Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
Speaker 2: weekly podcast about stuff that I think is cool, done
Speaker 2: by people. I'm a person. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. Also People
Speaker 2: is Mia Wong him me.
Speaker 3: A Hello, I am. I'm approximating a person for this one.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be great. Got very little sleep last night.
Speaker 2: It's good.
Speaker 3: It's gonna be it's gonna be incredible, or we're gotting.
Speaker 3: We're getting off the rails via here.
Speaker 2: I was thinking when you're like, I'm approximating a person,
Speaker 2: I was thinking it was like a gender thing like
Speaker 2: a million years ago. My my friend was like, is
Speaker 2: your gender identity, Wraith? And I was like, yeah, probably
Speaker 2: that was more like my gender presentation. To be honest, I.
Speaker 3: Mean it's a good one. They always always loved to
Speaker 3: be raithing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, obliterate the body while wearing cool floey black things.
Speaker 2: Also a people is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, how are you?
Speaker 3: Last time I checked?
Speaker 2: I am a people. It's seems probable. Oukham's Razor says,
Speaker 2: in fact, all three of us are people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes I'm a person. Some days I don't feel
Speaker 3: that way.
Speaker 2: I think I'm a person today, though, excellent. I'm willing
Speaker 2: to always pretend on Mike that I am Chipper. No
Speaker 2: one thinks I'm Chipper. Anyway, We're all here for part
Speaker 2: three of a four parter about the Korean People's Association
Speaker 2: of Manchuria and the much broader Korean anarchism around it,
Speaker 2: and probably the most ideologically complexed episodes we've done on
Speaker 2: this show. And we did the Russian Civil War.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, this makes me long for the relative ideological
Speaker 3: simplicity of the seventeen Green Armies. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: But before we get into that, we want to thank Rory,
Speaker 2: our audio engineer, hi Rori Hiri, Hi Rory, And you
Speaker 2: want to think Unwoman who did our themis and you
Speaker 2: can go listen to more of Unwoman's music. Some of
Speaker 2: it as singing, some of it doesn't. Yay, so many things. Okay,
Speaker 2: So the craziest thing happened in between recording parts one
Speaker 2: and two and then now actually a week later. Sometimes
Speaker 2: I pretend like, oh, here we are a week later,
Speaker 2: it's like, actually a week later, now, the craziest thing happened.
Speaker 2: I learned things. Wow, Usually I learned stuff, but this stuff,
Speaker 2: I learned stuff in a cool way because I brought
Speaker 2: up a lot of questions that I felt unanswered by
Speaker 2: my sources, right, and some of those questions a listener
Speaker 2: messaged me and answered those questions. Oh wow, it rules,
Speaker 2: So thank you, Joshua Kang. I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: some of those things that I learned, and then we'll
Speaker 2: move on. Okay, So remember I was talking about the
Speaker 2: Sillhack movement or the realism movement or the realist movement,
Speaker 2: the like old timey folks, like before any other political
Speaker 2: ideologies developed, where like a like maybe Catholic, maybe Confucian
Speaker 2: guy was like, what if we all live in communes
Speaker 2: and it's great? And I was like, I don't understand.
Speaker 2: One source says their Catholic, one sources their confusion, and
Speaker 2: definitely a lot not Catholic. I found the answer. The
Speaker 2: answer is that they are both.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, So as we've predicted, yes, exactly, I like
Speaker 3: learning this one because I learned I was right with
Speaker 3: my guests.
Speaker 2: Joshua said that Silhak took a lot of influences as
Speaker 2: a quote from the Catholics and had a lot of
Speaker 2: Catholic members. Even the Catholic members of this group would
Speaker 2: have considered themselves Confucians and so just people who thought
Speaker 2: of themselves as both.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense, and it's like that's a thing
Speaker 3: where I think what gets considered. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: obviously we talked about sort of Korean Christian syncretism, but
Speaker 3: this isn't even that, because like it's not that hard
Speaker 3: to sort of fuse Confucianism with like another kind of religion,
Speaker 3: Like people in China do this all the time too,
Speaker 3: where it's like or people move back and forth between
Speaker 3: them rapidly and like between different sort of religious ideological filiations,
Speaker 3: and then they also just are both at the same
Speaker 3: time and it's not like that difficult of a thing,
Speaker 3: just because of sort of the nature of how Confucianism
Speaker 3: is structured.
Speaker 2: That makes sense because I've always I don't know enough
Speaker 2: about Confucianism to be any kind of expert on it,
Speaker 2: but I've like read about it many times, and it
Speaker 2: always seemed like it was like kind of a not
Speaker 2: as like we are a religion and more of a
Speaker 2: like we are a set of ways of thinking about things,
Speaker 2: and I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the whole kind of religion, philosophy, ideology distinction gets
Speaker 3: kind of gets really blurry, the further out you get
Speaker 3: for the people who like developed it, which is like.
Speaker 2: So yeah and so yeah, I like that we were right. Okay.
Speaker 2: The other thing another thing I learned, So I was
Speaker 2: talking about how Korean anarchists set up a ton of
Speaker 2: schools in China and Korea. Right, it turns out obviously
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists were doing this, but like this is sort
Speaker 2: of a Korean cultural thing, Joshua said. Quote It's very
Speaker 2: much a cultural legacy of the Sian b which are
Speaker 2: Hermit's scholars who would be disgusted with politics and set
Speaker 2: up academies in exile so their students would one day
Speaker 2: restore a righteous government. So it's like an anarchist thing
Speaker 2: to specifically be like, we're going to go set up
Speaker 2: schools in exile so that we can fix Korea, which
Speaker 2: is cool, Like that's a cool thing. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 2: some in the US that were founded in a similar way. Huh,
Speaker 2: not necessarily by anarchists. But okay. Another thing that I
Speaker 2: learned that I forgot to write into my script, but
Speaker 2: now I remember off the top of my head, is
Speaker 2: that one of the ways that I was talking about
Speaker 2: how Korea was like always between all these imperial powers,
Speaker 2: and it was sort of being traded back and forth.
Speaker 2: Is a modern and slightly incorrect way of looking at
Speaker 2: the far past of Korea, and that actually, when it
Speaker 2: was under Chinese influence, it was a very autonomous place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it's always weird with So what are the
Speaker 3: stories I always remember about, Like thinking about Chinese, especially
Speaker 3: before like the eighteen hundreds, is like there are a
Speaker 3: lot of records of people in like the fifteen sixteen
Speaker 3: hundreds who are like European travelers who are in China,
Speaker 3: and they ask the people that they're talking about about China,
Speaker 3: and and then those people have no idea what the
Speaker 3: fuck they're talking about, because it's like, well, no, I
Speaker 3: don't live in China. I live in like this like place, right,
Speaker 3: that's like any And like the sort of especially the
Speaker 3: further out in the borders that you get, the sort
Speaker 3: of lines of control get really weird, and there's lots
Speaker 3: of groups that are like technically under the dynasties. But
Speaker 3: like in the most air quotes, I guess, okay, well,
Speaker 3: in Italy, this oracle parallem about the draw here is
Speaker 3: probably not that useful that many people, but it's it's
Speaker 3: kind of like Egypt in the late Ottoman Empire, where
Speaker 3: like Egypt is like nominally an Ottoman thing, but I
Speaker 3: mean I think they're actually more independent than that. But
Speaker 3: like Egypt periodically just conducts its own form policy. It's
Speaker 3: like basically like a self governing quality, but it makes
Speaker 3: sense periodically kind of like yeah, I think that's like
Speaker 3: Chinese control over Korea is like even more nominal than
Speaker 3: that a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if the more I read like David Graeber
Speaker 2: talking about anthropology stuff, the more I was realized that,
Speaker 2: like the ability to exert control over areas you claim
Speaker 2: to own is a fairly modern technological development, like not
Speaker 2: like modernism, like only in the eighteen hundreds or whatever, right,
Speaker 2: but like different places had the technology to actually rule
Speaker 2: the places that they theoretically ruled, and other places didn't.
Speaker 2: You know, Like I'm under the impression Rome was better
Speaker 2: at ruling England then English kings were after the fall
Speaker 2: of Rome, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's like like there's there's sort of bureaucratic
Speaker 3: and all I mean literally sometimes also literally technology, but
Speaker 3: a lot of it's like bureaucratic technology that you need to.
Speaker 2: Like I mean technology like bureaucracy, I mean ways of
Speaker 2: thinking and applying things, not like wheels that are around
Speaker 2: her or something. Yeah. Okay, then the other note that
Speaker 2: came up. Okay, So remember how I was like, well,
Speaker 2: one source was like, well, they're all pretty nationalist, right,
Speaker 2: and then there's that other source, that whole lass book
Speaker 2: that's like, no, the Korean anarchist movement was super cosmopolitan
Speaker 2: and transnational, right or made it blurry. Well, I'm now
Speaker 2: going to make an argument back in the other direction. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: because we talked a bunch about that Korean anarchist journalist
Speaker 2: and author Shinchweho who wrote the manifesto that was such
Speaker 2: a big deal for like revolution Manifesto that I really liked.
Speaker 2: It turns out his legacy is he as he aged,
Speaker 2: became more and more of an ethnic ulter nationalist while
Speaker 2: still remaining an anarchist, which unfortunate. I'd rather be abandon
Speaker 2: the anarchism an ethnic culture nationalist.
Speaker 1: Oh god.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that they talked about in
Speaker 2: that Revolutionary Manifesto that they were against was servile thinking, right,
Speaker 2: And when I read that, I was like, oh, I
Speaker 2: just don't really know what that means in this translation,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like one of those words where I
Speaker 2: just hear it and I'm like, ah, okay whatever, Like
Speaker 2: no one likes being told what to do. To quote
Speaker 2: Joshua again, when he talks about servile thinking, it is
Speaker 2: a reference to his nationalist thought that revolves around Korean's
Speaker 2: being nomadic warrior peoples that were then made servile and
Speaker 2: an effeminate by a Confucian elite and the Chinese. And
Speaker 2: I'm no longer quoting this ties into the jeuch thing
Speaker 2: that current North Korean philosophy. I know, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm talking about, but you know, for people don't remember.
Speaker 2: Because he wanted Koreans to be strongly and manly and
Speaker 2: self sufficient, so that's like where the jew Cha comes from.
Speaker 2: He also had a kind of manifest destiny kind of
Speaker 2: thing going on about Manchuria, which isn't quite the best
Speaker 2: parallel to make, right, but basically being like we should
Speaker 2: take Manchuria as Korea is really puts the whole thing
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about about Korean exiles and Manchuria
Speaker 2: into a different light.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is something that you see this
Speaker 3: with like kind of someone to let stuff You see
Speaker 3: this with like the Chinese communists too, where the ways
Speaker 3: that colonialism was understood can get very very messy, and
Speaker 3: it can generate kinds of like reactionary anti imperialisms where
Speaker 3: you have all of these people who you know, because
Speaker 3: there's a sort of like leftist, like pure leftist read
Speaker 3: of colonialism, which is sort of about like physical subjugation
Speaker 3: and domination and stuff like that. But there's also a
Speaker 3: read of it, and this is something that's very popular
Speaker 3: among sort of modern Chinese nationalists, for example, where it's
Speaker 3: read as something that was like an emasculating force, something
Speaker 3: that was read as like specifically an attack on masculinity,
Speaker 3: an attack on like their specific patriarchal authority. And that's
Speaker 3: another you know, this is a strand of anti imperalism
Speaker 3: that almost always gets mixed in with other kinds of movements,
Speaker 3: and it sucks. And these people tend to be the
Speaker 3: ones who take power after revalutions happened because they are
Speaker 3: the warshort of conservative action. Yeah, and that kind of
Speaker 3: nationalism is extremely powerful.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, and that ties into jewche being the
Speaker 2: official philosophy of North Korea, you know. Yeah, Yeah, So
Speaker 2: those are some updates where we last left our heroes.
Speaker 2: The Korean Independence movement was doing its thing in all
Speaker 2: kinds of ways, and we talked about what it was
Speaker 2: up to in China. Basically, it was embroiled in one
Speaker 2: of the most complicated moments in political history ever, where
Speaker 2: an ever shifting alliance of nationalists, communists, and to a
Speaker 2: lesser extent, anarchist was doing all kinds of stuff. And
Speaker 2: I was being grouchy that none of my sources got
Speaker 2: into the stuff I really wanted to know about, like
Speaker 2: the hospitals that they were running, the money that they counterfeited,
Speaker 2: and what Japanese imperialists they were exploding, and there is
Speaker 2: some information about who they exploded available and stuff. Just
Speaker 2: nothing read like an action movie enough for me. But
Speaker 2: that's so Magpie of you. Yeah, yeah, there was probably
Speaker 2: tunnels and no one mentioned. I'm sure they dug tunnels.
Speaker 2: I bet people broke out of prison.
Speaker 3: There has to have bend tunnels.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, while a ton of the more ideological rebels
Speaker 2: went to China and a ton of the fighters went
Speaker 2: to Manchuria, a lot of the Righteous Armies went to Manchuria. Oh,
Speaker 2: when I learned more about the Righteous Armies, and I'm
Speaker 2: not going to go back and add it because it's
Speaker 2: not relevant to a story. But I think I'm going
Speaker 2: to be doing a couple episodes about the Righteous Armies
Speaker 2: because they're interesting. Oh interesting haha, and like a bunch
Speaker 2: of their music and the Dong Hack music is available
Speaker 2: on YouTube. I also learned this from Joshua, Thank you Joshua,
Speaker 2: and I listened to a bunch of it right before
Speaker 2: we recorded. Anyway, an awful lot of students and workers
Speaker 2: went to Japan, so we're gonna talk about Japan. Japan
Speaker 2: is an island. Now, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 3: There's both of the islands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true. Japan was the most modernized country in
Speaker 2: East Asia during all this period and Tokyo. I was
Speaker 2: learning about how Tokyo was originally seen as sort of
Speaker 2: a symbol of Asian unity against the West, but very
Speaker 2: quickly it was like through US imperializing everything. Yeah, Japan
Speaker 2: is gaining power and things aren't perfect in their empire.
Speaker 2: They're getting a little spooked because anarchists keep trying to
Speaker 2: kill their emperor. The Russian Revolution just happened, and there's
Speaker 2: this whole thing called the Rice Riots. Of nineteen eighteen
Speaker 2: caused by rice and the massive inflation of rice, and
Speaker 2: if you ever want to hear more about not necessarily
Speaker 2: this one. I don't know if you covered this one,
Speaker 2: but MIA did a whole series on food riots and
Speaker 2: why they're behind everything that happens ever on it could
Speaker 2: happen here. Yeah, I do think we did the rice riots.
Speaker 3: I think we kind of I think I was kind
Speaker 3: of soft on the problem with doing a series on
Speaker 3: bread riots is that there's literally so many of them
Speaker 3: that you have to like, you have to pick your
Speaker 3: time periods, not even so much your specific riots.
Speaker 2: It's oh yeah, no, I mean like we could start
Speaker 2: just a whole new podcast called the Great Food Riots
Speaker 2: of History. I mean, like noting that down. And so
Speaker 2: the rice riots of nineteen eighteen were caused by the
Speaker 2: massive inflation of the cost of rice, and this brought
Speaker 2: down the Prime Minister and it probably led to further
Speaker 2: we need creator send us more rice. So things aren't
Speaker 2: necessarily going great. Well, they're not going great for anyone,
Speaker 2: including the powers that be. The work studies students in
Speaker 2: Tokyo were heavily influenced by anarchism, especially by Krapotkin. And
Speaker 2: soon they were publishing all their own newspapers and shit.
Speaker 2: The earliest you asked for the earliest Korean anarchists that
Speaker 2: I found, and the answer was these Koreans in Tokyo
Speaker 2: put out a journal called the Light of Learning or
Speaker 2: called Light of Learning. That journal talked about how tenant
Speaker 2: peasants should use direct action against their landlords. And I
Speaker 2: think that was like nineteen fourteen or something. But why
Speaker 2: would I write the year down in my script when
Speaker 2: I'm reading it? Who knows?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 3: Because who cares about years? They're they're boring's more explosions,
Speaker 3: less years. This is what American media has taught me
Speaker 3: about how people learn things. Well, see, eventually you care
Speaker 3: enough about all the explosions. The only reason years are
Speaker 3: interesting to me is that they're like the linkages, you know,
Speaker 3: They're like the part you can connect this thing to
Speaker 3: this other thing with the year. But without that context,
Speaker 3: they are a nonsense like all names are just nonsense
Speaker 3: words to me. They go in one a year and
Speaker 3: out the other, unless I like, really apply, I should
Speaker 3: remember that my friend's name is John, you know, like
Speaker 3: Otherwise it's just like they're just like meaningless whatever. I
Speaker 3: have a strange brain.
Speaker 2: But by the early nineteen twenties there are anarchist books
Speaker 2: everywhere and groups are popping up all over the place.
Speaker 2: It helped that even though they were students, the Korean
Speaker 2: work study students were rather dramatically oppressed along class, national,
Speaker 2: and ethnic lines, and they were forced to work the
Speaker 2: lowest wage jobs is in the city. They were like
Speaker 2: peddling in the streets distributing newspapers that kind of shit.
Speaker 2: When I say it helped, it helped radicalize them. It
Speaker 2: didn't help them with their lives to be happy or logged. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists and communists together formed something called the BLA
Speaker 2: Black Wave Society in nineteen twenty one. But nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: one wasn't like the best year for left unity speaking
Speaker 2: of years tying shit together, ah, because this is the
Speaker 2: year that the Bolsheviks firmly crushed all leftist resistance to
Speaker 2: their dictatorship in Russia. So, for whatever reason, who knows,
Speaker 2: the communist and the anarchists and the Black Wave Society split.
Speaker 2: The anarchists formed the Black Labor Society, the communists into
Speaker 2: the North Star Society. Points to the Communist here, that's
Speaker 2: a better name.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, definitely. I feel I feel like most of
Speaker 3: the names of anic descripts in Japan tend to be
Speaker 3: really good, but that one, we're working. We're kind of
Speaker 3: slipping there, guys, you gotta do better. But their journal
Speaker 3: name Ruled. The Black Labor Society published the journal The
Speaker 3: Recalcitrant Koreans at rips. We we love to see it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: good stuff on that part.
Speaker 2: And they believe that the way to find the self
Speaker 2: is through metal aid with others, a thing that I
Speaker 2: also believe, and they wrote a ton of philosophy around that.
Speaker 2: Like I just really like when people are like, hey,
Speaker 2: the self and the community are not in contradiction with
Speaker 2: each other but instead work well. And they also, in
Speaker 2: something I'll continue to underline throughout this episode, wanted a
Speaker 2: cosmopolitan world where the border between Japan and Korea was gone.
Speaker 2: They wanted the inversion of the Pan Asian imperialist writings
Speaker 2: of colonial Japan, right because colonial Japan's like, oh, we're
Speaker 2: all Asian under Japanese rule, yeah, you know, and the
Speaker 2: anarchists were like, oh, we're all people under our own
Speaker 2: self governance, yeah, which.
Speaker 3: Which is interesting because I think I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 3: Pan Asianism kind of got killed off really fast, both
Speaker 3: by the fact that it was you know, in a
Speaker 3: way that sort of like Pan Arabisines and Pan Africanism
Speaker 3: didn't like largely because it was so much of a
Speaker 3: Japanese project. But it's interesting that you get a Kai
Speaker 3: to ruciate of it, that's like, hold on, why do
Speaker 3: we have these borders and not the sort of Japanese
Speaker 3: like the borders are there for quality markings?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, And it's interesting and it comes out of Japan.
Speaker 2: It comes out of Koreans in Japan, and also Japanese
Speaker 2: people in Japan, and also probably Chinese and other folks
Speaker 2: in Japan. But so Japan is super tense at this time.
Speaker 2: Leftism is going wild in the early nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 2: they're critiquing and attacking the colonial and war machines of
Speaker 2: Japan from within. A lot of this tension came to
Speaker 2: a head in nineteen twenty three when the Great Tokyo
Speaker 2: Earthquake hit. And this is a sort of physical manifestation
Speaker 2: of fault lines that can't handle tension anymore. The first
Speaker 2: time I heard I'm now off script, let's go. The
Speaker 2: first time I ever heard about the Great Japanese Earthquake
Speaker 2: or the Great Tokyo Earthquake was. I was at the
Speaker 2: anarchist book fair in San Francisco and there was this
Speaker 2: group of folks from Tokyo there and they were tabling
Speaker 2: an English translation of a book that they had written
Speaker 2: in Esperanto about Japanese anarchism that rules, and it wasn't
Speaker 2: the best English translation, and they had all of these
Speaker 2: scenes about like the martyrs of the Japanese anarchist movement,
Speaker 2: and I'm flipping through it and there's all these children
Speaker 2: and it's just the names of children who died, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, what's going on? And the answer was the
Speaker 2: Great Tokyo Earthquake. If you want to hear more about
Speaker 2: this period in detail, check out our episode about all
Speaker 2: the Japanese anarchists women who kept trying to kill emperors.
Speaker 2: The short of it was that nineteen twenty three, a
Speaker 2: buck off big earthquake hit Tokyo or near Tokyo, and
Speaker 2: it turned into a massive race riot where six thousand
Speaker 2: Korean immigrants were hunted down and killed by folks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the story I always remember from this was there's
Speaker 3: a bunch of stories of guys who'd been like old
Speaker 3: like Japanese officers and like people who'd fought in China,
Speaker 3: like in like this the Sino Japanese War, like taking
Speaker 3: their swords off through mantlepieces and like going to hunt
Speaker 3: people down.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Just one of the worst, like one of the worst
Speaker 3: moments in a period of Japanese history, in which every
Speaker 3: single thing they do is going to be terrible. Yeah,
Speaker 3: really horrible stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And almost certainly there's some historical contention about the
Speaker 2: cause and effect here. Almost certainly the government consciously used
Speaker 2: this as a period to also go and kill a
Speaker 2: lot of the anarchists and entire families and like throw
Speaker 2: them into wells and shit. There's some argument that I've
Speaker 2: read a while ago that like maybe maybe they were
Speaker 2: hunted down organically instead of by the government, you know,
Speaker 2: but whatever, it was, whole families slaughtered, thrown into wells.
Speaker 2: And then they thought, say, like literally blamed Korean people
Speaker 2: in anarchists the earthquake. They blamed the earthquake on them,
Speaker 2: not just the chaos of it. Yeah, And that didn't
Speaker 2: hold up, and that that part didn't last very long.
Speaker 2: The authorities arrested a few anarchists for the quote high
Speaker 2: treason case, which was especially in the Korean anarchist scene,
Speaker 2: which was our A Korean anarchist man named paciol and
Speaker 2: a Japanese anarchist woman named Kanikofumiko were accused of trying
Speaker 2: to assassinate the emperor. The trial became a huge show trial.
Speaker 2: They were more or less on trial for being against
Speaker 2: the colonization of Korea, and one of my favorite love
Speaker 2: stories of all time is in that episode. And I'm
Speaker 2: not going to tell you it here do you have
Speaker 2: to listen? But in the end their death senses were
Speaker 2: commuted to life in prison. Kaniko Fumiko took her own life.
Speaker 2: Pacuol survived and was freed after the empire fell nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five, made it home to Korea, where I have
Speaker 2: read a ton of different arguments about how he lived
Speaker 2: the rest of his life. I suspect more information is
Speaker 2: available in English now than there was when I first
Speaker 2: learned about this. But whatever have you ever seen an anarchist from colony?
Speaker 3: Oh? I is that the one that has the show
Speaker 3: me a nation I refuse to be killed by an abstraction?
Speaker 3: Or is that a different one?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: That sounds right, I think So.
Speaker 3: There's like aes, because I know there's a few, like
Speaker 3: there's a kind of genre of both Korean and Jeffanese
Speaker 3: cinema that's sort of about this kind of thing that
Speaker 3: that could be from a different one of those movies
Speaker 3: that I'm confusing in my head because you know this
Speaker 3: is this is my plug for sleep. This episode is
Speaker 3: sponsored by getting enough sleep. Please do it. It's great.
Speaker 3: Damages your brain if you don't.
Speaker 2: And if you don't get enough sleep, you'll forget to
Speaker 2: do AD transitions when you're supposed to and have to
Speaker 2: go with that one. So this show brought to you
Speaker 2: by between seven and fourteen hours of sleep, whatever you
Speaker 2: would prefer.
Speaker 1: I also didn't sleep, and I thought you did one
Speaker 1: around nineteen minutes and you didn't.
Speaker 2: Nope, yep, you did not. Here we go.
Speaker 1: We're doing great everyone.
Speaker 2: And we're back from that nap that's seven to fourteen
Speaker 2: hour nap depending.
Speaker 3: On what you know, feeling rejuvenated. I'm alive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sadly it's not true on our end, none of
Speaker 2: us have swept since we went to ads. But Anarchism Colony,
Speaker 2: I really like it. It's a South Korean movie about
Speaker 2: paciol and kinkofumicco and about the love story. So I
Speaker 2: guess you can actually watch it by watching it, But
Speaker 2: it's interesting because this whole thing is part of the
Speaker 2: whole like Korea as a country that cannot and does
Speaker 2: not ignore its anarchists past. You know that there's like
Speaker 2: a lot of work to sometimes nationalize the anarchist heroes.
Speaker 2: But I really like that movie. Top five fictional representations
Speaker 2: of anarchism at cinema easily maybe my favorite one. Honestly
Speaker 2: probably my favorite just in terms of like accuracy and
Speaker 2: also it's a good movie anyway. The Japanese anarchist movement
Speaker 2: was splitting hard in the early nineteen twenties between anarcho
Speaker 2: syndicalism and then the thing that my friend Miowong did
Speaker 2: a bunch of episodes about pure anarchism, which is developed
Speaker 2: in Japan anarchist tendency that didn't want to be watered
Speaker 2: down by being part of the labor movement. And the
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists were split by this as well, but mostly
Speaker 2: in Japan. Actually in Korea they were like, we got
Speaker 2: bigger problems.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really like that split is really just a
Speaker 3: Japan I think every other anarchist in the world who
Speaker 3: have ever read who's looked at it was like, what
Speaker 3: on earth are you people doing? Yeah, Rico Balatesa is
Speaker 3: a very famous was.
Speaker 2: It was it? Mala Tesla was a roough Rocker, either.
Speaker 3: Mela Tesla, who's a very famous Italian anarchist or Rudoff
Speaker 3: Rocker who's probably the most famous German. And Arcosynicolas like
Speaker 3: reads about like the split that they're having. It says
Speaker 3: them a letter being like, hey, y'all should work this
Speaker 3: out instead of splitting. The Japanese actors like, no, we're
Speaker 3: gonna worr to split every single federation in movement between
Speaker 3: these two kind of all along sort of semi baffling
Speaker 3: ideological lines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so that happened to the Korean anarchist there
Speaker 2: as well. But I think I think overall the Korean
Speaker 2: anarchists movement in Japan was more or in Tokyo at
Speaker 2: least was more split by the fact that a lot
Speaker 2: of them were arrested, one of them was one of
Speaker 2: their friends was in prison, and a lot of them
Speaker 2: basically fled Tokyo and went to either China or Korea.
Speaker 2: And nineteen twenty three hard time to be Korean an anarchist,
Speaker 2: or especially a Korean anarchist in Tokyo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, dear God.
Speaker 2: After nineteen twenty three, a ton of the Korean Tokyo
Speaker 2: anarchists went back to Korea itself to start organizing groups there,
Speaker 2: including a lot of Pocuo's friends. The other big center
Speaker 2: of Korean anarchist activity in Japan was in Osaka, an
Speaker 2: industrial city with a higher population density than Tokyo did
Speaker 2: at that time, and the cheap labor that built that
Speaker 2: industry was, of course immigrant labor from Korea. About fifteen
Speaker 2: to twenty thousand Korean people came there every year. I'm
Speaker 2: uncertain if this was seasonal labor where they're like showing up,
Speaker 2: if it's the same fifteen twenty thousand people, or if
Speaker 2: it's like that's how many people were pouring in every
Speaker 2: single year and it was adding up. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: these folks brought anarchism with them to Osaka. One of
Speaker 2: them had already been in jail in Korea for organizing,
Speaker 2: and a ton of them grew up as child laborers.
Speaker 2: These are not theory focused folks, yet one of them
Speaker 2: formed a As you pointed out, some fucking good names here.
Speaker 2: One group that they formed had the sick name the
Speaker 2: Alliance of Societies of Korean Property List people that rules. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like what other people with nothing?
Speaker 3: Fuck you.
Speaker 2: I don't know a ton about what they got up to.
Speaker 2: I know that they were. They held mass demos in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty four alongside others for the free speech of
Speaker 2: Korean immigrants. It was a big Korean immigrant rights movement.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty four in Osaka, folks organized labor night
Speaker 2: schools in Osaka where they taught how workers could free
Speaker 2: themselves by uniting and fighting capitalism and just going into
Speaker 2: the like Koreans and exile set up schools and it's cool. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: that is Korean anarchism in Japan. But what about two
Speaker 2: and a half hours into us learning about Korean anarchism,
Speaker 2: what about Korean anarchists in Korea overall? I think people
Speaker 2: talk about a story less because it's it's not nearly
Speaker 2: as well documented because it was all underground and it
Speaker 2: mostly it was really sad. But the way Korean anarchism
Speaker 2: moreton Korea itself was people would organize underground at first,
Speaker 2: and formally there's tons of anarchists. They would create a
Speaker 2: group with a name and membership lists, which was that
Speaker 2: worked out against them, To be clear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not a great idea if you're trying to organize
Speaker 3: an underground group.
Speaker 2: No, like when in doubt, if your group is illegal
Speaker 2: or very likely to be, don't keep lists, which they
Speaker 2: then got good at. And now we don't know shit
Speaker 2: about what happened. But they would form a group with
Speaker 2: a name, try and get shit done. Then all the
Speaker 2: organizers would be arrested and the group would break up.
Speaker 2: And even though they were given like fairly light sentences
Speaker 2: like two to five years in prison for free speech,
Speaker 2: they would usually die in jail or at least multiple
Speaker 2: of the times that I've read about it. Survivors and
Speaker 2: new folks would form another group, and so it went.
Speaker 2: In colonial Korea, socialism was part of the daily conversation
Speaker 2: among the youth again in the early nineteen twenties. This
Speaker 2: socialism was primarily anarchism. There's a you know, major split,
Speaker 2: like obviously communism and stuff is part of everything too,
Speaker 2: but that comes a little bit later in terms of
Speaker 2: which one has more influenced when one of the major
Speaker 2: ways that anarchism spread was through esperantism. Our friend the
Speaker 2: constructed language. We've talked about this a bunch on the show. Basically,
Speaker 2: there's this constructed language called Esperanto. It was invented by
Speaker 2: this Eastern European anti Zionist Jew in the nineteenth century
Speaker 2: whose name I didn't write into the script, but I
Speaker 2: talked about it a whole bunch In fuck, I've done
Speaker 2: so many episodes, I don't remember which one. Listen to
Speaker 2: all one hundred episodes and you'll find out more about
Speaker 2: esperantism and hear that guy talking about why he doesn't
Speaker 2: think Zionism is a good idea. It became the language
Speaker 2: of the left across the world, and it was an
Speaker 2: attempt to destroy national borders through a common tongue that
Speaker 2: was no one's mother tongue, as best as I can tell.
Speaker 2: And this is sort of an inference. Part of how
Speaker 2: anarchism was spreading in Korea is that, like, the fucking
Speaker 2: sensors didn't know how to read esperanto, so books and
Speaker 2: esperanto just contained secret anarchism messages that the sensors couldn't
Speaker 2: they didn't notice.
Speaker 3: I bet Also to another contributing factor is that, I mean,
Speaker 3: we've talked about this a bit, but the people who
Speaker 3: absolutely love ESPERANTOI the Japanese anarchists, like they really really
Speaker 3: love Esperanto, So there's probably books moving from there too.
Speaker 2: Oh totally. It was actually called the Wind from the
Speaker 2: East Anarchism was, which I think is cool.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I didn't know where to put that into
Speaker 2: the script, so thanks for me bringing that up. At
Speaker 2: the end of every single time I write scripts, I
Speaker 2: have all my scattered notes that I haven't yet figured
Speaker 2: out where to plug in, and then I just like
Speaker 2: highlight them all and delete them and it makes me
Speaker 2: sad every time.
Speaker 3: You know, Glen, glad, we got this one. We need
Speaker 3: to found that group that can be the like successive
Speaker 3: organization Asian anarchists. You should make an anarchist group or something.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, hell yeah. So Korean anarchists in Korea, we're
Speaker 2: actually the least radical in terms of what they were
Speaker 2: saying of the five geographies of Korean anarchism that I'm
Speaker 2: the one who made up that there's five geographies of it.
Speaker 2: This is not an accurate thing. But you know, like
Speaker 2: most of China, Manchuria, Tokyo and Osaka and then Korea
Speaker 2: all have very different personalities of Korean anarchism. Right during
Speaker 2: this period, elsewhere, the anarchists are like, all right, here's
Speaker 2: the deal. We're gonna kill all the Japanese invaders, reclaimed Korea,
Speaker 2: build a bottom up society built on mutual aid and solidarity,
Speaker 2: and then get into arguments about how I know, nationalists
Speaker 2: we should be like. That's like overall the vibe most places.
Speaker 2: Right inside Korea, the anarchists at this point are like, Hey,
Speaker 2: we're activists working to improve everyone's material conditions, and we
Speaker 2: happen to like theilosophy books, but we're not going to
Speaker 2: say anything about the colonies and the empire because then
Speaker 2: we'll die.
Speaker 3: Yeah, censorship does tend to have that effect. I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They kept independence out of the rhetoric because they
Speaker 2: kept getting murdered in jail as it was. But the
Speaker 2: softening of the rhetoric did not save them. But what
Speaker 2: could have saved them was products, especially if those products
Speaker 2: were This show is brought to you by international solidarity
Speaker 2: and mutual aid, which, to be fair, they had, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't enough to save them. Even more were brought
Speaker 2: to you by even more international solidarity and mutual aid.
Speaker 2: That's the only sponsor, and also whoever gave us money,
Speaker 2: here's that and for back. One thing that being under
Speaker 2: the gun helped prevent them from doing is getting caught
Speaker 2: up in ideological differences. Mentioned that, yeah, the pure anarchism.
Speaker 2: So the split was felt between syndicalism and pure anarchism,
Speaker 2: and it was discussed, and it was not nearly so
Speaker 2: important to anarchists in Korea, although one thing I read
Speaker 2: is said that the most prevalent strem was pure anarchism.
Speaker 2: But another thing I read was like, here's all the
Speaker 2: labor unions they started.
Speaker 3: I'm like, yeah. Also, I will say that the peer anarchists,
Speaker 3: like as much as their whole thing is opposition to
Speaker 3: societies based around organization around production, like they do, also
Speaker 3: have a bunch of labor unions. So it's hard to tell. Okay,
Speaker 3: it's hard to tell what formation is which just based
Speaker 3: on what the formation is because well, just like how
Speaker 3: national borders are nonsense, but people live in different places.
Speaker 3: Lines between ideologies are nonsense and artificially constructed, but there
Speaker 3: is still differences between different places.
Speaker 2: That's that's my deep thoughts for today. The first group
Speaker 2: of anarchists that I found was actually the first labor
Speaker 2: association in Korea as best as I can sort out,
Speaker 2: and by that I mean a source said it was
Speaker 2: the first labor association in Korea. But anytime anyone says
Speaker 2: the first something something, I don't believe them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty folks who liked Krapotkin but didn't go
Speaker 2: explicitly anarchists until nineteen twenty four formed the Association for
Speaker 2: Labor and Mutual Relief in Korea. This was a combo
Speaker 2: labor union and mutual aid group. As best as I
Speaker 2: can tell, The Black Labor Society was founded explicitly anarchist
Speaker 2: in Seoul in nineteen twenty three. Soon it disappeared due
Speaker 2: to repression. Next, the League of the Black Flag was formed,
Speaker 2: which is a good name. Anything with a league is
Speaker 2: a good name. I've read it that it was formed
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty four, and I've read it was formed
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty five. Everyone listed in their membership was
Speaker 2: arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. So the
Speaker 2: government didn't like the League for some reason. I think
Speaker 2: it was the name. They were like, we don't like
Speaker 2: the name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, his name is. His name's too cool.
Speaker 2: It's cool.
Speaker 3: If any of the names we've come up with, we've got,
Speaker 3: we must put every single one of these people in prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and almost all of them died, even though there
Speaker 2: sense to a year in prison, they almost all died
Speaker 2: in prison or killed themselves immediately after release because of
Speaker 2: how badly they've been treated.
Speaker 3: Oo.
Speaker 2: And this was a strong message to the anarchists, but
Speaker 2: not one that stopped anarchism. Bachiol, the political prisoner in Japan,
Speaker 2: was heavily influential on these groups. Right, he's a guy,
Speaker 2: and he's in fucking prison in Japan, And some of
Speaker 2: the founders of a lot of these groups had already
Speaker 2: been arrested in Japan in nineteen twenty three during his trial.
Speaker 2: Another group set up only a few months later was
Speaker 2: the True Friends League. I promised up at the top
Speaker 2: of this there was going to be a lot of
Speaker 2: like friends leagues. And there's so many group names that
Speaker 2: I didn't put into this script, but a lot of
Speaker 2: the ones that are not in it are like eighteen
Speaker 2: different versions of the Best Friends and the True Friends
Speaker 2: and the Black Friends and the Yeah, True Friends League
Speaker 2: is also good. Although I think League of True Friends,
Speaker 2: but that's probably just a translation difference. This lasted about
Speaker 2: a year before all of this founders were arrested. Everyone
Speaker 2: got two to five years for Darien to try and
Speaker 2: build new society on anarchist principles. At least one of
Speaker 2: those members died of pneumonia during hunger strike in prison.
Speaker 2: Just like in China and Japan, anarchist groups in Korea
Speaker 2: were multi ethnic. When the True Friendsly headquarters was raided,
Speaker 2: there were at least two Japanese anarchists present who went
Speaker 2: to prison as well. A Christian anarchist named Kim Son
Speaker 2: opened a church in Korea after he came back from
Speaker 2: China convinced that the Bible was anarchistic. So he started
Speaker 2: off as a Christian and then he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: now I'm an anarchist Christian and I'm going to go
Speaker 2: open a church about how the Bible is anarchistic. He
Speaker 2: was always in and out of prison for that work.
Speaker 2: And he also tried to set up an anarchist village
Speaker 2: in northern Korea. And I don't know more about it.
Speaker 3: Probably they all got arrested, unfortunately, that that seems like
Speaker 3: the arc of the story. Yeah, in Korea, that they
Speaker 3: all got arrested.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they might have fucked off to Manchuria. That's the
Speaker 2: other thing people successfully do. Yeah, maybe where they all
Speaker 2: eventually whatever, We'll get to that. Several times, I think,
Speaker 2: partly to evade all of this getting arrested for doing
Speaker 2: political groups, they would set up groups that were explicitly
Speaker 2: art and literature movements, not political movements. Ah, these were
Speaker 2: still crushed.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty five they tried another left unity one
Speaker 2: all types of socialist art came together, and by that
Speaker 2: I mean Bolsheviks and anarchists. These are the two primary
Speaker 2: forces at this point, called the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation.
Speaker 2: They split because the Bolsheviks kept arguing that all literature
Speaker 2: must be political propaganda or else it isn't proletarian, and
Speaker 2: that everything had to be Bolshevik. The anarchist position was,
Speaker 2: what if art can just be art sometimes, or it
Speaker 2: can be anarchistic and it can even be Bolshevik.
Speaker 3: What if art is okay, if it's art proto actually know,
Speaker 3: what is this even proto socialist realism or were we
Speaker 3: just in their socialist realism by this point I think
Speaker 3: we might be.
Speaker 2: I actually don't know exactly. I have this whole plan
Speaker 2: where I want to do it like futurists versus Soviet realism,
Speaker 2: and like.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, there is a whole bunch of interesting
Speaker 3: stuff about, like Soviet art communes that I only sort
Speaker 3: of know about. Oh cool, that I've heard interesting stuff about.
Speaker 3: But they also get eventually wiped out by piped out
Speaker 3: by the Stalinists. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't remember whether I covered this enough, but it
Speaker 2: might be later in the script too. All the Korean
Speaker 2: folks who sided with the Soviets, they went really badly
Speaker 2: for them. There was a whole ethnic cleansing that happens. Oh,
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really one of those old Bolshevik war hero
Speaker 3: d next to their name, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, it's mostly nineteen thirty seven for the Korean Soviets.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I think about twenty five thousand of them
Speaker 2: killed anyway, Okay, I think it's in the script, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: I think it's in the scrip. We'll get to it.
Speaker 3: Oh No.
Speaker 2: In May nineteen twenty nine, folks from the Chungho Artist
Speaker 2: Movement Society were arrested and given two to five years.
Speaker 2: So they're getting the same as everyone else, right, And
Speaker 2: they were as they claimed they were just an art
Speaker 2: movement members happened to be anarchists. At their trial, no
Speaker 2: one bothered bringing up evidence that they were like doing
Speaker 2: anything that was criminal even under the fucking statute at
Speaker 2: the time they all went to prison. The movement seemed
Speaker 2: to have been strongest on Jaju Island, which is the
Speaker 2: largest island off Korea, and some Korean anarchists who left
Speaker 2: Japan moved there started a mutual aid group called Our
Speaker 2: Mutual Loan Club, which did a Taoist anarchist thing and
Speaker 2: combined anarchism with Daoism's idea of the three treasures diligence, frugality,
Speaker 2: and modesty. Just for another syncretism, I'm going to shove
Speaker 2: as many into this episode as I can. Yeah, most
Speaker 2: of the groups started in southern Korea, where the capital
Speaker 2: of Korea was right, but as those groups were all repressed,
Speaker 2: the spirit moved north by like nineteen twenty seven or so.
Speaker 2: There anarchist theory was developed that sort of replaced the
Speaker 2: proletarian class of Marx with the desperate and humble class
Speaker 2: by a Korean anarchist, ying Yong that felt more appropriate
Speaker 2: to the Korean in context. Because it included peasants and
Speaker 2: it includes like well, Iron is desperate and humble, right
Speaker 2: or humbled by society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like the Japanese pur anarchists like do a
Speaker 3: kind of move like this too, And it's interesting that
Speaker 3: they get here kind of in some ways before the
Speaker 3: Marxists are really getting to this place where like they're
Speaker 3: they're running into problems with the fact that like they're
Speaker 3: sort of you know, Marxist idealized the revolutionary subject kind
Speaker 3: of like isn't the only person who's being a revolutionary
Speaker 3: subject around it? Also isn't even necessarily the primary thing
Speaker 3: that you're dealing with if you're in a colony.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. And also like oh crap, I
Speaker 2: forget the name of it. The different like modes of
Speaker 2: production that Marx describes, one of them isn't one of
Speaker 2: them called the asiatic mode or like something horrible and
Speaker 2: like just like racist and wrong.
Speaker 3: It's really people have tried to rehabilitate the asiatic mode
Speaker 3: of production, but like, well, one of the things that
Speaker 3: if you really go into the marks, you realize he's
Speaker 3: kind of just making up like there's a slow vonic
Speaker 3: mode of production. He's kind of just he's kind of
Speaker 3: just freestyling with it, and they're they're not very good.
Speaker 2: He's like, here there be monsters mode of production.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like there's a really good David Graeber piece
Speaker 3: called turning modes of Production inside out and which you
Speaker 3: kind of ar he's trying to kind of rehabilitate the
Speaker 3: idea of it. And his argument basically is that like
Speaker 3: capitalism as a mode of production is a form of slavery. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like it's just like a different version of that. But
Speaker 3: if if you want to get if you want a
Speaker 3: good thing about how the whole sort of modes of
Speaker 3: production thing gets really incoherent really fast about what you
Speaker 3: poke at it with a stick, and Marxist is trying
Speaker 3: to explain the slavonic motive production to you. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: a good one.
Speaker 2: And it's like overall, I would say the economic work
Speaker 2: of Marx is like the thing that I like Marx
Speaker 2: about whatever put that sense together correctly. The thing I
Speaker 2: like the most about Marxist stuff is overall, like I
Speaker 2: think it was a decent economist. He wasn't flawless. He
Speaker 2: did a lot of work that no one else did
Speaker 2: at the time. It's my general takeaway. But obviously he
Speaker 2: got some shit wrong. Yeah, it just makes a lot
Speaker 2: of sense that people like in their own context are
Speaker 2: like the proletarian thing, isn't. We're in Korea, just different.
Speaker 2: We're gonna talk with a desperate and humble you know.
Speaker 2: And so there they formed another Black Friends Society and
Speaker 2: organized workers in the unions and opened to labor night school,
Speaker 2: because that's what you do. In August nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 2: the yich On Freedom Group was caught and everyone was
Speaker 2: sentenced to three to four years in prison.
Speaker 3: Je's Christ, did they all die in prison?
Speaker 2: I don't know about that one or not, you know,
Speaker 2: like maybe they made it out Hope springs eternal, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And they slowly got better at secrecy, and then they
Speaker 2: secretly formed the Korean Anarco Communist Federation on November tenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty nine. And the KAF had a rule that
Speaker 2: its members weren't allowed to get into physical fights with communists,
Speaker 2: And I think that's funny. They tried to hold a convention.
Speaker 2: This was not a good idea. It was like a
Speaker 2: secret convention. They didn't like put flyers up right, But
Speaker 2: it wasn't a good idea to have a Korean anarchist convention.
Speaker 2: Almost everyone was arrested. Families of those who were arrested
Speaker 2: were punished as well, mostly like economically, I think they
Speaker 2: were denied jobs and kicked out of different situations, like
Speaker 2: they weren't necessarily like murdered or whatever. I mean, well
Speaker 2: take away people's livelihood and a colony sort of murdering them.
Speaker 2: But international anarchists from Manchuria and Japan were deported. The
Speaker 2: first convention of the Korean and Arco Communist Federation where
Speaker 2: everyone didn't get arrested was in nineteen forty six, after
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. It wasn't a colony anymore. No, I don't
Speaker 2: think they like tried every year in between, but that
Speaker 2: would have been funny. It's our duty to go get
Speaker 2: arrested at the anarchist convention. That's what it means be
Speaker 2: an anarchist. The Korean Anarchist Federation was the last major
Speaker 2: anarchist organization in Korea until nineteen forty five. For the
Speaker 2: rest of the colonial period, anarchism was a thing discussed
Speaker 2: in bookstores and shit. But shout out to the people
Speaker 2: who kept radical bookstores. Everyone who talks about the shit's
Speaker 2: going to fucking prison and dying there. And then there's
Speaker 2: these bookstores that are like, we're going to have our
Speaker 2: anarchists book clubs here, and we're going to sell books.
Speaker 2: It's like one of the things that we take for
Speaker 2: granted in a place that currently has wait, we can't
Speaker 2: take free speech in publishing for granted in the United
Speaker 2: States anymore. Never mind, people are going to prison. Librarians
Speaker 2: and teachers are going to prison in the United States
Speaker 2: right now for having books about queerness and shit. So
Speaker 2: never mind. Shout out to the bookkeepers in Korea during
Speaker 2: this period who fucking made sure that the spirit didn't die.
Speaker 2: There's also an implication that's hard to pin down. I
Speaker 2: know that's the recurring theme of this episode, that some
Speaker 2: Korean anarchists, including at least one woman, went to Soviet
Speaker 2: Russian to fight against the Bolsheviks. I'm guessing this would
Speaker 2: have been on the Siberian Front of the Civil War,
Speaker 2: which is where one of the two places that anarchists
Speaker 2: held out the longest there in Ukraine. So that's Korea itself.
Speaker 2: And when we come back part four of our four
Speaker 2: parter about the Korean People's Association of Manchuria is going
Speaker 2: to be about.
Speaker 3: Aiation in Yeah, that's extremely exciting. I'm glad we're finally
Speaker 3: getting there four parts.
Speaker 2: I know this is like I felt it was necessary,
Speaker 2: and I think that I hope you all enjoyed the ride.
Speaker 2: But the peak of it, we're reaching our destination where
Speaker 2: two million people are going to live in an anarchist
Speaker 2: society for I think longer than actually people usually talk about.
Speaker 2: People usually talk about as a two year project. There's
Speaker 2: it could have been a six year anyway. That's what
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about on Wednesday. But first, Mia,
Speaker 2: what do you want to talk about?
Speaker 3: Uh? Oh, yeah, I have I have a podcast. It's
Speaker 3: called akadept here. There's a bunch of other people on
Speaker 3: it too, who are great. If I died before this
Speaker 3: has come out, I was assassinated by Boeing. By the
Speaker 3: time this comes out, you will know why. You won't
Speaker 3: know why. Oh shit, Okay, Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I mean not you getting assassinated, but you
Speaker 2: fucking yeah, Okay, I'm sorry for sending you that story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Sophie, you must avenge me if Bowie hit Man
Speaker 3: comes for me.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I promise I will do an amazing.
Speaker 2: Podcast about you. I promise I'll organize a funeral with
Speaker 2: a you know, black and red and a coffin parade
Speaker 2: into the street.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 1: Bagpie is like, I'll give you a great funeral, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'll do a wonderful true crime podcast about
Speaker 1: your dad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so dark, I have great friends, and then all
Speaker 2: of us at cool Zone Media will.
Speaker 3: Oh, there we go.
Speaker 2: That's nice. So you know, everything will and happily that way.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go on book tour if I'm not
Speaker 2: assassinated by Boeing. I have no reason I'll be assassinated
Speaker 2: by Boeing unless I jack. Oh, but I'm going on
Speaker 2: book tour. I'll be coming to a city near you.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to a lot of them. If you live in
Speaker 2: the Northeast or anywhere, I will be driving from Pittsburgh
Speaker 2: to Washington and down to Portland. You can check out.
Speaker 2: I'll have all the dates on my substack, which is
Speaker 2: Margaret Kiljoy do at substack dot com. You don't have
Speaker 2: to sign up in order to see that. That would
Speaker 2: be ridiculous. And also on my Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy
Speaker 2: and also at my Twitter at Magpie Kiljoy. I will
Speaker 2: be posting all of the dates of my tour for
Speaker 2: my book, The Sapling Gage, which comes out tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Holy crap. Yeah wow.
Speaker 2: So not as we record it, but as you if
Speaker 2: you listen on time comes out September twenty fourth, twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, and you all be glad because then I'll
Speaker 2: stop plugging it at the end of every episode. But
Speaker 2: you would be even more glad if you read it.
Speaker 2: This is good. See you on Wednesday, Bay.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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