Part One: The Golden Age of Terrorism

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hmm. It's up cast uh pod today Robert Evans
me behind the Bastards. This podcast we talk about bad people,
and I don't do a very good job of introducing
the show. That is the entirety of my job to
do and also to introduce UM. I apologize for that.

(00:22):
Today we have a little bit of a special episode
for y'all. We're talking about the Golden Age of terrorism
and I'll explain what that is in a minute. And
my guests are a couple of of of friends and
colleagues of mine from the the real world, UM and
in the mean streets of Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show.
To two of the people, I get repeatedly tear gassed

(00:45):
and grenaded and threatened with firearms, sometimes with being a lane. Hello, Hi,
how are y'all doing tonight? I'm doing okay. I'm not
getting threatened with grenades or tear guests. Yeah, that's some
always a fun thing to do, especially since probably some

(01:05):
of our friends will get threatened with grenades into your
guest tonight more likely than not. Yeah, that's most most night. So, uh,
you want to you want to tell the listeners a
little bit about yourself since you're not you're not comming
into this as as as as a big time stand
up comedians like most of our guests, or is local
youths like Garrison. Oh um, Yeah, So my name is

(01:29):
b Um and I am half of Surtists were journalists
collective that started as a ship posting account and then
there was a curfew and our friend Robert wanted some backup,
so we went and started reporting on stuff. And now
three months later we're still reporting on stuff and we've

(01:51):
been shot with a lot more tear grass and grenades
and pepperballs since then. Yeah, and an amount that seems
almost impossible when you try to take stock of it.
I have now Vintier guest with you more times than
I can count. Yes, yes, that is very accurate, but
certainly I can confirm north of a hundred times. Um.

(02:12):
So yeah, that's that's be in a lane. And today
we're going to talk about the Golden age of terrorism?
Do you do you know? What? What do do you do?
You know anything about the golden age of terrorism? Is
that a term you've heard prior to tonight? I assume
it involves bell bottoms and just massive quantities of cocaine
in a K fort Yes to everything, but the A
K forty seven. So this is a fascinating period because

(02:33):
when when you were talking about the golden age of
terrorism is like the sixties up through the late seventies,
and some people would say into the eighties. One of
the things that's fascinating about it is that modern body
armor didn't really exist. Like you you had some you know,
some flak vests and stuff. You had some stuff that
can maybe stop some pistol rounds, but like it was
very uncommon and it didn't work well. So fucking everybody

(02:55):
in terrorism uses machine pistols so like, which are like
like little handguns the fire a bunch of rounds really fast,
so you can just jam in like the door of
a building and just spray it down with gunfire. So
it's like a lot of fucking scorpion machine pistols and stuff.
Nine Mills and Toko ReBs. Yeah, all of the all
of the eighties action movies and every good James Bond

(03:18):
and every good. That's why I'm excited to talk about
today because like terrorism real bummer these days, right, Like
it's mostly you're gonna kill a lot of innocent people.
You're gonna specifically try to just kill innocent people most
of the time. And usually if you're a terrorist now,
like one way or the other, you want to kill
everyone in the world, pretty much like your isis and
you want to kill all the people who aren't Muslims.

(03:39):
You're some Nazi and you want to kill everybody who's
not like you're kind of white like whatever, whatever kind
of terrorists you are, it's a bleak ass kind of terrorists.
Whereas in the sixties and seventies there were some fun terrorists, Like,
I mean, they killed a lot of people, Like, but
did any of them want to drown Silicon Valley to
make France the new hub of technology? Not no, but

(04:01):
that that would have been That would have been fun.
There is there, there is. There is a pretty good
attack on OPEC though. Um. Yeah, so it was like
you you've got in this period of time, number one,
the world wasn't quite so bleak, so terrorism was like
a lot more fun, um and it's a lot cooler.
Everybody's like walking random machine pistols. They got like fucking

(04:22):
bell bottoms, great great outfits. You've got all these cool
like different you know, liberation movements that aren't all religious
extremists and stuff. It's a fun time to talk about terrorism. Um,
and the main thing people do isn't just suicide bomb
others too and fire randomly into businesses full of people. Um. Yeah,

(04:42):
we're gonna talk a lot about plane hijackings, skyjackings. Yeah,
I just keep thinking of now Saturday Night Live episodes
from my childhood. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot
of those eighties episodes make jokes, and there's like the
movie Airplane, there's a joke. But we'll talk about We're
all that in a second. So we're gonna talk abou
the Golden Age of terrorism, and that's mostly gonna be

(05:03):
part one. We're mostly going to talk about sky jackings
and the Japanese Red Army, which is a fun group.
And then part two was going to be all Carlos
the Jackal, who used to be the most wanted terrorists
in the world and is a neat guy, I mean,
a monster. Maybe he was definitely the one in the
Day of the Jackal. Well that's actually where his name

(05:25):
came from, but when they made the movie about it, it
it was pretty inspired. But anyway, Yeah, Carlos the Jackal,
um who as you can tell by his incredible nickname,
um one of the coolest terrorists. A lot about it
probably and sucks out the morrow somewhere he was he was,
he was one of the guys who was like there

(05:46):
for all of Black September. So he may have had
to eat a couple of bones out in the deserts
of Jordan's. This is lots of things I'll be new
to me. Yeah. So, but before we get into anything else,
I want to start by talking about the phenomenon that
most defined the golden age of terrorism, which is skyjacking.
And no, that does not refer to masturbating on an aircraft,

(06:07):
because masturbating on an aircraft isn't a crime, and in
some cases it's actually mandatory. I don't know they're aware
of that, Um, I've seen a very specific movie from
the seventies that implies that. Right. Oh yep, yeah, I
don't opening INVESTI Beethoven. There's a lot of mandatory sex
on airplanes. Well, I'm very supportive of skyjacking. That kind

(06:28):
of skyjacking and the other kind of skyjacking. Actually both
kinds of skyjacking. So the kind of skyjacking that we're
talking about today involves the hijacking of planes, which was
a thing that used to happen back in the day
before al Qaeda kind of ruined it forever. Um, nobody
gets to enjoy an air It used to be fun.
Hijacking airplanes used to be a joyful affair. Um, and

(06:50):
they ruined. That's really the crime. Okay, I probably shouldn't.
So the first recorded skyjacking occurred on February eighteen thirty
one and are to keep up Peru when a group
of passenger plans they were really like one of the
crazy things when you study aviations, like how fucking quick.

(07:11):
It was like, well, now we're just flying these things
all over the damn place. Yeah, it was paying hijacking
and now we're sky skyjacking, skyjacking, very hijacking. So the
first one, yeah, a keeper our equippa whatever. Peru, when
a group of rebel soldiers accosted two American pilots and
tried to force them at gunpoint to drop profit propaganda
leaflets over Lima. Um. So the pilot said no, and

(07:34):
so the rebels occupied their plane and kind of sat
around for two weeks. Basically, Um, no one was good
at it yet flying no they were just kind of
sitting there on the tarmac being like fly drop. These
pamphlets flu around and the pilots were like no. And
then we were like okay, yes, yeah, they weren't dicks
like they were going to murder them, but they really

(07:56):
like less of a skyjacking and more of a sit in. Yeah,
it was an attempted skyjacking. Um, no one was good
at it yet, but yeah, that was the first attempt
at a skyjacking anywhere in the world that that is
on record as far as I can, as far as
I can find um. And yeah, they didn't get what
they wanted in the end. The pilots were just kind
of like no, and like, no one else knows how

(08:17):
to fly planes because it's nineteen thirty one, so you
really have no other options right now. I'm just also
in that two weeks, they weren't like how else can
we distribute pamphlets? You know how it is when you
kind of like get your heart set on something, Yeah,
and you're already there with a gun pointed at the
pilot and you're Timac and bro there's like military surrounding

(08:40):
you at the airport or something, it's never mind. Yeah,
I I don't know how much attention it drew, but um, yeah,
that's the first one. Now, the first US no SA,
someone would have to know about it. And it's the thirties. Yeah. Um.
The first U S skyjacker was a failed carney named

(09:03):
Ernest Pledge um and in nineteen thirty nine he he
shot his flight instructor in the back of the head
during a during a training flight while in mid air
and very nearly crashed because he shot his instructor in
the head it was flying at Also what a career trajectory. Yes,
failed Carny to sky jack to first American sky jack.

(09:26):
I'm no good at operating this ferris wheel. Perhaps I'll
try stealing at airplane. I mean, you know, we all
that's life. I'm just saying, there's one lever on the
ferris wheel. It's a little bit more complicated with the airplane.
So the Yeah, so Ernest, yeah, shoots his flight instructor,

(09:47):
manages to like I think, throw his corpse out of
the plane and like take control. Um, and then he
kind of goes on the run with this stolen plane. Um.
But almost immediately before he can really get into being
on the run, he stops for Hamburgers. I'm sorry, but
he stops for hamburgers. Like he lands the plane, lands

(10:09):
the plane. No, he lands the plane outside of a town,
and then he walks into town to get hamburgers. Well,
if you're going to go on the run, you need
to be fortified. He should have packed a lunch. Yeah,
So he gets caught by police immediately because he's covered
in blood, and the people at the Hamburger restaurant are like,
this guy seems like he might have done something. I'm sorry,

(10:29):
where was this? Um, let's see the I forget exactly
where Pletch was when he put some like some in
the middle of America, Right, So yeah, you know, sheriff
was like, hey, there's a plane and that guy is
covered in blood. Caper solved. That's good police work. Yeah.
So the Pletch case essentially invented a lot of early

(10:52):
legal codes for air piracy, which is what it's called
when you commit crimes like this in the air, and
it's the coolest crime you can get charged with. Right, Like,
if I had to go commit federal crimes that we're
going to put me in prison, I would want it
to be air piracy because then people like, what are
you in here for well, I was an air pirate
and you wear a little leather hat and monocle. Yeah,

(11:12):
I have a scar one Oh yeah, yeah, you gotta
get a scar on one cheek. That's something you request
from law enforcement during the standoff. Now, I'll let these
people live, but you need to wound me so in
such a way that I have exactly one Rakish scar
on my right cheek. That way, twenty years from now,
when Nicolas Cage comes to get me released on prison
in a special deal with the federal government because I

(11:34):
need to hijack a plane in order to get an alcatrat. Whatever. Wait,
that's just my pitch for about Nicolas with Nicholas Cage.
Isn't that the rocks like the rock but in the
air the time? Oh yeah, it's all it's a sky prison.
All the ground prisons are full, so they have sky prisons.
So it's like escape from anyway. Yeah. So uh yeah.

(11:55):
So the Pledge case invents a lot of the early
legal code for sky crime air piracy um. But by
the time the federal government started to oversee aviation in
nineteen fifty eight, hijacking a plane that still was not
technically a crime nobody really thought they'd need to put
that in the lackers. So as long as you're not
on the ground or the water, it's fine. Yeah, it

(12:18):
was fine. There were no laws in the sky in
nineteen beautiful time. It must have been perfect. So airports
had no security measures in place. There was just nobody
did anything about airplanes. Everyone was like, well, why would
we why would we even think for a second about
airports security. It was it was, it was like an
aggressive disregard for wanting to take like any precautions. You're saying,

(12:41):
it's like when we drive past the National Guard car lot, Yeah,
drive tanks and they just leave all the tanks sitting
there and they're just push button ignitions, which, yeah, we
shouldn't talk too much about that, but it's a thing
you should know. And Tullio Ortiz is the first guy
uh to hijack a plane successful, And he gets on

(13:02):
a flight bound for Key West and he locks himself
in the bathroom. Then he slips a note underneath the
door and he warns everyone he's got a bomb and
he says he'll detonate it if the flight isn't rerouted
to Havana. Now, Ortiz timed his attempt, well, because the
Bay of Pigs had happened just a couple of weeks earlier,
tensions were high between the United States and Cuba, and
Castro basically was like, oh, ship, Like this is a

(13:23):
great opportunity to say funk you to the United States, um,
and not actually risk anything. So he offers Ortiz political
Sanctuary's super romantic though, because he's locked in the bathroom,
he is threatening the plane. He's locked in the back
with the bomb. Right. Yeah, you wonder like a number
of things about this, um okay, And my only other

(13:44):
question is it he just want to lift to Cuba
or was he taking the plane there for some reason
or because he just wanted to lift to Cuba. He
just wanted to go to Cuba the way way he
could kind of worked at that point. Really yeah, I
mean the Bay of Pigs had just happened. But you
go to another country and like just round a little bit.
I don't know if it was that easy in that time.

(14:05):
You could lock yourself in the bathroom and slip whatever
the reasoning or Teaz decides this is the way he's
going to Cuba. Um, and he doesn't like it there.
He actually tries to leave and then gets put in
prison in Cuba. It takes him like fifteen years to
get back to the United States. Um, So he regrets
his decision very soon quickly. Sometimes you make your bed

(14:26):
and then you lie in it. Yeah, and then you
gotta live in Cuba, which I don't know right now,
maybe not the worst bed in the world. So yeah,
so or tease. It doesn't work out well for him.
He's not super happy with the decision that he made
to hijack a plane and get to Cuba. UM. But
a lot of people suddenly realize once he's done it,
like it's that easy, Like, well, all you gotta do,
I want to go to Cuba. So three more US

(14:49):
planes were hijacked and taken to Cuba over the course
of nineteen sixty one. UM And afterwards it becomes it
becomes a meme. UM. In the next like eight years,
a hundred and seventies seven skyjackings were committed worldwide, and
more than seventy percent of them involved an attempt to
divert a plane to Cuba. So Cuba is the place
to the place to go if you are jacking a plane,

(15:12):
if you're an airline or government maybe just let people
fly to Cuba, right, Yeah, that might have been an option.
Um you know, there's a number of reasons. It's free essentially,
like you can get a real cheap ticket and then
just demand it go to Cuba because you've got a gun.
But also, it was the seventies. It was real cheap
to fly do everything. It was the Golden Age, and

(15:34):
you could smoke on airplane. You could smoke. Everybody's smoking
the like a hundred percent of the people involved in
all of these hijackings are smoking the entire time. That
is something we have to keep in mind. Um. So, yeah,
Cuba comes like the motherfucking place to go if you're
hijacking a plane, and the reason to hijack a plane.
So how Cuba's got like a pretty decent airport set up, right, Like,

(15:57):
because otherwise I could see this being a problem. I've
ever heard that it was a problem. I think they
I don't know much about the Cuban Cuban airport. Just
imagine air traffic controller in Cuba and like the nightmare
of like, oh god, we got another one. Not a
lot of other traffic into Cuba. I don't think in
this period of time. So I just have one more question, though,
what did Cuba do with the planes afterwards? They just

(16:18):
give them that getting to that. So, the reasons why
people would hijack sky jack planes and take them to
Cuba were very varied. Everybody had like a different purpose
behind it. Um, But the del Castro kind of helped
Um make his country a more desirable destination by letting
everyone in the world know that Cuba just kind of
would take in anybody who stole a plane. Like, if

(16:40):
I'm steal a plane, you can land in Cuba and
live here. Was like essentially what he told everybody Um.
And there were a lot of ways in which he
benefited from the situation. For one thing, it was good propaganda.
All these people leaving the decade and West like traveled
to this socialist paradise of Cuba. Um. But more than anything,
it meant hard currency for Castro. See airlines had to

(17:02):
pay to get their planes returned, and eventually Cuba settled
on a standard fee of seventy five hundred dollars per plane,
So every time a plane got skijacked, they got a
pile of cash to return it. Um. Yeah, So that's
that's their little industry develops. I mean of this, you
build your own commercial airline one plane at a time.
But I guess that works. And just to crunch the

(17:22):
numbers here for you said, so there was about a
hundred and twenty or so, well know about like a
hundred and thirty years something like that trips to Cuba. Yeah, okay,
so that's not bad money. Up. I do it for
a living. So uh yeah, Now a number of people. Um,

(17:45):
there were a lot of reasons people ski jack planes
for Cuba, including like some folks were just kind of
mentally ill and decided to do it. Um. Other folks
chose Castro's capital because they were true believers in communism.
They convinced themselves that they would be greeted as revolutionary
heroes if they success. We got a ransom from, you know,
some government and took it to Cuba. One skyjacker recalled thinking,
at the start of his endeavor, in a few hours,

(18:07):
it would be that dawn in a new world. I
was about to enter paradise. Cuba was creating a true democracy,
a place where everyone was equal, where violence against blacks
and justice and racism, where things of the past. I
had come to Cuba to feel freedom at least once.
There are a number of non white people whose skyjack
planes to Cuba because they're just kind of like, fuck
this bullshit and the United States in the seventies, I'm

(18:27):
going to Cuba in the Black liberation struggle. There's a
lot of people who get broken out of jail and
get to Cuba somewhere another, so better place than jail,
that's what people say. Um, yeah, So the reality of
the situation, UM, I don't know. It differed for everybody,
but it was less rosy than a lot of skyjackers

(18:48):
had anticipated. Um. For one thing, just as a general rule,
governments that put a lot of value on law and
order don't like people who hijack planes, even if those
people believe the same fixed they do. So like, thanks
for the plane, we get dollars out of it, but
I forgot it was still like at some point two

(19:12):
hundred thousand dollars or something. But now that you brought
us this plane, you're also the kind of person who
steals planes by pointing guns and moms out of them.
So we don't really trust you, is what we're saying.
Kind of person who's not one of our highly trained
doctors in our very good medical system. Yeah, um so.
According to Wired quote, Castro had a little bit disdained

(19:34):
for the hijackers themselves, whom he considered undesirable malcontents. After
lying landing at Jose Martie, which I guess is the airport,
hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that
served as the headquarters of G two Cuba secret police.
There they were interrogated for weeks on end, accused of
working for the CIA, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The lucky ones were then sent to live at Cassa
de Troncitos, the hijackers house decrupt dormitory in southern Havana,

(19:59):
where each American was allocated sixteen square feet of living space.
The two story building eventually held as many as sixty hijackers,
who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of forty
pesos each skyjackers who rubbed their G two interrogators the
wrong way. Meanwhile, we're dispatched to squalid sugar harvesting camps
where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. At these tropical goologs,
inmates were punished with machette blows. Political agitators were publicly executed,

(20:22):
and captured escapees were dragged across razor sharp stocks of
sugarcane until their flesh was stripped away. One American hijacker
was beaten so badly by prison guards that he lost
an eye. Another hanged himself in his cell. So it's like, wow,
kind of a mixed bag. Yeah, he stole a whole
plane just for that, because sixteen feet of living space,
that's that's two feet by eight feet. That's like a

(20:44):
cop back to talking about career trajectories of hijackers. You
really got to have an end goal in mind. Better,
jacking itself is not cannot be the end goal. Better
to be the broker who's arranging the transfer of the
planes back to their that's the growth industry. Maybe it's
also funny that a communist country would take the people

(21:07):
who put in the hard labor and you know, expropriate that. Yeah, yeah,
you know, all governments are kind of the same when
you get on the other hand, depending on where you
lived before, at least you're warm now, Yeah, you're warm now.
It works out for some of them, right, Like, there's
got to be some people that like getting good with

(21:29):
the G two folks, and I don't know. I assume
it worked out for some people, but it's it's a
rough it's a rough situation for most of them. Now,
the stories that kind of came out about how not
ideal it was to become a skyjacker and go to
Cuba didn't stop people from jacking. One of the jackers
was a thirty or four year old Cuban exile who
simply couldn't live any longer without the taste of his

(21:49):
mother's free holes. He'd apparently like left as a kid
like the yeah, and like one of his mom's soup,
which is I hope he got a lot more soup.
I don't know. A plane, so we had to steal
a plane. Really, that was That was a decision you
can make because there were essentially no risks, Like it
was not dangerous to hijack a planets. Also, I don't

(22:09):
know what their relationship was like, but after that he
and his mom got along pretty good, you would have
to hope, so right. Yeah. Another was a sociology student
who wanted to study communism. Uh. And of course there
were non Cuba related jackings. Twenty eight year old Trust
fund kid hijacked a Delta Airlines flight well dressed as
a cowboy. He received fifty thou dollars and parachuted out.

(22:30):
He horribly injured himself upon landing and was immediately caught. Yeah,
way to go trust fund kids. Yeah, I just got
into Cuba, buddy. So skyjackings represented a problem for the
airline industry, but not really a big one. Most ski
jackings would cost the airline between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Uh.
And since passengers were basically never harmed, like, there wasn't

(22:52):
really a lot of desire among like the people buying
flights for it to be stopped, like it wasn't it
wasn't a horrible issue from most because to doing business. Yeah,
got a detour to Cuba. Yeah, yeah, that was the thing.
Like a skyjacking meant like some excitement for everybody on
the plane. You might get a free night in Havana
or something, you know. I assume it wasn't great for everybody,
but it wasn't Like, it wasn't a big problem. And

(23:13):
again people basically never got hurt. Proposals were made to
add X rays to airports and begin scanning passengers but
this was shot down as an unreasonable violation UM. Basically,
like airlines were like, people will never submit to this.
Fortunately we never did, and nobody ever changed about that.
So kind of one by one, all of the airlines
like looked at this problem of hijackings every year, many

(23:36):
many of them, and we're like, I guess we'll just
kind of right it out. Fuck it. I mean, what's
the worst outcome you can imagine from people hijacking planes?
It's fine, No one's gonna like fly them into buildings.
Uh So the federal government had a little bit more
on the line and was kind of less willing to
let this keep happening, being the federal government. All these

(23:59):
jackings were international embarrassment, and they also helped fund because
a lot of times people would like the jackers would ransom,
you know, the passengers and stuff, and this funded terrorist
organizations around the world, including particularly a lot of like
Palestinian liberation organizations and stuff. So that was a real
issue for the State Department UM and a real issue
for the US government. In a nineteen sixty eight a

(24:21):
Senate hearing was held on the matter. Irving rip who
represented the f a A, told the assembled Congressman, it's
an impossible problem short of searching every passenger. If you've
got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana
and he has got a gun, that's all he needs,
and there's no way to figure out that he has
that gun. And certainly wouldn't search every single passenger before
they boarded a plane. That would be madness. Yeah, well, yeah,

(24:44):
that's actually the what I'm about. Yes, quote from Wired.
Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Rips Gloom by raising
the possibility of using metal detectors or X ray machines
to screen all passengers. He noted that these relatively new
technologies were already in place at several maximum security prisons
and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. I

(25:04):
see no reason why similar devices couldn't be installed at
airport checking gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns
or other weapons, just prior to implaning, Smithers said, But
Rip dismissed. The senator's suggestion is certain to have a
bad psychological effect on passengers. It would scare the pants
off people, plus people would complain about invasion of privacy.
No one made any further inquiries about electronics. If you

(25:28):
someone asks you if you have guns before you get on,
to take a single solitary action to make sure people
aren't carrying whatever gun they want onto a plane, like
people will not fly, It will ruin the industry. And
I think history that I won't get on a plane
without my scorpion machine pistol. You know, occasionally I think
about how people believe in this idea of the forward

(25:50):
progress march of history. This is a solid education that
we have headed because they were right in the seventies
by god um so two about absolutely everything, especially cigarettes
and cocaine, which is not addictive here it's not addictive.
Mix as well with cigarettes in a way that again

(26:11):
absolutely not addictive. That's what everyone and smoking. You know,
it feels really good everything jacking a plane, Yeah, really,
gripping tightly the handle of a scorpion machine pistol as
you scream wildly the word havana over and over again
to the flight attendants. I assume, yeah, huge, yeah, and enormous.

(26:36):
A leather vest like you wouldn't believe such a leather
vest called medallion that I could use as a coaster.
Oh yeah, medallion's where you keep the extra bullets too.
It's like a pez thing. So two weeks after the
Senate inquiry, a forklift operator named or In Richard's hijacks
at Delta Airlines flight from a forklift upgrade from a forklift.

(26:57):
He springs his trap over West Virginia a gun on
the first man he meets in the aisle after leaving
a seat, and the first man he met in the
aisle after leaving a seat wounded up, wound up being
a sitting senator from Mississippi. Who at that. So the
whole situation got resolved peacefully in Miami, but it spooked
the federal government, who suddenly realized that elected officials could

(27:18):
very easily be skyjacked over like political issues. And like
we she probably had this motherfucker off at the past, right,
this might not end well for us, I suppose. Yeah,
So the State Department, like again, no one knew what
to do because you couldn't search people. Look, it's the air,
there's no laws. The State Department actually seriously proposed offering

(27:41):
all Americans free one way trips to Cuba in order
to stop it. Like again, if we just say any
American can go to Cuba for free once forward is
a lie because there was a point where we all
could have just taken a free trial Cuba. Castro actually
said no to that, with the US just offloading all,
you know, sucking shitty people. I've never had any reason

(28:02):
to critique anything Photol Castra has done, but right now,
this is this is the first thing that I'm aware of.
I mean, okay, stripping people's flesh off the sugar cane,
and that was not that, it was a little bit
of that. I mean, if you're gonna strip people's flesh,
and if you've got to strip off people's flesh, you
might as well use sugar exactly. I've always said that. Yeah, yeah,

(28:24):
it's like it's basically the same thing that like those
fancy salons do when they make they use the sugar
to make the thing for depilating here. But but it's
your muscular chair off of your skeleton. Okay, well we
don't need to be like, you know, nobody's perfect. Is
kind of the point here, and that's really what we're
talking about um today. So yeah, Castra is like, no,

(28:44):
I'm not going to just take all of the Americans
who want to go to cute think they might like Cuba.
Um that there's an alternate timeline where Cuba becomes the
absolutely like Cuba becomes Silicon Valley because they went with
that plan. Could it could have could have been pretty sweet,
actually right? Um? Yeah, So he refuses to accept them,
so the f a A forms an special Anti Jacking

(29:07):
task Force instead. Um, and they're I don't understand. They
are deeply, deeply confused about what their job is from.
So uh, for reasons I will never understand, they solicit
American citizens for suggestions on how to solve the problem,
and they're immediately buried in just awful awful suggestions like

(29:27):
thousands of letters that are all stupid as shit, including
installing trapdoors outside cockpits, army stewardess is with tranquilizer darts,
making passengers wear boxing gloves so should they couldn't grip guns,
and playing the Cuban national anthem before takeoff, and arresting
anyone who knew the lyrics. I mean, I have no

(29:47):
problem with that last one. That's think boxing gloves would
be fantastic. That would be very funny. I'm also just
now imagining the movie Airplane, but everyone is wearing boxing
gloves the entire time and what a bit that would
be quite funny. Well, they would have to rework some scenes,

(30:10):
but they wouldn't fly to Cuba. That woman would still
be hysterical in the lineup waiting for it. So not
all of the suggestions were immediately rejected by the government.
The most popular one among the f A was the
idea that they could just build a scale mock replica
of the airport in Cuba in South Florida, so that
they could trick skyjackers into thinking they'd reach out, um

(30:33):
right next to where they staged the moon lie right right,
yeah exactly. But yeah, which, which, of course isn't they
put in Florida. That's where you put your fake moon.
They're such similar anyway. Um yeah, So the the f
A was like, seriously, like what if we just build
a fake airport, But then they decided it would be
too expensive. So the airlines meanwhile just decided to make

(30:53):
like policy be to completely comply with skyjackers. In always,
they actually banned employees from taking any act and whatsoever
to scott to stop a sky jack It's like if
you work in a retail store. The policy about shoplift. Yes,
and this actually winds up having an impact on nine eleven.
Happens the way it does because at that time there
had not been like a plane hijacking where that sort

(31:15):
of thing had been done, and the wisdom was still
you know in two thousand one, Oh, they're gonna ransom
us or take us somewhere. They're gonna fly us somewhere,
like they want to get money or something. Um. So
that's part of why people didn't really fight back until
they started, you know, that last plane kind of realized
what was happening. On the other hand, no one was like,

(31:35):
they're not using a gun. Well you couldn't, you know,
they put some security measures. I'm pretty sure that you
could no longer do the fish called Wanda and just
flip the gun around. But it did used to be
that easy, is it is. It isn't like you just
would carry a gun onto a plane. Um. So, I know,
Simonon Lawton ruined it for everybody. He really did that.

(31:59):
That's his want. No, okay, so the airlines, yeah again,
decide like everybody's just gotta do whatever the the hijackers say.
So all plane cockpits in the United States were for
a period of time equipped with charts of the Caribbean
c regardless of the flights destination, because it was just
known like you might have to fly to Cuba, like

(32:20):
any flight in the country, you might wind up going
to Cuba. Like you just accessorized that a little bit.
You get like some palm trees and everybody's got like
some coconut drinks. Yeah, you could keep a special set
like yeah, rum like Cuba. Well probably not Cuba libres
because those won't go over well once you're in Cuba. Um. Yeah, anyway,
uh so, Yeah, skyjacking. It was a viral meme right

(32:42):
for eight years or so, and really the year in
which it hit its height was nineteen sixty nine. Yeah,
eleven US flights were commandeered in the first six weeks
of the year alone. Was really excited by the number. Yeah,
they really were. They wanted to make it count. One
plane was taken by released mental patient in his three
year old son, which which the gun. I'm sure it's

(33:06):
a less fun story than it is think. I think
saying that a plane was hijacked by anyone and their
three year old son maybe gives the three year old
son too much credit. I don't know, have you met
in those three year olds in the midst of a tantrum?
They could totally hijack a plane. Because also that sounds
like a movie. That sounds like a movie with Tom
Hanks in the eighties where like, you know, he gets

(33:27):
out of the middle institution and like his kid wants
to teach him a lesson about had in. I don't know,
you could make a fun, feel good movie about it.
Then he falls in love with the stewardess. Yeah. And
then they go to Cuba. Yeah. Yeah, Then they go
to Cuba, um and help ignite a communist worldwide revolution
like Tom Hanks has always wanted to do. So yeah.

(33:50):
One plane in nineteen sixty nine was diverted by a
college student who was armed with bug spray, so you
didn't really have to be all that well equipped I'm sorry,
armed with but I think he did like a flamethrower thing,
but I'm not really sure. Um. And another was commandeered
by a retired Green Beret whose plan was specifically to
beat Castro to death with his fists. So this was

(34:14):
this is nine six nine, Yes, so this was before
any of the Rambo movies would have given him that idea. Yeah,
I think the best part of this idea he had
on his own. I think the best part of that
is that you've already described what happened once people landed
in Cuba. Yeah. So, uh, speaking of landing in Cuba,

(34:34):
you know what Cuba loves rum Yes, not America, but
broader than that. Cuba. If anyone knows anything, it's that
they love products and services. Huge fans of corporations, and
several of those things that I've just listed are in
facts and services. There might be an ad for rum

(34:54):
or for cigars, or for having a lot of doctors,
like a really tremendous amount of doctors, and really good
hurricane response and just very response. It could be an
ad for any of those things. Um. So here we go.
All right, we're back so um. In this period of time,

(35:17):
there was exactly one reasonable person who worked in the
entire US government. Uh, and he was a guy named
John Daily. He was the f a a's chief psychologist,
and he decided that we should probably do something about
this problem. And the thing that we should do, rather
than search every passenger or all that stuff, was trying
to analyze like all of the different hijackings in the past,
and particularly all of the people who had committed them,

(35:38):
to try and determine if there were certain key behaviors
that might like give away the fact that to hijack
a plane. So his research convinced him that all these
people had done things that had marked them out as
potential hijackers while they were checking in. Uh So, these
behaviors weren't uniform. But Daily believed that if you trained
airline employees to watch for a certain range of suspicious

(35:59):
behaviors and then search the people who seemed like might
be a plane hijacker, the fact that some of these
folks would be innocent wouldn't piss anybody off too much
if it meant less skyjacking. So you like repeatedly checking
your gun and asking if anyone knew how to get
to Cuba. Instead of saying that guy is repeatedly checking
his gun, better better let him get on this plane,
you say that guy's repeatedly checking his gun, I'm gonna

(36:22):
ask him if he plans to hijack the plane, but
not prevent him from bringing the gun onto the plane. Well,
they tried to, so it actually worked really well. Um,
mainly it was just the fact that there was now
a possibility of being searched by the law before a flight.
That scared off most h that was that was great.

(36:45):
There was actually there were reports from airports around the
country in this period of time. For weeks after these plants,
Like after airports started doing this of like airport security
finding guns and knives and bombs stashed in the bushes outside,
they realized and dumped it out. We got to hide
it in the bushes. They're never gonna let us take

(37:05):
this to Cuba. Yeah, by nineteen seventy, the skyjacking epidemic
was mostly over, so it really worked. This is part
of why, like dB Cooper, that guy in seventy one,
who I think part of why it was so noteworthy
is that like they've really gotten a handle on hijacking
for the most part, and then he managed he does
it jack um. But this like that, it turns out
like a lot of people were just hijacking planes because

(37:28):
there was literally no barrier to hijacking plane. I gotta say,
if we were playing Minecraft and you were able to
hijack planes and there was nothing in the game to
prevent you from hijacking planes, I think a lot of
people playing Minecraft with a hijacking plane. I think a
lot of people would in Minecraft hijack a plane, which
is not a thing that anyone in the real nobody
should ever do. Yeah. Um so yeah, by nineteen seventy,

(37:51):
they've kind of gotten a handle on the jackings in
the sky. Now up to this point, uh on us
skyjackings because they were very silly, but there were skyjackings
all around the world, and a lot of them were
like like I was saying earlier, like a lot of
different This is kind of like the height of of
kind of international solidarity with a lot of like Palestinian
liberation movements. So there are a lot of different groups

(38:14):
kind of allied with different Palestinian groups who would do
it to like help fund them and stuff. And this
is a big deal. They happened in the US, but
also like all around the world. Um, and it was
you know, a thing that other groups would do to
kind of fund their activities or to make political points. Um.
And this kind of brings me to the story of
one of the most successful and interesting jackings in all

(38:37):
of sky history, the story of the Japanese Red Army. Yeah,
and there's a lot to this story. This is this
is a fun one. This is one of the funnest
stories in all of terrorism. Um. And there's a lot
of fun stories terrorism. It's really just laughs all the
way down, um, but this is all the way yeah,

(39:00):
like that like that falling Man on nine okay. Um.
So to tell this story, we have to talk a
bit about Japan in the nineteen sixties. Japan was just
fifteen years out of World War Two at the start
of the decade, and thus only fifteen years out of
like literally centuries of rule by emperors and shogun and
they didn't have a lot of experience with democracy. It

(39:21):
had not been an open society. Um. And you know,
then there's a bunch of nukes going off and Douglas
MacArthur is in charge for like five years that nothing
could go wrong. Douglas MacArthur, by the way, a few
years later would suggest so strenuously that he was fired
for it putting it into the Korean War by nuking

(39:43):
all of China basically, so not they didn't go with
that option, huh no, no, not a not the most
even tempered guy. But he opens Japan up and it's
his job to like make sure that they democratize and
stop being authoritarian, so like overnight, Japan's a democracy and
people who had once lived or died on the words

(40:03):
of a single man suddenly had the right to go
and protest the government in the streets. MacArthur also freed
all political prisoners in Japanese jails. Despite the fact that
he himself was like a right wing radical, McArthur's hard right.
He frees all of Japan's in prison left wing radicals,
including communists. Um. And this is part of why the
Japanese Communist Party during this period of time is kind

(40:24):
of known for being more pro democracy than in the
other party in the country and very different from like
other communist parties in that part of the world at
the time. And there's there's some very famous authors from
from the postwar Japanese period. Uh oh A I know
is one of them who Yeah, it's like hardline anti
capitalist communism and also really excited about the post war constitution. Yeah. Yeah,

(40:48):
it's clearly there's a lot of cool stuff in it, exactly. Um.
And it's one of the reasons MacArthur is such an
interesting dude to like look at his because he's like
he has a big impact on the constitution. He's a
monster also, but like for there's a brief period of
time where he's like doing what you'd broadly say are
the right things. And so the Communist Party in Japan
actually goes from about a thousand members pre war because

(41:09):
it was illegal, to a hundred and fifty thousand members
by nineteen fifty, just five years. Another major major change
in Japan was the education system. The new government extended
the possibility of higher education to everyone, not just a
privileged few. The fact that there were now more students
on campus and more possibilities for political involvement led to
an explosion in Japanese activist culture, and MacArthur supported this too,

(41:29):
under the belief that even left wing activism on campus
would help flush out Japanese instructors who still held lingering
nationalist beliefs. So that's kind he lets the left rises,
He's like, so this will flush out the nationalists. He
hates communists, but he's but he hates the guys. He
was just fighting and anti fascism, anti told holitarian first

(41:50):
kind of he was pretty he was. It was more
he specifically hated the old Japanese government, and he knew
that they really hated the left, and letting these kids
march in the street would kind they're not going to
be able to shut up about exactly. That's more the reason,
Like McArthur's not doing this because he's a nice dude.
And and there's there's certainly things to bear that out

(42:11):
because you have like Maschima and his Shield Society, and
there's there's some really wild right way uprisings that happen
in post or Japan, just irate about the idea and
that like a switch. Yeah, the emperor can't order everyone
to die anymore, and that is unacceptable, the worst thing
that's ever happened. Um So, yeah, students self governing associations

(42:33):
pop up at campuses across Japan, and they functioned kind
of like unions, um, giving kids a voice on their campus.
In a bunch of these associations formed up into a
national league. They called themselves Zenga Kurin, which is short
for All Japan League of Students Self Government. Now, most
of these people were communists, but there's you know, you
know communists, there's a whole lot of different kinds of communists.

(42:55):
It's like skills there, right, there's there's Lenin, and there
Trotsky Stalin. At this point most Stalin. Yeah, those are
all the kids that I know. And at this point,
you know, even the people who are like Stalinists aren't
really Stalinists by what we'd call them, like, because if
you're a Stalinist, then you don't really know most of

(43:18):
what Stalin did. Being a Stalinist now and denying everything, Yeah,
well and he hadn't done some of that stuff. He
had not done all of that stuff. You've done a
lot of it. Have a goldfish pond, um, Yeah, I
think so, probably, Yeah, so, yeah, these guys started, these
these students start protesting. Like a big one is US

(43:38):
bases on Japanese soil, and like the no base movement.
You'd still see when I was over there, you'd see
a bunch of graffiti for that, Like that's a big thing, um,
because the US military presence in Japan is it's massive, Yes,
absolutely on Okinawa. And have a lot of a lot
of fond memories of driving class past like missile silos
that are just like in the countryside I have Okanawa,

(44:00):
and my impression is that there's not much too Okinawa
other than military. Oh no, Okanowa fucking rules. Like there's
a lounch of cool sh sorry, that's what is Like.
The bases are big, like it's it's it's a it's
big and it has a major impact on the local
culture for sure. Um but there's a like there's a
lot of cool ship going on another um so yeah,

(44:22):
so they start protesting US bases on Japanese soil. And
this is where Douglas MacArthur stops being on board. He wasn't,
wasn't it wasn't, but yeah, why not? But it won't
won't the fascists be upset that? Oh they won't be
upset about that, will they know? That's when MacArthur stops
being okay with the students speaking their minds. Uh So

(44:43):
in nineteen forty nine he backs a bill the like
the the Japanese government puts out that specifically, the Ministry
of Education pushes introduces this bill that would curtail the
right to protest. So this really pisses off studentship in Japan,
who are again able to protest best and organized for
the first time, and more than two hundred thousand of
them take to the streets and shut down universities across

(45:06):
the country. Uh. It was so shocking that the government
was forced to back pedal and scrap the bill, But
more attempts followed. In nineteen fifty two, the government tried
to pass an anti subversives bill that was basically Japanese
style McCarthy ism. Twenty students attempted to storm the Royal Palace,
hurling stones that lines of armored riot police, who eventually
beat them back with such violence that two students died

(45:27):
in the fighting. Um yeah, heck of a riot. Uh
So soon mass street battles become the norm. The Japanese
government's refusal to do anything as a result of these
protests caused the formation of a new movement in Japanese politics,
the New Left, who believed that electoral politics were hopeless
and only revolution could bring progress. Um, which doesn't sound
like anything that's ever ever come to that. Conclusions based

(45:49):
on police violence certainly not only happened this one time
in this one country. Um yeah, I'm gonna quote now
from a write up in the Asia Pacific Journal. New
Left street demonstrations steadily escalated into violent clashes resembling medieval battles.
The students wore color coded crash helmets and blasted with
the names of their organizations, carried long fighting polls, and

(46:10):
through stones or fire bombs at the police. They confronted
squads of riot police wearing medieval style helmets, who battled
the students with tall aluminum body shields and police batons,
supported by water cannon trucks that spread fire hoses of
water laced with tear gas at the students. At the
peak of the protest cycle in nineteen sixty nine, Japanese
authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations

(46:31):
of thousands of students. This turned the tide and in
part by producing splits within the new left groups. So
there's part of a reason why Japan is kind of
so famously disconnected from like politics and and people don't
like do ship like this anymore. To a large extent,
arrested because they arrested and beat and yeah that does

(46:53):
sound cool, and the long sticks and the hurling. Okay. So,
by the early nineteen seventies, the Zenga Kuran, which are
again these like student self governing organizations, it started turning
away from the Japanese Communist Party and mass largely so
that they could have a chance of influencing electoral politics.
So like, yeah, they decide they don't want to be
they're not new left right. They want to try and

(47:14):
actually like make things happen at the ballot box, and
the radical left is increasingly being like, that's bullshit. It's
all about fighting cops in the streets and the kind
of more moderate people are like, but that has horrible
consequences and I don't want to do it. Um, this
sounds like a summary of the entire seventies after nineteen
sixty yep Son, it's a thing that keeps happening. So

(47:36):
uh yeah, the larger number of moderate liberals broke away
from the radical left and stopped protesting, and the radical
left did what the radical left nearly always does and
devoured itself. Yeah. Yes, is this specific to Japan or
is this just this is literally any movement that's ever happened,
and also that's ever happened in the seventies after sixty

(48:00):
eight occurred. It's the thing that keeps happening. That's why
the earth will soon be an uninhabitable anyway. Communist radicals
in Japan decided that non violent resistance was no longer practical.
Japanese riot police were too good at their jobs, and
less committed members of the left were no longer trust
were the allies. The communist chunks of the left began
to split between those who wanted to continue the old
methods of protest in propaganda and those who wanted to

(48:21):
actually wage global war against capitalism, I mean a literal
war in that sense. Now, these types wound up in
a number of different groups, the most influential of which
came to eventually be known as the Japanese Red Army. Now,
my understanding from the latter twentieth century is any time
that something's called the Red Army, everything is good from

(48:44):
there on. Red Army, faction, re army cards, those are
all reds. Yeah, So Japanese Red Army, everything that's coming up,
the Soviet Red Army famously no war crimes committed. Um,
that's why the Polish people we're so happy anyway. So
I'm gonna quote now from a fascinating rite up an

(49:05):
Unseen Japan that really goes into these guys, and they do.
Actually a great multipart essay on the whole history of
the Japanese Red Army. That's very cool. The leader in
ideological master of the newly minted Red Army faction was
one Shiomi Takaya, an avowed Trotskyite for whom a violent
international revolution was the goal. In Shiomi's eyes, any attempt
at coexistence with the imperialist West, as was then being

(49:26):
professed by Soviet Premiere Kruschev following his shocking repudiation of Stalinism,
where a corruption of true Marxism, world revolution required unflinching
required unflinching action. Imperialism needed to be purged from the world.
In Japan was the place to start. If they joined
hands with other revolutionary forces in Cuba, Palestine, Korea, and Vietnam,
soon the entire world might glow red. The struggle first

(49:49):
took the form of an internesting battles with their within
their parent organization, the Communist League. Hostages were taken and
the headquarters stormed. One Red Army soldier died after he
slipped and fell from a high window will escaping being
held hostage at the League headquarters at Nihon University. Death
death had become a part of the Red Army mythos
from its very first days. So so they're they're taking

(50:10):
hostages from their own in their own headquarters. Yeah, how
it's going. Well, how can you go and fight the
capitalists if you cannot even properly purge your own ranks? Exactly? Yeah,
if there you're going to clean the house, you got
to clean your cloth. This is a story with a
real pergy ending to enjoy. The Red Army differed from

(50:32):
many of its fellow lefties by stating openly their desire
to commit violent actions against the state. They're propaganda heavily
sighted ly on Trotsky to make the case that violent
tactics would help spark a worldwide socialist revolution, which would
inspire a global revolutionary army to rise up an armed
revolt with bombs and guns. This is the part that
I always find delightful is you have all of these

(50:56):
guys throughout history who keep being like, so, we're gonna
do this thing, and then when we do this thing,
a global army is going to materialize, and all of
a sudden, the thing we want is going to happen.
I mean as opposed for like, hey guys, you mask

(51:16):
for like four weeks and it basically being the seat
of a civil war. Yeah, Like, if there's one thing
that seems to be true. It's doing one thing doesn't
lead to unified action across the planet. If there's one
people thing people hate, it's doing things they really do.
I don't like it. And this was before Netflix. Yeah, yeah,

(51:38):
this is before Yeah, so you had a chance, but
it still wasn't great. So yeah, they started publicizing this.
The Red Army faction starts publicizing their desire to spark
a global armed socialist revolution before they even hold their
first meeting. And this created a lot of buzz around
the new organization. Where do you publicize that, by the way,
is that okay? I'm just wondering if that's like the
back page of the newspaper and like the help want

(51:59):
to the ads revolution wanted. Uh yeah, a lot of people.
There's a lot of a lot of buzz around them.
As this quote from an article in the Journal of
Asian Studies by Patricia Steinoff makes clear, the organization's first
public meeting, held at a public hall in Tokyo in
early September nineteen sixty nine, featured a massive display of
state authority. In addition to the ring of uniformed police

(52:20):
surrounding the building, plain closed police photographed the three hundred
people who entered, and more police stood around the back
of the hall watching on stage. Gonna make you maybe
a little bit less excited about openly calling for violent
interaction again. They loved this ship. They loved this ship.
They all made speeches wearing like ski masks and stuff,
so they couldn't be um. And they didn't get arrested

(52:42):
that day because it's not people say that stuff. But
everyone knew they were saying, we're going to break the
law very soon. Um and so yeah, and they're all
masked up, and it's pretty good, pretty good propagandic coup
because people hadn't done anything like that at that point. Yeah. So,
the various cells of the Red Army ran a handful

(53:03):
of mass gatherings protesting US bases and that sort of thing,
but the fiery young men and women in the Red
Army faction proved to have very little patients for such things.
They moved almost immediately to hijacking vehicles, bombing police stations,
and robbing banks. Once they hit a few months of
this under their belt, the leadership cadres of different Red
Army chapters decided to attempt to spark uprisings in three
different cities, and keeping with their international revolution obsession, they

(53:26):
timed this with the Days of Rage planned by the
Weatherman and a Black Panther rally in Chicago, which is, yeah,
it'sn't not bad, not necessarily bad. I think that news
cycle you're gonna you know, you're gonna dominate, You're going
to dominate in the news cycle. Yeah, maybe a very
busy year. It was a year to try that sort
of thing. You gotta give them that. So I'm gonna
quote from Patricia stein Off again, uh Seguin, which is

(53:47):
like was what like? The Red Army factions Japanese name
organized its fall uprisings with only slightly more secrecy than
it would have used for a public demonstration. Prior. Publicity
about the events prompted a series of riot police raids
on univer Firsty campuses, where local Sekegun chapters were stockpiling
poles and iron pipes for street fighting and glass bottles
for making Molotov cocktails. The Osaka and Kyoto raids involved

(54:09):
over two thousand riot police and resulted in nearly a
hundred arrests and sixty four indictments. These raids contributed directly
to a huge increase in student weaponry confiscated by police
in the second half of nineteen sixty nine. In the end,
the uprisings turned out to be relatively minor skirmishes in
which secgun members ran around the streets throwing fire bombs
at police stations. One area of sekigun innovation. Weaponry was

(54:30):
handled secretly. From the beginning, Sakegon threatened publicly to use
more powerful weapons, but the specific details were restricted to
those directly involved. A small sake Gun research and development
group composed of physics, chemistry, and medical students quickly invented
a hand grenade made by packing dynamite, pachinko balls and
a fuse into round metal containers in which Peace brand
cigarettes are sold. Soon after, a more powerful hand grenade

(54:52):
was devised, using a length of iron pipe as the casing.
Both weapons were designed to be thrown with a lit fuse.
Small groups of Sakegun members were taught the new technology
manufactured the bombs as a cottage industry. Yeah, they they
they get really going so and they I like that
there's a specific brand of cigarettes where they're like, this
is this is the grenade. Brandy called him Peace bombs. Yeah, Yeah,

(55:14):
they did, and if I don't know, If you don't,
this won't mean much if you don't know a lot
about Japan. But if you know Japan, the fact that
their grenades had pachinko balls in them is the most
Japanese thing they could have possibly done. Like that's um,
it's uh, it's like what it's like, you know what
old people in America do when they go to gamble
in vegas, like Pachinko's that, but like countrywide, it's just
like a it's like a it's like a like a

(55:37):
I don't know how to describe it. If they've never
seen people play pachinko. Yeah, it's kind of like beingo. Um,
it's kind of like bingo, and they use it to
make grenades, which is very fun. Yeah. So, whatever else
you can say about the Japanese Red Army, they didn't
act lack Kutzba Shiomi, the leader and his top officers
next launched a plan to raid the Prime Minister's home
and kidnap him in the dead of night in order

(55:57):
to stop him from reading meeting with Richard Nixon and
finalizing the are in of Okinawa to Japan. This action
was disguised as a mass training event in the mountains
where members would learn to use explosive steering assaults. Now sorry,
they disguised their plan to kidnap the prime minister as
we an organization that has repeatedly said that we are

(56:17):
going to violently overthrow the government. Are going to get
all our people together up in the mountains to practice
making bums our cover story. Have you noted an error
in in their thinking, a tactical shortcoming. I have not,
but I'm excited to see how it goes. And everyone
was like, you should go do that. That seems like
a really good plan. The way you'll be out of

(56:38):
the way during what and and this was in nine
sixty nine. I think I can't imagine that less than
you know, less than thirty years out from World War Two,
the Japanese government is going to have any problem with
this whatsoever. Well, you're going to be shocked then, because
they send hundreds of riots police to bust their loss

(57:00):
training drill um and enough Uh enough of the group
gets arrested at this point that the Red Army goes underground.
Their founder himself got arrested and he lost control of
the movement. Shortly thereafter, uh and I'm gonna continue quoting
from that right up in Unseen Japan here. Ironically, the
discovered materials reveal that the Red Army faction had functioned
on higher on a hierarchical structure that was anything but revolutionary.

(57:23):
Those from the most elite universities, such as Tokyo or
Meiji were selected for the highest level of authority. Secondary
authority went to those from major public universities, with the
next level being local establishments, those without a college education
or those who were in vocational school or high school
with the grunts of the organization. So this is like
such typical like yeah, business firm, company man, bullshit, Like

(57:45):
I don't know, you went to a state school, so
you get for violent communist insurrection. And you can tell
that like the people who went to those good schools
are the ones capable of making the really important good decisions,
like to disguise kidnapping the Prime Minister as an legal
bomb building party. Look, when I went to my elite university,

(58:06):
we did an entire class, and how the Prime Minister
doesn't care if you say you're going to make bombs
for a massive insurrection. Now, you did go to Brown
so I mean I'm just gonna put out there, considering
that you went to a fancier college than I went to.
I get to be in charge of the communist insurrection,
and you have to be a lieutenant. Get because I

(58:28):
dropped out of college. But you definitely recount to me
way more ridiculous conversations with people you went to college with,
as though they were normal. I'm sure that's true, and
I am equally sure that I have been so broken
by higher education that I don't know which conversations you're
talking about. Good country, consistent. We all. So, as time

(58:51):
went on, the Red Army drew in smaller and smaller
numbers of very committed communists. Those who were left after
the disastrous raid attempt were desperate to carry off something
big and so successful to wash away the townership defeat.
So they launched another series of bank robberies. And these
weren't the haphazard affairs from earlier in their history, but
actually well planned actions whose perpetrators would like switch multiple
train lines as they fled and disappeared into these networks

(59:13):
of safe houses. Uh. They they they kind of like
stuck the landing after a real bad, real bad I
don't know, I don't know enough about gymnastics. The Red
Army kept a careful watching the police, you know, whenever
the law caught onto one of their properties, and they
would like became famous for like right as the police
were about to raid them, they would like close out
their lease and leave and they would just be the
spotless apartment behind and they they yeah, that's like if

(59:38):
you've if you've seen the departed, then like that's the
little booties on your shoes at the end of just
just nailing it. Yeah, like we were so ready for
the fact that we cleaned. Yeah. Um so yeah. The
switching tactics actually enraged most of the imprisoned founders of
the group, which saw theft that harmed normal working people

(59:59):
is and a revolutionary But the remaining but I don't
know if their banks were, like I don't know what
any Japanese banking this is. They don't have. This is
the issue that people had that like that some of
the imprisoned founders had. Maybe the imprisoned founder should have
advocated for the fdi C in Japan and then they
could have been fine. I don't know. So the remaining

(01:00:20):
free members of the Red Army saw it more as
a question of survival. They used the money to buy
samurai swords and pipe bombs and plane tickets for nine
men on a March thirtieth, nineteen seventy flight from Tokyo
to Fukoa. I realized, but you did just say a
matter of survival and then moved straight to samurai swords
and pipe bombs, which having taught the necessities, having having

(01:00:41):
taught something about survival over the course of my life,
and I understand that, Yeah, you're going out in the woods,
first thing, you need samurai swords and pipe well, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's how how else are you gonna start a fire? Right?
And are you gonna hunt that rabbit without a samurai sword?
I thought you were going to hunt it with the pipe.
You can hunt anything with whatever. That's the beauty hunting. Um.

(01:01:02):
So yeah, they buy, they buy tickets for this flight
to Focca, And as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude,
the members of the Red Army stood up and grabbed
the weird tube, blank pieces of luggage they all stowed
under their seats. Uh, and they pull out samurai swords.
I thought it was just really starts searching things. But

(01:01:22):
at least one time, under no circumstances should we search things,
because that way lies totalitarianism. People will get angry, unlike
these nice young men with other tubes, Let me help you, sir.
So they pull out samurai swords and bombs, and their

(01:01:43):
leaders screams to the other passengers, raise your hands. We're
going to North Korea, which is not what you want
to hear on a flight. So in in nineteen this
is yah, I think seven is we're going to North
Korea as bad a thing to hear in seventy as
it is, it's not a great thing to hear. Okay,

(01:02:06):
that's not a great thing to hear, not as bad
for sure. I think that like the mass starvation and
stuff hadn't really be still around. This is actually kind
of like what a lot of North Koreans would call
like a Golden Age sort of period, so like it
had many tracked any of this people from Japan, part
of the Korean diaspora that was in Japan, not that
I'm aware of, no, Yeah, but I you know maybe,

(01:02:30):
um but I think these are all like specifically kind
of like Japanese middle class and upper middle class kids. Um.
So the problem and problem immediately arose as soon as
they announced that the destination was North Korea, which is
that the flight didn't have the fuel necessary to reach
North Korea. I mean details. Yeah, the pilot pointed this out,
and he convinced the skyjackers to let him land as

(01:02:51):
scheduled and refueled. They took this bait, and of course
the police had a shipload of people in the tarmac
there to meet them. H. So there's a bunch of
tense conversations, uh and a you're like negotiations. They released
twenty three people from the plane, women, children and the elderly,
and then the flight takes off again. Um, and the
pilot starts getting like navigational instructions from a source that's

(01:03:12):
like loudly claiming to be from Pyongyang, and so he
lands the plane again in what is supposed to look
like the North Korean tarmac with like a bunch of
soldiers in North Korean uniform. It's a fake airport that
the Japanese very quickly threw together, which so after the
US is like, no, we can't depend which says everything. Yeah,

(01:03:34):
we could have just had a fake Havannah airport in
Miami instead of the t s antly. We could have
had the normal Miami airport look like the Havannah airport.
Just Miami lives under Cuba law now, like whether or
not Cuba wants it, and the US is washing its
hands of the matter. Let's see what happens. Um. So

(01:03:56):
the Japan builds an airport in an hour. Yeah, they
built a fake airport real quickly. Um. And yeah, it's
pretty good they're fake airport. But they forget to cover
up the tail markings of a Northwest Airlines flight. Um. Yeah,
so the hijackers Northwest Airlines not flying. You know, they

(01:04:17):
didn't do a lot of not a lot of not
a lot of Seattle to Pyongyang flights at this point.
You know, it's a big it's a big route now.
But if it had just been Panama, everything would have
been fun. Yeah. Um. So yeah, the hijackers realize something
is wrong because they're pretty smart cookies. Um and yeah,
they refused to let anyone leave the plane before the

(01:04:38):
airport officials show them a massive portrait of Kim Il sung,
like they demand to see. We want to see the
biggest fucking portrait of Kimmel Song you have, because there's
no way that a big picture of the leader of
North Korea could possibly exist outside of North Korea. I
think more of what it was is that there's no
way that a picture big enough for it to like
I think they all knew that, Like if if we
say a big picture of Kim Il sung in picture

(01:05:00):
they bring out if this isn't North Korea, isn't gonna
be big enough to believably be what North Korean. So
you want the big picture, it's gonna take. It's actually
a pretty smart thing to do because they're gonna bring
out like what normal people would think is a big
picture maybe, and anyone who knows anything about North Korea's
gonna be like, that's not a big picture. If Kim suck,

(01:05:22):
that's we're not flying right. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a
pretty smart move. Um. So yeah, they they realize what's
happening and they refuse to let the passengers off. Um.
And yeah. So eventually the Japanese government is forced to
compromise with him, and it's actually like kind of an
impressive compromise, like this is the one member of government

(01:05:44):
maybe ever that I'm I'm I'm proud of Japan's Vice
Minister of Transportation comes out and he's like, what have
you let everybody else off? And you just take me
prisoner and you fly me to North Korea. Um. And
the hijackers are like sure. Uh and that's a good
thing to do. You say, a politician putting themselves on
the line in the constituents, Yeah, it happened once. Well,

(01:06:08):
this exact time is the one tis well that in
the Jonestown Congressman. Yeah, yeah, well there's you also said
this is the guy who's in charge of transfer, vice
Minister for transportation. So he's also like, this is my
this is my duty. Yeah, that's better. Yeah and yeah,

(01:06:30):
and to their credit, the Red Army guys are like,
oh yeah, that works great. Um. And so yeah they
all fly to North Korea. Um. Didn't did Harrison Ford
do that in that movie where he was the president? Yes?
This was actually he did that during the period of
time where he was the vice Minister of Transportation for Japan.
That's what I remember about that movie. There's an entire
problematic anthropology book about this about Harrison Ford being the

(01:06:52):
vice Minister of because that was why so many Japanese
planes crashed that Okay, Um, Harrison, he's not a good pilot. No,
he's terrible. He's one of the worst. Um So, Yeah,
the Red Army, Uh, they succeed. It's a big caper,
it's big international news. They jack a plane and take
it to North Korea makes it sound real whimsical. Now

(01:07:15):
they're pretty much all miserable in North Korea. So the
like there. The North Korean government didn't really want them,
because again North Korea doesn't really trust people who hijack
planes are from not North Korea, are from not North Korea,
or are from North Korea. Um And the hijackers, like
a lot of them wound up wanting to return to

(01:07:36):
like they all kind of they all wanted initially to
return to Japan. Like their goal was to get arms
in military training from the North Korean military and then
fly back and launch an insurgency. And North Korea was like,
we have all these surplus resources which we will give
to you to take out of the country. Yes, have
you met us, We're North Korea, We're in North Korea.
We love to do this. Um So, North Korea didn't

(01:07:59):
really like the idea of giving these guys military training,
and they keep telling them maybe later. Um and a
bunch of These dudes wound up in Japan decades later,
so they gave interviews and stuff, and I found a
really funny article about their experiences. Here's one guy abe
Kimi Hero discussing their desire to be trained as soldiers
in how North Korea responded, quote, military training, military training,

(01:08:19):
always military training. If we didn't get military training, then
we had no reason for coming. Because one of our
motives for coming to North Korea was to receive military training.
Our daily routine also included running in the mornings. It
felt very good to run in the fresh early morning air,
far away from the city. We agreed that we shouldn't
just run but what but we should run in the
spirit of activism. So we shattered the still of the
early Korean mornings by shouting our Red Army slogan of

(01:08:41):
achieved the uprising victory in war. However, they were immediately
obliged to stop this demonstration. They received a message from
the Workers Party, you can be heard in all the
neighboring farms. Wouldn't be best if you stopped shouting your slogan.
So like North Korea is like okay, guys, we get
but maybe not um And they're all so like the
Red Army again, their their whole thing is simultaneous worldwide

(01:09:03):
revolution and North Korea's get their own things. That's very
different from that, which is we have a sort of
semi yea. They seek to be completely autonomous. Yeah, that
like jucha stuff. So considered leaving us the funk alone? Yeah,
we would like, well said, they have all these guys shouting,

(01:09:25):
So what they do is they forcibly indoctrinate them for
years until they all agree that jucha is the way
to go. Fortunately, I have never heard anything bad about
the detention facilities in North Korea. It was fine for
those guys. Two of them were trying killed trying to flee. Um. Yeah.
And a couple of they'd stopped their training, running every

(01:09:46):
day yeah uh yeah. And if a couple others made
it out under the guys of continuing the revolutionary activity,
four members remained in North Korea, where they spent years
faking a conversion to Juche philosophy. UM. In two this
and four they announced their desire to return to Japan.
Um And yeah, it's it's a it's not a perfect
story and pretty good hijacking. I do like that, you said,

(01:10:08):
spent years faking their conversion to juj philosophy, which puts
them in good company from what I understand with most
people in North Korea. Yeah yeah, uh so you know
who doesn't fake their commitment to the ideas of Kim
Il Sung? I could it possibly be products? It is
products and service. Yeah, this we're entirely supported by the

(01:10:31):
North Korean defense industry. Yeah yeah, so, uh, I don't know,
here's the ads. Uh, We're back. Oh my gosh, how
good was that? That was all very silly, but it

(01:10:52):
was a pretty good hijacking. And it shows that like
there was some steel in the Japanese Red Army, right,
Like they did some silly ship but like there's color.
There's some hardcore motherfucker's in that group. Uh. And then
they didn't all go to that plane caper. In fact,
there were thousands and thousands of kids left over in Japan.
Um and Yeah, the Red Army kind of splintered in

(01:11:13):
the absence because like the folks who went to North Korea,
a lot of them were like the intellectual leaders of
the movement. UM and one fragment, yes, one fragment of
the remaining movement decided to really commit to the international
nature of their political philosophy. They fled to Lebanon, where
they met up with members of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine. UM. So, you know, for people

(01:11:35):
who might not know as much about that history, we're
not gonna do it nearly the justice that it deserves.
But uh, you know, Israel became a thing. Uh. And
kind of the term that's used to refer to that
as the Nakba or catastrophe by the Palestinian people. Um.
And that word refers to the refers to the forced
expulsion of Palestinian people from the land that's now the

(01:11:56):
nation of Israel, about seven eight hundred thousand people forced out. Um.
And that had happened about twenty years ago at this point, right,
So it's really fresh, and the revolutionary movement dedicated to
taking it back is also really fresh. Um. There's no
way to talk about this where I won't uh make
a lot of people angry. UM. So I think I'm
just gonna say, I think what was done to Palestines

(01:12:17):
a real bummer. Uh. And a lot of Palestinians agreed,
which is why they formed organizations like the Popular Front,
which was a Marxist Leninist organization in addition to being
you know, liberation and stuff. We'll talk more about them
tomorrow because Carlos the Jackal is all real tied up
in this ship. Um. But the Red Army here about
like you know, they they they're paying attention to what's
happening in Palestine. It's like a big cause, particularly on

(01:12:39):
the international left at this point, and they're like, well,
if we're gonna do this international revolution thing, here's a
great place to do it. Like there's a bunch of
other armed people. They all want us to go fight
for them. Let's go leave Japan and go fight in
the Middle East where the Japanese Red Army and that's
what we're gonna do. And that's exactly what they do. Uh.
They cannot see how this plan would go wrong at all.

(01:13:02):
They're actually kind of great at it, actually going to
say this is I don't yeah, I'm curious to see
how this plays out. So they go and like unlike
you know, North Korea, like the Popular Front is like
we're fucking trained, you guys, we need like we're so
short on people to go like Palestine, yeah, before like

(01:13:25):
before the narc but Palestine is like the size of
New Jersey. It's not giants. Yeah, they need if they're
gonna need people, they need not actually a ton of
people there. Yeah. And these communists, you know, the Japanese
Red Army guys are all like really smart and really
dedicated and like they so they might up been Lebanon
and they get trained by the Popular Front and then
they go out and they start they start doing shit.

(01:13:48):
In May of nineteen seventy two, three Japanese Red Army
members open fire with automatic rifles at the Tel Aviv airport.
They fire at random, killing twenty four people in wounding
seventy six. So not yeah, some pretty serious terrorism right
out that fucking gate. It's also could you imagine how
many planes they could have stolen with this? They could
have stolen it, They could have stolen hundreds of plans

(01:14:08):
with us three people when for ever, not great tactics there.
I don't think that was their goal. I think it
was more of of what we were, kind of modern terrorism.
They're kind of like, more this is terrible terror instead
of yeah, hey look we got a plane. And the
Japanese Red Army went on to rack up like a
pretty terrifying pedigree of violence over the course of the

(01:14:30):
next few years. They seized foreign embassies, they hijacked aircraft,
they massacred civilians, kidnapped form dignitaries. On several occasions, the
government of Japan was forced to release imprisoned Red or
Red Army members in order to free ransom captives. Um.
And there's still some Red Army folks out there today,
although they're all pretty old at this point and not
super active. Um. But it would be fair to say

(01:14:51):
that the chunk of the Japanese Red Army who went
to Lebanon were like pretty terrifying people. Yeah, and we'll
get we'll talk about them more tomorrow. But they're like
a big deal in terrorism this time, Like the Japanese
Red Army, Um, pretty scary motherfucker's outside of Japan. Now.
The folks who remained behind in Japan, on the other hand,

(01:15:12):
they less committed. No, they were actually more committed, but
in a real dumb way. Yeah, we're gonna get like
the dumbest. Some of these people abscribed to slightly different
versions of communism than other versions of this and just
just kind of imagine it being the B list. Yeah, yeah,
you get your B list kids. So they're behind in Japan,

(01:15:34):
and you know, they don't really have a leadership CADRA
anymore because those people have all gone on to like
do better things than you know, in hierarchical communist organizations
do fine with leadership vacuums. Yeah, like really just great.
So all of the leadership to the Red Army in
Japan kind of falls on one dumb kid named Maurice Sunio.
He was not a great master of communist political theory,

(01:15:56):
nor was he an inspiring leader. Um, but he'd done
his time, and once all of the cool people were
arrested or in North Korea, he was just kind of
the guy who was was there, so he just kind
of aged into it like vice snority. Yeah. I mean, also,
this doesn't bear any similarity to any other dictators or
leaders that you have ever mentioned ever before. This is
a thing that only these specific communists did, and no

(01:16:18):
other groups or political preferences in history. You know, there's
a lot to be said for standing quietly in the
background and just letting everyone else go into the adventurous thing.
Would call it taken to Kennedy. Yeah, um, I was
speaking about the most recent Kennedy. He just lost his election,
because that's true he was trying to do anyway, not
the ones who got shot by Bernie Sanders. Um so, yeah,

(01:16:39):
the did both of them. Yeah, oh I thought it
was I thought it was just j Han sir Han,
like same number of letters as Bernie pull off his
face from Tom Cruise style. So uh yeah, the guys, Yeah,
we're going to tell that this is probably honestly, probably
the dumbest story in the history of terrorism. Um And

(01:17:00):
that's that's hard because there's a lot of fun videos
of like militant groups accidentally shooting each other and like, yeah,
um so yeah, after all the smart people left. Yeah,
Morey Suno winds up on top. I know, I know
it's a different name, but I love that his name
is Maury. Yeah, it is kind of funny. Um So,
the Red Army at this point is the most wanted

(01:17:22):
militant organization in Japan. Um So, Morey kind of has
his work cut out for him. And again they go
to the ground, carrying out small scale bombings and robberies
and tiny isolated cells. This limits, this limited domestic focus
causes a lot of grumbling within the ranks, as did
Maury's undeserved ascent. There were vicious struggles within the organization,
and those made some members leave and others flee to Lebanon.

(01:17:43):
Morey knew the Red Army needed a new caper to
keep their name in the news, so he hooked up
with another radical group who had recently pulled off a
daring gun store robbery, which obviously made the valuable because
it's not real easy to find guns in Japan, so
these kids have guns. Um. Also, it sounds like the
start of a western, one of the sad western kind
of Yeah, you get pretty good Quentin Tarantino movie out

(01:18:05):
of this store. Um. So, yeah, they they hook up
with this group that's just robbed a gun store because
the Red Army has got like money and fame and
this group has guns. Um. But both differential organizations differed
significantly in their political beliefs um. So you know, it's
not easy mashing them together. So the two groups formed
an organization called the United Red Army. So like that's

(01:18:28):
that's what happens when they merge. Um And the leader
of this organization that had stolen the guns, a woman
named Nagata Hiroku, becomes like co leader with this guy Mori. Um.
So Nagata, who was just about as competent as Marie,
knew that the right first move once she was in
power was to order the brutal executions of two former
members of her organization who had chosen to dessert. And

(01:18:49):
dessert is a word here that means like go back
to college. So they were like dragged out of their
dormitories and strangled to death brutally by men and women
who had once been their best friends. Then they were
buried in shallow graves outside of town. Now when more
hears about this, he gets jealous because he'd always been
too jealous. It's not the word I expect. Okay, you know,

(01:19:09):
if your organization joins with my organization and I go,
oh good, in order to show how good our organizations
are together, I'm going to have some deserters brutally murdered
by their best friends. I appreciate you as a comrade,
but I don't think I want to be in your
organization anymore. And if you don't show that you're nearly

(01:19:31):
as strong and powerful as me, I might not think
that either. I might be about to take a trip
to the United States and then slip a note under
a plane door, so that we don't have to hang
out anymore. I bet you that's not the choice he made,
so well, no more. Actually this like he feels he'd
never had the guts to have deserters executed. Um, but
he now that a girl had kind of beat him

(01:19:52):
to doing it, he decided he had to do something
in order to like exert his power. He throws a
leadership training camp for the top leaders of the new
organized group. Camp. Don't go to that camp. It seems
like a bad camp. It was a bad camp. So
it was going to be like a leadership summit and
a bonding experience for everybody, but most have already know like, yeah,

(01:20:13):
I don't know any other context. Um. Most importantly, it
was going to be a chance for Mori to flex
his power on a captive audience by corrupting an essential
tool of many leftist revolutionary groups, self criticism. Um. Yeah,
I'm gonna quote here from a write up and unseen Japan.
The sort of group self criticism Mori had in mind
has long been practiced by various Japanese corporations and has

(01:20:33):
become quite common among Japanese. Amongst Japanese new left groups
who called the process, so Katsu operations, once completed, would
become the subject of group discussion, where criticism of others
and of ones self was used to find whatever weakness
had led to any form of failure during the planning
of the next operation. They would then seek to overcome
whatever internal problems had been discovered. Within leftist groups, any
such failures were often seen as ideological errors. However, the

(01:20:56):
United Red Army was forced. As the United Red Army
was forced further underground and up, interaction became limited. Criticism
increasingly became aimed towards the personal weakness of individual members
rather than the failures of group ideology. In the first
days of December nineteen twenty nine, people consisting of nineteen
men and ten women made their way to the san
Sangaku Base lodge deep in mountainous rural Gunma Prefecture. For days,

(01:21:19):
they lived and strategyized and engaged in sessions. So, yeah,
they start doing these big self criticism sessions isolated alone
in the mountains um and things don't go well. Members
of like the group that had stolen the guns, have
all these criticisms of the Red Army and the Red
Army members have all these criticisms of the other group. Um.

(01:21:39):
And then there's punishments when people are found out when
enough of the group agrees that like someone did something wrong. Um.
So it starts with like forcing people to go days
without eating or sitting for long periods of time and
like this really uncomfortable position, like a yoga position that
hurts after a while. Um. And Mari and Nagata are
kind of like the judges at all of this and

(01:21:59):
determine like what people have to do to be punished
properly before they get to rest. Um. So not a
levelhead starting out in a healthy place. So until you
got to the punishment part, I was going to say
sarcastically that I've never ever been part of any leftist
group that engaged in this type of behavior, or for
that matter, any you know business the engasion that kind

(01:22:22):
of behavior. It's a thing that only happened to this
one time. So but actually this actual thing maybe did
only happen this one time because it gets way really
out of hand very quickly. Um. Like that's a kind
of situation. You expect people to be petty and bitchy
and cruel to each other, but you also are talking
about a underground communist instructionary group and the group they

(01:22:44):
teamed up with for no other reason than that they
stole a ton of guns. Yeah, and we already know
that somebody got straggled buried shallows. I think a group
self critique session that also involves arbitrarily designated punishment. You
don't think that that's going to end? Well, yeah, it doesn't.
I know, yeah, I do so. By like, after twenty

(01:23:06):
days of this up for three weeks, people still aren't
getting along. Um, Like the two groups haven't come together
well enough. They don't feel good about everything. Yeah, And
so more in Nagata are like, we've gotta we've got
to be more brutal about our punishments. That's how you
get people are not don't have the right amount of

(01:23:26):
revolutionary fervor, right, so we have to punish the more.
It's like when when you get in enough fight with
your buddy and you're like, let's retreat to the mountains
for three weeks and be brutally punished for our disagreements.
Did they not have drugs? I don't think they did. See,
there's there's the problem really drinking a bit. I don't know. Um, yeah,
and I'm gonna the right up and Unseen Japan does

(01:23:48):
a really good job of kind of laying this all
out beautifully and terribly, so I'm going to read that
It all began with Ozaki Mitsuo, a twenty one years
old the Tokyo University of Fishery student, had joined the
United Red Army as part of the merger with that
other group. The crimes for which he stood accused by
his fellow comrades during the self criticism session were of
discussing the whereabouts of Red Army hideouts and weapon stashes

(01:24:09):
with unauthorized persons. Additionally, he was seen as lacking the
correct amount of revolutionary zeal. More's collective punishment for these
offenses was to have Ozaki face off and a no
holds about and a no holds bout with a much
bulkier co revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters, ensuring
Osaki could not run away, and then the larger man
began wailing on Ozaki. Beaten to the ground, time and
tinam again. Ozaki, bloodied, still rose for more punishment. He

(01:24:32):
knew the only way out was to accept his physically
imposed chastisement. Finally, the badly beating. Ozaki was allowed some rest.
He then made a fatal mistake. He thanked Maury for
the chance to allow himself to become a better revolutionary.
There was murmuring from the surrounding group. Was Ozaki trying
to flatter his way out of proper training? Surely this
represented more spiritual weakness on his part. The solution was

(01:24:52):
to have Ozaki spend the night standing at attention outside
the mountain in the mountainous subzero temperatures. After some hours
of this, Ozaki, shaking in injured, asked to be allowed
to lay down. This was the last draw did his
weakness no no bounds. He was brought back into the
warmth of the lodge, only to face another intense beating.
His comrades then karried Osaki's broken body back outside, where
he was tied to a post that, in lieu of

(01:25:13):
ideological metal, would keep him standing. He hung there for
hours and hours as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak
christ for help. Occasionally members were sent out to beat
him again. By next morning, he was dead and they
didn't get along after that. It didn't help. This did
not bring them together as an unlikely family it's also

(01:25:34):
just such textbook cult ship, right that you're like, oh,
we're we're gonna make people do horrible things to the
only other people they are close to in the world. Yeah,
to demonstrate their allegiance to what I have told them
is our ideological commitment. And Mori spends this pretty much
immediately and tells everybody that Ozaki had chosen to die

(01:25:57):
because he'd like seen that he was fundamentally flawed and
bring the revolution down because of his weakness. So he
had to kill himself in order to suicide for he
knew they beat him to death for you know. Yeah,
so they decided to like celebrate this guy's death because

(01:26:19):
he'd made the movement stronger. Did they have a little party?
A little party? Yeah, So the self criticism sessions continue, um,
and self criticism is a strong I'm just gonna put
out there that like some people calling outside consultants and
kind of look like they really are taking a deep

(01:26:41):
die down this one hole. They could have done a ropes. Course,
they could have They did strangle some of them. They
could have played paintball to make a really horrible story
a little bit shorter. They this keeps happening every night
to someone new. Um, they just keep murdering each other
for ideological Uh, three left the most pure. Well, by

(01:27:06):
the time it's over, fourteen of the twenty nine people
who went out there had been killed. I thought, yeah, yeah,
and the remaining fifteen get along really well. They do
get into a gunfight with the cops. I mean, you
haven't lead with that, probably would have formed trauma bonds. Yeah,

(01:27:26):
so they purged like half of themselves. You know, everyone
will get along really well if you just kill everyone
that doesn't agree with you. All right, I've always said that,
And that's why Stalinist Russia I had no backstabbing at all.
Zero Prussia, the place where everyone got along. Yep, that's
what they call it. Um. So that's the podcast episode.

(01:27:48):
Uh being a Lane. You want to tell people where
they can find you. Um, yeah, you can find us
on Twitter and Instagram and medium at svist, and you
can find me in the mountains twenty eight of my
closest friends, where we all try to make each other
into better, better people, better people not going on that
camp and get a pile of rocks for self improvement purposes.

(01:28:11):
A post and a post for self improvement. I wanted
to teach you that day. Yeah, you know, mom. We'll
see where that's the episode go um oh yeah. You
can find us online and behind the bastards dot com,
but we'll have all the sources for this episode. You
can buy one of our FDA approved to cure all
diseases or prevent all diseases. I forget which illegal claim

(01:28:33):
we're making on the masks that we sell. Um, you
buy

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