Part One: The Korean People's Association of Manchuria: When Two Million People Lived In a Horizontal Society

Margaret talks 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 1/4

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.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things, there's good things,
like the rainbow after the storm, only in this case,
it's more like the rainbow before the storm that's usually
destroyed by the storm, like in this week's episode where
everything is going to end terribly. But you all kind
of knew that.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Great, you couldn't have lied just like once.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Okay, sorry, I could be the birds before the storm,
how about that?

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, it's like the name of my website that's broken
because it got hacked a while ago and I haven't
fixed it yet.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Our guest today is Mia Himya.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
You know I was thinking about because I sort of
know how this story ends, and I think the very
very long range ending of this story is that the
original President Bush throws up on the Prime Minister of
Japan and that's the revenge that we get for this. Okay,
So I think you're going to know more about parts
of this than me, and I'm very very excited for that.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
As you might have guessed, Mia already knows the subject
and that's a deviation from tradition, but we thought it
was best and by that I mean I needed to
nerd out while I was researching this because it took
me so long to research this. I spent so much
time researching this, and I needed to nerd out at
least a little bit. The other voice you're hearing is Sophie,

(01:21):
our producer, Hi, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Hi, mac Pie Himya.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
For those who don't know Mia Wong's work, Mia is
one of the hosts of It Could Happen Here, and
you can listen to her talk about things on that
daily podcast. And oh, I almost forgot. Our audio engineers
Rory Hi, Rory, Hi, Ri Hi Rory, and our theme
music was written for us by n Woman. This week

(01:49):
and next is a four parter. We're going to be
diving into a subject I've wanted to know more about
four years. This is one of the main things that
I was like, one day I'm going to cover on
this show. Verry first started Korean anarchism, specifically Korean anarchism
before World War two, so Korean anarchism while Korea was

(02:09):
a Japanese colony, and specifically me, I'm gonna present this
as if you've no idea what I'm talking about, but
you know more about what I'm talking about than almost
anyone in North America.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
I'm not sure I go that far, but it's definitely
above average for anarchists. I guess.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
There's this rumor that floats around that is trueish, and
I'm curious where you land on it being true as
is presented when people list off the examples of anarchist
societies that got off the ground in the twentieth century,
they talk about two of the ones that we've covered
on this podcast. They talk about Eastern Spain from nineteen

(02:48):
thirty six to nineteen thirty nine or so during the
Spanish Civil War, And they talk about a good chunk
of Ukraine from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one, the
sort of Makno controlled area of Ukraine during the Russian
Civil War, sometimes almost in whispers, not because they're like
afraid they're going to get in trouble for saying it,

(03:08):
but because they're not sure if they're right about what
they're talking about. People talk about the Korean People's Association
of Manchuria, which ran from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen
thirty one.

Speaker 3 (03:21):
And I've known the.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Cliff notes version of this story for a very long
time now, and I've always wanted to know more. This
is the I wasn't just like I need to do
Korean anarchism, although that was true, but it was specifically
I need to do the Korean People's Association of Manchuria.
Do you hear people talking about this much? I know
this isn't like what people normally talk about at parties,
except when they want.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Everyone else to leave them alone. Yeah, I mean, I
think it kind of in the last I don't know,
half a decade, kind of got added to the canon
of like the Big the Big three anarchist revolutions. Although
it's one of these weird things where the place it
pops up the most is you'll get a few paragraphs,
maybe a couple of pages about it in a book

(04:02):
that's about like here anarchist movements in every country, and
it gets it usually has like a similar length of
material to like, I don't know, like Chile or something,
or Brazil or like write sometimes Bolivia. If you're dealing
with a really in depth one, it doesn't. It very
rarely gets really really long and systemic treatments. I think

(04:24):
because and I think, yeah, you've run into this. The
sourcing on it is so hard, yes, because I mean,
we're gonna get into this, but like it's it's you're
dealing with sources that would have to be in three
languages because I'm technically multiple Chinese, multiple Chinese dialects, Japanese
and Korean in sort of like and English so I

(04:45):
can read it. Yeah, yeah, that has to be found.
You have to get this into English. And it's in
this sort of like shatter point of all of these
different sort of empires, and it's and the main book
on it is really unreadable. I the first time I
ran into this was so, this is this is this
is my mea origin theory, origin of story. So like
I had like kind of been doing anarchisty stuff before

(05:06):
twenty seventeen, but in twenty seventeen, I was like, Okay,
things are really bad. I'm going to go sit down
and read a bunch of theory. Yeah, and I was
in college. I love that for you. That's not the
way my brain works, but I love that for you. No.
I so like, I like checked out a bunch of
books and anarchism like my So this is the University
of Chicago Library. They apparently have an autographed copy of

(05:26):
krop Hopkin's Conquest of Bread. Holy She was like yeah.
I was like wow. But they had a bunch of
books and I picked out the ones. That I remember
was that I don't think I checked out that one
because I was like, this is I should not be
taking this out of the stacks, like this is they
should just stay here. But uh, yeah, I picked it
was it was a book on It was like one
of the books I'm assuming it's one of the sources
for this. It was like one of the books on

(05:48):
Korean anarchism, and then how to Shoozo and Purre Anarchism
into Ward Japan, which is much more readable and much
more fun. And that's the one that like took me.
But the Korean anarchism what I was like, Oh no,
this is so.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Impenetrable, we're actually gonna I actually added because of exactly
what you're talking about. I really like this way of
phrasing it, that it's in the shatter zone. Because of
how complicated the historiography of this is, I added a
little histiography section. Even though I don't know how to
pronounce that word. I still added the section. And that
didn't occur to me until just now that I don't
know how to produce it. So for people who are

(06:24):
listening who are like, what the fuck are these ladies
talking about, the cliff notes version is that there were
about two million Korean people living in Manchuria, which is
the region of China immediately north of the Korean Peninsula
at the end of the nineteen twenties. They were living
there because they'd been forced into exile by the harsh
Japanese occupation of Korea, and some chunk of them lived

(06:47):
under explicitly anarchistic values because they were like, fuck, how
do we organize ourselves so we don't starve but also
can fight off Japanese imperialists? And the people who offered
a decent idea of how to do that were a
bunch of anarchists, veterans of the anti imperialist gorilla struggle.
This formation, this non state is still the cliff Notes

(07:07):
version it lasted about. This is about as much as
you get in the average treatment of it, right, And
this is like mostly what I knew and mostly what
people knew about it, because I'm somehow representative of everybody.
Everyone knows about the Korean People Association of Manchuria just anyway,
I know who some pop stars are. Chap ol' ron

(07:28):
was in a nights uniform on TV and multiple people
send it to me. I know pop culture anyway, who
is she she? I know a little bit about her
because like some of my friends are, you know, queer
sex workers. So they made sure I knew about this
a long time ago because that Ping Pony Club song,

(07:48):
so I know slightly more about her. I know she's queer,
and she wrote Ping Pony Club and she sounds like
modern Kate Bush, and I like it.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
That's what I got. That's about all I know.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
It's a great analysis.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
You did it, okay.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
But the Korean People's Association of Manchuria, I know about
ten thousand words of most of it's how it happened.
This non state lasted about two years, but Japanese imperial
forces kept assassinating their leaders, and the Communist Party of
China also kept assassinating their leaders, and the project fell
apart and Japan conquered Manchuria, which means that once again

(08:25):
a large scale anarchist or anarchistic project fell apart because
of the combined forces of reaction the imperialist Japan and
authoritarian communism both used violence to stop them. It happened
in Ukraine, it happened in Spain, and it happened in
between those two in Manchuria. So how did a bunch
of Korean peasants living in exile wind up living as anarchists?

(08:49):
How did that go for them?

Speaker 1 (08:50):
Well?

Speaker 2 (08:51):
This weekend next we're going to try and answer that question,
and frustratingly, we're not going to completely succeed.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, you know, it's funny. The closest I've ever gotten
to like a first hand account of this was a
I sort of knew someone who's like grandma had been
in this.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Oh shit, that's cool.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
But the ideology is so weird. Yeah, it's so deeply weird.
There's also and I think there's something we're gonna get
you too, is it's also deeply sort of connected to
Korean nationalist movements because this is because this is an
anti imperialist movement, and it there's some frankly baffling ideological
stuff that happens here that you couldn't get into.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
And I suspect that there was not anywhere near a
real consensus about what that ideology meant. There was like
practical ideas This wasn't just like, oh, you know, if
you're listening to this is for the very first time,
you have no idea what talking about. When we say anarchism,
I'm not talking about being like there wasn't a government.
Everymber just kind of did stuff like it was a
system that was created that was an attempt at a

(09:55):
bottom up structure where like people's councils got together in villages,
passed delegates up to higher levels and made decisions collectively
and built a ton of schools and trained militarily and
fought against the imperialism of Japan. But beyond like those ideas, yeah, no,
the people all over the place in terms of what

(10:18):
people like really thought what was going on? You know,
in a weird way, it's like sort of the most
anarchic of all of the anarchists struggles I've read about
in that it's like in the almost like negative sense,
not the negative sense, but the like complicated, messy, multi
ideo logical sense. Anyway, along the way, what we learn
about this imperfectly, we're going to learn a fun time

(10:40):
about Korean in Japanese and Chinese politics. And when I
say we, I mean I guess you the audience. I
learned it all while reading this stuff. And we're going
to learn about anti colonial struggle, and we're going to
learn about a whole bunch of groups with really cool names.
They're all like called like the Black Friends Society and.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Those like so good.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
They're all these like friends societies. It's really it's really sweet,
and all those grips are going to come and go
because of oppression. So come with me if you will.
On Korean anarchism. This is my working title, anti colonial,
anti authoritarian, and awesome because I need another a word.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
I love it. This is great, ten thousand, this is this. Okay,
I gotta go behind the scenes for a second. The
apps people think that the hardest part of writing an
episode is doing research, and they are wrong. It is not.
It's not the actual podcasting itself. The single hardest part
is writing the title of description.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
To me, is the show you work on perhaps daily?

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah, I'm believably difficult. Oh my god, it's so annoying.
You've written so many titles.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
If we could just call the episode episode and then
like fifty two.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Or whatever, Oh yeah, it'd be more like five seven
hundred and twenty four or something. At this point, probably,
but well, yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
I gotta say I remember when I uh, oh my god,
I'm blinking. His name, Zack Snyder.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
That one the director I don't know names.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Sophie helped me here. I can't remember which one's Timothy
Snyder's the historian, Zack Snyder is the director d Snyder.
I know that one.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Zack Snyder's the filmmaker.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
Okay, yeah, he released a movie called Rebel Mood Part
two Scargiver, and it made me feel so much better
about myself because, like, so many people got paid so
much money to come up with the title for that movie,
and they came up with that, and I had just
come up with an episode, the title of which was
The Cheapest Land Is Bought in Blood, and I was like,

(12:38):
I'm so good at this.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
Yeah, Like I would watch a movie called The Cheapest
Land Is Bought in Blood. It could be almost any
of the episodes I've done with the shit.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, that one was a Palis side episode for I
think obvious reasons. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah yeah,
so histy or factal section, Wow, historiographical section, historiographical section,
how about that? Historiographical? Does that sound right?

Speaker 3 (13:10):
I think it's historiography.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
I think, I figure, okay, historiography if I get enough
of the English words wrong. Then the fact that I
looked up basically every Korean name in this and not
all of them could I find pronunciations for.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
I am so sorry. I can I help it all
about this? I know no Korean. It's okay. So it's okay,
completely useless here, I'm apologizing to Koreate advance.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
I looked them up, and also all of them are
being transliterated in different ways in different sources. Yeah, so
I want to do this thing that might become a
regular segment on the show. Maybe you'll end up at
the end, maybe you'll end up at the beginning. For
right now, because of this particular complicated story, it's here
at the beginning. History is, of course, the study of history. Historiography,
however it's pronounced, is the study of studying history. By

(13:54):
the way, if you're one of the fifteen people who's
currently opening up a messaging app to tell me how
to pronounce it, I don't care. I don't want you
to tell me.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
I also don't care. Yeah, they don't care.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Anyway, Historiography is studying history. It's how we talk about history,
and I want to start talking a bit more explicitly
about how people talk about what they talk about, because
this is one of the things that bothers me about
my own genre of pop history, right because I'm a
pop historian. You know, I'm not a historian. I don't
do the research. I look at the research. I look

(14:28):
at second hand sources primarily. You know. One of the
things that bothers me is that it's like really easy
to create these sort of like here's a fun story
that's like completely uncomplicated, because that's like the easier way
to get yeah, clicks or whatever you call downloads, I
don't know whatever, listeners. I am constantly trying to piece
together stories that are a bit hard to piece together.

(14:48):
Sometimes the stories are hard to piece together because they're
so widely known that they're sort of mythologized and misrepresented
and there's just like a million little like listical articles
about them or whatever. Sometimes stories are hard to piece
together because they're obscure as fuck and people involved didn't
take notes because they were all criminals. This story is
somehow hard for both reasons. Because Korea is one of

(15:10):
the few countries in the world that simply cannot hide
from its anarchist past. Instead, its anarchist heroes have become
national heroes, and those people's anarchism is a quirky side note,
or it is wrapped up in the national flag. You'll
see this some in Mexico and Ukraine and Spain, and
I've also seen it in Argentina, and I suspect there's

(15:30):
some other countries that kind of can't get away from it,
so they have to figure out how to cope with
the fact that they're like, yeah, you know, heroes were anarchists.
In Korea, it's extra complicated because of what me had
talked about a good number of the anti colonial heroes
of Korea were anarchists. And sometimes that anarchism has talked
about and sometimes it isn't. But Korean anarchism, because it

(15:51):
was built on an anti colonial movement, has a nationalistic
character that you don't find elsewhere.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
I mean you do.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
You find different versions of it elsewhere, right, But it's
different everywhere because it's different nations. That's part of nationalism.
I read a lot of long and short essays and
most of a book for this episode. I stopped the
book once I got well passed where it was.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Yeah, once I got past World.

Speaker 2 (16:12):
War Two, I was like, that's not what I'm covering
right now. You know, I still haven't read everything I
can about the Mancharian Anarchist Project because most of the
things that talk about this era aren't talking about the
anarchist project. They're talking about Korean independence separately, or they
like write in the other major characters of the twentieth
century instead. You know, basically, more work needs to be

(16:34):
done to make available in English information about the Korean
People's Association of Manchuria, and I would have needed half
a year instead of the two weeks I got in
order to like really break like do historian work instead
of what I do. But don't worry. I still think

(16:56):
these episodes are going to be really good and we're
going to learn a ton, and I'm just expressing upfront
there's more work to be done. Some of the sources
I used the History of the Korean Anarchist Movement by
Hockey Rock, which was written in nineteen eighty six by
Korean anarchist who's part of Korean Anarchist Federation. This was
the kind of first English language thing. It's been suggested
by other sources that this has a bias towards nationalist

(17:18):
and a more reformist look at anarchism, because Korean anarchism
has a different character than it does in most places,
and it has more both reformism and nationalism than it
does elsewhere. Then there's the book that both me and
I read called Anarchism in Korea by Dong Yon Huong,
which was published in twenty sixteen, and in many ways
it's a refutation of the nationalism presented by Hockey Rock.

(17:42):
Neither of these are very accessibly written. I don't want
to let go on at length because like, good on
you historians, thank you for doing this work, but these
are not written in ways that are entertaining.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yeah, it's one of the hardest things I've ever tried
to read, which is sort of wild considering how much
stuff I got handed by way professors in college.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
And like, I felt so much better when you told
me that, because it is the hardest book I've probably
ever read for this show in terms of just like
it's not particularly chronological, and it is making arguments about
ideology that aren't directly relevant to It's very direct relevant

(18:24):
to the subject matter, but it's not necessarily relevant to
like conversations that I'm usually part of, you know, anyway,
I'm not trying to go on about it. And then
there's another source called The Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism by
Michael Schmidt, which talks about the Korean People's Association more accessibly.
Michael Schmidt is a disgraced author because he's this white
South African guy who it turns out he went from

(18:45):
anarchism to national anarchism to regular old nationalism.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah, yeah, real fiasco.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
And then okay, almost known of my sources, there's another
summary available on libcom called Summary of the Symonym Prefecture.
It's basically by anonymous. It's like by a Twitter handle
that doesn't exist anymore, and it is, sadly mostly a summary.
It is a summary of a book in Korean that
I want to read, but I don't read Korean, which
is not anyone in Korea's fault.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
It is my fault.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
I feel confident about what I'm going to tell you well,
but I wish I could tell you even more because
there's just so much here. There is as much history
here as there is in Western Europe, and we just
focus not on the wrong shit, but we just need
to focus on more shit.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
Yeah, And I have a thesis that I'm public going
to do in like part four of this, which is
that I actually think this event is really important to
understanding the history of Japanese fascism. And I think the
fact that everyone has forgotten about this whole incident is
actually part of why all of the Western scholars who
you read going like, ah, Japan wasn't fascist, it was
just like anulter nationalist monarchy or whatever. I think that's

(19:56):
part of why they screwed up, because this is the
missing It's like one of the arguments that like fascism
scholars make because fascism is a direct reaction to sort
of like leftist revolutionary movements, right, And the thing in
Japan is that there kind of wasn't one, right, and
like on this scale of something like like the two
Red Years in Italy were like anarchist neely took over
the country. There isn't one, but there is. It's just

(20:17):
that it was in Manchuria and not in Japan. And
this has caused generations of fascism scholars like including like Paxton,
whose work is usually pretty good, I think, to just
fundamentally misunderstand what was happening in Japan. So this is
my thesis I will present at the very very end
of this whole thing. I'm excited to hear it.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
But you know what I'm even more excited to hear
is it the products and services that support this podcast?

Speaker 3 (20:41):
I am.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
I'm just always so curious what will happen when I
As soon as the little jingle music cuts in.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Who knows back. So let's say about Korea.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
I'm going to speed run a little bit of Korea,
although most of our story isn't going to take place
in Korea.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
That's one of the things about Korean anarchism.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, that's the wild part of this. There's a place
called Korea. Currently, quite famously, it is divided into sort
of the easiest encapsulation of the Cold War left on
the planet. The North, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
is a communist hotalitarian society, and the South, the Republic
of Korea, is a capitalist society, and they are in
a Cold war still because both claim to be the

(21:34):
rightful rulers of the entire peninsula. This division between North
and South, I think it's really important for people to
understand it's not fostered by like some deep ideological cultural
split between North Korean people and South Korean people. The
dividing line between the two countries, roughly the thirty eighth parallel,
was just where the USSR and the USA decided to
divide up their spoils after they drove the Japanese out.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, it's it's kind of funny because it's like there
are places in East Asia where it would have made
sense for that to happen, Like if that had happened
in China, it's like, well, yeah, okay, so like so
then China endure. Then China have had you know, I
mean different even different parts of it, but like I've
had enormous sort of cultural and social problems with each
other for like hundreds of years. But no, it happened
to Korea, where like that's kind of not a thing.

(22:19):
It's it's we got we got the most Like any
division like that is obviously going to be arbitrary, but
we got the most arbitrary one conceivable based on a
bunch of imperialists being evil.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, it didn't make it into my script, but I
was listening to this. That's a bunch of history of
Korea podcast just for the like broadest possible context. And
one of them and I didn't write this down and
I'm sorry, was like two random American guys just were like,
oh no, what about that line? And people are like,
that's it, that's the line that sucks.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah, this is like eighty this is like eight how
eighty percent of the border centers were drawn. Yeah, just
totally some British guy, I guess this is technically would
have been an American guy, but like, yeah, some some
random English speaking dude wentz scribbled on a map and
now there's like two rbs on either side of.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
The Korean Peninsula. People have been there for tens of
thousands of years at least, and you've got the Three
Kingdoms period starting at like fifty seven BC, and then
by the end of the tenth century AD, you've got
the dynasties kicking in that have unified the place. Most
of these dynasties haven't been fully independent, but instead under
the influence of the Mongol Empire and various Chinese dynasties,

(23:31):
and Japan also like to invade a lot, so Korea
seems to be like one of those. Like to use
a European comparison, because I know more about the history
of Finland coming into it.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Like it's a Finland.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
It's a place that other places just trade back and
forth and treat like shit, but then there's still a
like culture and some Actually I think I had more
home rule than Finland ever did. Anyway, the last of
these dynasties was the Josian dynasty, which lasted for five
hundred and five years, which, for those keeping track at home,
is more than two ussays and more than one hundred

(24:04):
and twenty five confederacies.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
I think that's such a long dynasty. Like, I think
that's way longer for any of the Chinese dynasties. I'm
pretty sure. Unless I'm really screwing up my Chinese dynasty history,
I think it's like twice as long as any of
though maybe more.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
That's impressive. It's a really long time. It is the
longest I've ever read about at anywhere. But I haven't
read a ton of it, right, but I do. I'm like,
I don't know history, and I'm like, okay, I do.
I read more history books than the average person, and
I want to replaced which I didn't write down the
name and I'm very sorry. Also lasted for almost five
hundred years, like cheese. Like, so when this one fell,

(24:41):
people were like they didn't see it coming because they're like, nah,
it's just there. That's just like the fucking like, that's
as long as white people have been in North America,
you know, Like, yeah, it's wild. Yeah, when power would
change hands between these dynasties, it's always got it bad.

(25:01):
The Josian dynasty sometimes called the Lee dynasty. If you're
reading some sources and get confused, like I did, that's
because it's referred to by different names by different sources,
but it's the same thing. The Josian Dynasty use neo
confusion ideology to rob the shit out of the working class, which,
in this case, since it's an agricultural society, is the peasants.
People were paying more than half their yield and taxes,

(25:23):
while officials paid no taxes at all. This is totally
not familiar to the modern reader. I don't know what
you're talking about. Yeah, a cast system was introduced. Taxes
were so bad that a lot of people abandoned their
land entirely to become drifters. Lots of people either became rebels,
or robbers, and I'm willing to bet the line between
these two things was not clearcut. So the Josian dynasty

(25:46):
was not like a happy great time, and therefore that
makes the colonization and imperialization of it totally justified, says
some people that you can still read writing today. God,
when I talk to you about how I was going
to do this episode, you said a thing to me.
You said, Oh, I'm excited I'm finally going to learn

(26:06):
about Korean anarchism before nineteen twenty. Well, yes and no,
because I'm going to talk about some of the precursors
to anarchism in Korea that have been marked by modern
Korean anarchists as precursors. Our main subject is the anarchist
movement in Korea, and the Korean anarchist historian Hockey Rack

(26:27):
presents a sort of interesting precedent to it, one that
got all the more interesting once you look at the
larger context around it. This precursor is strictly ideological, but
I love how basically anarchist communism has come up as
an ideological concept over and over again all throughout history.
You can read about whether it's the diggers or whether

(26:50):
it's like Siberian peasants or like just over and over again,
especially in religious movements actually, because that's just kind of
what philosophy was called. That in the day more or
less you find people being like, what if anarchist communism,
They just don't have those words.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yeah, there's a really famous one in China called the
Movement of the Tillers, where there's a lot of dispute
over what they believed because.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Because everyone wants to claim him, well, because because all
of their actual direct writing was immediately destroyed when Hambudi
took power, because he except for their agricultural manuals, which
were so good that like the empire like just kept
using them.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
So there's a lot of dispute over exactly what they believed.
But there's a version of it where it's like they're
basically an anarchist society, but they have one guy who's
a king, but he's just he doesn't do anything different.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
He's just also in the fields and they call him
the king. Oh my god, this is just Tolkien. This
is what Tolkien wants. Yeah, this is the future Tolkien wants.
The the the In the Tolkien version, the king is
supposed to handle politics. This guy, I think, is just
supposed to be like yeah, it's it's almost war. It's
it's almost more of like a chieftain thing where he's.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Just like, yeah, okay, I'm going to convince it to
go to the fields and waking up early and shaming everyone.
It's going to work because you gotta get out.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
So the Sophie, they need a sophie. They need someone
to actually get people to do the things. I need
a Sophie. I'm glad I have one.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Thank you me too. Thank you. So there was a
man who his name is.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
A million names depends on which source you read, but
overall his name is Dsan or Trung da Son or
a bunch of other things.

Speaker 1 (28:25):
It's kind of my favorite man. When you're like, what's
his name, we don't know.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
He's great. Yeah, he has a lot of fucking names,
and I mean what it is is that he has
like names that are transliterated in different ways. And then
he also has an art name, which is Dasan, which
is like mono name.

Speaker 4 (28:41):
Yeah, he's a man with a personality in hobbies. Yeah extinct.
The song was his art name, which is a phrase
that I run across all the time he is extinct
this particular one as well.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
I think I wounded.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
If this is a pop culture reference that's gone over
my head, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Okay, cool a joke that I don't think you heard
me say.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Okay, he was born in seventeen sixty two, so now
I'm not trying to figure what that sho'd ask what
the joke is. No, it'd be funnier if I don't know.
Okay to the audience, he was born in seventeen sixty two,
so like a long ass time ago. He was this
sort of super famous and influential philosopher and poet, and
he was an advisor to the king, like he was

(29:33):
super high up a guy. And then in eighteen hundred
or so, he was forced into exile because his family
was Catholic. Was he Catholic? It depends on the source
you read. Ah. Some sources are very specific that he
was Catholic. Some sources are very specific that he was
not Catholic. So he's very much one or the other.

(29:56):
I suspect he's somehow both. His family was very Catholic,
you know that much. While he was in exile, he
was forced to live among the peasants, and he saw
how bad they had it, and he was like, we
should have a better way to run things. And this
to me, I don't know a ton about Confucism, but
I read a fair amount for this. This seems like
a very confusion way to like be like, oh, let's

(30:16):
find better ways to run things, Like I am going
to create a system that is going to be very
specific and run things, you know, so in your return
to court. He had all these ideas and he was
part of what gets called the realist movement or the
Silhac movement. Wikipedia argues that the Silhac movement is part
of neo Confucism. The Korean historian Hockey Rock suggests that
the movement was heavily influenced by Catholicism and that most

(30:38):
of its major people were Catholics. I don't know, yeah,
I mean, I this is we're getting into the parts
of create istory.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
I don't know very well. I will say later like
Christianity in Korea is really really syncretic, even even sorted
by the standards of Catholicism, which gets syncretic really really fast, right,
and it leaves Europe. But yeah, it I don't know.
I mean, it could just be both and every side
was angry about it. It could have just been I

(31:06):
don't know, I suspect it's.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Both in every side is angry about it, and it's
kind of syncretic, and like, I find it fascinating. You know,
you're like, Okay, let's take some of the social teachings
of Catholicism and some of the let's try to have
a good theory of government from Confucism, and you end
up with this, And then you take some particular thinkers
is not guaranteed to happen, and you wind up with this.
Like proto anarchist communism, the realist movement advocated for land

(31:30):
reform that would divide the land up into basically village
collective ownership of about thirty families, called the eogion system,
and they would cultivate land collectively. Those who farm the
land would get a share of the produce, and those
who don't farm the land won't. But then you like
have sort of free exchange between those people. Crafts people
would trade their work for grain. Intellectuals and aristocrats would

(31:51):
have to help with productive activities as well, whether through
the direct application of intellectual labor to like this is
how we could try and grow things better or just
going out and helping grow things like you can't. You
can't just be a thinker. That's not a job that
this movement agrees with. Dassan wrote, quote, why should the
man who has the title of saw the aristocrats try

(32:12):
to grab the products of the land and swallow the
fruits of labor without toil. Because the men with the
title saw eat without doing any work, the benefits coming
from the land are not developed to their full extent,
and the ill of the society continues to accumulate. Is
just very similar to like Russian philosophy, like Russian communist
philosophy in like the nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yeah, we have developed land to the tillers. We have
done it very quickly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
He wrote about methods by which these societies could self
regulate without enforcement from above. This is where the anarcho
part comes in. Everyone has free will, and it is
by encouraging people's free will and the best development of
their own desires and things like that that we can
allow society to organize organically. That's an interesting thing because
if like it's kind of it's almost like Smithian to

(33:01):
me in the sense that, Yeah, I could see that.
It's this argument that like people.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Following their own will will inevitably sort of like self
organizing to a system. But like the sort of Smith
argument is that this will form a market and that
God will sort of like come in and help them.
They take out God leader. But right, yeah, it's interesting.
It's like it's that same kind of argument but for
a very very different system. No, you're right, that's actually

(33:26):
really interesting because there is always a like it's always
a little sketchy when anyone describing a political system gets
hand wavy, and it's like and then it'll work, and
you're like by what it means and you're like hocus focus,
you know, and like and sometimes it's just sometimes that's true,
but usually you.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Kind of have to set things up in motion to
get things to work that way, you know. But yeah,
I know it's a it's an interesting system, and I
see why. It's like not just like this doesn't become
the platform of Korean anarchism, right, but they like recognize
it as proto anarchism or at least this, you know,
hockey rock does. Dassan wrote about leadership, describing basically a

(34:03):
federation model familiar to those who study like democratic and
federalism or different federated anarchist structures or democratic structures. He
wrote quote, if there are sixty four dancers in the yard,
we select a man among them as the conductor to
lead the dance party. If he accomplishes his work successfully,
the audience will applaud him as our conductor. If he
fails to do so, he will be dragged out and

(34:25):
replaced by another able one. A representative of a group
is the same hmmm. And this is like the idea
of like a delegate with mandates is, for example, how
the Spanish anarchists organize their society during the revolution. Historian
Hockey Rock wrote about this quote, we find an ideology
of self liberation in Dissan. However, his age was not

(34:46):
right to accept his ideas. His voice remained as an
empty echo of a scholar in exile. It took another
century for his theory to receive the proper social response.
And you know what the proper social response to ideas
is market them for profit and then advertise them. So
this show is brought to you by the YogiOn system.

(35:10):
Go out and get thirty families and start a commune.
But it only works if you federate it up.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Here, you go and we're back. I hope all of
the ads were for weird communes, only good weird communes,
So we're actually bad weird communes. Let's be real.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Communes in general don't have a really good history. Like, hey,
the parish one was Okay, that's true, that's true, didn't
last super long. But yeah, I think overall, like all
of the attempts at like utopian society things that I
think they don't work as they're like outside of society.
I think that they don't work because they're like it
actually kind of takes all of us to do these

(36:00):
things together, you know.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Yeah, which, which which is why when you found your commune,
it has to be the whole. It has to be
named after the city you need to get like the
another mohawk in commune. And once you get it named
after the full city that you've that you're now running,
it'll it'll work. Then you got a chance. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
I don't want to dox myself by saying how small
the town I live in is, but I'm like, you know,
I have a chance. So the dynasty continues. People didn't
like living under oppressive conditions, and by the nineteenth century
it's unstable as fuck. By the eighteen sixties you've got
all these peasant revolts throughout Korea. I think you're named.

(36:40):
Chue Ju was like, let's do something new. His new
idea was called dong Hawk or Eastern Study, and it's
sort of a religious political ideology that eventually became a
proper religion of its own.

Speaker 3 (36:53):
Have you heard of this? No, I don't think you've
run into it.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
So this is the like religion behind the major uprisings
in the second half of the nineteenth century in Korea,
which is like one of those things when if you
say the whole thing out it sounds very minor, but
if you live in Korea, it's a really big If
you're in Korea in eighteen sixties, this is a big deal.
You know. Some of the basic ideas of this Eastern
Study of Donghak is fighting against Western religious colonization by

(37:20):
the Catholics and against the Confucism that's also being shitty
to us, although depending on who you read, it's either
anti Confucianism or it's a reform of Confucianism. Also, it's
kind of just Christianity with the serial numbers scraped off.

(37:41):
But they're like, we want to get rid of inequality,
whether it's feudalism or slavery, or patriarchy or agism or
class differences. They are like listing it out, you know.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah, that rules. We love this. This is great.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah, and it seems as though this is Christianity syncretized
with Korean traditional beliefs. Chue himself said, quote, the meanings
are the same, only the words are different. Like that's
why we think it's it's this. It's because he said
it is, you know, but it is different. It is
like a very like every person is heaven, you know,

(38:15):
all people are themselves part of Heaven. I'm not gonna
be able to.

Speaker 3 (38:17):
Do That's cool.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, no, it's it's an interesting idea. And once again,
I've seen it called both christian and Confucism, and it's
also against both of those things. And so that's just
kind of the history of before before the anarchists get
on the scene under the name anarchism.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
That's just all of it. It kind of reminds you
of these things where it's like everyone's arguing about like
a really obscure Marxist reformist movement or something where it's
like you're you're on like branch seventeen of like a
Trotskyite faction, and it's like, are they Trotskyites? Are they neocons?
Have they renounced Marxism? Is this a critique of Marxism?

(38:51):
Is this who knows? We're unable to discern?

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, totally, Like, and you know, it's like I suspect
that at the end of the day, it was people
who were like, man, you know, it would be cool
if we weren't being oppressed. Yeah, this seems like an
all right method of doing it. We're all part of Heaven. Fuck, yeah,
let's go. Like the first thing that the religion tried
to do was overthrow the government, which is cool and good. Yeah,

(39:15):
and they had some success. They took over parts of
South Korea or Southern Korea, but not South Korea.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
This didn't last, and Chuey himself got executed pretty much
right off the bat. But this didn't like just die
with him, because it wasn't actually just a charismatic leader movement.
As best as I can tell, I don't know, one
day I'm going to do a deep dive and do
a whole series on this thing maybe and I'll learn
more about it. This sort of democratic nationalist religious movement transformed.
It's actually still around as a religion called Cheonduism, and

(39:43):
it's a pantheistic religion that I know basically nothing about
except what I've just said. Nineteenth century it changed the
shit out of the world, as we've talked about a lot,
and Korea didn't modernize really, which left them pretty vulnerable.
So Japan started bringing the under its influence. China also
hadn't super modernized and it was under Chinese influence, but

(40:05):
Japan was stronger, so they were like, yeah, but we
want this.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
Yeah, China has this, Like there's a whole history there.
I like, China attempts to modernize and it just doesn't
work it okay, Yeah, I mean they're fucking country. Yeah,
it's that. And also, like the thing about Japan is
the degree of imperial pressure was under is really less
because I mean, one of the other things that's probably
probably gonna talk about a bit in this story, it
was like one of the other countries that is a

(40:28):
big imperial influence in Korea's Russia. Because Russia is pressing
so hard on China from the north that like there,
I mean, yeah, you know, like China at this point
is like in the process of being split up of
like all these concessions and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah, yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about the
Russian imperial influence on Korea, but not a ton, but yeah,
like overall, it's like worth knowing that, you know, the
Czar is being like, oh, I'm not going to annex Korea,
but he's like kind of moving to annex Korea and like.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah, and like the fact that Russia can do that
is sort of a side of like the weakness of
the Chinese government at this point, because yeah, this is
still the dice the dynasties.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
But yeah, yeah, So by eighteen seventy six, Korea is
firmly under Japanese economic influence, which the Qing dynasty of
China isn't excited about because it was supposed to be
under their influence, and it is still politically more under
their influence, I believe at this time. By the eighteen nineties,
the Korean government not doing so hot, and so government

(41:32):
posts are just being sold. They're like, h you want
to be a minister or whatever, like just give me
a bunch of money, and so that you have these
new officials and then they would be like, oh, I
just paid a bunch of money for it. I know
I can get that money back. I will tax the
shit out of everyone. The Roman system terrible way to
road taxes. Oh no, zero of ten maybe the worst
way ever. And so those in addition to all these

(41:54):
droughts that are hitting, there's riots and there's suddenly bandits everywhere,
and there's minor uprisings that are turning to armed revolts,
and you know, the Center is not doing so much
holding and that Pesky Dong Hack movement is still around
and they've mostly been doing non violence for a couple decades.
But then they were like, let's go back to what

(42:15):
we started with. Let's go back to the violence part,
going back to the old bee. Yeah, yeah, totally the
midlife crisis, you know, like I gotta be going again.
They buy a motorcycle and they like, okay, you might
know is better than me. It seems like Korea is
kind of a powder keg that, like East Asia, is
not the same because of what happens in Korea rather

(42:37):
than it being like a hinter land. It seems like
it's like, because it's this place where everyone's having proxy
wars constantly. Anyway, I'll I'll just explain what happens. They're like,
all right, we want self governance, and we want an
end to exploitation, and we want no more super rich
assholes telling us what to do, and we want fucking
decent treatment. So let's fucking go. By January eighteen ninety four,

(42:58):
they started to take parts of the Cuntree by force,
and they grew as they went. They just snowballed. Everyone
was like, yeah, that seems better because everywhere they would
go they would like get rid of the corrupt officials
and be like, hey, what if we're all good to
each other and like it actually seems like I haven't
read anything negative about them yet.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
I'll put it that way. Great pitch, Yeah, that's the rules.
We love to see it.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
No.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, like by April there were ten thousand of them
in their army and there can eventually there's gona be
one hundred thousand of them, and they're controlling half the
grain producing land in the country.

Speaker 3 (43:26):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
And they formed farmer self rule committees everywhere they went,
so they're also like not crazy top down because actually
the idea of bottom up things is as natural as
top down things. And they would defeat the army again
and again, and they would try to be super moral
about it every time they did. They would not slaughter
retreating enemies, they would treat prisoners well, all that kind

(43:49):
of stuff, right, and they did land reform everywhere they
went so that small farmers would have a better chance.
I mean, this is just like the revolutionary shit that
everyone dreams of. Yeah, and the regular army the reason
they kept winning these military engagements as best as I
can tell, because later it's not gonna go well form,
but for a while it goes really well formed, because
when they're against the Korean military, there's mass desertions, like

(44:12):
at one point the army loses half of its numbers
before it gets into combat. Yeah, because everyone's like, nah,
I don't want to fight them, I don't want to
do this.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
It sucks.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yeah, And so dog Hack Rebellion of eighteen ninety four
seems really solidly cool. People did cool stuff. I hope
one day gets its own episodes. By May seventh, they
reached a tentative peace treaty. They were like, no more slavery,
I actually don't know nearly enough about East Asian slavery
as I would like to. But it's gonna come up
a couple times in this episode that anarchists and also

(44:44):
the dong Hack people are abolitionists, abolish the caste system,
forgive all debts, and redistribute the land. And the government
was like, yeah, we're gonna lose if we don't say yeah,
so yeah, we're into that. But then the government, this
is going to shock you. They didn't stay true to
their word.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
They were like, what if instead of creating heaven on earth,
which is I think how dong Hak was like presenting
it basically right, because we're all heaven and so we're
all living equally, and you know, yeah, what if instead
we talked to our buddies in the Ching dynasty and
they sent soldiers over and then we like, shoot you
a bunch. But then Japan was like, well, what if
actually we use this moment to invade and overthrow you entirely?

(45:28):
Oh no, And so both those things happened. Oh and
this kicks off the First Sino Japanese War. This is
what I'm talking about, but like the powder keg shit, right, Yeah, yeah,
this peasant rebellion destabilized enough that Japan was like sweet ours.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
Yeah, I never realized that that was that this was
kicked off by a peasant rebellion, huh.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
I know. And then even then within that, like a
lot of what I've read isn't necessarily playing up the
religious aspects of the peasant rebellion, and so I like, yeah,
it's like part of why I want to know more
about it. Like I have red sources that are very
credible that are like this is the Donghak peasant rebellion,
and other ones that are like the peasant rebellion, you know,

(46:09):
So I don't know whether they're all like religiously converting
as they go.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
I guess this is yeah, and yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
The Sino Japanese War of eighteen ninety four eighteen ninety
five firmly cements Korea at its current position of the
territory where huge imperialist powers have proxy wars YEP, Japan.
They just come in and murder the shit out of
the entire peasant army. That's the way that the peasant
rebellion gets put down. I've read of one hundred thousand

(46:35):
people being slaughtered by like machine gun and mortar.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
I mean that sounds like the Japanese Army. They do
this a lot. They're gonna keep doing it until. Yeah,
it's really like if you like Jeppanese build or history,
it's really like it's it's an entire series of them
fighting in a bunch of countries who don't have it
industrial based the size of theirs until they finally pissed off,
like the only country on Earth that had an industrial

(47:01):
based the size of a continent that could just simply
like just just drop ships on them until they drowned.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, I like my grandfather fought in the Pacific Theater
as a torpedo, and like, you know, there's very few
times with the US is the good guys, but this
is among them as far as I can tell.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
Ye, I did bad stuff too, but oh they definitely did.
I'm more sympathetic to the US of the Pacific than
a lot of people are because like, yeah, my family
was like, like my grandma thought that she was an
orphan because her mom like picked up her sister and
like ran on foot across the country and they couldn't
take my grandma with her because she was too young
to like move. So like you know, I good, good,

(47:45):
good on the US.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Maybe do less war crimes, but I don't know, yeh,
steal less stuff while you're doing it.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Yeah, that's that's what you get with the US is
helping you unfortunately. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Yeah, I think that a lot of people, like again,
like I'm not I'm not being like, oh, the US
was moral when they did the following things, but like,
I think a lot of it is that people don't
pay enough attention to the scale of murder that the
Japanese were doing.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
Yeah, so they killed like thirty million people. Yeah, it's
like it's an unfathomable atrocity, except for the fact that
there was an even more unfathomable atrocity happening on the
other side of the world at the same time, right,
Like it's it's yeah, and so anyway, in one battle,
the Battle of Ugumchi, about forty thousand peasants soldiers went

(48:33):
up against a thousand professional soldiers. After a few days,
culminating on November eleventh, eighteen ninety four, five hundred of
the forty thousand people survived. Jesus, Yeah, and a handful
of soldiers on the Japanese side died like a small
enough number that it's not tracked. It's like, ah, couple,

(48:53):
I don't know, Yeah, John died like whatever, you know,
And yeah, it's just it's just a modernized army versus
a peasant.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah, and a really a very quite good modernized army
like this. You see, like this is a Prussian trained army.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
It is very in a period. We're Prussian ball. I guess.
I guess technically they Russians down. I mean, I guess
technically by this point they are now Germany. But yeah,
it's a it's a very very effective and brutal army.
Wait who trained Japan at this point? Oh well, I
mean they've been getting a lot of when they modeled
their military reforms. They originally modeled on the French, and
then the French lost Frank of Russian War, and so

(49:29):
they brought in the Germans.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Oh and they're like never mind.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
Yeah, which is funny because later on the Chinese are
also going to bring in the Germans, which leads to
the Nazis and Japan fighting each other in the thirty
seven in Chigaio're like, there's like Nazi officers who are
like military advisors, who are like have field command fighting
Japan baffling, baffling place. Everything is so weird in this

(49:53):
part of the world. But yeah, yeah, this has been
by diversion. So leaders were hanged in mass in March
eighteen ninety five and their rebellions done. Yeah, this war
not only ended dynastic rule in Korea, it was kind of,
according to one source, the Domino that ended dynastic rule
in China, which fell apart in the nineteen eleven Revolution

(50:15):
that I don't know a quarter about as much as
i'd like to or should so, comparing the destruction of
the Korean peasant movement and how that helped spur imperial
Japan to oh, this is kind of like what you
were talking about actually, to how the destruction of the
Spanish Republic helped Western fascism. That historian that I'm quoting
a lot, Hockey Rick, put it like this. Even though

(50:37):
there was a lag of about forty years in the
beginnings of these struggles and in the tempo of their
subsequent interventions, we can evaluate that the eighteen ninety four
Korean Peasant Revolution and the nineteen thirty seven Spanish Revolution
were of the same world historical significance in terms of
their characteristics as people's liberation fronts against feudalism and exploitation,

(50:57):
and that they were international wars into feared with by
foreign military services. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah, Like this is also the Spanish Republic part, you know,
because the thing that we're going to talk about later
is going to be compared to the Spanish Republic a lot, right,
But this one also is basically what this person's saying.
And so the rebellion fell, But don't worry because that's
just part one of four. There's gonna be so many

(51:25):
rebellions still to come.

Speaker 3 (51:27):
I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
And there's also schools. They're gonna build schools. There's gonna
be an anarchist hospital. And it's not like just like
I don't know, I trust, I have a lot of
anarchist doctor and medic friends, but I mean like it's
like a hospital as it got building, and like people
go there like because their kids sick.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
You know.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Korean anarchists are going to do a ton of things
really well, and one of those things is build schools
and at least one hospital, although well I guess it
was Korean people work to the hospitals in China whatever. Anyway,
it's really complicated, and we'll talk about it in part
two or maybe three or four, but first let's talk about, uh,
what you do? Who are you?

Speaker 3 (52:02):
How'd you get here? I walked into my closet where
I'm recorded.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Podcast podcasting is putting trans people back in the closets,
fucked up. Actually very funny because I came out here first.
Before I came out it real life to a lot
of people. But yeah, yeah, I have a podcast called
It Could Appen Here. I'm one of the hosts. We
put out episodes every single day except for the weekend.

(52:27):
I get that's not even true anymore because we.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Have one of them on the weekend. Yeah, which is great. Yeah,
you could find us wherever find podcasts or distributed. Yeah,
wherever you found this one, Yeah, it'll it'll be there.
It's it could Happen here. And yeah, I have no
idea what we're going to be doing when this comes out,
but it'll be something good. Hell yeah, I want to plug.

(52:50):
Let's see.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
I have been binging all the other cools on media
podcasts so hard this past week because whenever I'm doing
like work around them, I live on I just listened
to Jamie and Prop and Molly Conger and everyone, and
it's so good. And if you haven't heard Weird Little
Guys yet, I binged all of Weird Little Guys, which

(53:13):
is the new podcast from Cool Zone Media by Molly
Conger and it's like the weird Little Nazis who are
just somehow everywhere and how annoying they are and it's
really entertaining.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
And so she listened to it.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
And also Hood Politics with Prop. There's a recent episode.
I don't know exactly when this will come out, but
like there's a pretty recent episode that's explaining the economic policies.
I think it's called The Hammer and the Finesser and
it's really good. And that is one of my favorite teachers,
is Prop. And so check out all the Cool Zone
Media podcasts. Those are two of them, as well as

(53:45):
this one. They're already listening to. And I have a
book coming out. Sorry, there's more plugs than I thought
it was going to be. I have a book coming
out like really soon. It's called The Sapling Cage and
there's an audiobook version and you can listen to the
first chapter of the audiobook more or less because I
got the audio book narrator to come on to the
cool Zone Media book Club and read it to me
and so you can listen to that. There's so many

(54:06):
things you can do, including build society as a mutual
aid in thirty roughly families. But make sure it's not
just thirty of you total. You have to actually do
with millions of people.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
I believe in you.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Bye everyone, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and goal
Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.