun videos
Speaker 1: of like militant groups accidentally shooting each other and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: um so yeah, after all the smart people left. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Morey Suno winds up on top. I know, I know
Speaker 1: it's a different name, but I love that his name
Speaker 1: is Maury. Yeah, it is kind of funny. Um So,
Speaker 1: the Red Army at this point is the most wanted
Speaker 1: militant organization in Japan. Um So, Morey kind of has
Speaker 1: his work cut out for him. And again they go
Speaker 1: to the ground, carrying out small scale bombings and robberies
Speaker 1: and tiny isolated cells. This limits, this limited domestic focus
Speaker 1: causes a lot of grumbling within the ranks, as did
Speaker 1: Maury's undeserved ascent. There were vicious struggles within the organization,
Speaker 1: and those made some members leave and others flee to Lebanon.
Speaker 1: Morey knew the Red Army needed a new caper to
Speaker 1: keep their name in the news, so he hooked up
Speaker 1: with another radical group who had recently pulled off a
Speaker 1: daring gun store robbery, which obviously made the valuable because
Speaker 1: it's not real easy to find guns in Japan, so
Speaker 1: these kids have guns. Um. Also, it sounds like the
Speaker 1: start of a western, one of the sad western kind
Speaker 1: of Yeah, you get pretty good Quentin Tarantino movie out
Speaker 1: of this store. Um. So, yeah, they they hook up
Speaker 1: with this group that's just robbed a gun store because
Speaker 1: the Red Army has got like money and fame and
Speaker 1: this group has guns. Um. But both differential organizations differed
Speaker 1: significantly in their political beliefs um. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: not easy mashing them together. So the two groups formed
Speaker 1: an organization called the United Red Army. So like that's
Speaker 1: that's what happens when they merge. Um And the leader
Speaker 1: of this organization that had stolen the guns, a woman
Speaker 1: named Nagata Hiroku, becomes like co leader with this guy Mori. Um.
Speaker 1: So Nagata, who was just about as competent as Marie,
Speaker 1: knew that the right first move once she was in
Speaker 1: power was to order the brutal executions of two former
Speaker 1: members of her organization who had chosen to dessert. And
Speaker 1: dessert is a word here that means like go back
Speaker 1: to college. So they were like dragged out of their
Speaker 1: dormitories and strangled to death brutally by men and women
Speaker 1: who had once been their best friends. Then they were
Speaker 1: buried in shallow graves outside of town. Now when more
Speaker 1: hears about this, he gets jealous because he'd always been
Speaker 1: too jealous. It's not the word I expect. Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: if your organization joins with my organization and I go,
Speaker 1: oh good, in order to show how good our organizations
Speaker 1: are together, I'm going to have some deserters brutally murdered
Speaker 1: by their best friends. I appreciate you as a comrade,
Speaker 1: but I don't think I want to be in your
Speaker 1: organization anymore. And if you don't show that you're nearly
Speaker 1: as strong and powerful as me, I might not think
Speaker 1: that either. I might be about to take a trip
Speaker 1: to the United States and then slip a note under
Speaker 1: a plane door, so that we don't have to hang
Speaker 1: out anymore. I bet you that's not the choice he made,
Speaker 1: so well, no more. Actually this like he feels he'd
Speaker 1: never had the guts to have deserters executed. Um, but
Speaker 1: he now that a girl had kind of beat him
Speaker 1: to doing it, he decided he had to do something
Speaker 1: in order to like exert his power. He throws a
Speaker 1: leadership training camp for the top leaders of the new
Speaker 1: organized group. Camp. Don't go to that camp. It seems
Speaker 1: like a bad camp. It was a bad camp. So
Speaker 1: it was going to be like a leadership summit and
Speaker 1: a bonding experience for everybody, but most have already know like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know any other context. Um. Most importantly, it
Speaker 1: was going to be a chance for Mori to flex
Speaker 1: his power on a captive audience by corrupting an essential
Speaker 1: tool of many leftist revolutionary groups, self criticism. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote here from a write up and unseen Japan.
Speaker 1: The sort of group self criticism Mori had in mind
Speaker 1: has long been practiced by various Japanese corporations and has
Speaker 1: become quite common among Japanese. Amongst Japanese new left groups
Speaker 1: who called the process, so Katsu operations, once completed, would
Speaker 1: become the subject of group discussion, where criticism of others
Speaker 1: and of ones self was used to find whatever weakness
Speaker 1: had led to any form of failure during the planning
Speaker 1: of the next operation. They would then seek to overcome
Speaker 1: whatever internal problems had been discovered. Within leftist groups, any
Speaker 1: such failures were often seen as ideological errors. However, the
Speaker 1: United Red Army was forced. As the United Red Army
Speaker 1: was forced further underground and up, interaction became limited. Criticism
Speaker 1: increasingly became aimed towards the personal weakness of individual members
Speaker 1: rather than the failures of group ideology. In the first
Speaker 1: days of December nineteen twenty nine, people consisting of nineteen
Speaker 1: men and ten women made their way to the san
Speaker 1: Sangaku Base lodge deep in mountainous rural Gunma Prefecture. For days,
Speaker 1: they lived and strategyized and engaged in sessions. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: they start doing these big self criticism sessions isolated alone
Speaker 1: in the mountains um and things don't go well. Members
Speaker 1: of like the group that had stolen the guns, have
Speaker 1: all these criticisms of the Red Army and the Red
Speaker 1: Army members have all these criticisms of the other group. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there's punishments when people are found out when
Speaker 1: enough of the group agrees that like someone did something wrong. Um.
Speaker 1: So it starts with like forcing people to go days
Speaker 1: without eating or sitting for long periods of time and
Speaker 1: like this really uncomfortable position, like a yoga position that
Speaker 1: hurts after a while. Um. And Mari and Nagata are
Speaker 1: kind of like the judges at all of this and
Speaker 1: determine like what people have to do to be punished
Speaker 1: properly before they get to rest. Um. So not a
Speaker 1: levelhead starting out in a healthy place. So until you
Speaker 1: got to the punishment part, I was going to say
Speaker 1: sarcastically that I've never ever been part of any leftist
Speaker 1: group that engaged in this type of behavior, or for
Speaker 1: that matter, any you know business the engasion that kind
Speaker 1: of behavior. It's a thing that only happened to this
Speaker 1: one time. So but actually this actual thing maybe did
Speaker 1: only happen this one time because it gets way really
Speaker 1: out of hand very quickly. Um. Like that's a kind
Speaker 1: of situation. You expect people to be petty and bitchy
Speaker 1: and cruel to each other, but you also are talking
Speaker 1: about a underground communist instructionary group and the group they
Speaker 1: teamed up with for no other reason than that they
Speaker 1: stole a ton of guns. Yeah, and we already know
Speaker 1: that somebody got straggled buried shallows. I think a group
Speaker 1: self critique session that also involves arbitrarily designated punishment. You
Speaker 1: don't think that that's going to end? Well, yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, I do so. By like, after twenty
Speaker 1: days of this up for three weeks, people still aren't
Speaker 1: getting along. Um, Like the two groups haven't come together
Speaker 1: well enough. They don't feel good about everything. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so more in Nagata are like, we've gotta we've got
Speaker 1: to be more brutal about our punishments. That's how you
Speaker 1: get people are not don't have the right amount of
Speaker 1: revolutionary fervor, right, so we have to punish the more.
Speaker 1: It's like when when you get in enough fight with
Speaker 1: your buddy and you're like, let's retreat to the mountains
Speaker 1: for three weeks and be brutally punished for our disagreements.
Speaker 1: Did they not have drugs? I don't think they did. See,
Speaker 1: there's there's the problem really drinking a bit. I don't know. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna the right up and Unseen Japan does
Speaker 1: a really good job of kind of laying this all
Speaker 1: out beautifully and terribly, so I'm going to read that
Speaker 1: It all began with Ozaki Mitsuo, a twenty one years
Speaker 1: old the Tokyo University of Fishery student, had joined the
Speaker 1: United Red Army as part of the merger with that
Speaker 1: other group. The crimes for which he stood accused by
Speaker 1: his fellow comrades during the self criticism session were of
Speaker 1: discussing the whereabouts of Red Army hideouts and weapon stashes
Speaker 1: with unauthorized persons. Additionally, he was seen as lacking the
Speaker 1: correct amount of revolutionary zeal. More's collective punishment for these
Speaker 1: offenses was to have Ozaki face off and a no
Speaker 1: holds about and a no holds bout with a much
Speaker 1: bulkier co revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters, ensuring
Speaker 1: Osaki could not run away, and then the larger man
Speaker 1: began wailing on Ozaki. Beaten to the ground, time and
Speaker 1: tinam again. Ozaki, bloodied, still rose for more punishment. He
Speaker 1: knew the only way out was to accept his physically
Speaker 1: imposed chastisement. Finally, the badly beating. Ozaki was allowed some rest.
Speaker 1: He then made a fatal mistake. He thanked Maury for
Speaker 1: the chance to allow himself to become a better revolutionary.
Speaker 1: There was murmuring from the surrounding group. Was Ozaki trying
Speaker 1: to flatter his way out of proper training? Surely this
Speaker 1: represented more spiritual weakness on his part. The solution was
Speaker 1: to have Ozaki spend the night standing at attention outside
Speaker 1: the mountain in the mountainous subzero temperatures. After some hours
Speaker 1: of this, Ozaki, shaking in injured, asked to be allowed
Speaker 1: to lay down. This was the last draw did his
Speaker 1: weakness no no bounds. He was brought back into the
Speaker 1: warmth of the lodge, only to face another intense beating.
Speaker 1: His comrades then karried Osaki's broken body back outside, where
Speaker 1: he was tied to a post that, in lieu of
Speaker 1: ideological metal, would keep him standing. He hung there for
Speaker 1: hours and hours as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak
Speaker 1: christ for help. Occasionally members were sent out to beat
Speaker 1: him again. By next morning, he was dead and they
Speaker 1: didn't get along after that. It didn't help. This did
Speaker 1: not bring them together as an unlikely family it's also
Speaker 1: just such textbook cult ship, right that you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're we're gonna make people do horrible things to the
Speaker 1: only other people they are close to in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to demonstrate their allegiance to what I have told them
Speaker 1: is our ideological commitment. And Mori spends this pretty much
Speaker 1: immediately and tells everybody that Ozaki had chosen to die
Speaker 1: because he'd like seen that he was fundamentally flawed and
Speaker 1: bring the revolution down because of his weakness. So he
Speaker 1: had to kill himself in order to suicide for he
Speaker 1: knew they beat him to death for you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they decided to like celebrate this guy's death because
Speaker 1: he'd made the movement stronger. Did they have a little party?
Speaker 1: A little party? Yeah, So the self criticism sessions continue, um,
Speaker 1: and self criticism is a strong I'm just gonna put
Speaker 1: out there that like some people calling outside consultants and
Speaker 1: kind of look like they really are taking a deep
Speaker 1: die down this one hole. They could have done a ropes. Course,
Speaker 1: they could have They did strangle some of them. They
Speaker 1: could have played paintball to make a really horrible story
Speaker 1: a little bit shorter. They this keeps happening every night
Speaker 1: to someone new. Um, they just keep murdering each other
Speaker 1: for ideological Uh, three left the most pure. Well, by
Speaker 1: the time it's over, fourteen of the twenty nine people
Speaker 1: who went out there had been killed. I thought, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and the remaining fifteen get along really well. They do
Speaker 1: get into a gunfight with the cops. I mean, you
Speaker 1: haven't lead with that, probably would have formed trauma bonds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they purged like half of themselves. You know, everyone
Speaker 1: will get along really well if you just kill everyone
Speaker 1: that doesn't agree with you. All right, I've always said that,
Speaker 1: And that's why Stalinist Russia I had no backstabbing at all.
Speaker 1: Zero Prussia, the place where everyone got along. Yep, that's
Speaker 1: what they call it. Um. So that's the podcast episode.
Speaker 1: Uh being a Lane. You want to tell people where
Speaker 1: they can find you. Um, yeah, you can find us
Speaker 1: on Twitter and Instagram and medium at svist, and you
Speaker 1: can find me in the mountains twenty eight of my
Speaker 1: closest friends, where we all try to make each other
Speaker 1: into better, better people, better people not going on that
Speaker 1: camp and get a pile of rocks for self improvement purposes.
Speaker 1: A post and a post for self improvement. I wanted
Speaker 1: to teach you that day. Yeah, you know, mom. We'll
Speaker 1: see where that's the episode go um oh yeah. You
Speaker 1: can find us online and behind the bastards dot com,
Speaker 1: but we'll have all the sources for this episode. You
Speaker 1: can buy one of our FDA approved to cure all
Speaker 1: diseases or prevent all diseases. I forget which illegal claim
Speaker 1: we're making on the masks that we sell. Um, you
Speaker 1: buy