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