Part Two: Rebellion in Patagonia: When the Rural Argentinian Labor Movement Took Over Half the Country

particular story. But the other person who really likes history, well, there's actually two other people like history on this here recording one of them. I'm not even going to tell you the guest is yet first, and we tell you about the producer, because why is the producer always after the guest question? That's Sophie. Sophie's the produce. I have seniority. I should be introduced. I know you should be before me. But our guest is Mia, Amya, Hello, glad to be

back for more of this. I'm very very excited. Yeah, okay, so it's oh and our audio engineer is Ian. Everyone's to say hi to Ian Ian. Our theme music was written for us by a un woman. And this is the part two and it'll maybe make sense if you don't listen to part one, but not really. And if you have a brain like me, like like I can't even watch I can't read comic books or watch anime because there's too much of it and I have to start at the beginning of things, and if there's no

actual through line, it's it's over. Like I can't read a comic book because there's no start because it goes multi versus to break my head? Is this? I think I'm unique in this. But linear your history with Martyr Kiljoy. Okay, maybe you have a different brain and you want to listen to only part two. You know what you could do? Put down this next week, start with part three, and then go to part one, and then part four and

then part two. If you want to have an anime experience, everyone's going to get so mad at me for talking shit. Anemy is great. It's beautiful and there's nothing wrong with it. If this is the experience you're seeking out, go watch Boccado. Okay, great, we'll get this experience exactly. So we are talking about Argentinian anarchists and the labor movement, and we're building up to a wild strike from nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty

two in the rural parts of Argentina and Patagonia. But we are building up because there's so much cool shit that came before it. Last time, we talked about the Baker's Union to sell little cannons that are that you can eat their pastries. I wonder if they make vegan versions. I wonder if there's anyone in the US anyway. I got really distracted because I haven't eaten enough pastries today. But where we last left off, there was a guy who just exploded, and now we're gonna go back in

time to talk about how he got exploded. His name was Falcon, and the person who blew him up his name is Simon Simon Radowitski. This is not the pacifist bomber. I promised you at the very beginning of this episode on Monday that guy is still coming. This is another coolest fuck bomber is. This is really the great thing about early twentieth century anarchis it was like, you get, there is no conceivable world in which you can say

the bomber and it's a specific guy. Yeah, totally. And it's funny too, because like the tiniest percentage of anarchists in the early twentieth century were actually bombers, and then not, an incredibly large percentage of the archists nearly twenty century were cool with the bombers. Yeah, but this one everyone was cool with. And I think everyone will understand why as I go through his story. Simon Radowitski is a Ukrainian Jew. He was born in Ukraine in eighteen ninety one.

His dad wanted him to get a good education, so send him off to school. So he got a good education. There was a problem. They were poor as fuck, so by the time he was ten, he had to drop out of school. He dropped out of school, he went and become an apprentice blacksmith. By fourteen he was a factory worker. I don't actually know what happened with the blacksmith. I'm like, he feels like apprentice to a blacksmith is

a better line of work than factory worker. It might have just been the industrial revolution and poverty and whatever. It worked out well for him because the factory workers they were unionized. So he is fourteen when he goes to his first strike, and you know what happens when you strike in Ukraine in you know, nineteen oh four or whatever. They shoot everyone. Question. Well, okay, so think

a little more medieval. Oh, cavalry charges. He got cut across the chest with a saber by a cossack when he's fourteen years old.

incredible government over here, by the way, like real great stuff. Happening. It's like, yeah, we put this guy in prison for four months for passing out leaflets.

we've covered that particular revolution. It's one of the closest revolutions in history, but the when you have a like close, when you have a successful one, like twelve years later, people don't remember the almost as well.

like the other thing, you know. It's like, like why everyone really wanted to burn down the office's a secret police in nineteen seventeen. It's like, partially it is because people hated him, and partially because a lot of people were like, oh shit, we need to destroy the records that show that I was collaborating this whole time, because now now we've actually done this thing. They actually changed they actually it wasn't a provoctur working for the government

that brought down the government. It was a provocateur who was like, never mind, have changed my mind? Overthrow the fucking Oh no, no, no, sorry, this this is different. This actually was someone who was working with the government and they were trying to like do a protest to like let off steam, and then that just ah, I didn't want to get caught. Okay, okay, I one of these days, and I'm going to ruin it by telling the plot of the story that I've wanted to write for twenty years.

It's gonna be about tubervocteurs, one of whom is a FED and one of whom is a local cop, and then they fall in love and then they convince each other of anarchism, and then they die in a horrible Romeo and Juliet style like a gunfight with the police, because like they finally admit that they're cops to each other, but then it's like too late, the Feds are onto them anyway. One day. Let me, since Netflix listens to this show the entity Netflix listens on a regular basis,

let me write this as a TV show. So nineteen oh five Revolution does not work. Rentraw behind me is growling upset about the failure of that revolution and he is forced into exile at eighteen years old because of his role in the nineteen oh five revolution. I don't know whether he like, I don't. I don't, like I said, don't know the math here, So also just like not you do not want to be Jewish in anywhere controlled by Russia after that revolution? Terrible time. Yeah, getting out,

good idea. Yeah, Yeah, we're gonna don't worry. There's gonna be anti semitism in this episode. However, it's not left anti Semitism. This time, unlike some of the pogrums that were the result of the nineteen by Revolution. He goes to Argentina, he finds the anarchists, and he gets to work as a mechanic. He was in the crowd on May first when Falcon's guys were like, hey, let's like murder a bunch of people and like shot the crowd up, right, So he survived this massacre. And then Falcon was like,

you know whose fault this is? Can you guess we just talked about it? No, the Jews, Jew's fault. Oh okay, you know that that? Yeah, okay, I've I was being too optimistic about Yeah, the police specifically, it's the Jews from Russia. And so you have this Russophobia. I don't know if that's a word that ties into the anti Semitism. They're entirely conflated at this point. So as a Jew from Russia, Simon is like, oh, fuck, no, fuck this guy, right.

And it did not help that Ramon Falcon gave his cops fucking sabers and called them cossacks.

the violence should be used as little as possible. And about this, I want to quote Malatesta because whenever I have an excuse, I like to quote Malatesta. This is Maltesta in about thirteen years earlier, but I think it sets a lot of the tone and understanding for seventeen years earlier. So quote. We must do as the surgeon who cuts when he must, but avoids inflicting unnecessary suffering. In a word, we must be inspired by the sentiment

of love for people, for all people. It appears to us that the sentiment of love is the moral source, the source of our program. It appears to us that only by conceiving the revolution as the Grand human Jubilee, as the liberation and fratnization of all no matter what class or what party they have belonged to. Can our ideal be realized? That's the page that Simon Radowisky is on, as best as I can tell, because he's not. It comes up a bunch of times that he's like, he's

not a like bomb is first option? Guy? Right? Yeah, And I want to say we were talking about earlier anarchists have this reputation being like the mad bombers of history. But I would like to invite the listener to compare the number of bombs used by the advocates of nation states versus the number of bombs used by the opponents

of nation states. Like, yeah, like there are individual like there have been individual bombing runs in the past decade that I dropped more bombs in every anarchist in history. Like it's I will bet money that the Israeli government did so in the last week while we were recording this. Yeah, yeah, there are absolutely unethical bombings by anarchists in Argentina around this time. I read about one, and but then again I read this from a very right wing source, and

it so it's hard to know. Right, There's like one where they claim that the anarchists tricked a kid into bombing themselves. I don't know, because there's no other real evidence of like suicide bombing or anything like that being used by anarchists. Yeah, and that's like not a and that's a thing, but like SUSI, bombing is a is a relatively recent thing. Like it's not really an anarchist thing. If you're anarchist, you're trying to throw the bomb and

get away, assuming you're doing bomb throwing. Yeah, actually except our passive but we'll talk about him. But he wasn't a state side pommer either. He was like a like non violence it was his obedience guy only in violence. But he's later. We'll talk about Kurt Wilkins next week. So Siemon he waited. Falcon was at this like funeral for some state guy, and Semon was like, all right, I'm waiting along this route he knew he would be traveling on, and he threw a bomb into Falcon's coach,

killing Falcon. And his secretary's like not the administrative assistant, but you know the whatever as adjunct. Yeah, there was some The official name here is secretary, but he's like another military commander guy. I should have written down his title besides that, but I didn't. Semon did not make it far before he was caught, and the state wanted to execute him. Understandably, so I get why the state wants to fill out like, but his defense finds his

birth certificate and they're like, hey, he's only eighteen. He is not eligible for the death penalty in Argentina, just life in prison, which means nineteen oh nine. Argentina has more humane treatment of young offenders. Yeah. Three In the United States, a god whoh, he gets life in prison and each year and he has ay, they they fuck

with him each year. Near the anniversary of his assassination, he's put into solitary with only bread and water, and the government flips the fuck out and they stop pretending to be any sort of democracy. They declare a state of emergency over one fucking guy. Well, I guess two fucking guys. They fill the jails, they shut down every union they can, and whenever this shit happens, whenever I read about this stuff in history goes one of two

ways right away. Most often people get scared away from radical politics, and people get mad at the bomber and are like, hey, you fucked up the movement by exploding a guy who kind of deserved exploding, but it still wasn't a good idea and fuck you, right, that is like the most common result of people explosion. Not the workers of Argentina in nineteen oh nine. They're like, this

is our guy, the La Protesta, the newspaper. They're forced underground, but they publish a moral justification illegally fora The the Syndicalist Union is also now underground, and they put out a pamphlet called or they're not syndicalist or in our communist Sorry, someone's gonna be mad. They put out a pamphlet called our Defense, and then they defend Radowitzki there and this is the big Federation of Labor Unions, right, this is like of the afl CIO is like, no,

it's our guy about like or whatever. And so they refuse to let him become isolated, and they refuse to disclaim him, and by doing this they make their movement stronger. Through a period of repression, he becomes a central figure

in the movement. While he's in prison, there's rallies and campaigns to free him, some of which are the let's ask nicely variety, other which others are the we're gonna revolt and throw general strikes until you free him variety, and some of them are like, well, we're just gonna break him out of prison variety, diversity of tactics everyone. Yeah, all three combine to spoiler, they get him out of

prison eventually, and I think it takes all three. And I'll talk about why he spends his time in prison. He doesn't like keep his head down right. He's not like, oh, it's time to study and you know. No, he's like he is at the front of every prisoner strike and demonstration. He's in the worst prison in the Yeah. No, he's I always I like Kurt Wilkins, the bomber we're gonna talk about next week, so much that I've always kind of been like a Simon, He's just another guy whatever,

you know. And then like when I deep dived him, I'm like, oh, this guy fucking rules.

the front of everything. He's like everyone's commissaries. Yeah, And I just want to follow his story to its conclusion. He's not central to the strike, but I think having a sense of the Argentinian movement is really useful. At one point, the anarchists smuggle him onto a ship and get him out of Argentinian waters, like a small smugglers sailing ship, right, But the Chilean navy catches them and he goes back to prison and he spends two I know, he spends two years in a windowless sell on half

rations as a result of this. After twenty years in prison in nineteen third, the movement kept going for twenty fucking years. He's released because of all the pressure and then gets deported. They're like they're like, get him to get the fuck out of here.

they're just all in this fucking story. And now he wasn't like, oh man, I got out of prison and got supported, It's time to live a quiet life. Oh god, no, no, not Simon. He you know, he's now probably thirty eight or so. He's deported to Udaguay and and then he gets deported to tim Yeah, and then he gets deported from there. Yeah. Yeah, that seems like that seems like a terrible idea if you, oh, we got we got

to send a revolutionary somewhere. We're gonna sumem to Uruguays. Yeah, amazing, good great work, guys, Like nothing could possibly incredible repressive mapparatus and that this is actually uh, there's a whole lot of like cross especially Argentina and Notaguay and also Chile or there's like a lot of revolutionaries moving back and forth, especially in the like like one day we're going to do a whole thing after the like nineteen

twenty twenty two thing. Then there's this whole period where like all the anarchist bank robbers are having there, like heyday, and you have all this like yes, like Robin Hood shit happening everywhere, and it's all cross border. But that is not even that's a one day we're going to

talk about that. So Egos Utuguay and he gets deported from there from trying to overthrow their dictator, and then nineteen thirty six happens, where famously nothing happened of interest to the anarchists and or a friend of the pod the Spanish Civil War. Don't worry, you know I was going to bring up the Spanish Civil War. Maybe I already did last week. I can't remember. He's like, all right,

let's fucking go right. He's in his forties and he's he goes there and he doesn't just like go be like, hey, I spent twenty years in prison. I can just happily live in an anarchist city for a while, like maybe help with some of the organizations. No, he like immediately goes to the front and he volunteers with the Anarchist twenty eighth Division, and he goes to the front. And I've read a couple different versions of this, the one

that I find the most convincing. They're not really like contradicting, but there's like different little weird details. I'm trying to piece together the best I can tell. He's like, I don't want to kill people anymore. I killed two people.

I'm good. So I'm going to become a truck driver and drive food to the front and like straight up into the trenches, still absolutely putting himself a harm's way, and you know what, will also deliver food directly to where you're struggling against cap This is actually technically true. They were absolutely deliver food to where you're struggling against capitalism. If you I don't know who the ads are going

to be. If one of them is a food delivery service, you can use it or not use it like whatever, like we've had, so that'd be they should be pleased with this. Yeah, they're exactly like Simon Simon Radowitsky. Well, actually I would say that the like Uber drivers and ups drivers and shit are all ratis shit. So yeah, there's there's a bunch of or at least last night checked out half a decade ago, there were a bunch of Synicholas uber drivers in Indonesia. So I don't know

if any of you are listening. Hell yeah yeah uh. And then if there's any ads for anything else, they were a mistake, and please direct all complaints to our complaint department at Irate. Okay, on X? Is it more fun to call it? See? In my mind, I like every time I say X, I feel like I'm making fun of Elon Musk because it's such a fucking crappy name.

Or is it more fun to dead name X by calling it Twitter so that he can for a fit and be like, how come no one, we'll call it by chosen name, even though he's a transpher who hates his kid. Website. Okay, on that one fucking website, that's where a complaint department is. Here's some ads, and we're back, and we were just saying a bunch of legally actionable stuff that we're going to cut out of the podcast.

Say all right, So he survives the warm, he flees to France and where he's imprisoned in a concentration camp like all the other Republicans fleeing. And this is, by the way, not not the Nazi collaborationist government. This is the France before it's surrendered. However, isn't this the popular Front? A little bit mixed? And it's it's a little bit messy because the word concentration camp has it's not it's bad,

it's always bad. But there is a scale here, right, there's a put everyone in one place thing where we God, I'm really not trying to defend this. And then there's the Nazi thing, right, anyway, he's put in a fuck it's not good what happens to him, but it's not he's not specifically escaping a Nazi death camp, right. He somehow gets the fuck out of this. I don't know if they let him go or what. And he gets himself off to Mexico where he spends the rest of

his life, not just like like he's not. He spends the rest of his life where he writes for anarchist papers. He spends about half the time in the hospital because my man had a fucking hard life, right yeah, And he spends the rest of his time organizing mutual aid and he works sending care packages to refugees who are escaping Europe right and or internally displaced within Europe because

of World War Two. He works in a toy factory and he lives in a bear attic, and he dies of a heart attack on the factory floor on February twenty ninth, nineteen fifty six. He's in his late sixties. But you know what they say, and by they, I mean me and making this up right now. But it's true. Anyone who dies on leap Yer day doesn't really die. So I'm sure he's still out there passing out toys to kids, giving money to prisoners, avoiding killing someone unless

they really really just need to get exploded. Yeah, Okay, that's Simon Redowitski. I really like him. There's someone else I really like too. This would be a good transition to like plugs, but it's not. It's just another historical person. This is about one of the people who fought for his freedom. This is probably the woman who secured his freedom. And her name is Salvadora Carmen Medina and Rubia. Salvadora was bored in Buenos Aires in eighteen ninety four to

Spanish immigrants. Her father's job, which is a classic nineteenth century working class job, is died young. Her mother's job, Oh no, yeah, I would like funny, thanks, I'm proud of that one. And her mother's job was rural school mistress. She moved to the city of Rosario and gets involved into her two main lifelong interests, which are anarchism in theater.

She also becomes a teenage single mom. By the time she's nineteen, she goes to Buenos Aires and she's working at the anarchist newspaper La Protesta that I keep talking about, and she's publishing her writing in a bunch of other papers and gets involved in nineteen fourteen in the free Radowitsky campaign. By the time she's twenty, she marries his other writer guy. She's just like, oh, I like, we're both like cool writers, and we're in low We're going

to totally get married and he's actually good. This is usually this is what a woman say, Yeah, no, no, he's okay, he's like not as cool as her, but she keeps him in line. But then instead something happens. This is why she's one of my favorite historical anarchists to talk about to some of my friends. This guy that she marries soon starts in his run the most popular daily paper in the city called Critica, which at its peak is selling seven hundred thousand papers a day. Jesus,

this isn't the anarchist paper. This is just like basically, she marries the guy who starts The New York Times, right, and she just becomes this like rich bitch anarchist, and she stays an anarchist her whole life, despite her success,

and I fucking love it for her. So she's just like helping the cause whenever anarchists and like, so like anarchist papers get shut down all the time, like Le Pretesta is like constantly being shut down, right, So she hires the editors, all the anarchist editors over at Critica. So this is amazing. The daily paper is like half run by anarchists, which, as someone who works for Higheart Radio, I feel like we might all appreciate. One time, a

bunch of seamstresses are like economically fucked. I think they lose a strike or something. So she drives her rolls froys down to where they live and just starts handing out sewing machines to the women in the crowd out of her rules. Rice amazing, and her husband is like radical on his own right, but he's kind of like catch all radical right when he's like and so he's like at one point he's like, oh, let's let Critica become a communist party paper, and she just shuts that

shit down. No, we will not do that. I am an anarchist. And she regularly runs feminist columns, the occasional anarchist piece in the papers. It does not become an anarchist paper, right, And then during the Tragic Week, which we'll get to sadly, she's like standing on top of coffins of dead anarchists screaming to crowds when the police break up their funeral. And this is like one of the most powerful women in the country, you know. All the while she's getting famous as a poet and a playwright.

She writes Hit, an arc of feminist plays, and she writes an aristocratic romance novel that's like a feminist critique of society. And also she's just really into getting high on ether. Just nothing has changed about anarchists, Like, yeah, it's like the feminist when getting high, Like nothing has ever changed. Yeah, yeah, I used to shoot tin types, which means I used to get high on ether a lot,

not on purpose. But I was always like, why don't I feel so relaxed after a day of shooting tin types? And the answer is, I stick my head into this light because you have to develop them on the spot, you know. And I used to go to these steampunk conventions and like shoot photo like tin type portraits, and that's how I made my money for a while. And and so you like stick your head into a steamer trunk with like a hood over it, and just like, I'm not gonna live very long. I don't even like drugs.

That's the funniest thing about all this shit. But anyway, so and during all of this, she does not drop out of the campaign for Simon Redowhisky. She also doesn't change your tune about how it should get done. I can't find exactly how she orchestrated the following two escape attempts. All I have is this quote from a libcom article quote. On two separate occasions, Salvadora dispatched employees of the paper to orchestrate his escape from Isshuia.

you why, or you know, like I don't know. Both of these ventures are discovered and Simon has left to languish behind bars. I have no information about whether or not the employees were arrested or if they were paid up paide hazard pay. But where direct action failed, constant pressure, which I believe included all this direct action, succeeded. It helps when the woman who half runs the country's most popular newspaper has been involved in your campaign since she

was a fucking teenager. It was her direct pressure on the president that got him to set Radowitzki free, and it was a relative of her husband. This is why I'm like, her husband's still cool, right, who received the living martyr upon his exile in Uruguay. So it was like, go, when you go to Uruguay, go hang out with our family.

at pulling that off. She died in obscurity thanks to the Vagaries of Argentina in twentieth century politics, which get so complex, and whenever I talk about like, oh, I'm doing the same about Argentina, my friends are like, oh god, and I'm like, no, it's before all that, And they're like, wow, I don't know anything about Argentina before all that. And I don't know anything about the all that that I'm talking about vaguely, like the Piran and all that shit.

I haven't researched enough yet. If you ever want someone to die, ask someone who knows what paronism is, and you will watch someone's head explode. It's he was like a lefty fascist, right. Oh god, there is a total aside that I don't just say yes or.

One of them is not On Ernesto Leclow and Chantelle Mouf, who are both these are They're like they're they're the first of like the so called like post Marxists, theorists. They're like the people who who They're thing is we want left populism, And I fucking hate these people. Their work sucks, the writing is bad, their tactics are bad. And these people started as left parhists. Yeah, worst idea, literally the worst idea anyone had. Like after about nineteen seventy.

This is this is the worst idea anyone on the left has ever had. It's awful. They are they are like almost single handedly responsible for like what happened to podemos, Like they are there. They are like the premier theorist of like twentiest of failed twentieth century left electoral movements. Like everyone that didn't work you can find move and Leclow you can find their work behind it. I hate these people. I'm doing this now because I might never

get another chance my agrievances. But I've been here this for a long time. Yeah, like this is complete, total aside. I apologize for derailing the show from my project. But however, no, uh you know, okay, let's get back to Argentine after the assassination. Yeah sorry, no, no, I literally asked. And I'm like, when I learn more about this other shit, like I think every now and then people are like, oh,

Margaret knows all history. I feel like every person who's history podcast gets this, and I'm like, no, I everything I know about history I've already said on air and then forgotten. So yep, all that's left is like a vague whatever. I don't think I'm like, okay, So nineteen ten, the year after the explodees, that's what they called that period of time. That's not what they called it. By nineteen ten, Argentina declares herself in a state of internal war,

basically to stop the worker's movement. This is not actually a response to the assassination. It's a response to all these other major strikes and shit. They keep happening, and you start getting these far right militias of rich people who like burn the anarchists and socialist newspaper offices. The government suspends free speech, they suspend free press, they suspend free assembly. Formally, they're like, now we're done right. You all had your chance of freedom, and you blew it.

Two thousand anarchists are arrested or or deported, and that doesn't stop more and more radicals from showing up and throwing down. That's the lesson I thought it was going to be. So that's that. God, we're going to get to some higher numbers of virus. Oh later, okay, nine years later, in the tragic week. So I'll just keep cliffhangering that. But don't worry, that's actually going to be today. I don't have to wait till next week for that. I don't know why you're excited about it? What's wrong

with you? Why are you excited about the tragic Week? It's other nickname is the bloody Week? What do you do? Why are you so violence minded? Person who listens to a podcast about people who do good things and the usually die. Well. Anyway, they don't stop the movement completely, but they fuck up the movement. The government does, and everything goes underground for a couple of years. La Protesta

tries to publish anyhow. I think this is when like, this is one of the many times when the protests to get shut down and all the people end up working for critica. I think both times the police raid and shut it down and arrest the editors whenever they try and publish anyhow. Other editors got that shit going by nineteen thirteen, and it stayed going, and then other

papers keep it going all along. But basically there's a period where you're like, all right, it's my turn to goo edit an episode an issue of La Protesta and then get deported. Argentina is the most immigrant full country in the world at this point. In nineteen fourteen, foreigners make up forty six point one percent of the economically active population, of which only one point four percent had become citizens. Wow. Meanwhile, there's the less radical syndicalist Union, right,

and they finally joined the Anarchist Union. And for a little while you're like, hooray, like we're all friends again. No, they do it doing a classic thing called entryism. They did as a specific tactic to come and fuck it up,

and they succeeded at that. They were absolutely the minority, but they did a bunch of weird bureaucratic shit and got fora to move away from its explicit anarchists communism stance to end up becoming their neutral syndicalism stance, the thing that hadn't won them any followers because no one wanted to do it. They were like, well, well's go where there are followers and force them to be like us.

So the anarchists split off. This time, they leave FURA and they form an organization called You probably can't, but can you guess what they name the organization? I actually I actually know this, okay, Altholthough I did, I didn't actually know that that was what happened with the FA split. I just had heard there was a split, and I was like, huh, yeah, they So the anarchists split off and they form an organization called FORA. Yeah, because they

are some salty motherfuckers. The original for A people, the anarchists. They're now a minority of them for the moments. The anarchists actually become a majority of the working class again soon in Argentina. But and they call themselves We're not gonna reference. You don't have to. If you're like I don't want to keep track of these weird splits, don't worry, you don't have to. I'm just gonna complain about some shit.

So the anarchists split off. They call themselves four A five after the fifth Congress in nineteen oh five, when they decided to become Reading this history is so annoying, I know, because it's all anyone wants to talk about, is like, yeah, yeah, no, and don't worry, I'm gonna I'm gonna spare you all of that because this is a pop history. That is what this podcast is, because that's the way my brain works. And so then the liberal ish FORA calls usself four A nine after the

ninth Congress when they decide to be come neutral. I think that's also the one where they go into space. No way that's Fast and Furious. But whenever four X happens, this is like my pop culture reference of the day because I've actually only I've only seen the first seven Fast and Furious movies. I'm not caught up. But anyway, I've had weird conversations about masculinity and transition of the

Fast and Furious movies. But that's not for here. There is an episode of a podcast called an Arco Geek Power Hour that talks about that. If you want to hear two queer people talk about the Fast and Furious movies and how it reflects on masculinity and things like that. So the two fouras, there are some major and important ideological differences. It's not just we're salty, right. The Anarchist Federation,

they're mostly the older folks and or their immigrants. The Neutral Federation at this point more of them are native born, and they allow their member unions to ban immigrants from joining. So you start seeing this thing where the unions are capable of being reactionary, they're capable of being nativist, whereas that shit wouldn't fly under original fora all this ties

into the country's politics. For about thirty years, basically since Argentina was recognizably Argentina, there have been one party in charge, the National Autonomist Party. And you know that whenever you take a word that's kind of cool, like socialism or autonomism, and then you add national in the beginning, you know, you get something better.

and we're back. So in the early nineteen tens, there's universal mail suffrage and all the men can suddenly vote, and so they're like, let's get rid of the fucking autonomous right or the National Autonomius. I hate calling him autonomous because there's like cool people call themselves autonomous, right, be like, let's get rid of the fucking Nazis. Those socialists, you know, so the radical Civil Union Civic Union, which also does not deserve its name. But they're better, right,

they're not whatever anyway, Yeah, the lefties get in. The liberals get in is a better way to put it. The middle class liberals. They are the main opposition party. They win by a landslide in nineteen sixteen. They win by thirty three points, which is a lot. Wow points. That's right, wild Yeah, and that's a multi party system too, right, I don't know the answer. No, I don't know. You mean, is there like more than two parties running? Like there's more than Yeah, yeah, I think I think there are,

But I got hudos. It's I would leave you. And this is the middle class party. It is the party for urban professionals and small business owners. And they're like, well, we need to win over the working class and or they just actually wanted to make things better for the working class. Either one of these as possible. So they start throwing all these free parties and they're like feeding people and they open medical clinics and these are good things, right,

but they're still the government. And when the chips are down, they're going to do what governments do and So the reason this is so important to the story, these are the people who are going to repress all of the wildest shit that's going to get repressed in Argentina over the next couple of years. Like it's basically if Biden decided to murder a ton of people, so they start coosing up. The government starts closing up to the less

cool fora. That's how I'm gonna refer to them instead of I can't if you mentioned two numbers to me, they're the same number. So the less cool fora. And soon the liberal run strikes stop having so much police repression, will radical run strikes get just as much repression? Ah, the decade goes on. It's hard as fuck for everyone, but you know who else as hard as fuck as the Argentinian radicals. And then you get the Tragic Week.

You know shit is bad when the two names for it in history are the Tragic Week and the Bloody Week. Late nineteen eighteen like December, good good month. All the best stuff happens in December. People now know what astrological sign I am.

the people who organize the strike, they want them hired back. Right, Those are their fucking wild, crazy demands. I mean, they actually also want society to be to restructured completely without a state or capitalism. But this is what they're fighting for. This is what their demands are. The supposedly radical government at this point is fucking terrified of the Russian revolution that's happening, and they're fucking terrified of it happening in Argentina.

They are as fiercely the liberal government is as fiercely anti communist as anyone. And I'm pretty sure that the anti Russian sentiment that they have was often specifically and directly anti Semitic. There is this terror happening in Argentina of Ashkenazi Jews, in particular, the dreaded Russian Jew the right wing conflated the two so completely that they would just say death to the Russians, to mean kill all the Jews Jesus Christ. About eighty percent of the Russian

population in Argentina at that time was Jewish. Who were you know, they'd fucking led Russia because of the Brahms, right, Yeah. So when the company that the metal workers are striking against right higher scabs, the company is able to use its connections with the government, the liberal government, to get weapons permits to arm the scabs, jees, the metal workers. They have the city's workers on their side. Railway workers stop unloading raw materials, local shopkeepers start donating food and

coal to the strikers. Because one thing that I keep running across an anarchist history is that, like, when you don't have the like specific, weird class categorization obsession of Marxism, people are like, that's cool, small business owners are whatever. I mean, it'd be better if they treat their employees, okay, but like they're not our enemies, you know, And so I just I run across this in history. I'm not trying to make a specific well whatever, I clearly like

I think workers, cooperators are great, but whatever. Anyway, local businesses donating. There is a stand still with the strike because both sides are fucking powerful, right, one side has the government arming them and the other side has the people. On January seventh, nineteen oh, nineteen nineteen, police escorted scabs to the factory. The only way to have a strike is to stop scabs from working, so the strikers tried

to stop the scabs from working. They also probably overturned the chief of Police's car and set it on fire. That is the right wing account of the story, and I don't care. Nothing has ever changed about anarchists, right totally. The police fired into the crowd and killed either four or five people, I've read both, and the city pours

into the street for the funerals for these workers. For the anarchist one, they call a general strike, and all the workers in the city are like, yeah, obviously, we're not going to fucking work for capitalist focks who fucking murder. Yeah, right, this is the most complete general strike in all the general strikes of Argentina's history up to this point. I don't know as much about I never people are like, what's your opinion on twenty first century politics? And I'm like,

I don't know. Everyone should do what they want because I don't know, because I read history books all day, because I've made good decisions of my life. So they kind of take over Buenos Aires. Barricades fly up and for a brief moment the city is in the hands of its workers, and no one doubted that it was a revolutionary moment on each side. So the ostensible liberal government is like, we don't want a revolutionary moment. So they just worked with the far right immediately hand in

hand to well, it's called the Bloody Week. Wherever in history you've got labor unions, it's not just the government doing the repression. It's right wing goon squads of like civilians. Right, we've got the patriot We've got Patriot Front and the Proud Boys. Argentina nineteen had Lega Patriotica, the Patriotic League. This was an upper class militia supported by the military, like directly supported a real admiral personally, and they did

a program. They went into the Jewish quarter and they raped and murdered, They burned books, they burned houses, They did a bunch of really specific, humiliating and bad things. I'm not going to repeat on this show. They also joined the cops in the military and the rest of the city fighting against the workers, which is these are mixed up, right, because the Jews are workers too, right. Yeah, but it was a specific anti Semitic attack. With the

government's approval, they did a program. And I'm actually kind of mad at a lot of the anarchist history about this. When you talk when you read that Tragic Week from a lot of the like mid nineteenth century sorry, mid twentieth century history books about it, they don't mention the anti semitism of the program, and that's fucked up. Yeah, this was the first time I'd heard of it, and

I'd read a few things about it. Yeah. They However, the main source of history outside of that, if you want to learn about the Tragic Week, is from folks who fight anti Semitism, who've referred to this as Argentine's first program. It wasn't just the right wing focks who were doing this. The liberal government arrested one of the heads of the Jewish Labor Bund and tortured him and forced him to like confess his Bolshevik plans of evil, where the Jews were going to take over Argentina in

the New Russian Revolution or whatever. His wife was arrested and her charges were, as best as I can tell, her charges were being the fiance of the future president of the local Soviet, having too many books, and being Russian. Yeah. So the only thing that kept Buenos Aires from becoming a worker run horizontal society in nineteen nineteen was the raw and brutal mass murder and arrest one that used the oldest trick in the book Anti Semitism to rile

people up for reactionary violence. Program was called La Casa delos Rosos the Hunting of the Russians, and this is the birth of the nationalist movement that later takes power. What Argentine is like way more famous for I wish Argentina was more famous for having one of the most kicks anarchist, fucking movements in the history of the world. The death toll from this week was estimated by conservatives at one hundred and forty one. It was estimated at

seven hundred by the leftists. The US Embassy says fifteen hundred people. Most historians seem to stick around seven hundred unless you look at like specifically right wing stuff. I don't know why the US embassy overestimated over everyone else. They do that a lot, okay, And I don't know because this is the thing. I've ran into this randomly with like a lot of other things where the American numbers will just randomly be high and I don't know

what's going on. They might just be incompetent. Because this is the everything's bigger and sid exists, it's death toll. Yeah, it was like this period from like here is you like the end of the forties is a thing where you get very weird numbers from the Americans for reasons. I died, who knows, I know, run by cowboys, like yeah, and there's like I'm sure the Americans had some specific plan that's like outside the scope of what I was able to research, you know. Yeah, Okay, So about seven

hundred people were killed, almost all of them workers. The couple cops were killed. Most of the workers who were killed were Jewish, and a lot of the people who were killed who were Jewish were not necessarily leftists. Also, over fifty thousand people were arrested during this week. Argentina. During this time period, it's not a populous country. There were about eight million people in the country total. I couldn't figure out the population of Buenos Aires at the time,

but fifty thousand people is a fucking army. Like, yeah, I've been in some mass arrests. They were in order of magnitude two orders of magnitude lower than that, you know. Yeah.

Like the thing I was thinking was like my immediate thing for like, Okay, how large is the mass arrest was there was an arrest of like a I think like a pretty similar size number of people get arrested, like the end of the seventies in Italy, ok because there's a bunch of stuff, like anarchist stuff going on there too, and they arrest a similar number of people, but Italy has like like Italy has like fifty million people. Yeah at that point. Yeah, so it's like it's like

the equivalent yeah yeah, yeah. Like so they just arrest Buenos Aires is what they do. Yeah. And for decades the government held the position that they had averted a Bolshevik anarchist takeover by killing all these people. And at first that was like Bolshevik anarchists takeover, and then I'm like, well that early on in the Bolshevik Revolution, okay, whatever, those those two sides were on the same side for a little while. But yeah, they they were like, we

saved the country from communism, and I mean whatever. It didn't help that the Catholic Church had been spent decades spreading anti Semitic propaganda in the country, including writing it directly into the textbooks for schools. Oh, which is funny because the Catholic the Catholic Church's books were like, Jews are all usurers and money lenders, right, and then the Catholic street preachers were like, all the Jews are bad because they're all Bolsheviks. Because you can't fucking win. You're

either an anti capitalist or a capitalist. You're a Schrodinger's capital. I don't know, it's bad. It anti Semitism is bad. Of course, the one hundred and fifty thousand Jews in Argentina at that time were all over the map politically because they were people, and people famously all over the map politically. There were even a bunch of you agree with each other, Yeah, there were a bunch who after this joined lega Patriotica like, and all the other Jews

were like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Yeah, like every other part of the political spectrum was like you're you're dead to us, right yeah, anyway, uh, In case you're wondering this tragic week which was really bad, surely all the weird propaganda about that's over now, right, oh god? Enter English language Wikipedia article about tragic weeks. Ooh oh no, it is all the workers had it coming, and it like lists all the like the anarchists must have been,

must be stopped. You know, it is completely useless as a source. Some of my favorite lines include quote A company of the seventh Infantry Regiment is forced to use their Vickers machine guns in order to keep demonstrators at bay and buenous eires. They were forced machine gun a crowd.

like machine gunning workers in the streets. They will start doing programs they will like yeh literally anything. Yeah, like you know, we're regardless of what they're sort of previous political principles where everything just flies out the window of the moment. Anyone is like, hey, maybe like we should have the factories the people who work in them instead of the people who own them. Yeah, totally, we might do a better job. The economy would literally go up.

And people are like, yeah, but I have like one hundred thousand acres and I want to keep it. So I know, I said I was center left, but these far right guys will just go kill you because of your ethnicity, and I get to keep my factory. That's the tragic clink, and it sucks, and it it lays down the groundwork for what's to come when the rebellion goes rural off to the steps, where we get to see even more wildly interesting folks do wildly interesting things,

which we'll talk about next week. H The Fanger Part three. Even the cliff, You're still hanging from it. I know you think you've gotten off, but no, still there's still more cliff. I'm just sitting there with the two by four like that meme where of the actors like, ah, fuck you no, wait, no, I want people hanging on the cliff. I don't want to drop into the rocks below. Never mind. What is the metaphor of cliffhangers? Weird? Oh, it's because at the end of that, right, if I

was like, and then he's hanging on a cliff. Will he survive? That's the traditional. Well, during the Tragic Weeks, Simon Radowitsky broke out of prison and was literally hanging from a cliff. Will he survive? We will find out next week on cool people who did cool stuff. But what we'll find out first is more about you and your podcast or anything else that you feel like plugging. Oh yeah, yeah I do. I do have another podcast that I'm mostly doing. It's called It Could Happen Here.

It's about stuff that happens here, you know I really need in the broader sense. Yeah, I mean sometimes it is about similar stuff to this too. But yeah, you can find us wherever there are podcasts, you can find us that happen here a Twitter Instagram. I realize I've never actually plugged the thing where there's an Apple podcast thing or if we don't want to listen to ads, you can get that in the cooler zone. Yeah, so you can do that cool zone media. Yeah, I don't

hear Reagan coins anymore. Yeah, that's what I got. Other than I guess I fear the hour of the machine gun that comes when you and your bosses have a disagreement about who should control factories. Yeah, they did lout a bunch of sports stores to get guns at the very beginning of it all. That's like part of the justification too, Right, what do I have to plug? I want to plug that in any conflict between an oppressed and oppressor, it is important to understand which side is

the oppressed and understand their actions through that lens. And yes, I'm not even vaguely talking about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I'm talking about it explicitly because it is harder and

harder to talk about that explicitly. And I want to say that explicitly, and I want to say that you do not have to condone and you can even condemn the actions some specific actions by oppressed people without dropping support for pressed people who are fighting for freedom, and specifically if you are in a place that is safe and you can financially can there's a lot of different charities that specifically work for the people who are being

even further dispossessed within the gaza strip. And you know, like literally just getting food to children, and that is a fundamentally good thing to do, regardless of anything else. Is that the literal point of children is that they are innocent and need to be fed. So I would direct anyone who cares about this kind of stuff. I just kind of wanted to say that explicitly in case anyone there's like some confusion on the left about which side is the oppressed and which side is the oppressor,

and that is an incorrect confusion to have. And if you want to listen more about that, you can listen to content from this network that Sharen does on MIA's podcast. It could happen here. That's what I want to plug. So if you what you got, cool nothing, see y'all next week. By Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.