September 23, 2024 • 47 mins
Margaret continues talking with Mia Wong about the deep history of Korean anarchism and how it led to one of the great experiments with antiauthoritarian social structure of the 20th century.
Part 3/4
Sources:
Shin Chae-ho, "Declaration of the Korean Revolution;"
Ha Ki-rak, "A History of the Korean Anarchist Movement;"
Dongyoun Hwang, Anarchism in Korea;
Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works;
dogej63, "Summary of the Sinmin Prefecture."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly podcast about stuff that I think is cool, done
by people. I'm a person. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. Also People
is Mia Wong him me.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
A Hello, I am. I'm approximating a person for this one.
It's gonna be great. Got very little sleep last night.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
It's gonna be it's gonna be incredible, or we're gotting.
We're getting off the rails via here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I was thinking when you're like, I'm approximating a person,
I was thinking it was like a gender thing like
a million years ago. My my friend was like, is
your gender identity, Wraith? And I was like, yeah, probably
that was more like my gender presentation. To be honest, I.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Mean it's a good one. They always always loved to
be raithing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, obliterate the body while wearing cool floey black things.
Also a people is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Last time I checked?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I am a people. It's seems probable. Oukham's Razor says,
in fact, all three of us are people.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah, sometimes I'm a person. Some days I don't feel
that way.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I think I'm a person today, though, excellent. I'm willing
to always pretend on Mike that I am Chipper. No
one thinks I'm Chipper. Anyway, We're all here for part
three of a four parter about the Korean People's Association
of Manchuria and the much broader Korean anarchism around it,
(01:31):
and probably the most ideologically complexed episodes we've done on
this show. And we did the Russian Civil War.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Oh yeah, this makes me long for the relative ideological
simplicity of the seventeen Green Armies. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
But before we get into that, we want to thank Rory,
our audio engineer, hi Rori Hiri, Hi Rory, And you
want to think Unwoman who did our themis and you
can go listen to more of Unwoman's music. Some of
it as singing, some of it doesn't. Yay, so many things. Okay,
So the craziest thing happened in between recording parts one
(02:12):
and two and then now actually a week later. Sometimes
I pretend like, oh, here we are a week later,
it's like, actually a week later, now, the craziest thing happened.
I learned things. Wow, Usually I learned stuff, but this stuff,
I learned stuff in a cool way because I brought
up a lot of questions that I felt unanswered by
my sources, right, and some of those questions a listener
(02:34):
messaged me and answered those questions. Oh wow, it rules,
So thank you, Joshua Kang. I'm going to talk about
some of those things that I learned, and then we'll
move on. Okay, So remember I was talking about the
Sillhack movement or the realism movement or the realist movement,
the like old timey folks, like before any other political
(02:55):
ideologies developed, where like a like maybe Catholic, maybe Confucian
guy was like, what if we all live in communes
and it's great? And I was like, I don't understand.
One source says their Catholic, one sources their confusion, and
definitely a lot not Catholic. I found the answer. The
answer is that they are both.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, okay, So as we've predicted, yes, exactly, I like
learning this one because I learned I was right with
my guests.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Joshua said that Silhak took a lot of influences as
a quote from the Catholics and had a lot of
Catholic members. Even the Catholic members of this group would
have considered themselves Confucians and so just people who thought
of themselves as both.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, that makes sense, and it's like that's a thing
where I think what gets considered. I mean, you know,
obviously we talked about sort of Korean Christian syncretism, but
this isn't even that, because like it's not that hard
to sort of fuse Confucianism with like another kind of religion,
(03:56):
Like people in China do this all the time too,
where it's like or people move back and forth between
them rapidly and like between different sort of religious ideological filiations,
and then they also just are both at the same
time and it's not like that difficult of a thing,
just because of sort of the nature of how Confucianism
is structured.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That makes sense because I've always I don't know enough
about Confucianism to be any kind of expert on it,
but I've like read about it many times, and it
always seemed like it was like kind of a not
as like we are a religion and more of a
like we are a set of ways of thinking about things,
and I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, the whole kind of religion, philosophy, ideology distinction gets
kind of gets really blurry, the further out you get
for the people who like developed it, which is like.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So yeah and so yeah, I like that we were right. Okay.
The other thing another thing I learned, So I was
talking about how Korean anarchists set up a ton of
schools in China and Korea. Right, it turns out obviously
Korean anarchists were doing this, but like this is sort
of a Korean cultural thing, Joshua said. Quote It's very
(05:06):
much a cultural legacy of the Sian b which are
Hermit's scholars who would be disgusted with politics and set
up academies in exile so their students would one day
restore a righteous government. So it's like an anarchist thing
to specifically be like, we're going to go set up
schools in exile so that we can fix Korea, which
is cool, Like that's a cool thing. Yeah, and there's
(05:28):
some in the US that were founded in a similar way. Huh,
not necessarily by anarchists. But okay. Another thing that I
learned that I forgot to write into my script, but
now I remember off the top of my head, is
that one of the ways that I was talking about
how Korea was like always between all these imperial powers,
and it was sort of being traded back and forth.
Is a modern and slightly incorrect way of looking at
the far past of Korea, and that actually, when it
(05:49):
was under Chinese influence, it was a very autonomous place.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, that's it's always weird with So what are the
stories I always remember about, Like thinking about Chinese, especially
before like the eighteen hundreds, is like there are a
lot of records of people in like the fifteen sixteen
hundreds who are like European travelers who are in China,
and they ask the people that they're talking about about China,
and and then those people have no idea what the
fuck they're talking about, because it's like, well, no, I
(06:16):
don't live in China. I live in like this like place, right,
that's like any And like the sort of especially the
further out in the borders that you get, the sort
of lines of control get really weird, and there's lots
of groups that are like technically under the dynasties. But
like in the most air quotes, I guess, okay, well,
in Italy, this oracle parallem about the draw here is
(06:37):
probably not that useful that many people, but it's it's
kind of like Egypt in the late Ottoman Empire, where
like Egypt is like nominally an Ottoman thing, but I
mean I think they're actually more independent than that. But
like Egypt periodically just conducts its own form policy. It's
like basically like a self governing quality, but it makes
sense periodically kind of like yeah, I think that's like
(07:01):
Chinese control over Korea is like even more nominal than
that a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, And if the more I read like David Graeber
talking about anthropology stuff, the more I was realized that,
like the ability to exert control over areas you claim
to own is a fairly modern technological development, like not
like modernism, like only in the eighteen hundreds or whatever, right,
but like different places had the technology to actually rule
(07:27):
the places that they theoretically ruled, and other places didn't.
You know, Like I'm under the impression Rome was better
at ruling England then English kings were after the fall
of Rome, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like like there's there's sort of bureaucratic
and all I mean literally sometimes also literally technology, but
a lot of it's like bureaucratic technology that you need to.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Like I mean technology like bureaucracy, I mean ways of
thinking and applying things, not like wheels that are around
her or something. Yeah. Okay, then the other note that
came up. Okay, So remember how I was like, well,
one source was like, well, they're all pretty nationalist, right,
and then there's that other source, that whole lass book
that's like, no, the Korean anarchist movement was super cosmopolitan
(08:13):
and transnational, right or made it blurry. Well, I'm now
going to make an argument back in the other direction. Unfortunately,
because we talked a bunch about that Korean anarchist journalist
and author Shinchweho who wrote the manifesto that was such
a big deal for like revolution Manifesto that I really liked.
It turns out his legacy is he as he aged,
(08:37):
became more and more of an ethnic ulter nationalist while
still remaining an anarchist, which unfortunate. I'd rather be abandon
the anarchism an ethnic culture nationalist.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Oh god.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
And one of the things that they talked about in
that Revolutionary Manifesto that they were against was servile thinking, right,
And when I read that, I was like, oh, I
just don't really know what that means in this translation,
you know, it's like one of those words where I
just hear it and I'm like, ah, okay whatever, Like
no one likes being told what to do. To quote
Joshua again, when he talks about servile thinking, it is
(09:13):
a reference to his nationalist thought that revolves around Korean's
being nomadic warrior peoples that were then made servile and
an effeminate by a Confucian elite and the Chinese. And
I'm no longer quoting this ties into the jeuch thing
that current North Korean philosophy. I know, you know what
I'm talking about, but you know, for people don't remember.
Because he wanted Koreans to be strongly and manly and
(09:35):
self sufficient, so that's like where the jew Cha comes from.
He also had a kind of manifest destiny kind of
thing going on about Manchuria, which isn't quite the best
parallel to make, right, but basically being like we should
take Manchuria as Korea is really puts the whole thing
we're going to talk about about Korean exiles and Manchuria
(09:56):
into a different light.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Yeah, I think this is something that you see this
with like kind of someone to let stuff You see
this with like the Chinese communists too, where the ways
that colonialism was understood can get very very messy, and
it can generate kinds of like reactionary anti imperialisms where
(10:19):
you have all of these people who you know, because
there's a sort of like leftist, like pure leftist read
of colonialism, which is sort of about like physical subjugation
and domination and stuff like that. But there's also a
read of it, and this is something that's very popular
among sort of modern Chinese nationalists, for example, where it's
read as something that was like an emasculating force, something
(10:39):
that was read as like specifically an attack on masculinity,
an attack on like their specific patriarchal authority. And that's
another you know, this is a strand of anti imperalism
that almost always gets mixed in with other kinds of movements,
and it sucks. And these people tend to be the
ones who take power after revalutions happened because they are
(11:01):
the warshort of conservative action. Yeah, and that kind of
nationalism is extremely powerful.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That makes sense, and that ties into jewche being the
official philosophy of North Korea, you know. Yeah, Yeah, So
those are some updates where we last left our heroes.
The Korean Independence movement was doing its thing in all
kinds of ways, and we talked about what it was
up to in China. Basically, it was embroiled in one
of the most complicated moments in political history ever, where
(11:29):
an ever shifting alliance of nationalists, communists, and to a
lesser extent, anarchist was doing all kinds of stuff. And
I was being grouchy that none of my sources got
into the stuff I really wanted to know about, like
the hospitals that they were running, the money that they counterfeited,
and what Japanese imperialists they were exploding, and there is
some information about who they exploded available and stuff. Just
(11:49):
nothing read like an action movie enough for me. But
that's so Magpie of you. Yeah, yeah, there was probably
tunnels and no one mentioned. I'm sure they dug tunnels.
I bet people broke out of prison.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
There has to have bend tunnels.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah. So, while a ton of the more ideological rebels
went to China and a ton of the fighters went
to Manchuria, a lot of the Righteous Armies went to Manchuria. Oh,
when I learned more about the Righteous Armies, and I'm
not going to go back and add it because it's
not relevant to a story. But I think I'm going
to be doing a couple episodes about the Righteous Armies
because they're interesting. Oh interesting haha, and like a bunch
(12:24):
of their music and the Dong Hack music is available
on YouTube. I also learned this from Joshua, Thank you Joshua,
and I listened to a bunch of it right before
we recorded. Anyway, an awful lot of students and workers
went to Japan, so we're gonna talk about Japan. Japan
is an island. Now, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
There's both of the islands.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, it's true. Japan was the most modernized country in
East Asia during all this period and Tokyo. I was
learning about how Tokyo was originally seen as sort of
a symbol of Asian unity against the West, but very
quickly it was like through US imperializing everything. Yeah, Japan
is gaining power and things aren't perfect in their empire.
(13:07):
They're getting a little spooked because anarchists keep trying to
kill their emperor. The Russian Revolution just happened, and there's
this whole thing called the Rice Riots. Of nineteen eighteen
caused by rice and the massive inflation of rice, and
if you ever want to hear more about not necessarily
this one. I don't know if you covered this one,
but MIA did a whole series on food riots and
(13:28):
why they're behind everything that happens ever on it could
happen here. Yeah, I do think we did the rice riots.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think we kind of I think I was kind
of soft on the problem with doing a series on
bread riots is that there's literally so many of them
that you have to like, you have to pick your
time periods, not even so much your specific riots.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's oh yeah, no, I mean like we could start
just a whole new podcast called the Great Food Riots
of History. I mean, like noting that down. And so
the rice riots of nineteen eighteen were caused by the
massive inflation of the cost of rice, and this brought
down the Prime Minister and it probably led to further
we need creator send us more rice. So things aren't
(14:11):
necessarily going great. Well, they're not going great for anyone,
including the powers that be. The work studies students in
Tokyo were heavily influenced by anarchism, especially by Krapotkin. And
soon they were publishing all their own newspapers and shit.
The earliest you asked for the earliest Korean anarchists that
I found, and the answer was these Koreans in Tokyo
put out a journal called the Light of Learning or
(14:33):
called Light of Learning. That journal talked about how tenant
peasants should use direct action against their landlords. And I
think that was like nineteen fourteen or something. But why
would I write the year down in my script when
I'm reading it? Who knows?
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Well?
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Because who cares about years? They're they're boring's more explosions,
less years. This is what American media has taught me
about how people learn things. Well, see, eventually you care
enough about all the explosions. The only reason years are
interesting to me is that they're like the linkages, you know,
They're like the part you can connect this thing to
(15:05):
this other thing with the year. But without that context,
they are a nonsense like all names are just nonsense
words to me. They go in one a year and
out the other, unless I like, really apply, I should
remember that my friend's name is John, you know, like
Otherwise it's just like they're just like meaningless whatever. I
have a strange brain.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
But by the early nineteen twenties there are anarchist books
everywhere and groups are popping up all over the place.
It helped that even though they were students, the Korean
work study students were rather dramatically oppressed along class, national,
and ethnic lines, and they were forced to work the
lowest wage jobs is in the city. They were like
peddling in the streets distributing newspapers that kind of shit.
(15:48):
When I say it helped, it helped radicalize them. It
didn't help them with their lives to be happy or logged. Yeah,
Korean anarchists and communists together formed something called the BLA
Black Wave Society in nineteen twenty one. But nineteen twenty
one wasn't like the best year for left unity speaking
of years tying shit together, ah, because this is the
(16:12):
year that the Bolsheviks firmly crushed all leftist resistance to
their dictatorship in Russia. So, for whatever reason, who knows,
the communist and the anarchists and the Black Wave Society split.
The anarchists formed the Black Labor Society, the communists into
the North Star Society. Points to the Communist here, that's
a better name.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Oh, yeah, definitely. I feel I feel like most of
the names of anic descripts in Japan tend to be
really good, but that one, we're working. We're kind of
slipping there, guys, you gotta do better. But their journal
name Ruled. The Black Labor Society published the journal The
Recalcitrant Koreans at rips. We we love to see it. Yeah,
(16:54):
good stuff on that part.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And they believe that the way to find the self
is through metal aid with others, a thing that I
also believe, and they wrote a ton of philosophy around that.
Like I just really like when people are like, hey,
the self and the community are not in contradiction with
each other but instead work well. And they also, in
something I'll continue to underline throughout this episode, wanted a
(17:18):
cosmopolitan world where the border between Japan and Korea was gone.
They wanted the inversion of the Pan Asian imperialist writings
of colonial Japan, right because colonial Japan's like, oh, we're
all Asian under Japanese rule, yeah, you know, and the
anarchists were like, oh, we're all people under our own
self governance, yeah, which.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Which is interesting because I think I don't know, I mean,
Pan Asianism kind of got killed off really fast, both
by the fact that it was you know, in a
way that sort of like Pan Arabisines and Pan Africanism
didn't like largely because it was so much of a
Japanese project. But it's interesting that you get a Kai
to ruciate of it, that's like, hold on, why do
(18:03):
we have these borders and not the sort of Japanese
like the borders are there for quality markings?
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, No, And it's interesting and it comes out of Japan.
It comes out of Koreans in Japan, and also Japanese
people in Japan, and also probably Chinese and other folks
in Japan. But so Japan is super tense at this time.
Leftism is going wild in the early nineteen twenties, and
they're critiquing and attacking the colonial and war machines of
Japan from within. A lot of this tension came to
(18:30):
a head in nineteen twenty three when the Great Tokyo
Earthquake hit. And this is a sort of physical manifestation
of fault lines that can't handle tension anymore. The first
time I heard I'm now off script, let's go. The
first time I ever heard about the Great Japanese Earthquake
or the Great Tokyo Earthquake was. I was at the
anarchist book fair in San Francisco and there was this
(18:52):
group of folks from Tokyo there and they were tabling
an English translation of a book that they had written
in Esperanto about Japanese anarchism that rules, and it wasn't
the best English translation, and they had all of these
scenes about like the martyrs of the Japanese anarchist movement,
and I'm flipping through it and there's all these children
(19:13):
and it's just the names of children who died, and
I'm like, what's going on? And the answer was the
Great Tokyo Earthquake. If you want to hear more about
this period in detail, check out our episode about all
the Japanese anarchists women who kept trying to kill emperors.
The short of it was that nineteen twenty three, a
buck off big earthquake hit Tokyo or near Tokyo, and
(19:37):
it turned into a massive race riot where six thousand
Korean immigrants were hunted down and killed by folks.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Yeah, the story I always remember from this was there's
a bunch of stories of guys who'd been like old
like Japanese officers and like people who'd fought in China,
like in like this the Sino Japanese War, like taking
their swords off through mantlepieces and like going to hunt
people down.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Just one of the worst, like one of the worst
moments in a period of Japanese history, in which every
single thing they do is going to be terrible. Yeah,
really horrible stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, And almost certainly there's some historical contention about the
cause and effect here. Almost certainly the government consciously used
this as a period to also go and kill a
lot of the anarchists and entire families and like throw
them into wells and shit. There's some argument that I've
read a while ago that like maybe maybe they were
(20:36):
hunted down organically instead of by the government, you know,
but whatever, it was, whole families slaughtered, thrown into wells.
And then they thought, say, like literally blamed Korean people
in anarchists the earthquake. They blamed the earthquake on them,
not just the chaos of it. Yeah, And that didn't
hold up, and that that part didn't last very long.
The authorities arrested a few anarchists for the quote high
(20:58):
treason case, which was especially in the Korean anarchist scene,
which was our A Korean anarchist man named paciol and
a Japanese anarchist woman named Kanikofumiko were accused of trying
to assassinate the emperor. The trial became a huge show trial.
They were more or less on trial for being against
the colonization of Korea, and one of my favorite love
stories of all time is in that episode. And I'm
(21:18):
not going to tell you it here do you have
to listen? But in the end their death senses were
commuted to life in prison. Kaniko Fumiko took her own life.
Pacuol survived and was freed after the empire fell nineteen
forty five, made it home to Korea, where I have
read a ton of different arguments about how he lived
the rest of his life. I suspect more information is
(21:39):
available in English now than there was when I first
learned about this. But whatever have you ever seen an anarchist from colony?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Oh? I is that the one that has the show
me a nation I refuse to be killed by an abstraction?
Or is that a different one?
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
That sounds right, I think So.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
There's like aes, because I know there's a few, like
there's a kind of genre of both Korean and Jeffanese
cinema that's sort of about this kind of thing that
that could be from a different one of those movies
that I'm confusing in my head because you know this
is this is my plug for sleep. This episode is
(22:19):
sponsored by getting enough sleep. Please do it. It's great.
Damages your brain if you don't.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
And if you don't get enough sleep, you'll forget to
do AD transitions when you're supposed to and have to
go with that one. So this show brought to you
by between seven and fourteen hours of sleep, whatever you
would prefer.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
I also didn't sleep, and I thought you did one
around nineteen minutes and you didn't.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Nope, yep, you did not. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
We're doing great everyone.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
And we're back from that nap that's seven to fourteen
hour nap depending.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
On what you know, feeling rejuvenated. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, Sadly it's not true on our end, none of
us have swept since we went to ads. But Anarchism Colony,
I really like it. It's a South Korean movie about
paciol and kinkofumicco and about the love story. So I
guess you can actually watch it by watching it, But
it's interesting because this whole thing is part of the
(23:25):
whole like Korea as a country that cannot and does
not ignore its anarchists past. You know that there's like
a lot of work to sometimes nationalize the anarchist heroes.
But I really like that movie. Top five fictional representations
of anarchism at cinema easily maybe my favorite one. Honestly
probably my favorite just in terms of like accuracy and
(23:47):
also it's a good movie anyway. The Japanese anarchist movement
was splitting hard in the early nineteen twenties between anarcho
syndicalism and then the thing that my friend Miowong did
a bunch of episodes about pure anarchism, which is developed
in Japan anarchist tendency that didn't want to be watered
down by being part of the labor movement. And the
Korean anarchists were split by this as well, but mostly
(24:10):
in Japan. Actually in Korea they were like, we got
bigger problems.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah, it's really like that split is really just a
Japan I think every other anarchist in the world who
have ever read who's looked at it was like, what
on earth are you people doing? Yeah, Rico Balatesa is
a very famous was.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It was it? Mala Tesla was a roough Rocker, either.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Mela Tesla, who's a very famous Italian anarchist or Rudoff
Rocker who's probably the most famous German. And Arcosynicolas like
reads about like the split that they're having. It says
them a letter being like, hey, y'all should work this
out instead of splitting. The Japanese actors like, no, we're
gonna worr to split every single federation in movement between
these two kind of all along sort of semi baffling
(24:54):
ideological lines.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, And so that happened to the Korean anarchist there
as well. But I think I think overall the Korean
anarchists movement in Japan was more or in Tokyo at
least was more split by the fact that a lot
of them were arrested, one of them was one of
their friends was in prison, and a lot of them
basically fled Tokyo and went to either China or Korea.
And nineteen twenty three hard time to be Korean an anarchist,
(25:19):
or especially a Korean anarchist in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, dear God.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
After nineteen twenty three, a ton of the Korean Tokyo
anarchists went back to Korea itself to start organizing groups there,
including a lot of Pocuo's friends. The other big center
of Korean anarchist activity in Japan was in Osaka, an
industrial city with a higher population density than Tokyo did
at that time, and the cheap labor that built that
industry was, of course immigrant labor from Korea. About fifteen
(25:45):
to twenty thousand Korean people came there every year. I'm
uncertain if this was seasonal labor where they're like showing up,
if it's the same fifteen twenty thousand people, or if
it's like that's how many people were pouring in every
single year and it was adding up. I'm not sure
these folks brought anarchism with them to Osaka. One of
them had already been in jail in Korea for organizing,
and a ton of them grew up as child laborers.
(26:05):
These are not theory focused folks, yet one of them
formed a As you pointed out, some fucking good names here.
One group that they formed had the sick name the
Alliance of Societies of Korean Property List people that rules. Yeah,
like what other people with nothing?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Fuck you.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I don't know a ton about what they got up to.
I know that they were. They held mass demos in
nineteen twenty four alongside others for the free speech of
Korean immigrants. It was a big Korean immigrant rights movement.
In nineteen twenty four in Osaka, folks organized labor night
schools in Osaka where they taught how workers could free
themselves by uniting and fighting capitalism and just going into
the like Koreans and exile set up schools and it's cool. So, yeah,
(26:51):
that is Korean anarchism in Japan. But what about two
and a half hours into us learning about Korean anarchism,
what about Korean anarchists in Korea overall? I think people
talk about a story less because it's it's not nearly
as well documented because it was all underground and it
(27:15):
mostly it was really sad. But the way Korean anarchism
moreton Korea itself was people would organize underground at first,
and formally there's tons of anarchists. They would create a
group with a name and membership lists, which was that
worked out against them, To be clear.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, not a great idea if you're trying to organize
an underground group.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
No, like when in doubt, if your group is illegal
or very likely to be, don't keep lists, which they
then got good at. And now we don't know shit
about what happened. But they would form a group with
a name, try and get shit done. Then all the
organizers would be arrested and the group would break up.
And even though they were given like fairly light sentences
like two to five years in prison for free speech,
(27:57):
they would usually die in jail or at least multiple
of the times that I've read about it. Survivors and
new folks would form another group, and so it went.
In colonial Korea, socialism was part of the daily conversation
among the youth again in the early nineteen twenties. This
socialism was primarily anarchism. There's a you know, major split,
(28:19):
like obviously communism and stuff is part of everything too,
but that comes a little bit later in terms of
which one has more influenced when one of the major
ways that anarchism spread was through esperantism. Our friend the
constructed language. We've talked about this a bunch on the show. Basically,
there's this constructed language called Esperanto. It was invented by
(28:40):
this Eastern European anti Zionist Jew in the nineteenth century
whose name I didn't write into the script, but I
talked about it a whole bunch In fuck, I've done
so many episodes, I don't remember which one. Listen to
all one hundred episodes and you'll find out more about
esperantism and hear that guy talking about why he doesn't
think Zionism is a good idea. It became the language
(29:02):
of the left across the world, and it was an
attempt to destroy national borders through a common tongue that
was no one's mother tongue, as best as I can tell.
And this is sort of an inference. Part of how
anarchism was spreading in Korea is that, like, the fucking
sensors didn't know how to read esperanto, so books and
esperanto just contained secret anarchism messages that the sensors couldn't
(29:23):
they didn't notice.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
I bet Also to another contributing factor is that, I mean,
we've talked about this a bit, but the people who
absolutely love ESPERANTOI the Japanese anarchists, like they really really
love Esperanto, So there's probably books moving from there too.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Oh totally. It was actually called the Wind from the
East Anarchism was, which I think is cool.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Oh yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, And I didn't know where to put that into
the script, so thanks for me bringing that up. At
the end of every single time I write scripts, I
have all my scattered notes that I haven't yet figured
out where to plug in, and then I just like
highlight them all and delete them and it makes me
sad every time.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
You know, Glen, glad, we got this one. We need
to found that group that can be the like successive
organization Asian anarchists. You should make an anarchist group or something.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Hell yeah, hell yeah. So Korean anarchists in Korea, we're
actually the least radical in terms of what they were
saying of the five geographies of Korean anarchism that I'm
the one who made up that there's five geographies of it.
This is not an accurate thing. But you know, like
most of China, Manchuria, Tokyo and Osaka and then Korea
(30:34):
all have very different personalities of Korean anarchism. Right during
this period, elsewhere, the anarchists are like, all right, here's
the deal. We're gonna kill all the Japanese invaders, reclaimed Korea,
build a bottom up society built on mutual aid and solidarity,
and then get into arguments about how I know, nationalists
we should be like. That's like overall the vibe most places.
Right inside Korea, the anarchists at this point are like, Hey,
(30:56):
we're activists working to improve everyone's material conditions, and we
happen to like theilosophy books, but we're not going to
say anything about the colonies and the empire because then
we'll die.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah, censorship does tend to have that effect. I guess.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah. They kept independence out of the rhetoric because they
kept getting murdered in jail as it was. But the
softening of the rhetoric did not save them. But what
could have saved them was products, especially if those products
were This show is brought to you by international solidarity
(31:30):
and mutual aid, which, to be fair, they had, and
it wasn't enough to save them. Even more were brought
to you by even more international solidarity and mutual aid.
That's the only sponsor, and also whoever gave us money,
here's that and for back. One thing that being under
(31:56):
the gun helped prevent them from doing is getting caught
up in ideological differences. Mentioned that, yeah, the pure anarchism.
So the split was felt between syndicalism and pure anarchism,
and it was discussed, and it was not nearly so
important to anarchists in Korea, although one thing I read
is said that the most prevalent strem was pure anarchism.
But another thing I read was like, here's all the
labor unions they started.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I'm like, yeah. Also, I will say that the peer anarchists,
like as much as their whole thing is opposition to
societies based around organization around production, like they do, also
have a bunch of labor unions. So it's hard to tell. Okay,
it's hard to tell what formation is which just based
on what the formation is because well, just like how
(32:38):
national borders are nonsense, but people live in different places.
Lines between ideologies are nonsense and artificially constructed, but there
is still differences between different places.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
That's that's my deep thoughts for today. The first group
of anarchists that I found was actually the first labor
association in Korea as best as I can sort out,
and by that I mean a source said it was
the first labor association in Korea. But anytime anyone says
the first something something, I don't believe them.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
In nineteen twenty folks who liked Krapotkin but didn't go
explicitly anarchists until nineteen twenty four formed the Association for
Labor and Mutual Relief in Korea. This was a combo
labor union and mutual aid group. As best as I
can tell, The Black Labor Society was founded explicitly anarchist
in Seoul in nineteen twenty three. Soon it disappeared due
(33:27):
to repression. Next, the League of the Black Flag was formed,
which is a good name. Anything with a league is
a good name. I've read it that it was formed
in nineteen twenty four, and I've read it was formed
in nineteen twenty five. Everyone listed in their membership was
arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. So the
government didn't like the League for some reason. I think
(33:48):
it was the name. They were like, we don't like
the name.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah, his name is. His name's too cool.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
It's cool.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
If any of the names we've come up with, we've got,
we must put every single one of these people in prison.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, and almost all of them died, even though there
sense to a year in prison, they almost all died
in prison or killed themselves immediately after release because of
how badly they've been treated.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Oo.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
And this was a strong message to the anarchists, but
not one that stopped anarchism. Bachiol, the political prisoner in Japan,
was heavily influential on these groups. Right, he's a guy,
and he's in fucking prison in Japan, And some of
the founders of a lot of these groups had already
been arrested in Japan in nineteen twenty three during his trial.
Another group set up only a few months later was
(34:29):
the True Friends League. I promised up at the top
of this there was going to be a lot of
like friends leagues. And there's so many group names that
I didn't put into this script, but a lot of
the ones that are not in it are like eighteen
different versions of the Best Friends and the True Friends
and the Black Friends and the Yeah, True Friends League
is also good. Although I think League of True Friends,
(34:50):
but that's probably just a translation difference. This lasted about
a year before all of this founders were arrested. Everyone
got two to five years for Darien to try and
build new society on anarchist principles. At least one of
those members died of pneumonia during hunger strike in prison.
Just like in China and Japan, anarchist groups in Korea
were multi ethnic. When the True Friendsly headquarters was raided,
(35:13):
there were at least two Japanese anarchists present who went
to prison as well. A Christian anarchist named Kim Son
opened a church in Korea after he came back from
China convinced that the Bible was anarchistic. So he started
off as a Christian and then he was like, oh,
now I'm an anarchist Christian and I'm going to go
open a church about how the Bible is anarchistic. He
was always in and out of prison for that work.
(35:33):
And he also tried to set up an anarchist village
in northern Korea. And I don't know more about it.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Probably they all got arrested, unfortunately, that that seems like
the arc of the story. Yeah, in Korea, that they
all got arrested.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, they might have fucked off to Manchuria. That's the
other thing people successfully do. Yeah, maybe where they all
eventually whatever, We'll get to that. Several times, I think,
partly to evade all of this getting arrested for doing
political groups, they would set up groups that were explicitly
art and literature movements, not political movements. Ah, these were
(36:05):
still crushed.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
In nineteen twenty five they tried another left unity one
all types of socialist art came together, and by that
I mean Bolsheviks and anarchists. These are the two primary
forces at this point, called the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation.
They split because the Bolsheviks kept arguing that all literature
must be political propaganda or else it isn't proletarian, and
(36:29):
that everything had to be Bolshevik. The anarchist position was,
what if art can just be art sometimes, or it
can be anarchistic and it can even be Bolshevik.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
What if art is okay, if it's art proto actually know,
what is this even proto socialist realism or were we
just in their socialist realism by this point I think
we might be.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
I actually don't know exactly. I have this whole plan
where I want to do it like futurists versus Soviet realism,
and like.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Oh yeah, well, there is a whole bunch of interesting
stuff about, like Soviet art communes that I only sort
of know about. Oh cool, that I've heard interesting stuff about.
But they also get eventually wiped out by piped out
by the Stalinists. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
I don't remember whether I covered this enough, but it
might be later in the script too. All the Korean
folks who sided with the Soviets, they went really badly
for them. There was a whole ethnic cleansing that happens. Oh,
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah, it's really one of those old Bolshevik war hero
d next to their name, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yep. Yeah, it's mostly nineteen thirty seven for the Korean Soviets.
But yeah, I think about twenty five thousand of them
killed anyway, Okay, I think it's in the script, Jesus Christ.
I think it's in the scrip. We'll get to it.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Oh No.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
In May nineteen twenty nine, folks from the Chungho Artist
Movement Society were arrested and given two to five years.
So they're getting the same as everyone else, right, And
they were as they claimed they were just an art
movement members happened to be anarchists. At their trial, no
one bothered bringing up evidence that they were like doing
anything that was criminal even under the fucking statute at
(38:09):
the time they all went to prison. The movement seemed
to have been strongest on Jaju Island, which is the
largest island off Korea, and some Korean anarchists who left
Japan moved there started a mutual aid group called Our
Mutual Loan Club, which did a Taoist anarchist thing and
combined anarchism with Daoism's idea of the three treasures diligence, frugality,
(38:29):
and modesty. Just for another syncretism, I'm going to shove
as many into this episode as I can. Yeah, most
of the groups started in southern Korea, where the capital
of Korea was right, but as those groups were all repressed,
the spirit moved north by like nineteen twenty seven or so.
There anarchist theory was developed that sort of replaced the
(38:51):
proletarian class of Marx with the desperate and humble class
by a Korean anarchist, ying Yong that felt more appropriate
to the Korean in context. Because it included peasants and
it includes like well, Iron is desperate and humble, right
or humbled by society.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, it's like the Japanese pur anarchists like do a
kind of move like this too, And it's interesting that
they get here kind of in some ways before the
Marxists are really getting to this place where like they're
they're running into problems with the fact that like they're
sort of you know, Marxist idealized the revolutionary subject kind
of like isn't the only person who's being a revolutionary
(39:31):
subject around it? Also isn't even necessarily the primary thing
that you're dealing with if you're in a colony.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, that makes sense. And also like oh crap, I
forget the name of it. The different like modes of
production that Marx describes, one of them isn't one of
them called the asiatic mode or like something horrible and
like just like racist and wrong.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
It's really people have tried to rehabilitate the asiatic mode
of production, but like, well, one of the things that
if you really go into the marks, you realize he's
kind of just making up like there's a slow vonic
mode of production. He's kind of just he's kind of
just freestyling with it, and they're they're not very good.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
He's like, here there be monsters mode of production.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, it's like there's a really good David Graeber piece
called turning modes of Production inside out and which you
kind of ar he's trying to kind of rehabilitate the
idea of it. And his argument basically is that like
capitalism as a mode of production is a form of slavery. Yeah,
like it's just like a different version of that. But
if if you want to get if you want a
good thing about how the whole sort of modes of
(40:32):
production thing gets really incoherent really fast about what you
poke at it with a stick, and Marxist is trying
to explain the slavonic motive production to you. Yeah, that's
a good one.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
And it's like overall, I would say the economic work
of Marx is like the thing that I like Marx
about whatever put that sense together correctly. The thing I
like the most about Marxist stuff is overall, like I
think it was a decent economist. He wasn't flawless. He
did a lot of work that no one else did
at the time. It's my general takeaway. But obviously he
got some shit wrong. Yeah, it just makes a lot
(41:03):
of sense that people like in their own context are
like the proletarian thing, isn't. We're in Korea, just different.
We're gonna talk with a desperate and humble you know.
And so there they formed another Black Friends Society and
organized workers in the unions and opened to labor night school,
because that's what you do. In August nineteen twenty nine,
(41:24):
the yich On Freedom Group was caught and everyone was
sentenced to three to four years in prison.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Je's Christ, did they all die in prison?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
I don't know about that one or not, you know,
like maybe they made it out Hope springs eternal, Yeah, exactly.
And they slowly got better at secrecy, and then they
secretly formed the Korean Anarco Communist Federation on November tenth,
nineteen twenty nine. And the KAF had a rule that
its members weren't allowed to get into physical fights with communists,
And I think that's funny. They tried to hold a convention.
(41:58):
This was not a good idea. It was like a
secret convention. They didn't like put flyers up right, But
it wasn't a good idea to have a Korean anarchist convention.
Almost everyone was arrested. Families of those who were arrested
were punished as well, mostly like economically, I think they
were denied jobs and kicked out of different situations, like
they weren't necessarily like murdered or whatever. I mean, well
(42:19):
take away people's livelihood and a colony sort of murdering them.
But international anarchists from Manchuria and Japan were deported. The
first convention of the Korean and Arco Communist Federation where
everyone didn't get arrested was in nineteen forty six, after
Jesus Christ. It wasn't a colony anymore. No, I don't
(42:41):
think they like tried every year in between, but that
would have been funny. It's our duty to go get
arrested at the anarchist convention. That's what it means be
an anarchist. The Korean Anarchist Federation was the last major
anarchist organization in Korea until nineteen forty five. For the
rest of the colonial period, anarchism was a thing discussed
in bookstores and shit. But shout out to the people
(43:04):
who kept radical bookstores. Everyone who talks about the shit's
going to fucking prison and dying there. And then there's
these bookstores that are like, we're going to have our
anarchists book clubs here, and we're going to sell books.
It's like one of the things that we take for
granted in a place that currently has wait, we can't
take free speech in publishing for granted in the United
States anymore. Never mind, people are going to prison. Librarians
(43:28):
and teachers are going to prison in the United States
right now for having books about queerness and shit. So
never mind. Shout out to the bookkeepers in Korea during
this period who fucking made sure that the spirit didn't die.
There's also an implication that's hard to pin down. I
know that's the recurring theme of this episode, that some
(43:49):
Korean anarchists, including at least one woman, went to Soviet
Russian to fight against the Bolsheviks. I'm guessing this would
have been on the Siberian Front of the Civil War,
which is where one of the two places that anarchists
held out the longest there in Ukraine. So that's Korea itself.
And when we come back part four of our four
parter about the Korean People's Association of Manchuria is going
(44:10):
to be about.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Aiation in Yeah, that's extremely exciting. I'm glad we're finally
getting there four parts.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
I know this is like I felt it was necessary,
and I think that I hope you all enjoyed the ride.
But the peak of it, we're reaching our destination where
two million people are going to live in an anarchist
society for I think longer than actually people usually talk about.
People usually talk about as a two year project. There's
(44:40):
it could have been a six year anyway. That's what
we're going to talk about on Wednesday. But first, Mia,
what do you want to talk about?
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Uh? Oh, yeah, I have I have a podcast. It's
called akadept here. There's a bunch of other people on
it too, who are great. If I died before this
has come out, I was assassinated by Boeing. By the
time this comes out, you will know why. You won't
know why. Oh shit, Okay, Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Hell yeah, I mean not you getting assassinated, but you
fucking yeah, Okay, I'm sorry for sending you that story.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah, Sophie, you must avenge me if Bowie hit Man
comes for me.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Oh my gosh, I promise I will do an amazing.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Podcast about you. I promise I'll organize a funeral with
a you know, black and red and a coffin parade
into the street.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Bagpie is like, I'll give you a great funeral, and
I'm like, I'll do a wonderful true crime podcast about
your dad.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, so dark, I have great friends, and then all
of us at cool Zone Media will.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Oh, there we go.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
That's nice. So you know, everything will and happily that way.
I'm going to go on book tour if I'm not
assassinated by Boeing. I have no reason I'll be assassinated
by Boeing unless I jack. Oh, but I'm going on
book tour. I'll be coming to a city near you.
I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm
going to a lot of them. If you live in
(46:15):
the Northeast or anywhere, I will be driving from Pittsburgh
to Washington and down to Portland. You can check out.
I'll have all the dates on my substack, which is
Margaret Kiljoy do at substack dot com. You don't have
to sign up in order to see that. That would
be ridiculous. And also on my Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy
and also at my Twitter at Magpie Kiljoy. I will
(46:35):
be posting all of the dates of my tour for
my book, The Sapling Gage, which comes out tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Holy crap. Yeah wow.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
So not as we record it, but as you if
you listen on time comes out September twenty fourth, twenty
twenty four, and you all be glad because then I'll
stop plugging it at the end of every episode. But
you would be even more glad if you read it.
This is good. See you on Wednesday, Bay.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website foolzonmedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly podcast about stuff that I think is cool, done
by people. I'm a person. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. Also People
is Mia Wong him me.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
A Hello, I am. I'm approximating a person for this one.
It's gonna be great. Got very little sleep last night.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's good.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
It's gonna be it's gonna be incredible, or we're gotting.
We're getting off the rails via here.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I was thinking when you're like, I'm approximating a person,
I was thinking it was like a gender thing like
a million years ago. My my friend was like, is
your gender identity, Wraith? And I was like, yeah, probably
that was more like my gender presentation. To be honest, I.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Mean it's a good one. They always always loved to
be raithing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, obliterate the body while wearing cool floey black things.
Also a people is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Last time I checked?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I am a people. It's seems probable. Oukham's Razor says,
in fact, all three of us are people.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah, sometimes I'm a person. Some days I don't feel
that way.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I think I'm a person today, though, excellent. I'm willing
to always pretend on Mike that I am Chipper. No
one thinks I'm Chipper. Anyway, We're all here for part
three of a four parter about the Korean People's Association
of Manchuria and the much broader Korean anarchism around it,
(01:31):
and probably the most ideologically complexed episodes we've done on
this show. And we did the Russian Civil War.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Oh yeah, this makes me long for the relative ideological
simplicity of the seventeen Green Armies. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
But before we get into that, we want to thank Rory,
our audio engineer, hi Rori Hiri, Hi Rory, And you
want to think Unwoman who did our themis and you
can go listen to more of Unwoman's music. Some of
it as singing, some of it doesn't. Yay, so many things. Okay,
So the craziest thing happened in between recording parts one
(02:12):
and two and then now actually a week later. Sometimes
I pretend like, oh, here we are a week later,
it's like, actually a week later, now, the craziest thing happened.
I learned things. Wow, Usually I learned stuff, but this stuff,
I learned stuff in a cool way because I brought
up a lot of questions that I felt unanswered by
my sources, right, and some of those questions a listener
(02:34):
messaged me and answered those questions. Oh wow, it rules,
So thank you, Joshua Kang. I'm going to talk about
some of those things that I learned, and then we'll
move on. Okay, So remember I was talking about the
Sillhack movement or the realism movement or the realist movement,
the like old timey folks, like before any other political
(02:55):
ideologies developed, where like a like maybe Catholic, maybe Confucian
guy was like, what if we all live in communes
and it's great? And I was like, I don't understand.
One source says their Catholic, one sources their confusion, and
definitely a lot not Catholic. I found the answer. The
answer is that they are both.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, okay, So as we've predicted, yes, exactly, I like
learning this one because I learned I was right with
my guests.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Joshua said that Silhak took a lot of influences as
a quote from the Catholics and had a lot of
Catholic members. Even the Catholic members of this group would
have considered themselves Confucians and so just people who thought
of themselves as both.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, that makes sense, and it's like that's a thing
where I think what gets considered. I mean, you know,
obviously we talked about sort of Korean Christian syncretism, but
this isn't even that, because like it's not that hard
to sort of fuse Confucianism with like another kind of religion,
(03:56):
Like people in China do this all the time too,
where it's like or people move back and forth between
them rapidly and like between different sort of religious ideological filiations,
and then they also just are both at the same
time and it's not like that difficult of a thing,
just because of sort of the nature of how Confucianism
is structured.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That makes sense because I've always I don't know enough
about Confucianism to be any kind of expert on it,
but I've like read about it many times, and it
always seemed like it was like kind of a not
as like we are a religion and more of a
like we are a set of ways of thinking about things,
and I don't know.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah, the whole kind of religion, philosophy, ideology distinction gets
kind of gets really blurry, the further out you get
for the people who like developed it, which is like.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So yeah and so yeah, I like that we were right. Okay.
The other thing another thing I learned, So I was
talking about how Korean anarchists set up a ton of
schools in China and Korea. Right, it turns out obviously
Korean anarchists were doing this, but like this is sort
of a Korean cultural thing, Joshua said. Quote It's very
(05:06):
much a cultural legacy of the Sian b which are
Hermit's scholars who would be disgusted with politics and set
up academies in exile so their students would one day
restore a righteous government. So it's like an anarchist thing
to specifically be like, we're going to go set up
schools in exile so that we can fix Korea, which
is cool, Like that's a cool thing. Yeah, and there's
(05:28):
some in the US that were founded in a similar way. Huh,
not necessarily by anarchists. But okay. Another thing that I
learned that I forgot to write into my script, but
now I remember off the top of my head, is
that one of the ways that I was talking about
how Korea was like always between all these imperial powers,
and it was sort of being traded back and forth.
Is a modern and slightly incorrect way of looking at
the far past of Korea, and that actually, when it
(05:49):
was under Chinese influence, it was a very autonomous place.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Yeah, that's it's always weird with So what are the
stories I always remember about, Like thinking about Chinese, especially
before like the eighteen hundreds, is like there are a
lot of records of people in like the fifteen sixteen
hundreds who are like European travelers who are in China,
and they ask the people that they're talking about about China,
and and then those people have no idea what the
fuck they're talking about, because it's like, well, no, I
(06:16):
don't live in China. I live in like this like place, right,
that's like any And like the sort of especially the
further out in the borders that you get, the sort
of lines of control get really weird, and there's lots
of groups that are like technically under the dynasties. But
like in the most air quotes, I guess, okay, well,
in Italy, this oracle parallem about the draw here is
(06:37):
probably not that useful that many people, but it's it's
kind of like Egypt in the late Ottoman Empire, where
like Egypt is like nominally an Ottoman thing, but I
mean I think they're actually more independent than that. But
like Egypt periodically just conducts its own form policy. It's
like basically like a self governing quality, but it makes
sense periodically kind of like yeah, I think that's like
(07:01):
Chinese control over Korea is like even more nominal than
that a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yeah, And if the more I read like David Graeber
talking about anthropology stuff, the more I was realized that,
like the ability to exert control over areas you claim
to own is a fairly modern technological development, like not
like modernism, like only in the eighteen hundreds or whatever, right,
but like different places had the technology to actually rule
(07:27):
the places that they theoretically ruled, and other places didn't.
You know, Like I'm under the impression Rome was better
at ruling England then English kings were after the fall
of Rome, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like like there's there's sort of bureaucratic
and all I mean literally sometimes also literally technology, but
a lot of it's like bureaucratic technology that you need to.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Like I mean technology like bureaucracy, I mean ways of
thinking and applying things, not like wheels that are around
her or something. Yeah. Okay, then the other note that
came up. Okay, So remember how I was like, well,
one source was like, well, they're all pretty nationalist, right,
and then there's that other source, that whole lass book
that's like, no, the Korean anarchist movement was super cosmopolitan
(08:13):
and transnational, right or made it blurry. Well, I'm now
going to make an argument back in the other direction. Unfortunately,
because we talked a bunch about that Korean anarchist journalist
and author Shinchweho who wrote the manifesto that was such
a big deal for like revolution Manifesto that I really liked.
It turns out his legacy is he as he aged,
(08:37):
became more and more of an ethnic ulter nationalist while
still remaining an anarchist, which unfortunate. I'd rather be abandon
the anarchism an ethnic culture nationalist.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Oh god.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
And one of the things that they talked about in
that Revolutionary Manifesto that they were against was servile thinking, right,
And when I read that, I was like, oh, I
just don't really know what that means in this translation,
you know, it's like one of those words where I
just hear it and I'm like, ah, okay whatever, Like
no one likes being told what to do. To quote
Joshua again, when he talks about servile thinking, it is
(09:13):
a reference to his nationalist thought that revolves around Korean's
being nomadic warrior peoples that were then made servile and
an effeminate by a Confucian elite and the Chinese. And
I'm no longer quoting this ties into the jeuch thing
that current North Korean philosophy. I know, you know what
I'm talking about, but you know, for people don't remember.
Because he wanted Koreans to be strongly and manly and
(09:35):
self sufficient, so that's like where the jew Cha comes from.
He also had a kind of manifest destiny kind of
thing going on about Manchuria, which isn't quite the best
parallel to make, right, but basically being like we should
take Manchuria as Korea is really puts the whole thing
we're going to talk about about Korean exiles and Manchuria
(09:56):
into a different light.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Yeah, I think this is something that you see this
with like kind of someone to let stuff You see
this with like the Chinese communists too, where the ways
that colonialism was understood can get very very messy, and
it can generate kinds of like reactionary anti imperialisms where
(10:19):
you have all of these people who you know, because
there's a sort of like leftist, like pure leftist read
of colonialism, which is sort of about like physical subjugation
and domination and stuff like that. But there's also a
read of it, and this is something that's very popular
among sort of modern Chinese nationalists, for example, where it's
read as something that was like an emasculating force, something
(10:39):
that was read as like specifically an attack on masculinity,
an attack on like their specific patriarchal authority. And that's
another you know, this is a strand of anti imperalism
that almost always gets mixed in with other kinds of movements,
and it sucks. And these people tend to be the
ones who take power after revalutions happened because they are
(11:01):
the warshort of conservative action. Yeah, and that kind of
nationalism is extremely powerful.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
That makes sense, and that ties into jewche being the
official philosophy of North Korea, you know. Yeah, Yeah, So
those are some updates where we last left our heroes.
The Korean Independence movement was doing its thing in all
kinds of ways, and we talked about what it was
up to in China. Basically, it was embroiled in one
of the most complicated moments in political history ever, where
(11:29):
an ever shifting alliance of nationalists, communists, and to a
lesser extent, anarchist was doing all kinds of stuff. And
I was being grouchy that none of my sources got
into the stuff I really wanted to know about, like
the hospitals that they were running, the money that they counterfeited,
and what Japanese imperialists they were exploding, and there is
some information about who they exploded available and stuff. Just
(11:49):
nothing read like an action movie enough for me. But
that's so Magpie of you. Yeah, yeah, there was probably
tunnels and no one mentioned. I'm sure they dug tunnels.
I bet people broke out of prison.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
There has to have bend tunnels.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah. So, while a ton of the more ideological rebels
went to China and a ton of the fighters went
to Manchuria, a lot of the Righteous Armies went to Manchuria. Oh,
when I learned more about the Righteous Armies, and I'm
not going to go back and add it because it's
not relevant to a story. But I think I'm going
to be doing a couple episodes about the Righteous Armies
because they're interesting. Oh interesting haha, and like a bunch
(12:24):
of their music and the Dong Hack music is available
on YouTube. I also learned this from Joshua, Thank you Joshua,
and I listened to a bunch of it right before
we recorded. Anyway, an awful lot of students and workers
went to Japan, so we're gonna talk about Japan. Japan
is an island. Now, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
There's both of the islands.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, it's true. Japan was the most modernized country in
East Asia during all this period and Tokyo. I was
learning about how Tokyo was originally seen as sort of
a symbol of Asian unity against the West, but very
quickly it was like through US imperializing everything. Yeah, Japan
is gaining power and things aren't perfect in their empire.
(13:07):
They're getting a little spooked because anarchists keep trying to
kill their emperor. The Russian Revolution just happened, and there's
this whole thing called the Rice Riots. Of nineteen eighteen
caused by rice and the massive inflation of rice, and
if you ever want to hear more about not necessarily
this one. I don't know if you covered this one,
but MIA did a whole series on food riots and
(13:28):
why they're behind everything that happens ever on it could
happen here. Yeah, I do think we did the rice riots.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
I think we kind of I think I was kind
of soft on the problem with doing a series on
bread riots is that there's literally so many of them
that you have to like, you have to pick your
time periods, not even so much your specific riots.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It's oh yeah, no, I mean like we could start
just a whole new podcast called the Great Food Riots
of History. I mean, like noting that down. And so
the rice riots of nineteen eighteen were caused by the
massive inflation of the cost of rice, and this brought
down the Prime Minister and it probably led to further
we need creator send us more rice. So things aren't
(14:11):
necessarily going great. Well, they're not going great for anyone,
including the powers that be. The work studies students in
Tokyo were heavily influenced by anarchism, especially by Krapotkin. And
soon they were publishing all their own newspapers and shit.
The earliest you asked for the earliest Korean anarchists that
I found, and the answer was these Koreans in Tokyo
put out a journal called the Light of Learning or
(14:33):
called Light of Learning. That journal talked about how tenant
peasants should use direct action against their landlords. And I
think that was like nineteen fourteen or something. But why
would I write the year down in my script when
I'm reading it? Who knows?
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Well?
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Because who cares about years? They're they're boring's more explosions,
less years. This is what American media has taught me
about how people learn things. Well, see, eventually you care
enough about all the explosions. The only reason years are
interesting to me is that they're like the linkages, you know,
They're like the part you can connect this thing to
(15:05):
this other thing with the year. But without that context,
they are a nonsense like all names are just nonsense
words to me. They go in one a year and
out the other, unless I like, really apply, I should
remember that my friend's name is John, you know, like
Otherwise it's just like they're just like meaningless whatever. I
have a strange brain.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
But by the early nineteen twenties there are anarchist books
everywhere and groups are popping up all over the place.
It helped that even though they were students, the Korean
work study students were rather dramatically oppressed along class, national,
and ethnic lines, and they were forced to work the
lowest wage jobs is in the city. They were like
peddling in the streets distributing newspapers that kind of shit.
(15:48):
When I say it helped, it helped radicalize them. It
didn't help them with their lives to be happy or logged. Yeah,
Korean anarchists and communists together formed something called the BLA
Black Wave Society in nineteen twenty one. But nineteen twenty
one wasn't like the best year for left unity speaking
of years tying shit together, ah, because this is the
(16:12):
year that the Bolsheviks firmly crushed all leftist resistance to
their dictatorship in Russia. So, for whatever reason, who knows,
the communist and the anarchists and the Black Wave Society split.
The anarchists formed the Black Labor Society, the communists into
the North Star Society. Points to the Communist here, that's
a better name.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Oh, yeah, definitely. I feel I feel like most of
the names of anic descripts in Japan tend to be
really good, but that one, we're working. We're kind of
slipping there, guys, you gotta do better. But their journal
name Ruled. The Black Labor Society published the journal The
Recalcitrant Koreans at rips. We we love to see it. Yeah,
(16:54):
good stuff on that part.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
And they believe that the way to find the self
is through metal aid with others, a thing that I
also believe, and they wrote a ton of philosophy around that.
Like I just really like when people are like, hey,
the self and the community are not in contradiction with
each other but instead work well. And they also, in
something I'll continue to underline throughout this episode, wanted a
(17:18):
cosmopolitan world where the border between Japan and Korea was gone.
They wanted the inversion of the Pan Asian imperialist writings
of colonial Japan, right because colonial Japan's like, oh, we're
all Asian under Japanese rule, yeah, you know, and the
anarchists were like, oh, we're all people under our own
self governance, yeah, which.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Which is interesting because I think I don't know, I mean,
Pan Asianism kind of got killed off really fast, both
by the fact that it was you know, in a
way that sort of like Pan Arabisines and Pan Africanism
didn't like largely because it was so much of a
Japanese project. But it's interesting that you get a Kai
to ruciate of it, that's like, hold on, why do
(18:03):
we have these borders and not the sort of Japanese
like the borders are there for quality markings?
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, No, And it's interesting and it comes out of Japan.
It comes out of Koreans in Japan, and also Japanese
people in Japan, and also probably Chinese and other folks
in Japan. But so Japan is super tense at this time.
Leftism is going wild in the early nineteen twenties, and
they're critiquing and attacking the colonial and war machines of
Japan from within. A lot of this tension came to
(18:30):
a head in nineteen twenty three when the Great Tokyo
Earthquake hit. And this is a sort of physical manifestation
of fault lines that can't handle tension anymore. The first
time I heard I'm now off script, let's go. The
first time I ever heard about the Great Japanese Earthquake
or the Great Tokyo Earthquake was. I was at the
anarchist book fair in San Francisco and there was this
(18:52):
group of folks from Tokyo there and they were tabling
an English translation of a book that they had written
in Esperanto about Japanese anarchism that rules, and it wasn't
the best English translation, and they had all of these
scenes about like the martyrs of the Japanese anarchist movement,
and I'm flipping through it and there's all these children
(19:13):
and it's just the names of children who died, and
I'm like, what's going on? And the answer was the
Great Tokyo Earthquake. If you want to hear more about
this period in detail, check out our episode about all
the Japanese anarchists women who kept trying to kill emperors.
The short of it was that nineteen twenty three, a
buck off big earthquake hit Tokyo or near Tokyo, and
(19:37):
it turned into a massive race riot where six thousand
Korean immigrants were hunted down and killed by folks.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Yeah, the story I always remember from this was there's
a bunch of stories of guys who'd been like old
like Japanese officers and like people who'd fought in China,
like in like this the Sino Japanese War, like taking
their swords off through mantlepieces and like going to hunt
people down.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Just one of the worst, like one of the worst
moments in a period of Japanese history, in which every
single thing they do is going to be terrible. Yeah,
really horrible stuff.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, And almost certainly there's some historical contention about the
cause and effect here. Almost certainly the government consciously used
this as a period to also go and kill a
lot of the anarchists and entire families and like throw
them into wells and shit. There's some argument that I've
read a while ago that like maybe maybe they were
(20:36):
hunted down organically instead of by the government, you know,
but whatever, it was, whole families slaughtered, thrown into wells.
And then they thought, say, like literally blamed Korean people
in anarchists the earthquake. They blamed the earthquake on them,
not just the chaos of it. Yeah, And that didn't
hold up, and that that part didn't last very long.
The authorities arrested a few anarchists for the quote high
(20:58):
treason case, which was especially in the Korean anarchist scene,
which was our A Korean anarchist man named paciol and
a Japanese anarchist woman named Kanikofumiko were accused of trying
to assassinate the emperor. The trial became a huge show trial.
They were more or less on trial for being against
the colonization of Korea, and one of my favorite love
stories of all time is in that episode. And I'm
(21:18):
not going to tell you it here do you have
to listen? But in the end their death senses were
commuted to life in prison. Kaniko Fumiko took her own life.
Pacuol survived and was freed after the empire fell nineteen
forty five, made it home to Korea, where I have
read a ton of different arguments about how he lived
the rest of his life. I suspect more information is
(21:39):
available in English now than there was when I first
learned about this. But whatever have you ever seen an anarchist from colony?
Speaker 3 (21:48):
Oh? I is that the one that has the show
me a nation I refuse to be killed by an abstraction?
Or is that a different one?
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
That sounds right, I think So.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
There's like aes, because I know there's a few, like
there's a kind of genre of both Korean and Jeffanese
cinema that's sort of about this kind of thing that
that could be from a different one of those movies
that I'm confusing in my head because you know this
is this is my plug for sleep. This episode is
(22:19):
sponsored by getting enough sleep. Please do it. It's great.
Damages your brain if you don't.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
And if you don't get enough sleep, you'll forget to
do AD transitions when you're supposed to and have to
go with that one. So this show brought to you
by between seven and fourteen hours of sleep, whatever you
would prefer.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
I also didn't sleep, and I thought you did one
around nineteen minutes and you didn't.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Nope, yep, you did not. Here we go.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
We're doing great everyone.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
And we're back from that nap that's seven to fourteen
hour nap depending.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
On what you know, feeling rejuvenated. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah, Sadly it's not true on our end, none of
us have swept since we went to ads. But Anarchism Colony,
I really like it. It's a South Korean movie about
paciol and kinkofumicco and about the love story. So I
guess you can actually watch it by watching it, But
it's interesting because this whole thing is part of the
(23:25):
whole like Korea as a country that cannot and does
not ignore its anarchists past. You know that there's like
a lot of work to sometimes nationalize the anarchist heroes.
But I really like that movie. Top five fictional representations
of anarchism at cinema easily maybe my favorite one. Honestly
probably my favorite just in terms of like accuracy and
(23:47):
also it's a good movie anyway. The Japanese anarchist movement
was splitting hard in the early nineteen twenties between anarcho
syndicalism and then the thing that my friend Miowong did
a bunch of episodes about pure anarchism, which is developed
in Japan anarchist tendency that didn't want to be watered
down by being part of the labor movement. And the
Korean anarchists were split by this as well, but mostly
(24:10):
in Japan. Actually in Korea they were like, we got
bigger problems.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah, it's really like that split is really just a
Japan I think every other anarchist in the world who
have ever read who's looked at it was like, what
on earth are you people doing? Yeah, Rico Balatesa is
a very famous was.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
It was it? Mala Tesla was a roough Rocker, either.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Mela Tesla, who's a very famous Italian anarchist or Rudoff
Rocker who's probably the most famous German. And Arcosynicolas like
reads about like the split that they're having. It says
them a letter being like, hey, y'all should work this
out instead of splitting. The Japanese actors like, no, we're
gonna worr to split every single federation in movement between
these two kind of all along sort of semi baffling
(24:54):
ideological lines.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, And so that happened to the Korean anarchist there
as well. But I think I think overall the Korean
anarchists movement in Japan was more or in Tokyo at
least was more split by the fact that a lot
of them were arrested, one of them was one of
their friends was in prison, and a lot of them
basically fled Tokyo and went to either China or Korea.
And nineteen twenty three hard time to be Korean an anarchist,
(25:19):
or especially a Korean anarchist in Tokyo.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, dear God.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
After nineteen twenty three, a ton of the Korean Tokyo
anarchists went back to Korea itself to start organizing groups there,
including a lot of Pocuo's friends. The other big center
of Korean anarchist activity in Japan was in Osaka, an
industrial city with a higher population density than Tokyo did
at that time, and the cheap labor that built that
industry was, of course immigrant labor from Korea. About fifteen
(25:45):
to twenty thousand Korean people came there every year. I'm
uncertain if this was seasonal labor where they're like showing up,
if it's the same fifteen twenty thousand people, or if
it's like that's how many people were pouring in every
single year and it was adding up. I'm not sure
these folks brought anarchism with them to Osaka. One of
them had already been in jail in Korea for organizing,
and a ton of them grew up as child laborers.
(26:05):
These are not theory focused folks, yet one of them
formed a As you pointed out, some fucking good names here.
One group that they formed had the sick name the
Alliance of Societies of Korean Property List people that rules. Yeah,
like what other people with nothing?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Fuck you.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I don't know a ton about what they got up to.
I know that they were. They held mass demos in
nineteen twenty four alongside others for the free speech of
Korean immigrants. It was a big Korean immigrant rights movement.
In nineteen twenty four in Osaka, folks organized labor night
schools in Osaka where they taught how workers could free
themselves by uniting and fighting capitalism and just going into
the like Koreans and exile set up schools and it's cool. So, yeah,
(26:51):
that is Korean anarchism in Japan. But what about two
and a half hours into us learning about Korean anarchism,
what about Korean anarchists in Korea overall? I think people
talk about a story less because it's it's not nearly
as well documented because it was all underground and it
(27:15):
mostly it was really sad. But the way Korean anarchism
moreton Korea itself was people would organize underground at first,
and formally there's tons of anarchists. They would create a
group with a name and membership lists, which was that
worked out against them, To be clear.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, not a great idea if you're trying to organize
an underground group.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
No, like when in doubt, if your group is illegal
or very likely to be, don't keep lists, which they
then got good at. And now we don't know shit
about what happened. But they would form a group with
a name, try and get shit done. Then all the
organizers would be arrested and the group would break up.
And even though they were given like fairly light sentences
like two to five years in prison for free speech,
(27:57):
they would usually die in jail or at least multiple
of the times that I've read about it. Survivors and
new folks would form another group, and so it went.
In colonial Korea, socialism was part of the daily conversation
among the youth again in the early nineteen twenties. This
socialism was primarily anarchism. There's a you know, major split,
(28:19):
like obviously communism and stuff is part of everything too,
but that comes a little bit later in terms of
which one has more influenced when one of the major
ways that anarchism spread was through esperantism. Our friend the
constructed language. We've talked about this a bunch on the show. Basically,
there's this constructed language called Esperanto. It was invented by
(28:40):
this Eastern European anti Zionist Jew in the nineteenth century
whose name I didn't write into the script, but I
talked about it a whole bunch In fuck, I've done
so many episodes, I don't remember which one. Listen to
all one hundred episodes and you'll find out more about
esperantism and hear that guy talking about why he doesn't
think Zionism is a good idea. It became the language
(29:02):
of the left across the world, and it was an
attempt to destroy national borders through a common tongue that
was no one's mother tongue, as best as I can tell.
And this is sort of an inference. Part of how
anarchism was spreading in Korea is that, like, the fucking
sensors didn't know how to read esperanto, so books and
esperanto just contained secret anarchism messages that the sensors couldn't
(29:23):
they didn't notice.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
I bet Also to another contributing factor is that, I mean,
we've talked about this a bit, but the people who
absolutely love ESPERANTOI the Japanese anarchists, like they really really
love Esperanto, So there's probably books moving from there too.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Oh totally. It was actually called the Wind from the
East Anarchism was, which I think is cool.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Oh yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, And I didn't know where to put that into
the script, so thanks for me bringing that up. At
the end of every single time I write scripts, I
have all my scattered notes that I haven't yet figured
out where to plug in, and then I just like
highlight them all and delete them and it makes me
sad every time.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
You know, Glen, glad, we got this one. We need
to found that group that can be the like successive
organization Asian anarchists. You should make an anarchist group or something.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Hell yeah, hell yeah. So Korean anarchists in Korea, we're
actually the least radical in terms of what they were
saying of the five geographies of Korean anarchism that I'm
the one who made up that there's five geographies of it.
This is not an accurate thing. But you know, like
most of China, Manchuria, Tokyo and Osaka and then Korea
(30:34):
all have very different personalities of Korean anarchism. Right during
this period, elsewhere, the anarchists are like, all right, here's
the deal. We're gonna kill all the Japanese invaders, reclaimed Korea,
build a bottom up society built on mutual aid and solidarity,
and then get into arguments about how I know, nationalists
we should be like. That's like overall the vibe most places.
Right inside Korea, the anarchists at this point are like, Hey,
(30:56):
we're activists working to improve everyone's material conditions, and we
happen to like theilosophy books, but we're not going to
say anything about the colonies and the empire because then
we'll die.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah, censorship does tend to have that effect. I guess.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah. They kept independence out of the rhetoric because they
kept getting murdered in jail as it was. But the
softening of the rhetoric did not save them. But what
could have saved them was products, especially if those products
were This show is brought to you by international solidarity
(31:30):
and mutual aid, which, to be fair, they had, and
it wasn't enough to save them. Even more were brought
to you by even more international solidarity and mutual aid.
That's the only sponsor, and also whoever gave us money,
here's that and for back. One thing that being under
(31:56):
the gun helped prevent them from doing is getting caught
up in ideological differences. Mentioned that, yeah, the pure anarchism.
So the split was felt between syndicalism and pure anarchism,
and it was discussed, and it was not nearly so
important to anarchists in Korea, although one thing I read
is said that the most prevalent strem was pure anarchism.
But another thing I read was like, here's all the
labor unions they started.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
I'm like, yeah. Also, I will say that the peer anarchists,
like as much as their whole thing is opposition to
societies based around organization around production, like they do, also
have a bunch of labor unions. So it's hard to tell. Okay,
it's hard to tell what formation is which just based
on what the formation is because well, just like how
(32:38):
national borders are nonsense, but people live in different places.
Lines between ideologies are nonsense and artificially constructed, but there
is still differences between different places.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
That's that's my deep thoughts for today. The first group
of anarchists that I found was actually the first labor
association in Korea as best as I can sort out,
and by that I mean a source said it was
the first labor association in Korea. But anytime anyone says
the first something something, I don't believe them.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
In nineteen twenty folks who liked Krapotkin but didn't go
explicitly anarchists until nineteen twenty four formed the Association for
Labor and Mutual Relief in Korea. This was a combo
labor union and mutual aid group. As best as I
can tell, The Black Labor Society was founded explicitly anarchist
in Seoul in nineteen twenty three. Soon it disappeared due
(33:27):
to repression. Next, the League of the Black Flag was formed,
which is a good name. Anything with a league is
a good name. I've read it that it was formed
in nineteen twenty four, and I've read it was formed
in nineteen twenty five. Everyone listed in their membership was
arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. So the
government didn't like the League for some reason. I think
(33:48):
it was the name. They were like, we don't like
the name.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Yeah, his name is. His name's too cool.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
It's cool.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
If any of the names we've come up with, we've got,
we must put every single one of these people in prison.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, and almost all of them died, even though there
sense to a year in prison, they almost all died
in prison or killed themselves immediately after release because of
how badly they've been treated.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
Oo.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
And this was a strong message to the anarchists, but
not one that stopped anarchism. Bachiol, the political prisoner in Japan,
was heavily influential on these groups. Right, he's a guy,
and he's in fucking prison in Japan, And some of
the founders of a lot of these groups had already
been arrested in Japan in nineteen twenty three during his trial.
Another group set up only a few months later was
(34:29):
the True Friends League. I promised up at the top
of this there was going to be a lot of
like friends leagues. And there's so many group names that
I didn't put into this script, but a lot of
the ones that are not in it are like eighteen
different versions of the Best Friends and the True Friends
and the Black Friends and the Yeah, True Friends League
is also good. Although I think League of True Friends,
(34:50):
but that's probably just a translation difference. This lasted about
a year before all of this founders were arrested. Everyone
got two to five years for Darien to try and
build new society on anarchist principles. At least one of
those members died of pneumonia during hunger strike in prison.
Just like in China and Japan, anarchist groups in Korea
were multi ethnic. When the True Friendsly headquarters was raided,
(35:13):
there were at least two Japanese anarchists present who went
to prison as well. A Christian anarchist named Kim Son
opened a church in Korea after he came back from
China convinced that the Bible was anarchistic. So he started
off as a Christian and then he was like, oh,
now I'm an anarchist Christian and I'm going to go
open a church about how the Bible is anarchistic. He
was always in and out of prison for that work.
(35:33):
And he also tried to set up an anarchist village
in northern Korea. And I don't know more about it.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Probably they all got arrested, unfortunately, that that seems like
the arc of the story. Yeah, in Korea, that they
all got arrested.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, they might have fucked off to Manchuria. That's the
other thing people successfully do. Yeah, maybe where they all
eventually whatever, We'll get to that. Several times, I think,
partly to evade all of this getting arrested for doing
political groups, they would set up groups that were explicitly
art and literature movements, not political movements. Ah, these were
(36:05):
still crushed.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
In nineteen twenty five they tried another left unity one
all types of socialist art came together, and by that
I mean Bolsheviks and anarchists. These are the two primary
forces at this point, called the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation.
They split because the Bolsheviks kept arguing that all literature
must be political propaganda or else it isn't proletarian, and
(36:29):
that everything had to be Bolshevik. The anarchist position was,
what if art can just be art sometimes, or it
can be anarchistic and it can even be Bolshevik.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
What if art is okay, if it's art proto actually know,
what is this even proto socialist realism or were we
just in their socialist realism by this point I think
we might be.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
I actually don't know exactly. I have this whole plan
where I want to do it like futurists versus Soviet realism,
and like.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Oh yeah, well, there is a whole bunch of interesting
stuff about, like Soviet art communes that I only sort
of know about. Oh cool, that I've heard interesting stuff about.
But they also get eventually wiped out by piped out
by the Stalinists. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
I don't remember whether I covered this enough, but it
might be later in the script too. All the Korean
folks who sided with the Soviets, they went really badly
for them. There was a whole ethnic cleansing that happens. Oh,
Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah, it's really one of those old Bolshevik war hero
d next to their name, nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yep. Yeah, it's mostly nineteen thirty seven for the Korean Soviets.
But yeah, I think about twenty five thousand of them
killed anyway, Okay, I think it's in the script, Jesus Christ.
I think it's in the scrip. We'll get to it.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Oh No.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
In May nineteen twenty nine, folks from the Chungho Artist
Movement Society were arrested and given two to five years.
So they're getting the same as everyone else, right, And
they were as they claimed they were just an art
movement members happened to be anarchists. At their trial, no
one bothered bringing up evidence that they were like doing
anything that was criminal even under the fucking statute at
(38:09):
the time they all went to prison. The movement seemed
to have been strongest on Jaju Island, which is the
largest island off Korea, and some Korean anarchists who left
Japan moved there started a mutual aid group called Our
Mutual Loan Club, which did a Taoist anarchist thing and
combined anarchism with Daoism's idea of the three treasures diligence, frugality,
(38:29):
and modesty. Just for another syncretism, I'm going to shove
as many into this episode as I can. Yeah, most
of the groups started in southern Korea, where the capital
of Korea was right, but as those groups were all repressed,
the spirit moved north by like nineteen twenty seven or so.
There anarchist theory was developed that sort of replaced the
(38:51):
proletarian class of Marx with the desperate and humble class
by a Korean anarchist, ying Yong that felt more appropriate
to the Korean in context. Because it included peasants and
it includes like well, Iron is desperate and humble, right
or humbled by society.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, it's like the Japanese pur anarchists like do a
kind of move like this too, And it's interesting that
they get here kind of in some ways before the
Marxists are really getting to this place where like they're
they're running into problems with the fact that like they're
sort of you know, Marxist idealized the revolutionary subject kind
of like isn't the only person who's being a revolutionary
(39:31):
subject around it? Also isn't even necessarily the primary thing
that you're dealing with if you're in a colony.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Yeah, that makes sense. And also like oh crap, I
forget the name of it. The different like modes of
production that Marx describes, one of them isn't one of
them called the asiatic mode or like something horrible and
like just like racist and wrong.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
It's really people have tried to rehabilitate the asiatic mode
of production, but like, well, one of the things that
if you really go into the marks, you realize he's
kind of just making up like there's a slow vonic
mode of production. He's kind of just he's kind of
just freestyling with it, and they're they're not very good.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
He's like, here there be monsters mode of production.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, it's like there's a really good David Graeber piece
called turning modes of Production inside out and which you
kind of ar he's trying to kind of rehabilitate the
idea of it. And his argument basically is that like
capitalism as a mode of production is a form of slavery. Yeah,
like it's just like a different version of that. But
if if you want to get if you want a
good thing about how the whole sort of modes of
(40:32):
production thing gets really incoherent really fast about what you
poke at it with a stick, and Marxist is trying
to explain the slavonic motive production to you. Yeah, that's
a good one.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
And it's like overall, I would say the economic work
of Marx is like the thing that I like Marx
about whatever put that sense together correctly. The thing I
like the most about Marxist stuff is overall, like I
think it was a decent economist. He wasn't flawless. He
did a lot of work that no one else did
at the time. It's my general takeaway. But obviously he
got some shit wrong. Yeah, it just makes a lot
(41:03):
of sense that people like in their own context are
like the proletarian thing, isn't. We're in Korea, just different.
We're gonna talk with a desperate and humble you know.
And so there they formed another Black Friends Society and
organized workers in the unions and opened to labor night school,
because that's what you do. In August nineteen twenty nine,
(41:24):
the yich On Freedom Group was caught and everyone was
sentenced to three to four years in prison.
Speaker 3 (41:29):
Je's Christ, did they all die in prison?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
I don't know about that one or not, you know,
like maybe they made it out Hope springs eternal, Yeah, exactly.
And they slowly got better at secrecy, and then they
secretly formed the Korean Anarco Communist Federation on November tenth,
nineteen twenty nine. And the KAF had a rule that
its members weren't allowed to get into physical fights with communists,
And I think that's funny. They tried to hold a convention.
(41:58):
This was not a good idea. It was like a
secret convention. They didn't like put flyers up right, But
it wasn't a good idea to have a Korean anarchist convention.
Almost everyone was arrested. Families of those who were arrested
were punished as well, mostly like economically, I think they
were denied jobs and kicked out of different situations, like
they weren't necessarily like murdered or whatever. I mean, well
(42:19):
take away people's livelihood and a colony sort of murdering them.
But international anarchists from Manchuria and Japan were deported. The
first convention of the Korean and Arco Communist Federation where
everyone didn't get arrested was in nineteen forty six, after
Jesus Christ. It wasn't a colony anymore. No, I don't
(42:41):
think they like tried every year in between, but that
would have been funny. It's our duty to go get
arrested at the anarchist convention. That's what it means be
an anarchist. The Korean Anarchist Federation was the last major
anarchist organization in Korea until nineteen forty five. For the
rest of the colonial period, anarchism was a thing discussed
in bookstores and shit. But shout out to the people
(43:04):
who kept radical bookstores. Everyone who talks about the shit's
going to fucking prison and dying there. And then there's
these bookstores that are like, we're going to have our
anarchists book clubs here, and we're going to sell books.
It's like one of the things that we take for
granted in a place that currently has wait, we can't
take free speech in publishing for granted in the United
States anymore. Never mind, people are going to prison. Librarians
(43:28):
and teachers are going to prison in the United States
right now for having books about queerness and shit. So
never mind. Shout out to the bookkeepers in Korea during
this period who fucking made sure that the spirit didn't die.
There's also an implication that's hard to pin down. I
know that's the recurring theme of this episode, that some
(43:49):
Korean anarchists, including at least one woman, went to Soviet
Russian to fight against the Bolsheviks. I'm guessing this would
have been on the Siberian Front of the Civil War,
which is where one of the two places that anarchists
held out the longest there in Ukraine. So that's Korea itself.
And when we come back part four of our four
parter about the Korean People's Association of Manchuria is going
(44:10):
to be about.
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Aiation in Yeah, that's extremely exciting. I'm glad we're finally
getting there four parts.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
I know this is like I felt it was necessary,
and I think that I hope you all enjoyed the ride.
But the peak of it, we're reaching our destination where
two million people are going to live in an anarchist
society for I think longer than actually people usually talk about.
People usually talk about as a two year project. There's
(44:40):
it could have been a six year anyway. That's what
we're going to talk about on Wednesday. But first, Mia,
what do you want to talk about?
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Uh? Oh, yeah, I have I have a podcast. It's
called akadept here. There's a bunch of other people on
it too, who are great. If I died before this
has come out, I was assassinated by Boeing. By the
time this comes out, you will know why. You won't
know why. Oh shit, Okay, Yeah, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Hell yeah, I mean not you getting assassinated, but you
fucking yeah, Okay, I'm sorry for sending you that story.
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah, Sophie, you must avenge me if Bowie hit Man
comes for me.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Oh my gosh, I promise I will do an amazing.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Podcast about you. I promise I'll organize a funeral with
a you know, black and red and a coffin parade
into the street.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Bagpie is like, I'll give you a great funeral, and
I'm like, I'll do a wonderful true crime podcast about
your dad.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Yeah, so dark, I have great friends, and then all
of us at cool Zone Media will.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Oh, there we go.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
That's nice. So you know, everything will and happily that way.
I'm going to go on book tour if I'm not
assassinated by Boeing. I have no reason I'll be assassinated
by Boeing unless I jack. Oh, but I'm going on
book tour. I'll be coming to a city near you.
I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm
going to a lot of them. If you live in
(46:15):
the Northeast or anywhere, I will be driving from Pittsburgh
to Washington and down to Portland. You can check out.
I'll have all the dates on my substack, which is
Margaret Kiljoy do at substack dot com. You don't have
to sign up in order to see that. That would
be ridiculous. And also on my Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy
and also at my Twitter at Magpie Kiljoy. I will
(46:35):
be posting all of the dates of my tour for
my book, The Sapling Gage, which comes out tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
Holy crap. Yeah wow.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
So not as we record it, but as you if
you listen on time comes out September twenty fourth, twenty
twenty four, and you all be glad because then I'll
stop plugging it at the end of every episode. But
you would be even more glad if you read it.
This is good. See you on Wednesday, Bay.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website foolzonmedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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