Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to cool People that did cool stuff. You're weekly reminder that sometimes Margaret and Mia really like talking about complicated things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy And as implied in the tagline of the show, which that tagline, We've been using it the whole time and it never made any sense until now. But the guest today, despite being in the tagline every single week, is Mia Wong.
Hi.
Hello, glatic can finally covet and make the tagline work.
I know it's been like we've every now and then you're here and everything makes sense. It doesn't make sense when you're not here, Mia, But who's also here, and it also wouldn't make sense without is Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi.
I think it could still make sense without me here.
And not as much I mean, no offense to the sometimes other producers from the show or in Sophie's spot, and those episodes are also good. Yes, the only person who can't be replaced is me. Probably true, I'd be pretty.
Rentraw has entered the chat, so sorry mom. Yeah, and then just like clabbers you with love.
Oh my god, there's this fucking random Instagram video I saw of like a like lion that greets its handler by like jumping and tackling and bringing it to Oh my god, I'm like, it's so amazing. I want Rentroll to do that to me. So cool, but also so scary. I know, I don't want a lion to do it to me. Could Yeah anyway. Our audio engineers Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Rory, and our theme musical was
written for Spyan Woman. And this is part two out of four talking about the history of Korean anarchism as eventually builds up to the Korean People's Association of Manchuria and where we last left off, the people of Korea had tried for big old peasant revolt that seemed really cool and rebolt, by the way, is what happens when you start saying rebellion and then switch it to a revolt. Because you look at your script about halfway through.
It's about to be like, did we come up with a new word because I'd like it?
Yeah. No, Yeah, it's a halfway between a revolt and a rebellion. What's the difference. I don't know. They're probably synonyms.
I like it.
Yeah, And they all got slaughtered because it's.
Bad when people with fucking in the same way that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight, you shouldn't bring a regular gun to a machine gun fight.
Terrible idea.
Unfortunately, Uh, maybe there's nowhere to go but up for them. Just kidding. Japanese imperialism. In the immediate aftermath of this war eighteen ninety five, you've got the short lived Korean Empire, which was ostensibly independent for a while, it had close ties with Russia. This is the aforementioned promise Russian imperialism section, who didn't want the Japanese to take over, so that's why they were doing their thing. Korea was like, we
better modernize. We're in trouble, especially our military. We should modernize our military. Doesn't it seem like we should. Yeah, I think it seems like we should. But they're pretty geographically fucked because they are just right in the middle of the three huge imperial powers China, Japan, and Russia. They're all right there. Just kidding. Only the United States is capable period that to everyone that Japan colonized anyway. Then Russia and Japan got into a pissing match and
Japan beat the shit out of Russia. And this changes the course of history, and like leads in some ways. The downfall of this are very least leads to the revolution in nineteen oh five that doesn't work, but which leads to the nineteen seventeen revolution it does work. Whatever. As a result, Japan takes Korea as a protectorate state in nineteen oh five. By nineteen oh seven, Japan just dissolves Korea's military or starts too. And then it was
formally annexed as a colony in nineteen ten. And the first resistance to this colonization were what get called the righteous Armies, which is a good name, yeah, good pr Yeah, Like which side is the right side? I don't know, Probably the righteous ones, yeah yeah. On the other hand, you can justify a lot when you call yourself a righteous army.
That's true.
But I mean I haven't done a ton of research on the righteous armies. Like overall, they're actually they're doing pretty good. Well morally, militarily they're not doing good.
Yeah, I mean they are someone who is fighting Japan before nineteen forty one. Yeah, by definition, they're going to be doing pretty badly.
Yeah. Before Like my granddad, a hobo from Iowa gets into a funning offin you know, not that my granddad saved the day, but I just mean before the US was like we have a really big with a lot of fucking torpedoes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, the Righteous Armies don't succeed. They mostly ran around. They were like their peak was nineteen oh five to nineteen twelve. But the idea is going to stick around as long as colonization is. And the Japanese colonial government just sucked. It was oppressive as hell, especially right out of the gate. Japan rapidly modernized Korea. Hey, you finally get modernization, you know everything, but the military weird, weird how that happened?
Yep.
And one side effect of Japan modernizing Korea is that one hundred years later there are people who are apologists for the fucking colonization of Korea because they're like, well, at least they got modernized.
There are dudes who run South Korea who are apologists for college Yeah, pro japad.
That makes sense. That does not surprise me. I was like, I bet it's all white people, and I was like, no, I bet it's not. You know, it was really bad. It was a really oppressive colonial region. Obviously, colonial regimes are bad. Everything I've read puts this in the like it's not Belgian Congo. Yeah, but it's not nice. It's in the like medium to extra bad. You know. That's my that's my take. I didn't deep dive it. I could be wrong.
Well, I think the like I think the thing with Jeopanese superialism is that there's a marked shift where it gets worse, and this is before the shift where it gets worse.
Well, okay, so what's interesting is one of the things that I was reading was it was saying that this nineteen ten to nineteen nineteen is like the period of the saber, and then they get a little bit more subtle but also more economically destructive. But then I suspect that it then also continues to get militarily worse also on top of.
That, yeah, because it accelerates. Once you get like to about nineteen thirty seven nineteen thirty eight, everything gets dramatically worse. For like, you know, if this is the period of the saber, like once you get to about thirty six thirty seven, like that's that's when they are building the concentration camps and yep. Okay, Well I guess I guess they're doing it a bit in the slightly earlier thirties, depending on where you are in China.
But yeah, it re escalates, No, that makes sense. I did most of my reading, like I read like in detail up to about like nineteen thirty four or so, you know, and then that like, yeah, I read the like summary type stuff of the after.
Right.
Overall, the goal was to extract as much value out of the place as possible, as fast as possible, especially Japan. Right now they've had like these rice riots I think we're going to talk about later pretty recently. Well, actually they happened in nineteen eighteen. But you know, people are hungry in Japan, and Japan is less and less an agricultural state, but Korea is, and so they're like, let's get as much out of there as we can. A lot of people from Japan moved to Korea, especially more
later after nineteen nineteen or so. I've seen it referred to as like a lot of the like fail sons of Japan and then a lot of the like people trying to come up. Yeah, from Japan are the two groups of people who move there. Maybe because of my bias. The most immediate comparison I can make is the English colonization of Ireland in how they like they're like, oh here right next door are a bunch of non modern
backwards people. This is August Air quotes that we can extract value out of, even though we're gonna have to do a lot of really intense work to build racial categorization in order to oppress them.
Yeap, yep.
I only a little bit understand the like racialization of Koreans, you know, as relates to Japan, but it it seems like they had to do a lot of work specifically to be like, let's come up with how they're different, you know.
Yeah, I mean there's like there's a whole I know less about this in Korea, more about it in China. But it's like it gets to a point where they have these like I mean, they're doing just straight up sort of European style race science. They have like they
have like guys with like they're not calipers. They have their own system of like racial measure bit things of like how you measure something's face to determine their characteristics, and they're trying to like base their like forced labor system off of that of like who they think is gonna be the most effective worker by like face shape stuff, and it's it's real bad. They are unbelievably racist.
God, which is like we're gonna talk later about the nineteen twenty three earthquake in Japan where oh yeah, Japan's gonna run around and kill a lot of Korean immigrants. Six thousand people are gonna get slaughtered. Yeah, And the way that they did it is because they couldn't tell Korean people apart necessarily, so they made them pronounce I don't remember what word, and then if you pronounce it wrong,
they'd kill you. And it's also like, yeah, I mean, obviously it's wrong to go around and kill people because of racial characteristics or like national origin, but like it caught up a lot of people from like the boonies of Japan, you know, because they had like different accents.
Like this is this is a country who's like the shinzo Abe, their longtime prime minister, like couldn't write in one of their writing systems, So like, you know, there's there's a lot going on there in terms of like the difficulty of language and sort of class.
Dynamics, okay, And so Korea is being oppressed and there's this gorilla resistance going on, especially Korean folks who fled into Manchuria, which is the chunk of China immediately north of the Peninsula. As we talked about before, folks up there organizing gorilla bands and raiding Japanese forces regularly in Korea. But this is still not the like major resistance. The first like major resistance that people talk about is the
March First Movement. And I bet you can figure out what part of the year the March First Movement happens and July close. It's March. I mean it actually it actually is also I think still happening in July. Like it doesn't all like happen on one day.
Here's the thing, though, history is so dumb that in July would not be that far vegetive an answer.
Oh yeah, I mean you got the like fucking February Revolution in Russia.
Yeah, everything, all the dates in Russia are like this, yes, like no, it's all different buds.
Yeah, don't worries orthodox here. So it's fine. Most of the history I've read for this episode starts basically in the aftermath of the March First Movement. World War One, of course, matters everywhere. When it ended, President Woodrow Wilson was like, here are the fourteen points for peace, and some of those points were like Poland gets to be independent of colonial rule, and the Korean people were like, cool, what about us? Can we be independent of colonial rule?
And obviously the Western powers were like no, no, not you. Where did you come from? I think after the war they like send Korean representatives to the League of Nations and they're like, nah, you can't come in. We don't care, we're racist.
Like yeah, wood Wilson's like, I belong to the KKK. Come on, you thought you guys thought you were going to get independence, Like go on, what are you doing here?
Yeah. But despite not being accepted by the Western powers, the people of Korea are like, nah, let's fucking go. Let's do it. Let's have a mass, peaceful movement. This is called the March First Movement because it kicked off on March first, nineteen nineteen, and this is a huge mass movement. It is about two million people. There's not even twenty million people in the whole of the country
at that point. And Japan reacted strongly. This is the period of the saber death and arrest numbers very real, wildly because a lot of those numbers come from the Japanese government, and then other numbers come from like Korean nationalism. And no one hasn't any interest in telling the truth, right, I mean many of the people do. But whatever, we're going to go with seven thousand people killed and likely about forty thousand people arrested. Jeez. Despite being crushed really badly,
the March First movement did make some gains. The imperial form switched from will kill the shit out of you if you do anything we don't like to. We'll try to ask nicely first, and then we'll kill the shit out of you. That's my paraphrasing of the stuff I've read about the transition to like different methods of rule. And this is what opened Korea up for settler colonialism,
and Japanese folks started moving there. They got tons of financial incentives paid for by the Japanese government, so it becomes a settler project as well as a colonial extractive project. It's in the wake of this movement that Korean anarchism really got its start, especially under the name anarchism and when it got started, it immediately went hard. Interestingly, most of its most impactful work, though, didn't happen in Korea.
Korean anarchists during this period had the most dramatic and immediate impact in Japan and China, because in the wake of the March First Movement, a ton of radicals had to go into exile, mostly into China. I think the most of them just went into Manchuria because it's right there, right, yeah, yeah, but a lot of folks went much further to Shanghai and Beijing and a city called Guangcho, which is more in southern China.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, students who could afford to went to Japan because there were I was like, oh, they must have just been like, oh, that's like the nice place to go to college is the only place to go to college if you're a Korean student. There are literally zero colleges in Korea under early japan Uese rule until nineteen twenty four.
Oh god, yeah, oh my god. And so even when you hear about like all of the like like all these anarchists are gonna be set up all these schools and stuff, right, they're coming out of a time when there was no schools in their country, yeah, or no colleges in their country. The first college in Korea in nineteen twenty four is a Japanese Imperial University.
Yeah.
So most of the students who moved to Japan, they had to work constantly their work study students. And so when I say the people who are like rich enough to go there, these are poor people, but they're like able to get to Japan, and they're absolutely the underclass when they get to Japan, and they're doing really shit
jobs in order to get by. And in Tokyo, where most these students went, they fell into academic Japanese leftist circles, especially among anarchists, which appeared to be, at least by the reading that I did, the primary leftist thing going on there at that time.
Yeah, it's a I kind of want to take a second talk about what's going on more broadly. And this like literally in like within a few months of the March first movement, because like two months later there's the May fourth movement in China, which is a very very similar movement. And if you look at the historiography of you know, like Chinese anarchism, even Chinese communism, this is sort of the place where a lot of that starts.
Where because there's this giant student uprising, that's the point where sort of like Western leftist ideologies like really starting to take hold. And this is like this whole period is this real like from here until like really kind of mentioned twenty seven, is this whole period of like almost continuous uprising like in China, I mean particularly intensifies in China like mention twenty four and twenty five, but like this is this is a period where like the
Chinese left is also emerging really rapidly. But it's also fascinating because none of the stuff I've ever read about the May the Fourth Movement ever talks about the fact that the first one was in Korean. That's what I was like two months early.
Yeah, I was trying to figure that out because I was like, this seems related, you know, it has to be like a bunch of people from it, like clearly we're in China when yeah, they all went there.
I feel like it's just one of these things where like because it's yeah, it's like it's all the nationalists his geographies. Yeah, like because it's the main of the Fourth Movement is really really important to both the Chinese Nationalist Party and to the Communists, but when they're writing their history, they don't really want to. I guess you're biden of one of the fact that they were like two months late. Yeah, because Koreans went first. Well, that's even kind of what to talk about about.
Like Korea seems to be like I mean, it's this like place, this is constantly colonized by everyone, like kick back and forth, but it has all of these things where like are very very impactful on regional politics.
Yeah, it's almost hadisque where stuff moves there first.
Totally Okay, And we're gonna talk a little bit more. And this is good because you're gonna fill in a lot of gaps for me when we gets it's the Chinese part of this, because I'm like, because everything talks about everything siloed off. You read about like ye ye yeah oh, and then the Korea anarchists in China did the following and you're like, there's a war on in China,
like how does that relate to it? And it's like, well, we're just talking about the Koreans, and I'm like, there's a war where they went that is clearly going to influence things. And I think what it is is that a lot of it's like writing for people who like know that, right, Yeah, But it's like if I read something that happens in the eighteen sixties in the US, it's like, should we talk about the fact that there's a civil war happening?
You know?
Like anyway, So in Japan, you know, there's the students, they go to Tokyo, and then there's a ton of Korean workers moving elsewhere in Japan, especially to Osaka, and they were doing migrant labor under terrible working conditions because their economy had just been destroyed. In Korea, there's nothing else that they could do. And these folks ended up being part, a major part of the anarchist led labor
movements that were happening in the industrial districts. And so you have five distinct Korean anarchist movements all happening at the same time. One is in Korean and it is underground as fuck and it is constantly repressed. It is the worst place to be an anarchist. Out of these, yeah, one is in Manchuria, which is waging a gorilla war.
One is in the rest of China and they're heavily involved in Chinese politics and really fascinating and complicated ways, like hanging out with the communists less and the nationalists more and all this weird shit. But then be clear, the communist and nationalists were also hanging out together, so you can't just use this tankies.
Yeah.
And then also in Tokyo whole different movement that's like working class academic anarchist movement that is like involved in all of this, like assassination plots and all of this, like trying to build up things back in Korea, and is like maybe the most like deeply watching a lot of them. They're all deeply anti colonial. And then in Osaka you have the Labor movement. Five different fucking Korean anarchist movements. It's impressive. That's a lot for one country.
Yeah, yeah, and.
There's so much of it. And we're going to start with what happened in China. But first, even before we talk about China, we'll talk about if I say products and services, this is gonna yep, here's ads, and we're back. I hope everyone enjoys those products and services. To talk about Korean anarchism in China, I'm going to start with a man and a manifesto. See what I did. There's man's in the word manifesto. And I've read like five
different versions of this fucking guy's story. Like no, because he's super important outside of his anarchism, both to the Korean independence movement and also to like Korean literature and all this other stuff. Right, so his anarchism, of course is like only sometimes included. This man's name is shin Chweho, ironic to how many versions of his history I've seen.
He was a historian and a journalist. He started out working with a group called the New People's Association, which is one of these first It wasn't one of the Righteous Armies, but they were like kind of the people doing a lot of the intellectual work of like trying to justify the Righteous Armies. Start in nineteen oh six, and it's basically advocating for creating a republican Korea. And
they are supporting the various righteous armies. And they're also opening schools, and I think this is where that style comes from, but I'm not one hundred percent certain. They are opening schools for both military training and for regular education. They're separate schools, so it's not like you go to it's like you get both. Yeah, it's cool, but they're separate. Also important. Later around nineteen ten, they have to fuck off to Manchuria and eventually they're dissolved, and our guy
Shin just starts wandering. He writes for newspapers in Russia and then China. He kind of settles in China. It seems like after the March First movement, suddenly all of these exiles pour into China and the Korean Provisional Government formed in Shanghai in nineteen nineteen, and soon Chin is part of it. And this is I think the funniest thing I've read in an anarchist history. You know how like sometimes we cover anarchists who then later joined the government.
Oh no, is he one of the wait know what government isn't even it's the inverse.
What you know, where Korean anarchism comes from. It comes from the Korean Provisional Government, about half of them deciding they're anarchists and split it off.
Is that rule? It's they've They've done an even funnier version of the Portita liber Ati Mexico thing, where the Liberal Party became anarchists. But this is even funnier because of their provisional government.
Yeah, that rules. A whole crew of the Korean provisional government started off republicans and wound up anarchists, Shin included. And the way that I've heard this described is they basically looked at all the political party bullshit that was happening, all of the fighting between political factions, and were like, well, this ain't it now. Granted, obviously there's a lot of infighting and anarchism, but it's not political parties fighting for
domination over each other, right, Yeah. And then they looked at what the Bolsheviks were doing, crushing their fellow leftists, and we're like, well, that's not it either. Also, this is during the peak of Chinese anarchism, like roughly, so this is the leftism that they're you know, sort of that or Bolshevism is like the things that they can see.
And the inference I get from these texts is that also they looked back at traditional Korean ideals, whether from the Silhak movement or the dong Hak movement, and they were like, yeah, anarchism seems way closer to that stuff, you know, Yeah, which is a thing that we've also seen elsewhere across the world, where, for example, the you know, the democratic and federalists in Roshava come out of a communist leader who was like, wait, I just read a
bunch of anarchist texts, and now that I'm thinking about traditional Kurdish life, that makes more sense.
Yeah, you know.
Peter Czarro wrote that in the mid nineteen tens to about nineteen fifteen was the heyday of Chinese anarchism, and I think this means like the heyday of it coming up, but I'm not one hundred percent certain where you would see quote a good deal of organizational activism, especially in narcosyndicalism, as well as ideological refinement. And in all of this, in both Japan and China, the main i explicitly anarchist
ideological influence seems to be friend of the pod. Peter Kerpotkin specifically around the idea of societies built on mutual aid. This is like, you know, newspapers that weren't even anarchists, like covering his funeral will kind of like lead a lot of people like Shin does that Actually he's like
covers the funeral or whatever, you know. And here's where we run into one of the splits I've seen between the two main Korean anarchist historical texts I read, hockey Rack is focusing on the nationalist aspects of Korean anarchism and a lot of how it ties into these older Korean religious movements. Dongwong Hoong, meanwhile, does a really good job of showing just how explicitly transnational this movement is.
So basically it's like the way that people look at all of this is like either Koreans were building a Korean thing even if they weren't at home. And I'm not trying to say this is like Hockey Wreck is like specifically supernationalists, but rather Dong Wo Huong is saying
their goal is a cosmopolitan world. And he wrote an entire book that is basically just showing evidence of the fact that Korean anarchists, while they were fighting for nationalism, they were fighting for the liberation of their country, were fighting very explicitly for a cosmopolitan world, not Korea for Koreans, but instead to end imperialism, destroy borders, and in order to do that you start by liberating colonized people like us in Korea. I have a strong bias towards the
latter position if that didn't come across. Yeah, yeah, but the evidence is pretty strong. Yeah.
Well, and I think also, like I don't know how, I mean, I guess it is possible to develop extremely national politics by a bunch of people who were spread
out between a bunch of different countries. But it seems it seems kind of difficult to have a really really nationalist movement when like half of your people are in one of like five anarchist circles in Japan, or are like in Shanghai or Maturia or like in all of these places that are very very different and also have their own sort of like anarchist traditions and stuff like that.
It seems hard to just have that turned into a peer like I mean, admittedly, like I'm saying this, and this is kind of how nationalism came to China to the extent that it was like imported back from like a bunch of intellectuals who've been in Paris for a bunch of time. But yeah, you know, it's it's kind of hard for an anarchist but it's really function like that.
Yeah, and like and it causes I mean, it is an interesting tension, right that they are all dealing with and they're all covering all the different anarchist papers and things are all covering, like there's a paper that's covering how Chinese women workers are treated at a British owned factory in Shanghai, and how the liberation of all oppressed
people is the same. Another person writing at the time, Simyong Chio said Korean anarchists, since they were slaves who lost their country, had to rely with affection on nationalism and patriotism, and thus had difficulties in practice discerning which was their main idea and which was their secondary idea. The reason for the difficulties was due to that their
enemy was only the one Japanese imperialism. My life is one that has drifted along with this kind of contradiction inside, and so they're just like, yeah, like I'm a nationalist and an anarchist, but not a national anarchist, you know. Yeah, it's one of those words that you have lots of meanings. Yeah, And you've got all these exiles and they've started a government and then half, I don't know what percent a
chunk of the government splits away to become anarchists. Everyone's starting newspapers, some of them are all Koreans, some of them are mixed Korean and Japanese. The journalist and historian I mentioned Shin Chui how he was a prominent author of this era. He ran a newspaper called New Greater Korea, as well as another one focused on forming alliances with China called heavenlye Drum. And I think it was for Heavenly Drum that he covered the death of Krapakin. And
I love God, I love the names in this. You know, Yeither's so good. And he became an anarchist, and he did a few things of note immediately. There's a part that I know more about, which is that he wrote a manifesto, and a part that I wish I knew more about. He became a gorilla.
Hell yeah, or at.
Least was probably counterfeiting money and bringing it to the gorillas. But I'm not rules. Yeah, but he wrote a manifesto, and it's what comes down to us. One hundred and one years later, he wrote in nineteen twenty three, and this becomes I'll talk about how important it becomes, but it is like not just a like random Reddit post,
you know, it's a very influential document. A manifesto called the Declaration of a Korean Revolution in nineteen twenty and according to some accounts, although they're the less convincing accounts, writing it will be the death of him. That manifesto opens quote, to sustain the Korean people's survival, we need to wipe out Robert Japan. The expulsion of Robert Japan can only be accomplished by a revolution. But where do
we begin to engage in a revolution? After the revolutions of the old days, people used to become the slaves of the state, and above them there used to be lords and masters, a privileged group dominating them. Consequently, the so called revolution was nothing but an altered name for the privileged group. In other words, a revolution used to just replace one privileged group with another. Accordingly, a slogan such as behead the king console the people became the
sole goal of the revolution. However, today's revolution is one that the masses make for themselves, and for that reason we call it a revolution of the masses and a direct revolution. I'm going to keep reading from me because I like it and it is very impactful to everything we're talking about. From later in it, quote, the road to revolution shall we opened through destruction. However, we destroy in order not just to destroy, but to construct. If we do not know how to construct, that means we
do not know how to destroy. And if we do not know how to destroy, that means we do not know how to construct. Construction is distinguishable from destruction only in its form, but in spirit, destruction means construction. And then they list the five things that they want to destroy, the rule of a foreign race, a privileged class, the system of economic exploitation, social inequality, and servile cultural thoughts, and it ends quote the masses are the supreme headquarters
of our revolution. Violence is our only weapon for our revolution. We go to the masses and go hand in hand with the masses with ceaseless violence, assassination, destruct and rebellion. We will overthrow the rule of Robert Japan, transform all the absurd systems in our life, and construct an ideal Korea in which one human being will not be able to oppress other human beings and one society will not be able to exploit other societies.
Yeah, this rules, This is great, This is yeah. I think that the way that he talks about construction and destruction is really interesting because you know, there's the sort of echo of the Bakunin like our creative destruction stuff, but it's a more thought out.
Version of it. Yeah, totally, because it's not just like, hey, destroying is cool too, it's like, well, yeah, actually have to destroy. But if you don't know how to create things, you don't know how to destroy things. I really like that part of it.
Yeah, it's true also on like a tactical level too, where you know, I mean like, there's obviously the strategic level, but on a practical level, it's you know, the best way to destroy something is by knowing how it works, and you know obviously like but by being the person who bakes it work in the first place. So that lets you understand the most effective way to de shore it and the most effective way to recreate something better out of it.
I like that because it ties that what you just said ties into both the like famous Druty quote that might not be a druity quote. There's a general during the Spanish Civil War who said, we are not in the least bit afraid of ruins. We are the workers built these palaces here in Spain, and we can build them again. Basically, you know, it ties into that and the like sun Zoo art of war, like you know, if you know your enemy and know yourself, you don't
have to fear in a thousand battles or whatever. Cool. I like what you're saying about it. But what I also is destructive to the flow of this conversation is advertising. But what at the same time constructs our ability to have this conversation within the framework of a capitalist society are these advertisers. So they too know how to build, destroy and create. And that's why we let them advertise. We actually make them prove that they can both destroy and create. We do not that's true.
We do not.
Thing that I said wasn't true.
We have no idea who they are.
Yeah, here's some stuff we think and we're back. So the author of this is Shin He. I've read some versions of his history where he dies in jail, like more or less the next year for writing this. I think those are not true. More of the versions say that he still dies in jail. It's not good for him. Other versions where he's arrested by Japanese police in either nineteen twenty eight or nineteen twenty nine, and he's not arrested for writing this. He's arrested for running counterfeit money
across a border. I tend to believe those versions, and so in those versions he died in solitary confinement nineteenth six. He's received numerous awards and recognitions from the South Korean government in the century that followed well. At the same time, he's sometimes credited for being the founder of the jew Cha philosophy of self reliance that guides North Korea. I don't think he would have anything nice to say about North Korea or South Korea if he was alive. Yeah, yeah,
what a like that to me? Like that almost sums up all of this, right, is like he's a national hero to these completely. There's like a triangle of ideologies here, right, and he's at one corner at North Korea is at a different corner, and South Korea is at a different corner. You know.
Yeah, it's weird because it reminds me of the way that like both the okay, how do you actually put this, both the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists like both claimed Son yet Sen as like their great hero because he was the guy who was running the Nationalist party before the Nationalist and Community to split okay, but Sonny at Sen at least like ideologically, I mean, she's a mess ideologically one of the weirdest guys who has ever
had a major role in history, like ideologically, but at least you can sort of understand how his ideology could lead to either of these other two groups. Ideology, where's this guy, It's like, this is an anarchist, Like all of you people have just sort of like, you know, you were stripping these Although I admittedly I have actually heard the sort of like anarchist Juja thing before. It
was interesting. Yeah, well it's like and I mean, this is this is part of what's what's weird about like ju Cha as an ideology about like sort of the North Korean version of it is that it's a really really deeply weird kind of Marxism. Like it's not normal.
It's not like an import of Soviet Marxism. It's like that faction is its own distinct faction that sort of like wiped out the pro Sovia factions and like was different than the pro Chinese factions, and so like it does I guess it kind of makes sense that they kind of took in a similar way to like there's elements of Maoism that were taken from earlier Chinese anarchism. Like I guess it would make sense that they would absorb it, but it's also so unbelievably not the same thing.
No, I mean it makes sense. I mean, I mean the Bolsheviks took an awful lot from the anarchists during the like October Revolution, and like you know, like yeah, I mean, fascism takes from you know, everyone takes from Anicus.
Like it as good as good ideas and good critiques, and that's it turns out like it's much much better at producing critiques of other societies than most other people, like basically the other ideologies. So other ideologies take the critique and then leave the politics out of it.
That yeah, that tracks. I got called a tanky on Twitter the other day by a liberal and I was just like what. And I think it's because I had used the word imperialism or whatever, and I'm like, my god, what did every tankies hate me? Yeah? Anyway, so he wrote that manifesto. He also probably smuggled counterfeit money, and he wrote a ton of like novels and shit which I really want to read, and I did not successfully
find any English translations of them. They might exist. I didn't find any of my looking, but they are still in print, some of his books in Korea. When I'm rich as hell, I'm going to pay translators to translate all the great novels and shit written by anarchists that never made it into English. And what's fascinating about this manifesto? SiZ is cool and I like it is that one. It is one of the more important documents of the
Korean independence movement. Two. In April nineteen twenty four, a group called the Eastern Anarchist Federation got started, and this brings together anarchists from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan. And when they got together, they adopted a platform. And the platform the anarchists of these five different countries, all very different positions within the world stage, they adopted the platform those based on the declaration of the Korean Revolution.
And that is fucking cool, yeah, because it's basically all of these anarchists from all of these different places they look at this document about national liberation and are like, yeah, we want career to be free. That's like kind of the you know, like we can build from there. You know. Also cool about this the Eastern Anarchists Federation. I don't know if you've heard this. Their newspaper. The title translates
to the East. And this makes me happy because there's this really mid movie called The East from about ten years ago or something. Have you all seen this movie?
No?
Oh my god, have y'all not even heard of this movie?
No?
Oh my god. It has that he was the only famous transactor, trans masculine actor.
I was gonna say Hunter Shaffer, but clearly.
Not Elliott Page.
Yeah, huh.
It has Elliott Page in it, and they're like an anarchist cell that's like a terror cell in the US. It's like clearly based on crime thing.
This was his fucking face in it. Who's super famous? What's the name Alexander Skarsgard.
Yeah, oh yeah, I've never heard this.
I've quite literally never heard of this, and I like both of those actors.
Wow, it's a most it did it clearly didn't do super well.
But then again, you called it a mid movie, so I don't need to care.
It got it well. Me calling it a mid movie is saying I like it more than any of my friends. Valid but they don't like it because it's a reflection of a specific time of anarchist culture as seen from an outsider in a way that is like not always reflective in a positive way, because it's a little culty. It is very culty. It's a movie about an anarchist cult that does good things, but like clearly it's made
by someone who's sympathetic but disagrees at the end. Yeah, and that group is called the East, and it makes me happy that there's a real group called the East.
Why would the group why would the American one be called the East?
Though?
Because there's no way that these directors.
No, I don't know. I don't think they knew about it.
Korean Americast newspaper.
I think that they named it that. I get the impression because they wanted to use like sort of like a compass, like are you lost, find your way from, like you know, a guiding star, find the East. They just wanted a cardinal direction.
I think they could have made it more realistic by just saying the word black and picking a random object like this worst black flag, black wave, black mask, black tide.
I know, but that style doesn't work as well in the US. People still do it in the US, but like overall, calling something black something has just different connotations in the US.
That's true, that's true.
I thought the East was a pretty evocative name, and I'm just really excited that it's clearly based on the Eastern Anarchist Federation.
It's newspaper.
Also, a random thing that I learned about the Eastern Anarchist Federation that at least one conference. This is how I know that there's an anarchist run hospital because one of the years they met and had their conf at the hospital. Huh that anarchists had formed and were running at rules, Yeah, in nineteen twenty eight, that's where their
conference was. These first few years, like nineteen twenty nineteen twenty five are sort of seen as the early period of Korean anarchism, which groups were formed and works started to get done, and in order to kind of understand what they were doing in China, here's my attempt to as best as I can understand what's going on in China. There's a fuck ton going on in China during this time. Yeah,
so much. In nineteen eleven, the two hundred year Qing dynasty was like, what if we got overthrown by a revolution? We'll call it the nineteen eleven revolution, and then they did nineteen twelve, you get the Republic of China, and it's been that way ever since the end, except that actually, instead, in nineteen fifteen the monarchy blipped back on the scene and got overthrown. In nineteen sixteen, the Republic came back, and then by the time our story happened, it seems
to be get called the warlord era. Yeah, it's never a good time to be alive. Actually, I mean, I don't know. It might be fun, it's not a good time to live A long time.
It sucked. Yeah, So if you want a really really exhaustive breakdown of this, I did it that. The first Bastards episode I ever did was about this guy and David Jong Jong Chong, who's one of the warlords in this period.
He's the dog beat general.
If you go listen to that episode about that, I actually learned all of the factions, and that episode has exhaustive detail on it, and I left out like four of the big factional fights because like all of the literally the moment the nineteen eleven revolution happens, like there's all of these different factions based on like the existing armies and they all break up, and they're all constantly fighting each other at different Woolard clicks, so like moving
around the country, seizing territory and losing territory. And it's one of the most politically complicated periods I have ever encountered. It's like, Yeah, as I'm saying this, I'm realizing this applies to three people on Earth. But if you've ever to do a really, really in depth micro look at who controls one in Yemen, it's like that but across a continent.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's so convoluted.
Yeah, And it's funny because the next paragraph says confused yet, well me, it probably isn't confused, but the listener might be, and I might be. Yeah, And what I had is that, you know, the warlord era. Warlordism starts to end when the Nationalist Party eventually under Chen Kai Shek, but not yet and the brand new Communist Party joined forces to create the National Revolutionary Army, and the anarchists are kind of working with this, and it's complicated. This lasts not
very long that them getting along. In nineteen twenty seven, Chen Kai Shek was like, fuck all the commis, they started fighting each other until once again they formed a United Front nineteen thirty six because Japan was going to invade further into China. That's my my speed run of it.
Yeah, I think I think there's one really important moment. Definitely kind of neither of the the nationalists were I mean, the Coyist the Communists are kind of involved in it, but in nineteen twenty five there are these so nuetely twenty four is when the nationalists who are still under Sun yet Sen and the communiststart working together and the communists, like the like literals becically the Bolsheviks rebuild the entire nationalist party basically into a party that's built in their image.
It's really interesting because they're the first really I think, like proper like well they're doing this a little bit before this, Like this is the first real like communist party built in the image of like of specifically the Bolsheviks. And then they immediately get taken over by a proto fascist and who kills all of them.
Is that Shan Kai shak as the proto fascist.
Yeah, Shan Kai Shack.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's the sort of proto fascist drug lord cartel guy.
Okay, I heard him Pretisenta as the centrist of the three people who could have taken over. Yeah. So, but I trust you more than I trust this thing. Yeah.
The thing about Shinkai Shek is that so he's trained in by rushed by Russian military academies. Right when when the Bolsheviks rebuild the nationalist army, he's one of the guys who goes through their military thing. And the Russians like think that he's a communist, but he's not a communist.
He is an organized crime guy and he's been in his that's been his whole thing from the beginning, is that he's very very He's like he's a sworn brother of this thing called the Green Gang, which is one of the massive like Chinese organized crime cartels.
Ok.
And he basically the moment he like takes power, he starts turning on both left wing of the nationalists and the communists and eventually just exterminates them all, kills something like a million people.
Cool.
Yeah, And it's he's the guy who puts an end to sort of the this period that starts in nineteen twenty five where there are these mass uprisings against against the warlords, like in every single Chinese City. There are hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people in the streets. I mean, this enormous general strike. This spreads into like Hong Kong, like every every one of these cities has
these unbelievably massive uprisings. I I haven't like directly read about the Korean anarchists being involved in this, but there's no way they wouldn't have been in the streets because this was this is like an antiperialist uprising too, because like the inciting incident is that I think it was actually specifically Japanese troops open a fire and striking workers, okay,
and everyone just goes up. And so there's this giant sort of like super revolutionary period between nineteen twenty five and nineteen twenty seven where the entire country of China is just going up and the nationalist army's marketing across the country and then Chang Kai Shek hijackson and kills them all. So that's that's the brief thing of the situation in China, which is, yeah, there's this massive revolution and then Chang Kai Shek slaughters everyone.
And that's the kind of thing that like when you present here's Korean anarchism, and they happen to I'll be in China. Something's happening in China. This is not a blank slate.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess like I shall also mention the Chinese anarchist movement is split because there's a lot of so they're kind of they're kind of in the nationalist coalition because the nationalist coalition includes everyone from the nationals coalition stretches from on the one end, like almost monarchist landlords to Mao. So this is this is not a viable political coalition, right in the long run.
This is this is the it's it's everyone who actually is trying to do politics in China fighting like the war lords. Yeah, so the anarchists are involved in this, but some of them, I don't know. There's a lot going on, partially because by this point everyone has started to realize that the Bolsheviks are killing anarchists, right.
Yeah.
And also a lot of these people have close personal relationship Shankaishek. Yeah, for reasons. They're just like friends with him. So when the split happens, some of them break with a nationalists and some of them kind of break towards neither because both the communists and the nationalists start killing them.
Yeah, I got the uh kind of remember which source it was. One of the things I was reading was saying that, like the split between the anarchists who supported the nationalists after everything started breaking up and the ones who are like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, that split is something that Chinese anarchisms just kind of never recovered from.
No, it doesn't.
And that's like when it stopped being one of the primary political ideologies of the area.
Yeah. Well, and the second problem is that they don't have an army, right, both of the Like, the nationalists have this army that was trained by the Bolsheviks, which is the best non imperialist army in China. Yeah, and then the communists have the other part of this army that was trained by the Bolsheviks, which is.
Well, what's interesting, and I think I have a little Okay, Well, the thing I want to say is just like a couple paragraphs down, So I'm just going to keep going.
In the meantime, Korean and Chinese and Japanese anarchists in China, they start setting up schools everywhere, and this is like kind of what they're doing, right, and they're like full on primary and secondary schools, and they're also setting up military schools, and specifically they're doing this thing where they're trying to train peasants into these peasants militias as a way to help them drive off both like warlords and
bandits and also the Chinese Communist Party. Yep. Yeah, and this movement is particularly large in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, and they raise people's militias because they figured people's militias would be harder to recuperate into one of these large militaries. So the impression I get from what you just said and the sources that I've been looking at was it sounds like the anarchists didn't have an army on purpose, which might not have worked out for them in the end.
Yeah. Well, and it's it's also a mess because Guangzhou, so Guangzho is is like very it's very close to both sort of Shenzhen, and well, Shenzen is not really a real city at that point, like it's it's not the city that is now, but it's really close to Hong Kong. And this is sort of unfortunate because this is that's like the nationalist heartland.
Yeah, okay, and so.
It's it's kind of trying to wager insurgency from there, is a bit like you're trying to wage an insurgency from Texas, where it's.
Like, well, and so what happened is the these schools were largely funded by the nationalists. Yeah, but eventually the nationalists are like, fuck this, We're going to force you to dissolve all this.
Yeah, we have so many drugs to sell, we do not have time to run schools. Like, yeah, we are too busy getting unbelievably rich off the opium trade to have your peudy anarchist teaching children how to read thing.
Yeah, No, that doesn't surprise me. Overall, the vibe I got from reading about Chinese anarchism through this lens of what the Korean anarchists were doing in China was that the vibe was like, we're going to build schools and I guess hospitals, and raise people's militias and help peasants defend themselves and educate themselves, which is a good vibe.
Yeah.
In the schools that they built, faculty and students lived eight and worked together. They intentionally included Korean anarchists as well as Chinese anarchist teachers, I believe also Japanese anarchist teachers I was reading about. They would teach social movements, they'd teach critiques of communism, they'd teach how to organize rural societies, they teach critiques of capitalism. And they had three goals, a free and autonomous life, a cooperative laboring life,
and a cooperative defensive life. And then the Nationalist Party ordered it dissolved after less than a year. Yeah, they really really did their hard right turn. But they keep doing all this shit. And the reason that this part is important, this seems to be the vibe that causes Manchuria do its thing that we're going to talk about later, you know, because it's a similar this idea, this idea of free autonomous life, a cooperative laboring life, and a
cooperative defensive life. Yeah, as like paired together. Like I'm down with that. I mean, obviously it has. It clearly didn't work out militarily in this particular, you know. But we're not going to talk about Manchuria yet because we've still got Japanese Korean anarchists to talk about. In labor unions and assassination plots, and also we're going to talk about Korean Korean anarchists who are desperately trying to organize underground.
And on top of that, we're going to eventually talk about two million people who built a bottom up peasant society to fight imperialism and live their best lives. And we'll talk about it all next week, but first we're going to talk about it could happen here or whatever you want to talk about. Whatever you want to talk about.
Yeah, well let's look like what I could happen here. It's I've realized I haven't actually mentioned what this podcast is about. Our tagline is things falling apart and how to put them back together again. So we do a lot of I don't know we do. We do a lot of of history stuff. We do a lot of I guess news labor. I do a lot of labor reporting also good history. Yeah, I was about to say I had I had you on the show. I don't remember how long ago it was, but to talk about
Japanese anarchism. So if that, if that's the thing that you want to talk about, Yeah, there's some episode about it in the In the Misty Past that was that was That was a really good time.
Yep. And if you want to hear what I have to say about random ship, God, I'm really selling myself right now. I am so hungry. We're recording this a little bit later than we usually record, and it is showing. But I have a substack called whatever it's called. Just google Margaret Kiljoy substack and you'll find it and then you'll hear me write about politics and history and all the stuff. And some of it's personal and some of
it's not. And the most recent piece I wrote is called I Hate Election Years, and it's about why I hate election years. Yea, and yeah, no, it's great. It's like designed to piss off all the people who are like, no vote for the lesser evil, or like no voting's bad or just I'm just like it's how I'm tired of it, all hate it. I'm tired of it. I can't wait till next year. I mean, I'm sure everything's gonna be worse next year. But anyway, that's me, Sophia. Gu anything you want to plug.
Oh, I just gonna talk about the importance of voting. No, I'm kidding, whatever, No, just follow at Coolson media. We got a bunch of shows that are really really interesting and well researched, and I just can't recommend them enough to look out for that, including it could happen here featuring Mia.
And if you're ever like how do I make the world better but you don't know how. There's two things that are almost never bad, feeding people and rescuing animals.
I was gonna say, yeah, one of those better be a pet.
Yeah no, yeah, no, I was. I was like watching a just Twitter video of someone rescuing a straight dog and saving it and befriending it, and you know, like there's there's certain things that you're like almost never in the wrong when you feed people, yeah, and you're almost never in the wrong when you find and rescue animals. Someone's gonna be like, what do you mean almost never, And I'll be like I hate discourse by I see you all next week. Yeah, that's it.
That's the end, And that's the end of this podcast. Because my rescue dog is looking at me like excuse me, Yeah, it's my time, it's why are we not paying attention to me? And she is correct, Yeah, So I'm gonna go pay attention to her.
Dog times see y'all next week. Bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
You get your podcasts.