Whole Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People did cool stuff. Your podcast, it's yours, it's yours. Now you can do it.
What do you mean? You know?
Fine, I'll do it. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy doing my podcast. It's my podcast, but I have a guest, and my guest is Mia wong Am.
Yeah. Hello, also doing a bit of this podcast, like five percent of this podcast.
That's true, and then also doing an awful lot of the podcast at least as much as me. It's Sophie, Hi, Sophie Hi. Also doing this podcast is Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory, Hi, Rory, Sophie. We can't continue until you say it. Oh my gosh, Hi Rory. I was just so I was thinking about other things. I'm so sorry, Rory, my brain. Sophie was thinking about dog costumes.
I kind of was. I won't lie. You're very cute. I was thinking about dog costumes and hats. Yeah.
And our theme musical was written forced by un Woman. Welcome to the Rousing, part four of our deep dive into Korean anarchism.
You did it, you did it, Joe.
Wait, I don't get it. Wait, that's okay, that's happening, It's okay. Was I being compared to Joe Biden for not having a memory?
Oh I was so dark? Oh my god.
No, you were being compared to Kamala Harris finding out Joe Biden beat Donald Trump out and calling him.
And going you did it, Joe.
Hooray.
That was so much funnier than it was supposed to be.
So to sum up where we're at Korea in case people are like just checking in on the last episode, that's fine. It's fine if you did that, although you miss a lot. Korea was a Japanese collum in the nineteen tens until World War Two, and a lot of Korean rebels, including a lot of anarchists, fled Tomentaria. This is my little like, little like. If you're catching up on the Batman episode, here's the recap. You know, a lot of Korean rebels, including a lot of anarchists, fled
Tomentaria immediately north of Korea. Korean anarchists developed a lot of skills and ideas and philosophies and connections in China and Japan with comrades there. And I have been trying a bunch of stuff to make Korea both independent and also a horizontal society. They opened a ton of schools, they organized a ton of labor unions, they wrote a ton of books and newspapers, they organized gorilla bands. And that's the part I know at least about, and I want
to know more about. But generally they were cool people doing cool stuff. And so there's two million Korean people living in Manchuria by the mid nineteen twenties or so, and they were at war on a lot of fronts. They were at war against starvation because they're in an incredibly inhospitable land like well, we'll talk about more in a second. They're at war against the Japanese military who wanted to destroy them as Korean rebels, but also wanted
to colonize Manchuria. They were also fighting against the pressures from the constant warring in China, most specifically raids by bandits and acting like bandits Chinese Communist Party. Manchuria countries are fake and borders are fake. But Menoria is usually presented as a region of China, but what could get called Manchuria also extends up into what's currently Mongoli in Russia because borders regions alfake. I have seen the Korean presence in Manchuria described a lot of ways. I know
that's the theme of this fucking episode. A whole gradient goes from oh, this is just warlordism whatever, They're just the same as everyone else too. This is an anarchist utopia of two million people who prove that all of our ideas are right and there's nothing wrong with any of them. I suspect that the truth is not just in the middle, but like a dialectical third thing.
Ooh in narco warlordism.
Oh no, yeah, yeah, a narco nationalist warlordism. No, it's funny and messy. It also, when I'm trying to read about all of it, it doesn't help that every text transliterates everyone's names differently.
Yeah, that's a whole thing. Oh yeah, And.
Then a lot of the people are like related to each other and just their names will be extra similar. And then like translator, So I basically mean like, is this two guys, this one guy? Is this eight guys? Because I'm looking at eight names. You know that happened a lot, But I believe I have a clear picture. I'm going to present you a fairly clear picture. Koreans
have been moving into Manuria since about nineteen ten. This is rugged mountains, which is usually the kind of place historically with the least government, and that is totally honestly part of why I live in West Virginia.
Just be real.
One source claims that the area was under warlord rule. One claims that the areas that they were in wasn't. And I suspect that the source claiming warlord rule was
claiming the Korean generals as warlords. But there's also this thing where the Korean population was largely living in these very remote areas, and so the warlords that would rule mostly which were mostly Japanese aligned at this point, or at least the main particular war war that they came up against a bunch of times as Japanese aligned until they killed him.
Which warlord is it? I remember him.
I didn't write his name in and I feel so bad the Japanese eventually assassin I was like, I have too many names in the script. The Japanese assassinated him. I kind of actually didn't include him at all in the script. But eventually he didn't like successfully stop the nationalist enough Chang Kai Shek enough, so the Japanese who were his allies just like assassinated him by bombing the train he was on.
Yeah, okay, so I will say this about that guy. I remember this guy from the Warlers episode that I did, and the source I was reading was claiming that he wasn't actually a Japanese asset. It's just that everyone accused him of being one because they assumed that he was because he was fighting the nationalists and he kind of wasn't. No, that would make sense because they yeah, they blew his ass up. So I'm blinking at his name because it's
been like several years. Yeah, I really right to this stuff.
No, and I considered him a side quest that I decided to abandon. He's like one of the trimmed branches. Yeah, No, there's so much.
Also, one thing I do want to mention that I think is kind of important to this story that isn't talked about that much is that like Mansuria is by Chinese standards, like fairly close to like it's not that far away from from Beijing, Like it's kind of remote in the sense that like it's not it's I mean, it's it's a different power center than most of the sort of like traditional Chinese power centers, right. I mean, it's make sure he is the place where the manchees,
which is the the Qing dynasty came out of. But it's close enough to Beijing that it's kind of an issue for people.
No. See, that's like, that's a good context. So overall the Korean people living there. Because I was trying to figure out, I was like, there's two million people here. It's not Tara Knollys right. I was like, how is it two million in Korean people in Korean societies? And the answer is that they best as I can tell, they did sort of find the areas that weren't super
populated because they're in the mountains and shit. But overall, the Korean people are living outside of the Chinese state and outside of external warlord rule, and they are outside of control by Japanese or Russian forces. By nineteen twenty five, they set up three self governing prefectures, the jiong Chen, the Chanren, and the shin Men. These were set up by various gorilla groups that were all doing the fighting.
They collectively had a militia basically those gorilla units, right, and they defended the area and they were occasionally raiding into Korea against the Japanese. As best as they understand, this was the Korean Independence Army, not to be confused with the other Korean Independence Army, which existed from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty one and is the main thing you find when you try to do more research about this. But it's also called the Army of the North, which
is a sick name, that's true. And it grew out of these righteous armies, right, the original one, the one that disbanded in nineteen twenty one, the Korean Independence Army. It dissolved because the fucking Russian Red Army ordered them to integrate into the regular Red Army. Oh no, and the Koreans who joined the USSR were later betrayed during the forced ethnic cleansing of Manchuria in nineteen thirty seven, when one hundred and seventy two thousand people were deported to Kazakistan, which.
Is, oh, they're those people.
Oh no, yeah, it's not close. These are not nearby.
No. I guess we should also mention geographically, like in terms of just what kind of like Vladivlastok is like technically it's not technically EVENTUREI yet depending in terms of where you're how you're doing the borders.
There's like two maps if you look it up on Wikipedia.
Yah. Yeah, yeah, Like Latavastok is like right there, right, So it's it's just like like in terms of like you know, we talked about Korea being sort of like the shatter zone, like Manchuria is an even bigger one because it's literally like it is bordered directly by China, Mongolia, Russia, and then Japan is very very close by sea, and then you know also like borders of Korea, etcter, et cetera. So like there's all of these sort of imperial influences
are like literally right there. And like if the red arby in flat of Astok is like, hey, we're gonna do ethnic cleansings, deport you to whatever place that's some like Stalinist or whatever decides to send you to, it's exact Dania.
They they have the ability to do that, which is completely on the other side of the country, and Russia is a very big country.
Yeah. Also I want to mention the Stalinist line on that was that they were scared that those people were Japanese spies, which is i know, the most like out of all of the Stalinist lions I've ever seen about anything. That is the single most unhinged one, Like yeah, that, I mean, it's like their excuse for doing it is we are racist. That's what they're that's their excuse, their excuses. We don't trust Koreans because they might be friends with
the Japanese. The fuck is wrong with you? Just me and they're the same, Like you think they look the same, that's what you're saying. Yeah, it's like you literally, these are a bunch of anti Japanese gorillas that you forcibly integrated, and then the anti Japanese guerrilla is that you integrated into your army. You are now sending a you are now ethnically cleansing across the country because you think they're Japanese.
By was like, what is going? Oh god, So this just makes me very angry because this is one of the things there's a lot of kind of like weird denialism about I'm sure on the left, and it's infuriating to me. Yeah, no, I'm certain. I Like I read one hundred thousand of the Koreans from Entrereo removed, and then I also read that the whole thing was one hundred and seventy two thousand, and so I don't know whether that's like other people were also being moved.
I don't know enough about that. And also some of the numbers that are wildly disparate, but none of them are small numbers. Is that between sixteen and fifty thousand of those people died. Yeah, so between a tenth and half, depending on how you calculate it all.
Because it turns out that being an ethnic cleansing, even if they're technically not literally shooting you all, still kills enormous numbers of people. Yeah, deeply evil stuff.
It also goes to show the primary lesson of history of the twentieth century is when you make friends with tankies, they kill you, even if you're a tanky. Maybe especially if you're a tanky. Yeah, but that's not what we're talking about. I just love a little side quest to point out that you shouldn't trust the fucking USSR. Yep, those earlier armies are gone. There's this new army, and
I'm sure it's a lot of the same people. Actually, I learned some from Joshua that one of the reasons that a lot of these uh coming out of the Righteous Armies. A lot of these armies were people who had been part of like the Korean government and even like putting down the dong Hak rebellion in eighteen ninety four, and even some of them have been like kind of fighting for the Japanese. And we're like, no, never mind, and if I get anything wrong, it's not Joshua's fault
to my own inferences. I want to be clear about that. But you have all of these like cops and soldiers, shit and shit showing up at like anarchist schools to be like, all right, here's how you organize the military to kill the japan Ris. History is very weird, yes, and ideological borders are like real borders, they're fake, you know.
I mean there's also different places are different whatever. Anyway, the general of this army was a guy named Kim Joe jin, and he was pretty rat He's not an anarchist yet at the start of all this, and there's
some stuff that I wonder about. He is talked up as like he's one of the big national heroes of all this, right because he's a general who like, well, i'll talk about what he did in the second If you read articles about him as soon as he turned eighteen, which is around like nineteen in the middle of the night, like nineteen oh five, nineteen oh six. I forgot to write down what year he was born. But when he
turned eighteen, he's from this rich family. He freed all fifty families of slaves his family owned and gave them land and shit and burned the slave registry and this gets called the first act of a man's patient of modern Korea. The confusing thing about that, you're shaking your head a little, right, I could see you think. And didn't we just say in the last episode that slavery was outlawed in eighteen ninety four in Korea?
Yes, we did.
Yeah, so huh myth making. Yeah, you know, I mean he still might have done it. He's still might his family probably still enslave people after it was illegal for them to do it, you know, yeah, I.
Mean, see, for example, the entire history of the United States.
Yeah, exactly why we celebrate Juneteenth instead of just the fucking yeah. Well and also, yeah, though, what fourteenth the fuck the amendment that means that slavery is still legal if you're in prison anyway, Kim jo Jin was cool, whether or not he's mythologized in this way or that right, or at least what I know about him is fucking cool.
He served about three years in prison in Korea for rebellion and shit, and then he moved to Venturia and started taking up arms there, and this is like kind of he's pretty early on the scene there, and he's a really good general, and he kept killing all the Japanese soldiers who were sent after him and shit, including the first military victory by the Koreans against the Japanese of the entire colonial period.
That rules. We simply love to see it.
Yeah, exactly. And as far as I can tell, these autonomous prefectures get set up in nineteen twenty five, and they're already pretty dang cool. I can see why non political historians refer to them as being under rule by war lords because they are created and supported by the military, wait.
Which by theirs? Whose military? Yes?
These gorilla groups, right, these like yeah, okay, these the descendants of the Righteous Armies are like, okay, we are defending this territory. So it is a militarily set up political structure, which is sort of warlordism, right. But the anarchists in the area, and there are a lot of them supported the militarily constructed societies. And Kim Joe Jin had a relative named Kim Jongjin, and he's one of the major figures of the Korean Anarchist Federation. I can't
figure how they related. Everything's like a close relative. I've seen it called like in three different sources. And this is that federation that formed in northern Korea, right and had to be like super underground, and they kept trying to have conventions, and so I love that, like cause you kind of have this like wacky when you're like, oh, we're gonna call ourselves the anarchists and try and have conventions and everyone's gonna get deported. Like no, they're like
doing shit. There's armies involved, you know, like yeah, And so as these autonomous prefectures are getting set up, they're like, hey, I'm pretty good at like killing Japanese soldiers, you know what. I don't have any experience in constructing a society from scratch. Ah yeah, hello, my close relative who talks about this shit constantly, Like can't get you to shut up at
family dinner. You got any ideas? And the anarchists are like, yeah, we have some fucking ideas, the rules, So this is how you have a like constructed from the top down, bottom up society. And the generals are like, all right, let's do it. Let's make an anarchist society. Let's fucking go, and they they did it. It seems to be the case from nineteen twenty five, but it's usually credited as nineteen twenty nine, which is when the Shinman District was
renamed the Korean People's Association of Manchuria. It called itself quote an independent, self governing cooperative system of the Korean people who assembled their full power to save our nation by struggling against Japan. And if that isn't the most anarchist nationalist statement ever made, because they're not calling themselves a government. They're like, we are a self governing cooperative
you know, like King I didn't, I don't whatever. I'm trying to do the mud farmer thing for Monty Python, but I can't do it off the top of my head. Yeah.
Like, I'm kind of less sympathetic to the non political historians who are just calling the warlords because like the warlords have sort of two organizational modes there's one that's just almost pure banded army, and then the second one is that they're just straight up being the state, right, I mean, like there is like a Republic of China and in training the worlord period, and who has control over it depends on sort of like who you know,
like but like like there's like people going through positions, people are getting appointed to stuff, so like they tend to be like parasitic on the existing state. And this is very very.
Different from that even from the beginning totally. But you know, it isn't different from our current economic system.
Is it the products of services?
Well, interrupting a podcast about non capitalist societies with advertisements is an example of something that I don't know how to finish my sentence, but.
Here's ads and we're back, okay.
So, and you have this sea of complications happening where an anarchist structure was designed and implemented from the top down, and basically representatives from the anarchist non government though like cooperative structure or whatever, would go around and teach people how to set up horizontal structures in their villages, and it seems like people were into it. I don't think
this was at gunpoint. Nothing I have read argues in that direction, and also nothing I have read argues that they were like extracting from these communities much in fact, specifically they were building infrastructure within these communities. How it worked is it used a federated system, seemingly similar to how like democratic and federalist systems like the one in Roshava. Work power is invested in village councils, who then sent
delegates up to regional assemblies. The sort of bureaucrats working at the highest level were paid the same as everyone else, and they had executive departments working on agriculture, education, propaganda, finance, military, social, health, youth, and there's one for general affairs. They did voluntary collective, which is what the Spanish anarchists did not six years later in Catalonia, where you know, they were like, let's
set up collective farms if you want. You know, I don't think that they actually like destroyed like the market economy. I don't get the impression that that happened. And I'll give you my reason why I think that. In a minute. They set up free education for everyone up to the age of eighteen. Ongoing adult education was available to anyone who wanted it, and there was arms training for all responsible adults, which makes sense.
They're in a war. Yeah, it's really a war that is going to last from what like nineteen eleven to nineteen forty nine. No, that's not even true because like, well it's still technically going on. Yeah, yeah, it's just Yeah.
There were mutual aid banks, is how I saw them described, and which I'm guessing these are sort of like the people's banks advocated for by Prudon and many other anarchists, which is basically a way for people to get capital to build cooperatives without creating a society built on the exploitation of capital. It's uncertain how many of their plans
were implemented or just planned or in progress. And by that I mean of the like four or five sources, one says, hey, I don't actually know how much they actually pulled off, and then everyone else is like, they did all this stuff, you know. Yeah, this is also one of the records, one of the most of all time records are fragmentary of all uh huh. It's like the worst possible place on earth you're trying to get records out of. Yeah.
Absolutely, to quote that book Anarchism in Korea, There quote plans for agricultural development, education, and military training within its jurisdiction, as well as for its representative system along with its administrative body, have all been praised as a reflection of the anarchist idea of a government without compulsory government that assured the principles of no rule, no naked power, and
no exploitation. It is unclear, though, whether they had a substantial chance to implement these or related principles, programs or policies during the short span of its existence, or just to only had them planned on paper. That's the only source that actually questions how much of it they got done. But I think it's worth highlighting just because there's so much myth making happening everywhere.
You know, yeah, yeah and so, and anarchists are not immune to that, right.
Totally totally, because I could just be trying to add to the like, here's the pantheon of perfect societies that absolutely would have worked if it wasn't for the Dang Kamis and the Dang imperialists. Yeah, you know which is well, we'll get to it. It's like not that far from true, but like, who knows, who fucking knows. You know, they started off doing that thing that is doomed Horizontalist project.
After horizontalist project, they decided that the Japanese Empire was the greater enemy, and so they didn't stop Bolsheviks from organizing in their areas. Younger anarchists, either more worldly or more hot headed, were like, no, we've seen the USSR and we can't let that happen here. But Kim chuijin that general was like, I don't know, I say we deal with Japan first, And I don't know whether that was like his call or not.
I don't know. Spoiler alert.
The most common belief of historians is that it was a communist who assassinated Kim Joi Jen soon after he said.
This, Yeah, you know, it's it's funny we talked about this happening in Vietnam on this show, where in Vietnam is like the rare example with the Communists in Vietnam
genuinely want to do this. But the problem is that, like, and this is the problem for all of these deserted bution of communis stuments, is that like they're not actually in control of their run movements, like they can have totally orders can come down from Russia from the common turn And this is totally I've talked about this with like in other podcasts, but like this is what like orders coming down from Russia to work with Like the
nationalists gets a million Chinese workers killed, yeah, I in nineteen twenty seven, like in this period, like actually the communists finally pull off a revolution in Shanghai in twenty seven, and then they get ordered by Moscow to like let the nationalists the nationals kill everyone. Yeah, and this you know the result of blood bath of this kills a
million people. And like this this issue, right, this issue of sort of these groups a like almost purely being in this for their own influence and be their willingness to just like accept orders from Moscow and murder everyone is just such a fiasco for just everyone in basically everywhere, but like particularly in East Asia. It's just complete fiasco. That makes sense to me.
And I think that that's like one of the things that it's like, well, look, I can trust this person's intentions, but if they're part of an authoritarian structure, it doesn't matter how much I trust their intentions. It matters how much I trust the intentions of the person on top. Yeah, you know, and it's sad, and like Vietnam is a perfect example of that, where like, overall, I think the Vietnamese Communists are you know, we're trying to do right.
And yeah, we did a whole episode about a Trotskyist who had to flee from I think from the styles. Oh god, it's been a while since I did that fucking up episode anyway.
Yeah, those stylists. Yeah.
Yeah, So in the middle of this war on multiple fronts, they worked on developing the kind of infrastructure that would enrich small villages and give them more economic autonomy. For example, they wanted to build a rice mill in this one village so that rice could be milled locally instead of being sold to middle men merchants, and like basically like how to reverse economic extraction from these areas. And this is the why I like that they worked to avoid and counteract economic extraction.
Is part of my life.
They're not warlords.
Also, I have an entire episode about the middle bitch structure in East Asian agriculture. That's about the company that poisoned one hundred thousand babies whoa really Yeah, just specifically in the milk industry later on, Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, but that's very specifically that middle men structure is so noxious and yeah, yeah, so it's glad to see the like trying to knock out these things. Yeah.
Well, Kim Juijin went in person to help build one of these rice mills, and I get no impression that this is like a photo op. I think he was just like, this is what we're doing, is we're building a society, and I'm going to go build it by putting bricks on top of each other. Hell yeah, we know about this particular rice mill and his work on it because at the age of forty, while working on a rice mill to cut out the middlemen, Kim Juijin
was assassinated on January twentieth, nineteen thirty. No, at first, most historians say this assassin was sent by Japan. Most modern historians agree that it was a communist. Oh, this did not stop the Korean People's Association. One advantage of even a sort of accidentally top down anarcha's structure is that's still an anarcha structure. They kept going and it
continued to grow throughout most of nineteen thirty. It expanded into nearby regions and eventually encompassed about two million people. The Korean anarchists in China in particular basically decided that they were like, all right, this is our thing, this is what we're supporting, and so you have this like all the like, yeah, not all of but you know, a ton of the Korean anarchists in China are like, there's all these women smuggling guns up to the area, and folks all start moving up there.
That rules.
But eventually anarchist Manchuria felt the way that more or less every anarchist project has fallen. The Bolsheviks and the right wing informally teamed up to fight it at the same time. Anarchists Ukraine, of course fell because while the anarchists were busy fighting against reactionaries, the Red Army came and destroyed it. Anarchist Spain fell, and this one's messier, but it fell because while anarchists were busy fighting Franco, the Stalins waged a dirty war against them, and the
cohesion fell apart. And I'm only saying that one's messier because it's completely possible that if the anarchists and the communists had stuck together, they still would have lost to Franco.
Yeah, because well, I mean that's one way they were fighting. They're fighting Franco, they were fighting the Italian Army and they were also fighting the Germans at the same time.
Yeah, which yeah, yeah. And Anarchist Shinman fell because the Japanese attacked it from the south while the Stalinists attacked it from the north. To quote historian Alan mcsimeon from his speech to the Worker Solidarity Movement in Dublin in nineteen ninety one, quote, in early nineteen thirty one, the Stalinists sent assassination and kidnapping teams into the anarchist zone
to murder leading activists. By the summer of nineteen thirty one, many leading anarchists were dead, and the war on two fronts was devastating the region. It was decided to go underground. Anarchist Shinman was no more. And just because I think this person seems kind of cool, I want to point out that another of the many people who was assassinated was a man named Sim Yong Hay, who was a
Korean fluent in Chinese and Esperanto. Was murdered by the Japanese in Manchuria in nineteen thirty and he'd been an editor at National Customs Daily and he had lived in the office.
I just I like this, like news.
This is a cool guy, right, yeah, yeah, he worked at a newspaper called National Customs Daily that was an anarchist newspaper and he lived in the office. What. Yeah, it's amazing, I know, I know. And the other people helping I mean and when you're like, oh, that sounds nationalist, well, the other people who were working on it with him was a Chinese anarchist and two Japanese anarchists.
Incredible stuff. And the group of.
Them when this paper spoke about how quote all under Heaven comprises one family and the whole world is full of whole brothers.
Oh, it's funny. Like the reputation of anarchists is that we're the ones who do assassinations, and then you actually look at the history and every single other faction is doing even more assassinations. Yeah, and it just like doesn't stick at.
All, And you're like, oh, anarchists are the mad bombers of Like have you met countries?
Yes?
Like like the day before we recorded this, fucking Israel just exploded pagers and radios to oh did it again today too? Yeah, yeah, yeah, who knows what it'll be by the time and that this comes out. But what won't explode in your pocket is anything you buy from our sponsors unless they're made in Israel.
I don't know. Uh, it's Christ, here's ads and we're back.
I'm under the impression that the pages are exploded weren't made in Israel, even though they were obviously you know, it's obviously orchestrated by.
Yeah, there's a whole there's a whole debate right now, but who made them? Probably you in the future will know more about this than we do right now on day two. Absolutely, so enjoy your knowledge and your FEELINGO spoke superiority. It'll it'll get you through something. Hopefully the work day.
A week from now, everyone will have like opened every piece of electronics they own with like a little thing to like see whether or not there's fucking explosives and planted into it.
Anyway.
After the Anarchist project went underground and the they weren't able to hold the space, the Koreans fought a long retreat, but Japan invaded and con Manuari in nineteen thirty one, creating the region known as Menchukuo. China appealed to the League of Nations who asked Japan to leave. Japan was like, no, I don't want it. Though, yep, the US refused to recognize Japan's presence there as legitimate, and that kicked off
a naval arms race. And this seems like not not a factor in the US's trade embargo on Japan and Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, in the US declaring war on Japan, and World War two. This is not the domino, I don't think. But no, yeah, I mean like it was a kind of I know, I guess we don't need to fully go to the causes of World War two.
Year it did have some role. Yeah.
After the fall of anarchist Shinman, the remaining anarchists largely went underground. Some fought in World War Two. Most anarchists were so deep underground that while their actions were seen, there was no real trace of who they were, how
they organized, or what they believed. There was another big push for a common front against Japan during the Second Sino Japanese War, which was from nineteen thirty seven to nineteen forty five, and anarchists seemed overall to sort of deradicalize in order to fight what they saw as their common enemy, anarchism. Probably as a result of this de radicalization or just whatever, it declined overall through that the nineteen thirties, Korean anarchists stayed active elsewhere in China, in
Minchuria and Korea. And I know, I keep separating China in Minuria and it's not actually true, but we're complicating things.
Well, it technically isn't this period in the sense that like, oh, that's true because it's occupied by Japan.
Yeah, they were involved in the war. They were bombing endeming positions and such like the Shanghai Black Terrorist Group, which in nineteen thirty three was a group of Korean anarchists in China that attempted to assassinate the Japanese consular and did a bunch of other shit, or the League of Korean Youth in South China, which was organized in
nineteen thirty Shanghai. They killed Japanese high officials and military commanders in Korean Traders, and this was the sort of central group of Korean anarchists in China, many of whom had lived in Japan. And like, this is the kind of thing where I like, hope one day I'm going to find a fucking book or two about and just just talk about the League of Korean Youth in South China. Yeah, you know, it's platform because of course they had a
platform too, right. They were like, even though they're underground, they're all wild shit. They were, Oh, there must have been pure anarchists. Their platform was included denying and rejecting political and syndicalist movements, as well as the family system
and religion. They were into spontaneous alliances to build society that provided from each according to ability, to each according to need, and they developed theories about how to turn cities into organic, complex structures that looked like farming villages, but more complex and larger.
That's cool, I know.
I hope they don't all die at the end of this christ work. I don't fucking no, they're all underground if it's not. Yeah, yeah, living in China and being involved in the fight against Japan is not a good way to live a long life. But it's a oh yeah, the way to die nice, you know, a way to die proud. Yeah.
I mean, it's like there were very few things in world history that you could die fighting against where you died like better than that, Yeah, Like it's totally.
And so then in Japan there's still Korean anarchists. They are in the belly of the beast, and they ran Black Newspaper, which was a propaganda war in Japan by Korean anarchists and it went hard. At the time, Japanese anarchists were doing this thing called the Society of Youth and Farming Villages movement, and the slogan was let's appeal to the peasantry, which is like a thing that just keeps recycling as of Yeah, a theme like every sixty years.
Yeah, we're due for another one soon. Like you're gonna see all these American kids being like it's time to go to the farming villages or whatever.
I thought I was worriing my camo hat or recording, but I'm wearing a different hat.
Yeah.
But then after the invasion of China they moved into the combat period. Black Newspaper put out its first issue in the summer of nineteen thirty and it lasted about five years. It was funded by anarchist organizations and by Korean labor unions. It was published by the Tokyo Labor Alliance at first and later by the Federation of Black Friends and Free Youth. It was regularly banned and confiscated.
Its editors went in and out of prison, and it was sent out and sealed envelopes to readers in Japan, China, and Korea.
Are their rules?
I know, I know, Like this ain't a safe thing they're doing, you know, like yeah, yeah, the slogan was rush with revolutionary actions at the irrational contemporary society.
Oh, we love to see it. That's that's such a good one.
Yeah, and so yeah, the imperial country had anarchists sending out information to its wartime enimy being like hell yeah, fight us win, fuck us a lot like Russian anarchists. Honestly, that's the main Well, we'll talk about more in a second. And this newspaper it also covered news from around the world. It kept people up with revolutionaries and also reactionaries, so like people were like learning Hitler and Stalin and shit while this is happening. They also actively worked to communicate
worldwide and break down East versus West. And it was also run in partnership, probably run in partnership with Japanese language anarchist papers available at that time. Eventually, basically, as like the cycles of oppression against it kept happening, many or perhaps most of its editors had to move to China to avoid persecution. Imagine being like, I got to go to the country we're invading.
It's safer there. Yeah, jus christ, Oh, I mean I hope they got to like, like, I hope they got the Western China because yeah, totally.
Oh boy, honestly, I think most of them went and joined the like Black Friends, Murder Club or whatever. You know.
Yeah, I mean many, many such cases.
Korea won its independence when the Japanese Empire fell. Some assholes are a random line across the middle. The US imperialized the South, the US the North, and they've been in a cold war ever since. Both sides claimed the anarchists. Both sides persecuted the anarchists. In nineteen forty five, the anarchists in Korea de radicalized fully because they are easy targets from the anti democratic governments. They launched an anarchist political party. I think in South Korea this did not work.
This is also in part due to the rise of the National Front that had tried to unite everyone from the nineteen thirties onward, and they figured they could fight for a society without government along the way, but for
now they need to fight against a common enemy. And yeah, the closest parallel I can see is that there's anarchist Ukrainian involvement in the Ukrainian War, like and they're part of the traditional Ukrainian military alongside everyone else, because they're like, we can deal with that when that man is not murdering my family, you know.
Yeah, And I mean it's like, especially in these conditions, it's like like you are fighting you were fighting Japan, You're you're finding go cheap who were going to kill thirty billion people? Like it's you know, totally, things are going extremely badly for everyone here. And it's yeah, yeah, it's like are people making the best decisions? Maybe not? But also like the scale of the slaughter is just sort of incomprehensible, no, totally.
It's like we did an episode about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, right, and for most of that conflict there was three different factions. There's the anti Zionist Left, there was the Zionist Left, and there was the essentially fascists who were happened to be Jewish, and those three sides did not like each other. And then when there's like we're just all dying, we are just being exterminated. At that point, they coordinated their actions together. Still to the very I think it's been
a while since the episodes. I think to the bitter end, the anti Zionist left was like, we're not fighting alongside fascists, but we will coordinate with them. We will coordinate our attacks together because we need to not die.
We need to you know.
Yeah, things can always be worse, you know, yep, And so yeah. After nineteen forty five, during deradicalization, they were more about autonomous government and autonomous people, and they moved away from more specifically anarchistic ideas. Overall, this is the
way it's presented when it's a vey. I'm sure there's people who stayed anarchist or whatever, and they were about building social movements to show how important rural life was alongside industrial development in cities, especially in the sixties and seventies, and they worked hard to distinguish themselves from the communists.
Anarchism started to rise again in Korea in nineteen ninety after the collapse of the USSR, and I've read about how people are working to disentangle it from nationalism while still being proud of the enormous legacy of anarchist freedom fighters involved in a national liberation struggle. I heard from
that listener Joshua King about the complicated mythologization of Korean anarchists. Basically, the role of the provisional government can't be downplayed, right, and that was full of anarchists, and this has been acknowledged. The previous president of South Korea, Moon jay jin, gave a speech in twenty nineteen that explicitly shouted out anarchist involvement in the struggle, which the right wing.
Was not excited about.
Yeah, imagine just like the president of your country being like, look, we gotta admit the anarchist did something.
You know, Yeah, I mean this is like a whole other story. But like he's like Mija In's like from a like I mean, he doesn't like an incredible president, but he's like he's from a sort of like student movement, democracy movement, like organize your background and you know those people like you know, you could say what you want about them politically, but all like a lot of those people got machine gunned by by the Korean army, so like they have more of a like.
They got some cred.
It's like a little bit more like I respect him a little little tidy bit bore that I would like his equivalent in a country where like his people didn't get like absolutely bowed down with the backing of Jimmy Carter.
So whow the first jim Carter slander on cool Zone media. Oh, one day I'm going to write the Jimmy Carter episode I Hate You Jimmy. Jimmy Carter was the first American neoliberal.
People don't remember this because Reagan came afterwards and we got Reagan neoliberalism instead of like the Socialist Party of Italy and neoliberalism, which was what we were sort of like angling towards. But he has that man has a body count and it's no I believe it's largely in Korea. Yeah, No, I like I always sort of knew. I was, like, I assume there's some like you don't be president of the United States without skeletons, like not even in your closet,
but like dancing around in the street. Yeah, So for people who don't know what I'm talking about. There was there was a giant so I mean, it's called pro democracy uprising, but it was like more leftist than that uprising in Korea, which is under that time like ruled by actually was it. I'm forgetting which configuration of dictatorship this was, but Jimmy Carter basically green lighted that, like
it's called like the Guansha Uprising. They basically formed like a commune for a bit, and then Jimmy Carter green lights the Korean army just killing the ball and cool.
Yeah, also cool that the United States can green light another I mean this is not surprising to any listener of this show, but like, yeah, this is the thing we're pointing out, like, yeah, that's not our country. It turns out that's that's Korea. It's a different place. I know all countries are fake, but uh, that's over there. But what also is over there is the script because
it's now behind us because we finished it. Because we talked about the Korean People's Association of Menuria and Korean anarchism.
Oh I promised us getting revenge on Japan by aheorg hw Bush throwing up for the Japanese prime mitistry. Oh yeah, let's do it now. I need to explain that, okay. So the arc of this is that one of the things that you know, the when the Japanese like Congress Venturia and destroys the anarchist movement, kills all of these people, like, that's one of the things that crystallizes I guess one of the Japanese fascist movements, but just the one that's
going to take power. I did a bunch of episodes on u Ki Kishi, who was the prim to serve Japan. He's the guy who founded the Liberal Democratic Party, which is basically like effectively has ruled Japan as a one party state for basically since it was founded in the fifties until.
Like now, I love how words just don't mean anything as soon as you get into politics.
Uh huh, yeah, it's why. I mean, there's literally a line where k she walks out of prison and he said, he's kidding, he's about to run for office, and he goes, I guess we're all Democrats now. But so like they get installed by literally the CIA, and CIA has individual guys who are like running the election campaigns of individual LDP candidates to make sure they win their election and keep left out of power. Yeah, and so they do this.
It works, and the LDP holds onto power. But it means that Japan is sort of like Semi's basically permanently subordinated to sort of American imperial control. And the lasting consequence of this is that when George H. W. Bush vomits on the Japanese Prime minister at a dinner, there's nothing they could really do about it, because this is a party that was put in charge by the institution
that George H. W. Bush ran, the CIA. So and now you know, there's a lot of there's a lot made of the fact that the US sense as an ambassador to Japan Raba Manuel. But like I don't know, if you guys didn't what rab A manual is your ambassador, you should have taken all that CIA money in the fifties and sixties. So you know, this, this is our this is our Our small amount of revenge is that the head of the fascist party getting vomited on but George W. Bush and not being able to do anything
about it. There's video of this, by the way, you can find you can find the video. I'm into it.
I'm so into it.
Well that's it. Uh, did you got plugs?
We want we want to talk about it.
You're on a podcast, Yeah, I have have the podcast that could happen here we do it. It comes out five Oh my god. Six No wait, I guess technically because the episode that's all of the episodes for the week comes out on Saturday. It's every day. It's a true daily, yes, so it is now literally every day there is an episode, including including you can find Margaret on there too. It's true. It's it's good. We we do. We do good stuff and.
We're never tired as a result of running a daily Sometimes I explain to people like people are like, what's your writing schedule like, and I'm like, well, I write between five to nine thousand words of podcast script, two thousand words of substack post. Still have to stay on top of my fiction writing. And then yeah, I run two other podcasts.
It's fine.
I totally have a social life. His name is Rentraw and he is three years old and forty five pounds and barks dreamy.
Yeah, I'm happy with it.
Well, the other thing I do is I'm on tour right now while this is released.
I'm I think I'm in Philly today. I don't know.
I guess I could look out the window if I were in the future like you are, but I'm not, and I'm on tour around some of the mid Atlantic. I'll be going up to Boston and Maine next weekend, and then the weekend after that, I'm gonna head up to Pitsburg, over to Cleveland, up to ann Arbor and points west. So you can catch me talking about the Sapling Cage, and then during Q and A you can ask me about the show. That's fine, I don't get mad. That's not sarcasm. I genuinely don't mind talking about it,
even if I'm doing a different talk. So if you guys think you want to plug behind my Bastards is on YouTube, Daniel keeps telling me to plug that so you can see videos of our normal episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Hell yeah.
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