Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 25

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Myanmar, Printing the Revolution.

It's an It Could Happen Here special miniseries, an in-depth documentary investigation with me and journalist James Stout. Over the next four days, you're going to learn about the Genzi militias of the Myanmar Civil War, 3D printed weapons, and a bunch of other really fascinating stuff besides. So, without any further ado, here's James. Ever since a first person built the first fence, took land from everybody and annexed it to themselves, property rights and violence have gone hand in hand. With property, grew the state, and with the state came the police. Today, most of us grew up under the control of states, and they're so ubiquitous that their violence is often overlooked,

until a particularly egregious incident occurs. But all states, even the most benign, rest on a monopoly on violence. States are the entities that impose laws on a given area, and if you break those laws, the state can beat you up, lock you up, or shoot you up. When the state loses a monopoly on violence, it ceases to be able to enforce its laws, charge its taxes, and enforce its will on the people it rules. We've seen this all over the world, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to briefly downtown Seattle. Our state in the USA speaks a language of rights and liberties.

When we want to appeal to the state, we tend to use that language. Even though our state, as we saw in 2020, is backed by plenty of violence, as much as any other, it goes a long way to camouflage that violence. Some states are a bit more mask off, and speak to their citizens more or less exclusively through violence, and when citizens need to respond to that state, they respond to the language it uses to speak to them. That's how a teenager from Yangon, Myanmar, ended up on Reddit in summer of 2021, asking strangers how to use a 3D printer and computer to make a rifle. Myanmar isn't a country that is on the radar for most of the US.

If it is at all, it's probably because of state councillor and foreign minister Aung San Suu Kyi. She managed, perhaps the history's fastest pivot from Nobel Peace Prize winner, to head of a government accused of genocide. But Suu Kyi is in jail now, and the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic group that the military attempted to eliminate from the east of the country under her rule, are just one of many ethnic and political groups that are in open armed conflict with the military, who now hold control of the government of Myanmar. Known locally as the Tapmedor, the military seized power in early 2021.

You might have seen a video of a woman doing an aerobics workout as the vehicles rolled in behind her to seize power. Ever since that day, they've been committing crimes against humanity all over the country. Myanmar has a longer history of dictatorship than democracy. The British East India Company occupied the area that now represents the country in the 19th century. As always, they talked about civilising missions and freedoms, but in practice, the occupation was extractive and only benefited the Anglo-Burmese and a few Indian civil servants they bought with them.

Often, Buddhist monks led the resistance that manifested itself in hunger strikes, and everyday acts of disobedience, small ways of saying no. In a few instances, it became open and unrest spilled into the streets. The country became a major battleground during the Second World War, with Japan invading and seizing the country, before Allied forces took it back in a fierce campaign in 1944. As many as 150,000 Japanese troops died. Burmese people fought on both sides.

Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi's father, demanded that Britain grant him and his fellow Burmese people independence if they fought for the Allies. The British refused. Aung San then went first to China and eventually Japan for support, and eventually he fought against the British with his Burma independence army. But after two years of occupation, Aung San and his comrades changed sides. Under a broad alliance called the Anti-Fascist Organization, they turned on the Japanese, and they once again took up arms to liberate their country.

On the 4th of January, 1947, Burma became an independent republic. The new republic's territory combined three British territories, and over 100 distinct ethnic groups. For the next 14 years, these groups struggled to find a democratic Burma, and an identity for themselves within it. Mostly they failed. The period was characterised by the Chinese civil wars spilling into Burma, ethnic armed insurgencies,

and repeated demands for a federal republic with a weak central government. In 1962, the military, a rate at new demands for a federal republic, staged to coup. Burma spent the next 22 years under the military rule of a council, pursuing what they called the Burmese way to socialism. Burma's planned economy left it largely isolated from the rest of the world. At home, the press was censored, and a type of nationalism that combined nominal socialism and Burma ethnic identity

became the official state ideology. During this period, Burma became one of the world's poorest countries. Its sporadic protests were met with overwhelming force. On the 8th of August, 1988, an uprising began. It started among a students in Yangon, but it took root quickly around the country. The so-called 8888 uprising, because of the date, began with the general strike, and huge non-violent protests.

These were met with gunfire. Protesters fought back with Molotov cocktails and rocks. The military fired into hospitals, and by September 18th, they'd launched a coup to take the country from a one-party state, back to a military dictatorship. It was during these protests that Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of independence hero Aung San, emerged as a national figurehead, especially in the West.

Amitav Ghosh, the Indian writer, wrote the following about 8888. Across Burma, people poured out in thousands to join the protests, not just students, but also teachers, monks, children, professionals, and trade unionists of every shade. It was on this day, too, that the Hunter made its first determined attempt at repression. Soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, and hundreds of unarmed marches were killed. The killings continued for a week,

but still the demonstrators continued to flood the streets. After the uprising had been suppressed, multi-party elections were later held. While the new National League for Democracy Party of Aung San Suu Kyi won the most votes, the Hunter refused to cede power. Protests continued on for decades, with the 2007 Saffron Revolution, in which the government violently cracked down on monks,

resulting in the most international condemnation, following the Saffron Revolution. The government's isolationism hindering aid after extensive cyclone damage in 2008, the military government finally implemented the roadmap to discipline flourishing democracy that had developed in 1993. If you're wondering about the name of the country, this officially changed in 1989 as well. But like much of the nation's history, a grand proclamation from the government didn't mean much on the ground.

Both words derived from Buranma, a name that the majority ethnic group who we're calling Burman here, used for themselves. Many opposition groups still use Burma, instead of Myanmar. It's another small way of saying no to the military's attempt to control every aspect of their lives. Finally, on the 18th of September, the army took to the streets in a coup led by their chief of staff, General Saumong. The next day, the killings began again.

The army later described these people as looters. It was not until 2011 that the military junta finally stepped down and passed on power to the Union Solidarity and Development Party in an election that was widely seen as fraudulent. A year later, Aung San Suu Kyi was released, and by 2015, her National League for Democracy won an absolute majority. While she was barred from holding the presidential office, she took on the role of state counselor,

and Myanmar entered a period of liberalization, which, although never the federal democracy promised when the country gained its independence in 1947, allowed for significant freedoms of communication and speech, especially for the Burman majority ethnic group. Not everyone was reconciled to the change. Many of Myanmar's 135 ethnic groups feel marginalized by the state, which tends to be dominated by the Burman ethnicity. Some of these groups have armed insurgent wings,

often more than one per ethnic group, as they disagree on politics or religion. These groups have fought various Burmese governments since the 1940s, but many of them reached a ceasefire with the government as the country passed from military to civilian rule. One group, however, saw a huge uptick in violence. The Rohingya ethnic group have been persecuted by Buddhist nationals since the 1970s, but the campaign against them increased in violence and scale in 2016, when the Tatmadaw began a huge crackdown against Rohingya people in Rakhine state.

The persecution began in response to attacks by the Arkan Rohingya Salvation Army on Burmese border outposts, but the campaign that followed had nothing to do with the small insurgent group, and a lot to do with the desire of the Tatmadaw to destroy or drive out all Rohingya people, who they claim are undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and not citizens of Myanmar. While the world praised Suu Kyi, her government looked the other way as the military carried out a genocide that displaced over a million people and killed tens of thousands. It was in the context of growing international condemnation of the genocide

that Myanmar went to the polls in November of 2020. The November 2020 election was only the nation's second since the official end of military rule. Ansan Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won a resounding victory. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party holds 25% of seats under a constitution that Suu Kyi wanted to change. It didn't take defeat well. The election was neither perfectly free nor fair. The Rohingya have been almost wholly disenfranchised. The government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and thus unable to vote.

Areas with ethnic armed organizations which oppose the government often had polls cancelled and internet cut off according to Human Rights Watch. The Carter Center estimates that 1.4 million citizens couldn't vote. The one opposition party that was certainly not shortchanged was the militaries. However, it was the Union Solidarity and Development Party, USDP, which had been calling for election delays due to COVID before polls opened. Once the elections concluded, they immediately began questioning the results. They continued to attempt to undermine the vote for months before they resorted to force on the 1st of February 2021.

The day before, the newly elected legislators were due to be sworn in. The world largely ignored the situation, apart from the one viral video where a masked fitness instructor dances in the foreground as APCs roll through a roadblock and into the parliament complex behind her. Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested, charged with breaching COVID-19 restrictions and illegally importing a walkie-talkie, and General Min Aung Hlaing was installed at the head of a military junta. If this sounds a little like a stop the steel fantasy, that's because it is eerily similar to one.

Myanmar's democracy is not what academics call a consolidated one, which is to say that democracy has never been the only game in town there. But the United States seems to be rapidly deconsolidating its own democracy. The allegations of election fraud in Myanmar were no more credible than those in Arizona. However, the military's tradition of political engagement there moved many of the barriers in between electoral defeat and the death of a short-lived democracy. Within 24 hours of the coup, the people of Myanmar had fought back. Healthcare workers and civil servants were on strike by February 3,

and a boycott of junta-owned businesses had begun. Protests began with a handful of people. The memories of massacres of pro-democracy protesters in the 1980s kept many away. But a younger generation who had grown up with relative liberty, internet access, and basic freedoms had not seen blood in the streets like their parents. They had seen activists in Hong Kong, the USA, and Ukraine take on violent state apparatuses, and they'd often seen them win. By the 6th of February, 20,000 people were in the streets of Yangon, the largest city.

And the internet was shut down nationwide. Protests began peacefully with memable signs like, my ex is bad, but the military is worse, and we are protesting peacefully, but with the WAP capitalized, so it said WAP. These signs were designed by a generation of kids who grew up with access to the internet to attract international attention. Despite the ban, they used VPNs to show image into their struggle. One sign read, you've messed with the wrong generation. Now we'll never be allowed to ruin our own lives. The Tap Madore showed its cards pretty quickly. Police began the suppression with slingshots and clubs.

Then tear gas and flash bang, and quickly they removed to rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. By the 9th of February, Maya Thway Thway Hine, a 20-year-old woman, had been shot in the street. What are you doing? Hurry! Hurry! What are you doing? Hurry! Soon, those young protesters had switched signs for shields. By mid-March on Arm 40th Day, 114 civilians were killed in a single day, including 65 in Yangon, who were kettled by police, surrounded, and then shot. Quickly, shield walls were set up, medics identified themselves in the protest movement, and hard hats and goggles were distributed.

But this didn't hit the balance of power in their favor. Suolin, a former student union leader, was there from the start. In a text message, he told me, I did not miss a single day as a member of the Kaya State National Strike Committee. I later became more involved in anti-authoritarian protests. In the early protests, you see him in photos walking in the front of a group carrying flags and banners with his student ID card on a lanyard around his neck. But by March, he's wearing a black shirt, goggles, and a hard construction hat.

Meanwhile, the National League for Democracy politicians who had escaped detention joined other parties and set up a national unity government in April. The national unity government contained members of the National League for Democracy. But significantly, a Rohingya activist was appointed and advised by the Ministry of Human Rights, and the national unity government has announced it would for the first time accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court with respect to all international crimes committed in Myanmar since 2002. This would include the Rohingya genocide.

By May, both the national unity government and Suolin had realized that no amount of nonviolent protest was going to disloyal regime that was happy to gun down kids in the street. So on the 5th of May, he left for the jungle. That same day, the national unity government announced the formation of the People's Defence Force, or PDF. In a month, 800 soldiers had been affected to these pro-democracy guerrilla units. Many put their guns with them.

But Suolin didn't join the PDF. Instead, he joined one of Myanmar's many ethnic armed organizations, groups opposed to the central state and its domination by the Burma ethnicity. To understand these groups, you need to understand that Myanmar is composed of dozens, not hundreds of ethnic groups, but that the Burma who make up about two-thirds of the population have always controlled the state and used it as a tool in furthering their interest. Some of these groups, like the Karen National Liberation Army

and the Kachin Independence Army, have been fighting for decades since the country emerged from British colonial rule at the end of World War II. All of these groups were on a combination of ethnic and political grievances. Many of them administered semi-autonomous territories, like the Karen state. In 2013, 13 ethnic armed organizations, or EAOs, came together to form the nationwide ceasefire coordinating team in CCT and signed an 11-point common position of ethnic resistance organizations on national ceasefire, or the LISA agreement.

Most of them seemed to agree that they would accept a federal system, rather than complete autonomy. In 2015, a ceasefire was signed, but conflict between ethnic armed organizations and between EAOs and the government continued. Since the coup began, EAO membership has skyrocketed, and in October, the National Unity government announced alliances with several groups under a central chain of command. Some political organizations who played a part in the 1988 uprising,

like the All-Burma Students' Democratic Front, have been revived as armed groups. The ABSDF recently attacked Tatmadaw ships using an RPG. Attacks on military bases have also stepped up. PDF units have ambushed and killed policemen and raided police and military outposts. Each time they do, they steal valuable weapons and ammunition. The Tatmadaw has responded with shellings and airstrikes against residential areas, executions, mass physical retribution, and the murdering of civilians and aid workers and burning of their bodies.

As a result of all this, ethnic armed organizations have joined forces with anti-authoritarian Burman people under the auspices of the People's Defense Forces, which are under the command of the exiled National Unity government. We have never experienced such kind of brutalities from the military as well as a strong resistance from the people. They try to make sure the whole country submits to them, but we still refuse to allow them to be our rulers. This defiance has led to the formation of the People's Defense Forces, or PDF,

a coalition of thousands of resistance fighters who are carrying out surprise attacks on hunter checkpoints, bombing army convoys, and supporting ethnic armies in their fight against the regime. Twelve months ago, the Tatmadaw was killed by a group of people who were killed by a group of people. They were supporting ethnic armies in their fight against the regime. Twelve months ago, these men and women were students and office workers

protesting the coup. Today, they're training to overthrow the military. Being a soldier is a tough choice, but the young people, they are ready to defend the communities. They have to, of course, sacrifice their own daily life, ordinary life. Since March of 2020, the influx of new recruits has changed these groups. Generation Z militias, like the Karini Jin-Z Liberation Army, have sprung up, founded by kids who were holding memeable signs at protests

just a few months earlier. They care less about ethnic independence and more about beating the junta. Many Berman kids join these groups. These organizations of young fighters received training from the experienced guerrillas hiding in the jungle, but they tended to adopt a less top-down military structure and armed themselves by scavenging whatever weapons they could find, often 22-caliber rifles better suited to shooting squirrels than soldiers. It was these kids who grew up online and knew that there was nothing you couldn't learn about on Reddit

who tipped the balance of force away from the state. Unlike the ethnic armed organizations and other more experienced guerrillas in Myanmar, these kids have little military experience. Their organizations have few rules and regulations. They're made up entirely of young people. As a result, there are certain things that they're less proficient at, but they're much better at things like grasping the use of new technologies, which has led to Myanmar being the first country in the world

where 3D-printed weapons have taken part in a revolution against the government. We're going to hear more about that and many other things as this series continues. Hey everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is Myanmar, Printing the Revolution, Part 2. Since the dawn of firearms, regular people all over the world have had the same basic idea. Maybe if I made myself a gun, the government wouldn't be able to be such a dick to me. Historically, this has had little impact on the willingness of governments to be dicks to people. In the beginning, all gun manufacturing was done by individual artisans and thus making a gun in your home was really no different from making it in a shop

as long as you had the proper tools. Guns in this period weren't super useful on their own and were best fired in a volley by a shitload of dudes at once. Since individual firearms were extremely inaccurate and cumbersome to use, the fact that some poor blacksmith could make himself one wasn't much of a threat to anybody in power. It did mean that battlefield prowess came from large blocks of trained soldiers, not feudal lords on horseback rallying untrained peasants. This change in technology led to a change in warfare and helped to change society.

When firearms evolved and became the central weapons of battle, they required more intense tooling and more expensive manufacturing capacity. Nations and peoples without the know-how or infrastructure were at a tremendous disadvantage. As soon as the situation came into being, these unfortunate communities set to work finding ways to gain the advantages of firearms without the manufacturing capacity their foes enjoyed. Indigenous cannons and regions resisting imperialism often consisted of composite materials, less sturdy than bronze or iron.

In the 1600s and 1700s, indigenous Americans in South America used wooden cannons to fight against Spanish and Portuguese conquerors. The Vietnamese used wooden cannons to resist the French during the Cochin-China campaign of 1862. American Indians used wooden artillery to blast settler fortifications in the 1700s and 1800s. In the months that led up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the men who fought to create the United States busied themselves building rifles and cannons in their homes and communities to resist the English. This trend has never really stopped in warfare.

The day before we recorded this, James, my partner in this series, sent me a screen grab from a live stream of someone in Ukraine printing pieces for AK-47s on a 3D printer. Firearms manufactured outside the arms industry have played a role in every conflict of the modern era. But as you've probably guessed, they have had the greatest influence in the little wars of colonialism. European nations rarely allowed any sort of firearms ownership in their colonies, except the individuals and ethnic groups that adopted its local enforcers. Since most of these places had never developed their own industrial-based firearms industry,

colonial rebellions often relied on homemade weapons in their early stages, along with modern firearms pilfered by deserting local soldiers. Where domestic productive capacity existed, European colonising nations went out of their way to relocate it, along with the profit it generated to the metropole. Or were reflected on this in his novel, Burmese Days, saying, In the 18th century, the Indians cast guns at any rate up to the European standard.

Now, after we've been in India 150 years, you can't make so much as a brass cartridge case in the whole continent. Meanwhile, among the colonisers being armed became almost a synonym for being a man. This was particularly true for the colonial police forces and militaries. But it was also true domestically. Most people are broadly familiar with the U.S. Second Amendment, the robust gun culture that it spawned. But during the height of colonialism,

English citizens were also free to arm themselves. In 1900, Prime Minister Robert Gaskell in Cecil, Markey of Salisbury, gave a speech in which he claimed he would lord the day when there was a rifle in every cottage in England. Firearms were utterly unrestricted at this point. The first change to this came in 1903, with the first law that required a permit to carry a handgun, and restricted children from buying guns.

Still, firearms were widely available until a red panic gripped the nation in 1919, following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Across the ocean in Spain, where firearms ownership was less strictly restricted, and where all well himself would learn what it was to fire a rifle at someone who shot back, armed unions and working people served as the only bulwark to a military coup in 1936. In Madrid, one officer opened his armory to the Union militias, but another refused to hand over the bolts for the guns that had been issued. In Barcelona, where the anarchists left had a long tradition of armed political violence,

the coup was repelled by workers with guns, and the general leading troops there was imprisoned and executed. The same pattern played out all across the country. In July 1936, when the military rose up to topple the elected government. In the cities where the government opened the armories to the people, the coup was repelled. In the cities where the government did not, the coup succeeded. Reflecting on this in 1941, all worldwide,

the totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do. They cannot give the factory worker a rifle, and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle on the wall of the laborer's cottage, or working class flat, is a symbol of democracy. It's a job to see that it stays there. Despite Orwell's pleas, the years that followed the Second World War

led to greater restrictions of the ability of the public to arm itself. By the 1950s, carrying any weapon for self-defense was illegal. Semi-automatic center-fire arms were banned in 1988, and pistols were banned in 1996, after a mass shooting killed 16 children in Dunblane. This was all utterly infuriating to a man named Philip A. Loody. Loody, born in 1965, grew up on a farm in West Yorkshire, England. We don't have a tremendous amount of detail about his upbringing,

but by the time he was in his early 30s, he'd become a committed crusader for an unrestricted right to bear arms. A skilled machinist with a well-equipped shop, Loody began the long process of learning how to craft homemade firearms. Soon he was building semi- and fully-automatic weapons. Now, these were not military-grade firearms. The barrels were unrifled, which made them terribly inaccurate, but every piece could be crafted from widely available things,

like sheet metal, washers, and screws. The person assembling a Loody gun would need to be a skilled craftsman, but they would not need access to welding rigs, forges, or other expensive industrial equipment. Loody published a book, Expedient Homemade Firearms, the 9mm submachine gun, in 1998, through Paladin Press. In the late 1990s, Paladin was one of the places you could go

to mail-order fringe political literature and guides for stuff like trapping human beings or disabling the drive system of an Abrams tank. In the United States, nothing about Loody's book was, or is, illegal. But Phil didn't live in the United States. He was arrested several times, starting in the late 1990s, when a pair of illegal home-built guns were found on his property. Loody spent the rest of his life, which ended in 2011,

operating a website where he raged against gun control. His main argument was that England was headed for totalitarianism, and, like Orwell, he believed only public ownership of arms could prevent this. Unlike Orwell, Loody was firmly on the right wing. He traced society's problems to, quote, a combination of political correctness and anti-freedom of speech laws, legislation governing how we speak about such subjects as religion or a person's race, being just two examples,

words and phrases that have been used for centuries, without malice, are now insipid in people's mouths and said to cause offense by those very same speech police, who, on the other hand, turned a blind eye to the violence, foul language, and sexual references blasted daily through our TV sets, a phenomenon that really does cause offense to many people. Loody never succeeded in sparking a renaissance and civilian arms ownership in the UK.

But his ideas were adopted by organized criminal groups all around the world. In Brazil, Loody guns can go for as much as $2,500. From 2011 to 2012, nearly half of the submachine guns seized by police in Sao Paulo were homemade. Most of these arms were certainly used as tools by drug dealers or other gangsters. But some of them were surely also the tools of citizens, who simply sought a way to defend themselves in a place with no real rule of law. Loody guns have long been popular among motorcycle gangs in Australia,

and in October of 2019, a fascist terrorist carried out the last of that year's eight-chan shootings in Hala, Germany, with a Loody gun. His weapons, thankfully, did not work well. As a general rule, Loody guns were never going to be of much use to anyone besides organized criminals. They aren't great in a gunfight, but you can use them to spray bullets into a room or a vehicle at close range pretty well. The year after Phil Loody died, 2012, a fellow named Cody Wilson decided to carry on his work.

Cody felt 3D printing carried the possibility of eventually manufacturing arms of equality that might rival traditionally produced guns. He started simple, with a single-shot, 380 handgun, based around the old Liberator pistol from World War II. The Liberator had been a single-shot, 45-caliber handgun, meant to be dropped into Nazi-occupied territories and used by insurgents to stealthily kill single German soldiers and take their guns. Cody Wilson described himself as a crypto-anarchist,

and when his ideas began to draw attention, he dropped out of law school to create defense distributed. This organization was dedicated to the development and distribution of plans to craft 3D printed weapons. It used a platform called DeathCAD to allow users to develop and share blueprints. In 2013, the first CAD gun file became available online to everyone. It was downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days. I'd like to quote now from an article on the website 3DNatives. This prompted the US government to demand that defense distributed remove the file from their site.

What followed is a legal battle between Cody Wilson and the US government, consisting of back-and-forth lawsuits. It lasted five years until, in 2018, the Trump administration legalized 3D printed guns. The same year, Wilson was charged with sexual assault of an underage girl and had to step down from defense distributed. Nonetheless, the organization did not cease to exist without Cody. Today, for a yearly fee of $50, users of the DeathCAD website can access the files containing different designs of 3D printed guns.

And I should note here that it's probably more accurate to say the Trump administration legalized sharing the plans and printing the files and whatnot of 3D printed guns, not legalized 3D printed guns. Homemade firearms have been federally legal in the United States since forever. The fighting in the courts over all this has continued ever since, and in 2019, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked DeathCAD. This sparked the creation of a new group, deterrence dispensed, which was even less centralized. The basic idea was that this would make them harder to take down via lawsuits or police action.

Not stated was that this might also protect their reputation from a Cody Wilson situation. The debate over the legality of 3D printed firearm plans continues on to the present day, but the development of these arms has continued at an ever faster pace. The best modern 3D printed arms can even rival conventional guns. It's worth emphasizing that these are not purely plastic tools. The Liberator pistol used a metal nail, and the better 3D arms have metal barrels, rifled using other craft methods that require some know-how, but arguably less than it took to manufacture a looty gun.

3D printed arms have been confiscated by police around the world, but in recent months they've begun to crop up somewhere new, in the arms of revolutionaries fighting against a military coup. Myanmar, and Burma before that, has had relatively strict gun control laws for decades. When George Orwell was a policeman there in the 1920s, he may have carried a gun, but the people he was policing did not. In the 1930s, the British leaders allowed TAT organizations, similar to militias, to form and drill, but they weren't allowed to carry guns.

Gun licenses under the dictatorship were issued primarily to party members, but most were revoked after 1988 failed pro-democracy uprising. The only civilians who were permitted to own arms were the Chin, the nation's poorest ethnic group, who rely on guns to hunt for food. In many cases, these guns were flintlocks that would not have looked that out of place on a battlefield two centuries before. In practice, though, things are very different. The current conflict is best seen as a flare-up in violence

that has been ongoing since Britain left the country in 1947. The Tatma Door has consistently used violence against marginalized ethnic groups in the country, and they have consistently taken up arms in response. But, unlike civil wars in the Middle East, many nations in the West have not been flooding Myanmar with weapons for decades, and the various E.A.Os, or ethnic armed organizations, have had to turn to much more unorthodox routes to arm and equip themselves against the government. To get a better idea of what things are like on the ground, we spoke to Pierre.

He's French, but he's a serial volunteer with national liberation struggles around the world, and fought with the Korean people in the early 2000s. Yes, so the ammunition is a constant problem. The shortage is absolutely permanent. And yes, there are two sources for the weapons there. It's the black market, and the prices, especially of ammunition, are prohibitive. This is why I would like to have my notebook here with me, because I think I wrote down the conversation I had with some leaders of the KNLA at the time,

asking them why we didn't do more operations. We just can't afford it. Strictly, we don't have enough ammunition to do any kind of operation. All the operations we did were always focused on if we could capture some ammunition. If we could capture weapons, but especially ammunition. That's the second source of weapons. The source is the capturers, of course, then the black market. The black market used to be huge in Cambodia.

I don't know what's the situation now. It was in the 90s, there was a bit of Albania of Southeast Asia at this time. There are also the other ethnic groups that receive a lot of arms and ammunition from sponsors. Some of them, like the Western armies, are sponsored by China, so their supply of ammunition is pretty good. Then there are other ethnic groups that also produce locally quite good their own arms, light arms, usually. In the early weeks of the protests, once it became clear that nonviolent demonstrators were going to be met with state violence, protestors began to fashion weapons.

First, they fought soldiers with assault rifles using catapults and bows and arrows. It was incredibly brave, but it wasn't very effective. By the 28th of March, protestors had taken a step further. A group calling itself the Kalei Civil Army set up barricades and defended them using pressurized air rifles that fired marbles and bicycle wheel bearings. The rifles all used the same design and the same components. They were based on a video someone found on YouTube, but they weren't lethal. They helped protestors defend their space, albeit at great cost.

In that first clash, four protestors and four soldiers were killed. The protestors in Kalei were able to hold out a few days. Using old hunting rifles and air guns, they ambushed military patrols, and they took four police hostage. Then they exchanged them for nine incarcerated protestors. But in early April, the Tatmador returned to the protest camp in Kalei with rocket-mopel grenades and machine guns, and killed 11 people. We must fight back against them, if not our generation will face a worse situation than us. They have no laws, a neighborhood villager who battled the regime's forces told the Irrawaddy a local paper.

The air guns spread around the country quickly. To avoid surveillance, protestors talked about cooking up biryani on telegram channels, and what they meant was desperately scouring the internet for a way to fight back and finding a way to make an air rifle out of a butane canister, a pipe, and a cigarette lighter. Combined with fireworks and smoke bombs made of potassium nitrate, the air rifle gave protestors just enough cupboard to escape police charges. But they also gave the junta an excuse to further escalate the violence. Attitudes are hardening among the protestors too.

In Mandalay, they took air rifles to the barricades on Saturday, hardly a match for the weapons of war they face, but now they know this is a fight to the death. And more destruction after a fire raged in Pijidalgun township overnight. People living there but kept away by security forces returned to find 60 homes burned to the ground. Now all they can do is pick through the ashes, trying to save anything from the military's policy of scorched earth. Even the Tatmadaw makes its own weapons, a highly unusual move for a relatively small nation. Tatmadaw troops and police can be seen with a bewildering array of indigenously produced copies of M16s, Uzzies, and even 5.56 Galil pattern AK-style rifles, as well as M3 light machine guns,

which are slightly updated copies of the MG42 used by the Nazis in World War II. After the failed 8888 uprisings in 1988, the military offered concessions to China and returned for more advanced weapons. They got them, but it didn't stop China from also supplying ethnic armed organizations. EAOs don't have access to the same munitions factories that the government does, but there is a long tradition of homemade weapons in Myanmar. In more remote parts of the country, homemade air rifles and shotguns seem to have been relatively commonplace before the start of the conflict, and they were mostly used for hunting. The country is also covered with land mines, which the EAOs used to great effect against the Tatmadaw.

We spoke to Pierre, a former combatant with the Karin who no longer lives in Myanmar. His experience is not that recent, but it helps us to understand the way this conflict has been fought for decades. What we used to do was to produce a lot of land mines. That's what we produced at the base, yes. With very raw systems, with a little bit of a different type of plastic explosive, a couple of bamboo for contactors, and a battery. That's it. Pellet guns are not good for combat, and EAOs mostly relied on weapons imported from Thailand, India, or China. Overwhelmingly, these were AK or M16 pattern rifles.

Yeah, mostly in the units I've been there is probably a majority of AK platforms in this time, yes. It's more reliable and simple to operate. It's very adapted to the type of guerrilla. It was quite correct. From the moment that I switched to AKs, at least because at first I tried to use this super-fancy M16, and it was a nightmare of malfunctions. So I switched back to AKs, which is what I best know and used on my videos, and it doesn't have this... I never really had any malfunctions with AKs. Maybe one time it was a faulty lot of ammunition, but that's it. Not really the rifle's foot.

The fight, Pierre says, has never been restricted to the battlefield. For the Tatmadaw, violence against civilians is part of their four-cuts doctrine that cuts off funding, food, intelligence, and recruits for the EAOs. Now they are moving that same outlook to the cities. There are literally no laws of war or else. One of the first things that I saw when we went patrolling in the Karen villages around the hour zone of operation is that there was absolutely no girl between the age of 11 to the age of 70. I asked my commander about it, and he said, obviously, if they stay here, they will be raped by the Tatmadaw and the first patrol, the first time they will come.

So this gives you a little bit of the tone of what they are about. They constantly run some civilians when they don't murder them, like shell villages for no reason or because there had been an operation of the Karenile, and they take revenge on who they can take revenge on with the civilians. This is how they behave. This is who they are, basically. The Tatmadaw is a large army, and many of the conscripts are hardly high-speed operator types, but that hasn't stopped them from killing thousands of innocent civilians. I mean, they have, as many armies, different units with different military values. Many times, the units that are stuck on the hilltop in the middle of the rebel zone are not the most combative.

Let's say, but sometimes you will get surprised at the resistance. But, yeah, except for that, when they do an operation in a place, they bring in more elite troops, let's say. By contrast, the KNLA, the Karini National Liberation Army, and other EAOs relied on civilian support to survive. The KNLA operates in Karen territory, and civilians are Karen. I mean, pretty much when we arrive in a village, there are medics with us that take care of the population, distribute medicine.

No, like, I don't know what to tell you. It's quite a funny accusation coming from the Tatmadaw. This attitude has helped them, Pierre says, and they have always been open to non-Karin recruits. First of all, it's not, absolutely not, let's say, some kind of ethnicist organization, or ethno-nationalist, like, you know, some hate for the ethnic group, including the Bama ethnic group that, like, traditionally, you know, are the leaders of the Tatmadaw that have been oppressing them for 70 years. But they have absolutely no resentment. They are extremely open to work with the democratic forces from every ethnic group. Since 1988, Pierre said, the KNLA had been willing to link up with democratic rebels,

providing them with training and shelter in order to further their shared goal of a federal and democratic country that treated all ethnicities with respect. So PDF, so this Bama Rebels, let's say, also trend by the Karen's, and also by people I know very well, since it was my commander then, Nerda Bomiya. So I've seen the Karen's have always been extremely accommodating to the Bama opposition, meaning the Bama are the main ethnic group. I'd say this for people that might not know the difference. And so the Karen's always had representation and they took, like, you know, political refugees,

let's say, from inside Burma in the territory of the control. Manor Plaza was, like, the student association, which is exactly my country called right now. But all these are Bama organizations of opposition. And so now they keep this tradition by helping these rebels of the PDF to get military training. By the summer of 2020, young people had flooded into the jungles and many of them, even the ones of Burma ethnicity, were fighting alongside the Karen and Karen rebels they'd previously seen as troublemakers and terrorists just a year or two before. We spoke with one of these people, Zaw Lin, who left his home in May of 2021.

There was students, friends, but also young people from just the neighborhood. Most people were just above 20. A lot of them were single, you know, there's women as well. People who knew technology, young people from the from the technology computer colleges, like university. A lot of these people who knew modern technology went into the jungle to go in the jungle to train and be able to overthrow the minimum government. So it was very tiring. We had to go up and down on lots of hills.

It was two days of walking to get there. So we went up and down the hills and back down, up and down until we got to the training camp. Hey everyone, I'm Robert Evans and welcome to episode three of Printing the Revolution. Here's my partner, James Stout. In the spring and summer of 2020, millions of Americans had versions of the same experience. State forces killed a helpless man. Protesters took to the streets in anger and armed agents of the state responded with mass violence. A lot of people's lives changed forever in fairly short order.

What happened in Myanmar after the military coup was that story turned up to 11. Within days, the military had used live fire on demonstrators. Zor, our source for today's episode, was 22 years old at the time. He spent his days working as a delivery driver, hanging out with his girlfriend, playing video games. On the day the coup started, he was playing PUBG after a long shift. Soon, he and his girlfriend took to the streets with thousands of other Gen Z Burmese kids. The state responded with massacres. Often firing automatic weapons into the crowds.

Zor hadn't been particularly politically active before this moment. In fact, he felt pretty poorly towards revolutionaries opposing the government in the jungle, seeing them as rebellious troublemakers. In the past, we thought that the military is a group that loves all the people, all the different groups in the country. And then there's just a few people who really hate the military, but especially after the 2021 coup, we face it with our own foreheads in home with the guns.

We can face the evil of the military, and all the human rights and things that people who hated the military before were talking about. We understand it now because we had to, face it ourselves. And then they're going to tell us terrorists and how ever much they call us. We know that we're fighting for human rights. And we know that each person deserves these basic things. So even when we capture a soldier, we don't kill them immediately.

They're unarmed. When they capture a PDF, they torture and kill them very quickly. They torture and kill them very horrifically or horrendously. And they kill and hurt all the citizens and ordinary bystanders. So for us, what they're calling as rebels before, we're not rebels. They're the ones that are rebels. So we have to call them rebels. They're the terrorists. But as violence against protesters escalated,

Zul began to see through the lies he'd been told by the military all his life. What we're calling as rebels are what we kind of become, but we know why we are now rebels. That's because of their terrorism, their oppressive regimes and their violation of human rights. That's why we have to revolt against them. For a time, protesters responded creatively with giant potato guns, meant to fire less lethal projectiles long distances.

These homemade guns would be fired in volleys, while other protesters protected them with shields. Some of these tactics were effective at points, but it quickly became clear that the government was willing to massacre everyone standing up to them. So his girlfriend and their friends quickly decided that nonviolent resistance wasn't going to work, but they didn't give up. As we get onto into June, there's two paths, right? We can be normal. We can go on the streets.

We can ask for the people's power back. And since that's not working, we know that what we have to do is we need to hold these guns, get these guns. And on the military side, all they know is that they will solve this by holding guns. The only path that's left for us is to take those guns for ourselves. So around the end of May, we started entering training school. So the down tool is what the word he used, and it's something like this corner part. So one corner part, one to two. So he's talking, what that means is that in the hunting that we were doing, hunting rifles that we were using for that.

So we kind of started and we fought first in the Mosul. If we can ask the military nicely, then there's no reason for us to be using guns. But since they don't listen to our demands or our request at all, and since all we can do, all they are saying, all they're doing is using the guns and being terrorists trying to shoot us. So the only thing that we can do to get what we need and what we want is to take the guns for ourselves. And so like hundreds of people is age, it's all headed into the jungle in May of 2021. The decision wasn't an overnight one or an easy one. But after protesting non-violently, then meeting state violence with community defense,

then seeing his peers gun down in the street, he didn't have many other choices. He'd picked up a megaphone, then a shield, and now he was heading in the jungle to pick up a rifle. The only problem was that there weren't any rifles. He left with his girlfriend and quote, with the blessing of his parents. Keep that in mind for later. When he first went to the jungle, Zoll went to a two-week training camp where the Karinni People's Defense Force taught him the basics of guerrilla warfare. But they didn't have enough weapons to arm him and his friends. So these Jinzy militants began their fighting careers with.22 caliber rifles.

If you aren't a gun person, the.22 was one of the smallest widely available bullets. Like any bullet, it can kill, but as a caliber, it's better suited for shooting rabbits than soldiers. These.22 rifles were hand-made locally and only fired one shot at a time. But it was those rifles that Zoll, his girlfriend, and their friends carried into their first gunfight with the Tot Madag. After battling like that for about three weeks, the shooting stopped. He said in an interview we conducted over signal. After the shooting stopped, we grouped together money to buy arms by asking for donations. They were massively outgunned but determined to fight on with the weapons they could make and buy on the black market until they could find something better.

Even if that meant taking guns from dead soldiers. The military's guns are extremely good of course compared to.22's, he said. We fight with the mindset that we must win. Our minds are always prepared to take their guns when a soldier falls. It's a mindset to want the enemy's arms to be your own arms. You need to want to resist injustice because we are fighting for what is right. We do not get sad even if we die. We are happy even when wounded.

We no longer care if our arms are matched unevenly. Now despite their enthusiasm, PDF units all over the country were finding themselves in the same desperate situation. When thousands of young people in Myanmar decided to take up arms against the government, there just weren't enough guns to go around. AK pattern rifles sell for $3,000 on the black market and ARs sell for up to $7,000. The GDP per capita in 2020 was just $1,218.35 per person. And unlike militias in Syria and Iraq, the pro-democracy EAOs in Myanmar don't have the benefit, questionable benefit, of the US flooding the region with its firehose of guns and money. Undeterred, Zaw and his squad took to YouTube where they found videos explaining how to make.223 caliber bolt action rifles.

Again, if you're not a gun person,.223 may not sound very different than.222, but whereas.222 is commonly used to shoot squirrels,.223 is the standard rifle round, more or less, for the US military. These new bolt action.223, Zaw and his friends were making, could not match the rate of fire of a modern rifle, but they could at least match those rifles in stopping power. Once these Jinzian surgeons had the technique down, they created a detailed album on Facebook showing how everything from the stock to the barrel could be made with pipes, lumber, and hours and hours of detailed hard work. Unlike their guerrilla warfare instructors, these kids had grown up on the internet rather than the jungle, so they knew that if it exists, there's a subreddit for it.

It was the internet that came to their rescue. 3D printed guns have been around for a decade, but the early models didn't work well and suffered from a pretty bad reputation. Due in part to Cody Wilson, the pedophile libertarian activist we discussed last episode. Jake Hanrahan of Popular Front has covered the printed gun movement extensively. Cody Wilson made it his whole thing, like, I'm the guy with the 3D printed guns and he was on this moral crusade. The 3D printed gun lads, particularly deterrence dispense, were like, yeah, we don't give a shit about that, we're just putting our stuff out into the world. Obviously they got the right ideas, but they weren't really wedded to this idea of it being one person. Deterrence dispensed was a group of anonymous activists who were more concerned with making printed guns that worked than making a name for themselves.

Hanrahan was connected to one activist who used the pseudonym Jay Stark through the group and after three years of conversing online, Hanrahan met Stark in Germany to produce a documentary. Jay Stark died of a heart attack following a police raid last year, so we spoke to Hanrahan about Stark's worldview. His whole worldview comes from this idea that, you know, everybody should have the right to be able to fight tyranny, and if you can't fight tyranny, like, you're fucked. And the way to fight tyranny in the modern era is firearms. We know that, you know, there's no, you can't argue, there's no peaceful march, get rid of a fascist dictatorship or whatever.

But he was, you know, some people would say he was far right, some people say he was an anarchist, some people say he was a US patriot type. I mean, firstly, he wasn't even from America, and he had a lot of, he liked the laws in America, but he wasn't like some American kind of fanboy or anything on that sense. He liked the gun laws, he liked the freedom of speech laws, which I do as well. You know, like personally, in this country, you know, if you tweet the wrong thing, even in jest, like police will literally come to your house in Britain, like it's happened, it's fucking mental. So yeah, he liked that kind of thing.

And I think for him, it was, he was very tunnel vision, you know, he was very tunnel vision, it was just freedom, freedom, freedom. And if you said, well, what about this? What about that? He was like, I don't care about that until the freedom is there, there's no point looking at anything else. And so his brain was always on people that are living under tyranny, you know, and it genuinely was. I know there's a lot of people, even leftists, particularly leftists, who tried to completely smear him as a white supremacist. They were saying, oh, everything he said in that doc that I made was really, it was secret anti-Jewish white supremacy. And then it came out that he wasn't even white, you know, it was like very good, very good, you fucking idiots. So there was a lot of that going around, but I honestly believe that deep down, he was just tunnel vision focused on this idea of

every, until everybody is not living under tyranny, I must go on this mission. And okay, if someone shoots up a school with what I've invented, so be it. You know, which I'm not saying that's good, but that was just his idea, you know, he was like, so be it, fuck it. If I can, you know, he was very genuine when he was done about the Uighurs or he was done about the mistreatment of Kurds from Turkey. And, you know, he was like, look, if we can build something that can help them. Well, sorry that the West might get fucked up because of it, but I'm focused on this. Now, obviously in practice, that would be chaos, probably. But, you know, he just saw it the way he saw it, and that was that.

The cavalier attitude Stark seems to have had to how his invention might be used is, of course, worthy of criticism. But the revolutionaries on the ground in Myanmar were not concerned with ideological debates over the ethics of homemade firearms. They needed guns and they needed them now. Stark's FGC-9, which stands for Fuck Gun Control 9mm, was simple to make, easy to use and relied entirely on parts you could print or buy in any hardware store. In September of 2021, a post popped up on the FOSCAD subreddit, which is dedicated to the manufacturing of 3D printed guns. Stark is a hero there. The post said, I wanted to say thanks to this community, the creators of FGC-9 and the various mods when we could, you guys are literally empowering the armed revolution against dictators in one of the most underdeveloped countries.

We are now equipped with FGC-9 and starting the armed revolution to the coup leader dictator. As one poster comments, the account, quote, went from posting about mobile games to how to 3D print SMGs to desperately asking people to pay attention what was happening in Myanmar. Then after the FGC-9 post, it was deleted entirely. Jay Stark never lived to see this. He would have loved it. What everything that he was doing, that was the main focus, in my opinion, that like it couldn't be a more perfect, like practical, actual realization of his project. You couldn't pick a more perfect version of it to happen like that, you know, and there's a lot of talk of,

oh, where there's a load of drug dealers in Amsterdam have FGC-9s. There was a Nazi recently arrested with one, you know, these people are awful, of course. But the most prevalent use of the FGC-9, at least from what I've observed, has been from the rebels in Myanmar making them. I think I've seen like 30 of them so far, you know, that's a lot of them. And there was one was found stashed in a bush. My theory is they're left around for ambush attacks in areas that are not as fully controlled by the rebels. FOSCAD, a community of mostly US-based gun printers, lost its collective mind. And it didn't take long for people to make the connection between the post and a desperate plight of Myanmar's spring revolution.

Soon after the post, the Tatmadaw started posting pictures of FGC-9s, often without sites, captured from fighters in Yangon. On the 21st of September, the Tatmadaw's Ministry of Information released a statement. Aimee Atthway and Ye Mient Ang were found with an FGC-9 Mk2 pistol, five rounds of 9mm ammunition. They were arrested along with their drone. The military alleged they were an urban unit from the same Generation Z freedom army that Zor was a part of. That same month, the military posted pictures of three more captured FGC-9s, suggesting that at least five have been captured by late September. Then, two months later, a new post popped up in the FOSCAD subreddit. Hey, I'm back. I'm the guy who posted a thank you note back in September here.

Now that the FGC-9s are already known by the dictator, I can proudly announce that we're from Myanmar. Yes, we are mass producing FGC-9s to fight back against the dictator. More info about our production will be published later. This time, the user u slash daddy u m c d hung around to answer questions. Those bastards didn't know we had the tech back then. Now that everything is in public, we can proudly say we're from Myanmar. We are mostly responsible for production in R&D, even though we also involved in other ground missions. We distribute the FGC-9 to a lot of different urban guerrillas in urban and rural areas.

Some of the units got arrested a few weeks ago, which you might have already seen on the subreddit. Apart from the FGC-9, there are other equipment and weapons that are being produced with 3D printers, he wrote. He said his team were residing in ethnic armed organization areas, mainly the Korean National Union and the Kachin Independence Army, controlled zones. He posted that they tried other 3D printer designs, such as the Plastikov, which is a printed AK-47 receiver, but getting the other parts made impractical. By contrast, the FGC-9 could be made entirely using a 3D printer and some hardware store parts. According to another source, Myanmar's small motorcycle repair shops made quick work at the metal barrels and bolts. Electrochemical machining was used to make more barrels. They also had the chance to buy a few Glock barrels from Thailand, Daddy UMCD said, but those cost a lot more than the FGC-9 barrels.

While his account continued to post, the military continued to share photos of captured FGC-9s. Three workshops that had been using lathes to make the barrels were raided, and photos of three more captured guns popped up in November. Alongside bolt action rifles, it still had stickers on their stocks from what looked like US gun shops. Production and decentralised locations continued despite the raids, while other groups fought on with homemade revolving rifles, crude homemade wooden stocks and other improvised weapons. A telegram channel with instructions in Burmese on how to make the guns made sure that even when one shop or gunsmith was taken out of the fight, the knowledge wasn't lost. Although filament for their 3D printers was becoming harder to get, they'd stockpiled a lot in advance. Daddy UMCD tried to manufacture automatic FGC-9s and another printable model called Professor Parabellum's Square Tube Submachine Gun. But nothing else seemed as easy or as reliable as the FGC-9.

Of course, Reddit being Reddit, people questioned the veracity and utility of his posts. He responded, FGC-9s are just part of the game because they could be produced with what we have at the lowest cost available. Rifles of 4,000 to 7,000 US dollars at our border. FGC's are under $100. Rifle parts are 10 times more expensive than glock parts. To all those who are saying that these photos are sus, we don't want to blame your suspicion. If any of you remember the threat I posted in September, you will remember that we are mass producing FGC-9s.

The ones in the photos you've seen were supplied by us. There are many groups like this now. We do the main production just like I explained in September. Then, Daddy UMCD went on to thank the other members of the subreddit. Claiming their active help was the only reason he and other revolutionaries have been able to overcome certain technical issues. We wouldn't be here without you guys, especially someone who shared with me the buffer spring and fire control group spring measurements, he said. By late November, photos of FGC-9s in the hands of fighters emerged. And they showed sights this time.

They had longer barrels and homemade suppressors too. The FGC-9s were apparently used by urban units for close-up fighting, and for the training of new fighters since they have essentially the same controls as an AR-15 or M16 rifle, both of which are common in Myanmar's rebel units. We have successfully streamlined a variety of techniques to produce FGC-9. 1000 plus efficiently. Our primary forces are equipped with proper rifles. FGC-9s are for guerrilla warfare.

We started using those in hit-and-run and special task force missions too. We don't share much about the missions to the public yet. It will definitely come. And when it does, I'll update it here. Even if I'm still alive, haha, wrote data UMCD on the FOSCAD subreddit. Even with production in full swing, ammunition remained a problem. Although some regions can produce 22 and 9mm at home according to data UMCD, 556 can be purchased in large quantities at the border with Thailand, but it isn't cheap.

Instead, the PDF relied on raiding police and military outposts in the same way the EAOs had for years. 9mm is the most common centre-fire pistol round in the world. That's why deterrent dispense picked it for the FGC-9. C's weapons often only have a handful of rounds, but that's enough to kill a soldier and take his weapon. Jay Stark might not have been around to see his invention used to fight Tony, but Hanrahan thinks he would have been happier with the results. He would have been made up. I think that's everything he wanted to achieve. You know what I'm saying? That really is everything he wanted to do.

Even the National Unity Government, Myanmar's government in exile, has come around to at least some of Jay Stark's ways of thinking. Calling to data UMCD, our Ministry of Defence Minister already promised about the right to bear arms at the first day of the revolution. Promises made by revolutionary governments are not exactly solid commitments, but it's not hard to see why a generation of kids like Zaw, forged by an asymmetrical conflict with a government that possessed a near-absolute advantage in armaments, might be committed to staying armed, even if they win. At the moment, the future of their struggle is very much in doubt. Scrolling through Facebook photos of Zaw and his comrades is a surreal experience.

They look not just young, soldiers mostly look young, but they look like students, kids from some weirdly militarized university. Photos on Facebook show them sprawled out together in the grass, in camo fatigues, bearing rifles, but each glued to their phones as they cuddle in together. Zaw and his girlfriend, who he described to us as the girl I love, fought alongside each other until January 7th of this year. The battle that we started, she was coming with him and, you know, as happens, a weapon landed near her and it hit her leg, so her bone broke, so she had to go to hospital. 3D printed and homemade guns have helped, but Zaw and his friends are still fighting

against a modern military with planes, night vision goggles, and tanks. Despite this, more than a year after the coup, they're still fighting and more soldiers defect to join them weekly. It's hard to see what victory looks like. The cities will be another battle altogether, but in the jungle camp where Zaw video calls us from, it's impossible to see what giving up might look like either. He's still fighting, his girlfriend is healing, and they're both committed to staying out in the jungle until they earn their freedom back or die a tribe. I'm Robert Evans, and this is Part 4 of Myanmar, Printing the Revolution. And then once we got there, we couldn't rest, you know, rain, sun, whatever, women as well.

When they came, when we were leaving, they were all like very fair skin, beautiful. And then we went in and then everyone got tanned in the jungle. We were training all the time, you know, people in training camp. We were driven, required, and the reason that we were all doing this is because of Myanmar's coup, as students, and how much he has terrorized the public and the people. And that's why we were, we have this morale and the ability to get through the training and be able to wield weapons. Zaw and his friends went into the jungle as students, programmers, and kids. Now they're fighters.

They're tech-savvy young people, he says. They grew up online, and that generational divide which the internet brought here came much later in Myanmar. It wasn't until 2011 that people really gained access to the internet, and with it, the new ideas and identities that it brought. Zaw's generation are among the first to embrace global connectivity. And now, after having it taken away, they're refusing to give it up. The start of the coup in February, the military, well Gen Z was organizing online, social media and all that. And they were kind of, I think this is from my experience, but kind of organizing around like Gen Z is going to be different than the ADA generation because we have the internet and also we know more about the world and can communicate the rest of the world. I think one thing that was big was that in 2008, it just took one video leaking out of the country for there to be big international repercussions.

It's worth noting that when people in Burma talk about the internet, they mean Facebook. Phones come with the Facebook app installed, and it's sometimes exempt from data charges. For many people in Burma, using the internet means using Facebook. Zaw and his friends are different from their parents in many ways, not least in their perceptions of authority. This has led to a situation where the PDF, People's Defense Force Units, are much less hierarchical than Units of the Tatmador. So when we make decisions in our group, there's no master and student, there's no teacher and student, but you know, the way that it works. There are people who are good, there are older people who are more trained, and then there are new recruits, new people who just came in. So of course, the people who are there for longer and know more about the situation have more voice when we discuss.

So especially people who were there when we founded this group, there were only really eight people when we improved. So those eight people kind of discussed on the bigger strategy. You know, we don't really vote. He says he wants to do it, he thinks it's good. There's the seven of us, we think it's good, or we support him, or someone says, we don't really like that idea, then we don't do it. They try to achieve more gender equality as well, but those are explained that in his unit, the women are not always the frontline fighters. At the place, there's no discrimination, you know, women can, women and men were training whoever could try. But like on the battlefield, people, we don't use women that much on the battlefield.

That one thing that we do know is that it's not really discrimination, but if women are with us together, we have a confusion about whether we need to protect them or we're just fighting with them or they're fighting in front of us. And that there's one thing that is very different is that in terms of mentality, we can't, we never take the women out really far into very dangerous fights. So often they're in the back as backup or to supplies or things like that. But as you know, the military government, the military terrorists are very, very unethical, they don't follow the rules. So, you know, they're going to shoot whoever they see. So even if they're hanging back and they're sending medical supplies, they can still get hit. For Zora in particular, there's a lot at stake. After almost an hour and a half of talking, I asked about his parents.

I'd heard of retribution attacks against the families of fighters and wondered if he was worried about that. So mom and dad are both, they support me fighting against the military, they're very happy. His dad really wants to do CDM, but he can't run away because the military has taken his mother and his sisters. He still has five sisters. They're all still in that military command. They're in the military schools. So it's very hard for them to run away. Right, he's daggon defect. He really wants to leave the military, but he can't.

So while that fact that I am there trying to fight against the military, he's very happy. But he tells me to be careful about my own life. They're supportive and they really want to come fight themselves, but they can't because of my sisters and my mother. So in seeing that I can do it, it's really wonderful for them. So his father, his other brother and other people, but three of them below him, they've all usually just lived together with his grandfather and stuff in the military compound or near the military. So he really wants to call all the people that are still there, but they can't leave. This is what Civil War does.

It traps us in a situation where we can't make the right choice, even when we know what it is. And in many situations, it's pretty hard to discern right from wrong in the midst of so much violence. Zor has been able to fight, but his dad is stuck fighting against people like his son in order to protect his daughters. Thousands of families across the country are divided in the same way by circumstance or ideology. The military is something of a separate society. It has its own schools and its own culture, but ethnic armed organizations have not been close to urban populations either. And so whole new identities have been forged by Generation Z, while their families often struggle to abandon old certainties.

As we record this, Zor is still fighting. His girlfriend is still healing. Every few weeks, a video of him and his friends pops up on Reddit or Facebook. They have optics on their rifles now and are taking long-range shots at the Top Medaugh, who rely on iron sights. They shoot and reload like soldiers, and they laugh like kids. The Top Medaugh still controls the cities, but to move between them, they have to travel in convoys at breakneck speeds. Using ambushes, mines, and knowledge of the terrain, E.A.Os, and the PDF are able to deny the military access to large portions of the countryside. Without a serious change in the conflict, it might stay like this for years.

A report published this month detailed the attacks in the Kharini state by the Top Medaugh on churches, residential homes, camps for displaced people, which killed 61 in the months since Zor left the city. On Christmas Eve, in a Prusos township, they killed at least 40 civilians. Autopsies show some were gagged and burned alive. In recent months, the Top Medaugh has increased its use of airstrikes against targets that it deems legitimate. Ming Anhuang, the junta's leader, flew to Russia twice in 2021. He was proclaimed an honorary professor of the military university of the Russian armed forces. Quote,

We are determined to continue our efforts to strengthen bilateral ties based on the mutual understanding, respect, and trust that have been established between our two countries. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting with the coup leader on June 22. We pay special attention to this meeting as we see Myanmar as a time-tested strategic partner and a reliable ally in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region he went on. Min Anhuang was equally lavish with his praise, saying that he saw Russia as a friend forever. Myanmar relies heavily on Russian hind MI-35 helicopter gunships, transport helicopters, MiG-29 and Su-30 fighter jets and Yak-130 ground attack aircraft to carry out bombing raids and strafe civilians. All of these weapons systems have been seen more recently in the fighting in Ukraine. One prominent Burmese-Irish family, the Kyatongs, has helped the junta avoid an international arms embargo using their global connections and a network of shady shadow companies. They have purchased helicopters under the pretense of using them for tourism and the oil and gas industry and handed them over to the Taat-Madaw.

They've also helped shuttle coastal radar to Myanmar, which the Taat-Madaw used to track Rohingya refugees and provide cover for several aircraft purchases. To fund these arms purchases, the Taat-Madaw has found willing markets for luxury goods abroad. According to Justice for Myanmar, since the coup in February 2021, the United States has imported 1,565 metric tons of teak from Myanmar using intermediaries to avoid sanctions. In the 2017-2018 financial year, the last year for which data is available, the government received US$100 million in revenue from taxes and royalties applied to the timber trade. In 2021, there were more shipments than 2018, offering the Taat-Madaw the chance to make enough money to continue purchasing weapons to use against their population. The conflict in Myanmar remains complicated. It's easy to reduce the alphabet soup of rebel groups to EEOs and the PDF, but these groups and their motivations are diverse. Pierre explained to us that even within the Karin, there are deep divisions.

First, you have to know that historically, the Karin rebellion that started in 1948-1949, quite a long time ago, was led by the Christian minority of the Karin people. Obviously, that was the most western-educated people at the time, and so this elite kind of reproduced itself in the Karin without being... The Karin National Union is a democratic movement, but our elites tend to reproduce themselves. And so most of the leadership of the Karin National Union and the Karin National Liberation Army was Christian. So the Burmese junta, the Burmese military government, decided to use this to create a wedge between the Karin Christians and the Karin Buddhists and sent monks to agitate and try to cause this split on religious grounds. And they succeeded in part, and succeeded to separate a part of Karin Buddhists that created the democratic Karin Buddhist army, the KBA, which then allied themselves, of course, to the junta, and to attack the Kaineli and the Manor Plo, which of course they knew all the roads there and the defences and where was the defences situated, etc. And succeeded in destroying the capital of the Karin National Union in Manor Plo in 1995.

So that was the situation pretty much when I arrived. It was pretty hard. There was not so much territory anymore held by the Karin, and more importantly they lost a lot of income because a lot of their income comes from tax at the border that they can control. So yeah, that was the situation. Not every EEO has embraced the national unity government directly. After all, many of its members were enthusiastically running cover for the Rohingya genocide a few years ago. Many of the EEOs remain, technically under a ceasefire with the Tatmadaw, and the Tatmadaw knows that if it pushes too far into EEO territory, it risks provoking a full blown response. The EEOs, meanwhile, have been aiding and training the PDF and still maintaining enough deniability that the Tatmadaw has not been forced into a confrontation. EEO PDF alliances look different in different regions, and often realities on the ground bear little relationship to the backdoor diplomacy and official stances embraced by leadership and public. The war continues to have a huge toll on civilians. According to the United Nations, in total some 440,000 people have been newly displaced since the coup happened in February 2021, adding to an existing 370,000 who had fled their homes from earlier waves of violence and over a million people who had fled the Rohingya genocide.

More than half the population of Kareli State has fled. Humanitarian access is hard. Much of the relief effort for displaced people occurs within local communities. Thousands of refugees are camping along the border with Thailand, which is defined by rivers. Initially, many people fled into Thailand, but terrible conditions of refugee camps led some of them to return to Myanmar. Now, they wade across the river for international aid donations of food and water, but they can't bring themselves to stay in the crowded camps overnight, so they wade back to sleep on the Burmese side of the bank. The UNHCR, the High Commission on Refugees, has been unable to access camps in Thailand, or Myanmar, to check on the conditions. But it has urged the Thai government, which has been credibly accused of forcing people back across the border, to move people to better conditions further into Thailand instead of keeping them in camps near the border. And here we find the unfortunate, unavoidable reality of the civil war in Myanmar.

For all the uniqueness of aspects of the conflict, the innovative ways that Gen Z militias have interfaced with older ethnic military forces, the 3D printed arms, etc. At the end of the day, this is another brutal, horrific conflict between large numbers of people who want to be free, and a small number of people who want to control them. From Myanmar to Armenia, Ukraine to Syria, Ethiopia to Iraq, and beyond, the nobilities of 21st century conflict don't change the fact that at the end of the day, each war brings with it what might be the truest symbol of our current age. Parents saying goodbye to their kids, camps filled with desperate people fleeing violence, and governments all over the world willing to send nothing more than kind words and stern warnings. This is a post script to episode 4. It's not one that we'd been intending to record because it's not news that we'd ever hoped to have to share, but here we are. Unfortunately, we found out that about 10 days after we last spoke, and a couple of weeks before we released our podcast, Zor died. He died in battle fighting with the Tarmador.

He really was, I suppose, an amazingly brave and courageous young man. I think that his loss is one that reflects the realities of what war is, which is not great and glorious and exciting. It's young men and sometimes young women, young non-binary folks, I imagine too, dying when they had no quarrel with anyone, when they just wanted to live their lives. Two years ago, a year and a half ago even, he was just loving the people he loved, having fun, being a kid, riding his motorcycle, speaking to his girlfriend on his phone, living a happy life. And then someone who had power decided that they wanted to have more power and they decided that it didn't matter how many kids had to die so they could have what they want. And he decided to say no to that and that's brave and I think all of us would agree that what he did was right and morally courageous and that we would hope to be brave enough to do the same if the same thing happened to us. This one's hit me quite hard, honestly, and I know this is my job and this happens, it's happened before and it'll happen again, but he was such a happy, polite, kind young man, he never didn't pick up the phone. He never got tired of explaining stuff that we didn't understand and he always answered our questions.

There was nothing that was off the table, there was nothing that he wouldn't talk about with us, he was completely open and yeah, we will miss him greatly. He died fighting the thing that we all have to fight, right? Fascism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, militarization and yeah, we'll grieve his loss both Robert and I, we've just spoken on the phone. We found out because the contact of mine on the ground sent me a Reddit message with a link to a Facebook post. It's very clearly Zorin, no doubt about that, it names him and unfortunately it also shows him dead. So we were not in any doubt that it was him who died and we're not in any doubt that we will gravely miss him either. We'd both hoped to go over and record with him, to speak with him, to meet him. I'd spoken to him several times on video, sometimes just to chat, not even to record anything, just to chat, just to catch up and look at what each of us was doing that day.

So it's a hard loss for me and for Robert too, as I said, we just spoken. So yeah, that's the news that we hadn't hoped to end on. Obviously though, this is the reality of war as the world is looking at the conflict in Ukraine. Now, I'd urge you to look at the conflict in Myanmar too. Another Russian bomb killed another nice kid who never had any quarrel with anyone who just wanted to live his life and didn't want to live the rest of his life with a boot on his neck. So we decided to stand up against it. As you can probably hear in my voice, I'm quite upset by his loss and will be probably for a few days. So I'm sorry to have to end this podcast on such a sad note.

I'm sorry for his family who are now caught between the loss of their son and trying to protect their daughters. I'm sorry for his girlfriend who's dealing with shrapnel in her own leg and now the loss of the person she loved. And I'm sorry for his comrades. They've said they'll go on fighting and I hope they do. And I don't think there's any point really pretending to be objective at this stage in the games and I hope they win. But I mostly just hope that like one day young men and women and everyone else just gets to live their lives without having to kill and die. Because ultimately no one should have to and no parent should have to bury their kids. So yeah, as much as we're all focusing on Ukraine and what's happening there is terrible. Please don't forget Zors comrades. Please don't forget his legacy.

And please don't forget him. We won't and we obviously want to dedicate this podcast to him and what he stood for. Yeah, thanks. Oh, welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Robert Evans, recording from a deeply unsettling Airbnb right near the border of Texas and Mexico. I'm here with my good friend James Stout. Say hello to the people. Hi everyone. And we're going to talk about, well, let me let me introduce briefly, you'll see the episodes soon enough.

We're down here reporting on a mixture of right wing militancy, government militarization of the border, and the attempts by people trapped in the middle to survive and avoid those authoritarian structures. So today, James and I are going to talk about Molotov cocktails. But first, James, you want to talk about this Airbnb we're in for a second? Because you book this motherfucker. Deeply, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happens when you have like less than 24 hours before you arrive and need a place for more than two people is you really get into a depth of Airbnb and I found this place which how to describe it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, unsettling. Yeah. Yeah, it just feels wrong. It can't put my finger quite on where there is a basement, which definitely has like murder vibes.

And there's not basements in Texas normally, and it's crumbling and unsettling. There's a sump pump that doesn't appear connected to anything. There's puddles of standing water. I think there's like nine bedrooms in this house. Yeah, but only one like is upstairs. And it seems to have like, like to be designed to command an archive fire around the house. Then there are other bedrooms which are like kind of in this stable block. What else is weird?

Three of the bedrooms are separate from the main house in a built in a way that it looks like a roadside motel. And then there's a main house that has like four living rooms. We're sitting at a large kitchen table right now, which spins around a central axis for some inexplicable reason. We have the overwhelming feeling that something horribly wrong was done in this space because it doesn't. Everything is a little off. None of the decorations look like people. This is some sort of trap house, but we cannot identify the kind. I think Robert, you described it best when you said it's like one of those this person does not exist photos, but of home and you can't work out what's wrong, but it's not human and it's not right.

So we just had to get that out of our systems because it's been deeply unsettling the last couple of days we're here. Now, James, in 2020, you wrote an article about Molotov cocktails that got you in a bit of a fascinating situation. I want you to just kind of walk me through what happened there and what the fallout was. Yeah, well, the one that started it was about how to tear down statues. And that was for popular mechanics and in that article, I interviewed a couple of experts and one of them explained how to make something called thermite. Thermite is like an exothermic reaction. You mix a couple of things. They get hot. They got hot enough to melt some metal. So if you were interested in bringing down a statue of a bigot, that might be helpful to you.

By the way, it's legal in basically all of the U.S. to possess thermite and pretty simple to make. Not that, you know, you can Google it. You can figure that out yourself. I'm not telling you how to make it. I'm telling you that it exists. It exists and is surprisingly legal. And if you need to weld some shit underwater or join together some train tracks, it's the right tool for the job. Yeah, if you happen to be, I know a lot of the Russian army in Ukraine listens to this podcast. If you happen to be in the process of abandoning hundreds of millions of dollars in armor, thermite can allow you to stop Ukrainian farmers from towing it back to their homes.

But don't do that if you're a Russian soldier. Just run. Go to the Ukrainians. I'll let you call your mum. They're nice. Okay, so I write the story for Pop Mac, right? It's just a useful guide to people who are looking to safely dispose of a racist statue, right? And when I write it, I think their readership might lean pretty conservative. Or they felt like that was a safe space anyway. It immediately became like the epicenter of the culture war for like a week. Including triggering one Benjamin Shapiro, who then sub-tweeted me like a coward

and asked when I'll be writing my story about Molotov cocktails, which I subsequently wrote. So that gets us to the Molotov cocktail story. It was in Russia today as well. Now banned media outlet. Your article, you didn't write it correctly. No, no, no. I wrote it for a British magazine called Huck. I describe like Huck as like vice but less tragic. Like after vice went bad, Huck's cool. And so, yeah, Ben was upset.

Ben orchestrated this kind of right wing panic around the story. They canceled Pop Mac for a while. And I wrote a piece about the history and I guess chemistry of Molotov. And their role in democratization movements. That was really fascinating to me. So yeah, that's how we got to the Molotov story. And you want to give me kind of some Cliffs notes on the history of the Molotov and its role in? Because what I know about Molotov cocktails, I assume it's named after Molotov of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, right? Vyacheslav Molotov, yeah.

And I know I have been near a couple of them going off. I nearly got lit on fire by one and I watched a colleague get lit on fire by another. So I am aware of what they do. But yeah, why don't you walk us through kind of the Cliffs notes of the history of Molotovs? Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of times you'll go on the internet and you'll read something about history and it will turn out not to be right. And that's often the case with Molotov cocktails. So yes, they're named after Vyacheslav Molotov.

We can get to why they're named that way in a second. But their origin is actually with Franco's nationalist fascist, national fascist, whatever you want to call them, national Catholic, troops in the Spanish Civil War. So early on in the Spanish Civil War, 1937-ish, the Republic had some Soviet tanks and they were using these against the Fuentes de Ebro. They were using these against the Nationalists and Nationalists were throwing what they then called petrol bombs at the tanks. Too great effect. Those old tanks had rubber on the wheels that turned the tracks and those would melt. So that's when they were first used.

If you're not familiar with what a Molotov cocktail is, it's an improvised incendiary device. It's a glass thing filled with a flammable thing topped with some kind of cloth with a flame that the cloth is burning. And when you throw it, obviously the glass thing breaks, the flammable liquid comes out and the flame catches the liquid and you have a fireball. So the first time we kind of see them is used in the Spanish Civil War. We see references to them in like British media in the 1930s when British reporters were going out to watch the Spanish Civil War. And they were like, wow, what a development, what a technology. And so they used there, but where they get their name is in Finland, right? When the Soviets invade Finland.

Why they got their name is that Molotov claimed that his planes were not dropping bombs. You'll see like a history of gas lighting in Russian foreign policy, Soviet foreign policy here. He claimed they weren't dropping bombs. He claimed that they were bringing aid to the people of Finland, right? And people in Finland was like, this is ridiculous. So they started calling the bombs Molotov's bread baskets. And pretty soon everything that was shit was associated with Molotovs. Bombers were Molotov's chickens, blackout curtains were Molotov's curtains. And so they switched many of their state alcohol factories to making Molotov cocktails.

And so they started calling these what were called petrol bombs Molotov cocktails. And that's how the name stuck. It is neat that Russia has such a long history of causing other nations to retool their domestic liquor production towards making bombs to throw at Russian soldiers. And like how, what do we know, 80-odd years on from 1936, 37. And like it's not always Russian tanks, but it's nearly always Russian tanks, right? Like Spain and the Russian tanks are obviously like in some public in Spain is much preferable to Franco. Finland, Hungary in 1956, right?

And today in Ukraine, you see people throwing bottles of petrol with flames on top at Russian tanks. But yeah, they have a long history. Yeah, I mean, it's among other things, like especially if you don't have easy access to firearms and no access to explosives and stuff. Like it's not a force equalizer, but it does allow you to do certain things militarily that would be harder to do if you were like trying to manufacture something a little bit more. Like it's easier than making a grenade, right? Like, yeah. And it does much more damage than a rock, but it's not much harder to come by for most people, right? And one really interesting thing I read about them was by this academic who I really like his work.

It's called Ali Kadiva, and he's Iranian, and he's looked at like democratization movements all over the world, right? So how do authoritarian regimes collapse? And his research suggested that like peaceful extreme like extreme, like quote unquote peaceful protests tend not to work. And insurgencies hadn't had that high of a success rate. But his papers called stick stones and Molotov cocktails. And like his research suggests that like if you're prepared to do violence against property by hitting it with a stick, throwing a stone, throwing a Molotov cocktail, then you are more likely to have success in toppling a regime. So like, because they're accessible to people who don't necessarily have guns or aren't doing insurgencies, they've had this really interesting role in arming non-state actors or arming liberation movement throughout history. I mean, that's really interesting because it would seem to suggest like a reading of that paper would seem to suggest that yeah, it's not so much like,

being willing to carry out like a militant movement, but being willing to destroy things is one of the primary signs that like you have a chance of actually overthrowing an authoritarian regime is like your ability to prepare to do damage like of a financial nature. Like is that kind of the argument he's making? I think the argument he's making is that like, and it's an argument that can't be made enough, right? Damage to property is not the same as damage to people and violence against property in the name of liberation or justice is okay and tends to work. And but yeah, you have to have some skin in the game. You have to be prepared to fuck some shit up if you want to bring down a regime which is prepared to use violence against you. So that's kind of talking about the use of these tools within liberatory struggles, but they're not. I guess the liberatory struggle isn't about I have the beholder that's talking about the use of these tools and kind of like street movements that are agitating for change.

But we also have this military history, which I think is much more muddled in terms of its actual efficacy as a as a weapon, its ability to deny area, its ability to destroy or damage like enemy like combat ability. Do you do you have any kind of sense of like how effective like we're seeing all these people in Ukraine arming themselves with cocktails. Evidence of, you know, the efficacy of these in combat is a lot murkier, at least within the present conflict. Do you have a sense of how historically they useful they tend to be for that? Yeah, I think depending on the age of the and then the type of the vehicle you're attacking, right? So like these old Russian tanks and what they would do a lot was make something which is not quite what we would see of the Molotov cocktails. They had a whole blanket that was soaked in petrol and that would get caught up in the track and then it would destroy that. There was a bit of rubber on the wheels interface with the tracks and it would melt and that would immobilize the tank and then folks could swarm it from all angles.

That was kind of the move there. And then I think they've been more useful in Ukraine than one might have expected because of the nature of some of the Russian military vehicles, they tend to carry their fuel on the outside. They also because of the mud, they'll carry lots of pieces of wood that they can use to put under their wheels. Like you would, you know, like sand ladders on a truck. And so those tend to catch fire more easily. I know the BMPs also have fuel storage on the back door, which is pretty optimal for if you want to walk up behind someone and set something on fire. So they've worked pretty well there in other places. Yeah, they seem to be more of annoyance.

Like I know I've spoken to people who have been in the military in the UK and like big thing in Northern Ireland, right? Again, right? You have a sort of a liberatory movement there. And so they were very popular, but they didn't seem to do much of it and cause people distress, cause people personal injury sometimes, but not particularly to, they weren't game changing in terms of like the monopoly on violence there. But yeah, they seem to be very, very, I think they're better when you have a ton of people throwing them. I think if you have a lot of people setting things on fire, that tends to be causes people to stop. And I think with Russia being lacking in excellent leadership, it seems like we could say in Ukraine and some of their soldiers may be lacking in training. And with the fact that they tend to carry fuel externally, so their vehicles catch fire.

If you can just convince some conscripts that their vehicle is on fire, they are going to get out and run away. And we've seen that a lot, right? A lot of people running away. Yeah, I think when I think about like outside of military uses, where I've seen Molotovs be most effective in like the time I've been covering conflict. The first thing that comes up is the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine late 2013, early 2014, where people were throwing some of the same people throwing Molotovs at Russian troops now, where through a mix of throwing by hand and like catapult devices were launching sometimes hundreds of Molotovs in a couple of minutes and like melting tank treads to the ground, which is definitely like, that's obviously it was effective. It's also almost a different kind of weapon system when you're dealing with that kind of volume.

Grad Molotov launcher, yeah. But then I can think about like there's this really amazing video that you can find if you look of Greek anarchists on bicycles swarming past a Greek police station and throwing. It looked like about a dozen Molotovs at once and just like a sacking a police station that way and then biking right the fuck off and like disappearing into the city, which is which you know seemed like a more effective tactic than some of the ways I've seen them use where it's like a person throwing a Molotov. And then the cops get really fucking angry, but it doesn't really do that much damage to them and then people get or they hit the wrong person. Like it is it is a tool with a high degree of chance for error if you don't know what you're doing. Yeah, there's a decent skill requirement. You also really don't want to have like anything flammable on your hands or shirt or anything like that. Like I've seen people really end up badly after trying to make a Molotov and just hurting themselves trying to light it or throw it or drop it.

Yeah, it's it's not it's not one of those things that like you want to casually suggest people use because the odds of actually injuring yourself with it are pretty high if you're not being careful. And if you if you're going into a situation where you think people might have Molotov's natural fibers people natural fibers, not synthetics. Yeah, wool is your friend. Yeah. Welding gloves your friend. Like, yeah, you don't want to be caught on fire. So let's talk a little bit about how like what are the different kinds of constructions of Molotov's you've seen people using and how they changed over time. You talked a little bit about kind of the early Spanish ones were like full blankets and stuff. Yeah, I think one of the interests that we go from Spain to Finland, right where we're seeing the same thing basically petrol or maybe ethanol something like that inside a bottle with with just a wick or something sort of. I know in Spanish Civil War they were using jars a lot like jam jars. But when things started to develop I think is in the UK. So in Britain, and you actually have this guy called Tom Wintringham who who went to Spain as a war correspondent decided to become a soldier and then returned to the UK and tried to share what he'd learned with British people right

this article he wrote for picture post. He was very much into Molotov cocktails is a great way of fighting an invasion, much like actually the old guy you heard. Did you hear the guy who called into NPR recently. Yes. Yeah, he was outstanding. Just just turning NPR into a how to do guerrilla warfare. And so what they did they made this thing called the number 76 grenade and they made 6 million of them. Jesus Christ. And they still find them it's funny they'll still find them in like when they'll be digging the foundation for a building they'll be like oh shit this is not a box of beer. And what those had was a strip of rubber that they dropped in it. It was in a bottle with a cap. And it had a phosphorus igniter actually so you didn't have to light it you just tossed it. And yeah those were extremely effective the rubber dissolves and then that allows the flaming liquid to adhere better to the personal thing that is hit right.

And you're almost like making a napalm bomb. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the phosphorus will last for a long time it's much less risky to the thrower. And you can also have a whole box of them and just keep throwing them right you don't have to light each one you don't have to have someone else light each one so those seem pretty effective. I don't know if they were ever really used in anger because obviously the Nazis never landed in the UK. But yeah that was that was a pretty big development and that kind of set the tone for the other developments which I've seen at least. I'm not like a Molotov expert but people put sugar in them people put polystyrene in them or what do you call that? What does sugar in them do? I think it gives it a higher viscosity. And I think they sort of it maybe melts when they and like sticks and like creates like a sticky kind of hot like like if you're making toffee I would imagine.

The big thing I've seen people putting in them is various like plastics right so when you look at it you've seen these videos old ladies in Ukraine with cheese graters just grating like packing styrofoam. And they put that in there and that this that does the same thing right creates a more viscous kind of napalm which adheres to the thing that you throw it at. And that I think if you're talking about persuading someone that their tank is on fire if it keeps burning for 10, 20 seconds you know you don't have a very long time to get out of a BMP. So you're going to start getting out I would imagine. Well and that does point to like an interesting reality of like not just this war all war but like specifically in the context of territorial kind of volunteers who are on paper terribly outgunned. But the psychological dimension is that like you said if you can convince people they may be in an armored vehicle that has unquestioned supremacy over the partisans attacking them but if you can convince them they are on fire. They will make decisions that lead them to no longer have the advantage in terms of firepower it's not impossible to do. Yeah I think you saw that I think there was some footage from Maidan of them sort of ambushing some armored vehicles and yeah once you throw half a dozen Molotov cocktails from above at windows.

You can either get those people to abandon their vehicle and run away if that's their goal if they get out they're a lot more vulnerable to further attacks from Molotov cocktails or anything else right. So yeah I think it really plays into that kind of guerrilla or sort of like underdog side of conflict. Yeah one of the things that's interesting to them about me I mean you and I just finished this series that dealt heavily with like 3D printed weapons homemade guns and stuff but you know there's a lot that you as the state can do to reduce people's access to firearms or even to reduce people's access to like knives that are bigger than kitchen knives a lot you can do to reduce people's access to conventional arms but everywhere's got liquor. Yeah exactly it's almost impossible to stop people having them right if you have gasoline diesel alcohol and glass things and fabric and lighter you have access to these so yeah they're accessible to everyone. And they are yeah incredibly effective like they're probably the most effective thing that you could make in your home. If you were doing an insurgency or fighting Russian invaders in this case. Well James was there anything else you wanted to get into on the subject of Molotov's or other forms of cocktails.

Yeah let me think I should probably say that it's probably illegal to make them in the United States. I mean there are specific ways you legally can but you need a number of different permits. Yeah yeah you do have to ask the government so I probably wouldn't suggest yes you have to I probably wouldn't suggest doing that but no I think it's always interesting to look at these like if we want to move towards a world where there is less authority and more freedom than these things which take away the state's monopoly on the ability to do violence should always be not necessarily like things that we want but like it's interesting. Yeah that's one of the things that's fascinating to me obviously Ukraine is a pretty standard government within the global or at least up until this point has been like they are they are a state that has done a number of ugly things in its past and will do them in the future. But they're in this fascinating moment where the government has really set down any claim to a monopoly on force in a lot of fascinating ways the kind of widespread here's how to make a Molotov here's how to disable. And one of the things that's fascinating the Ukrainian government very famously sent around sheets which are like here is where to throw Molotovs to do the most damage different Russian vehicles are also Ukrainian vehicles. Yeah and also those vehicles now belong to random farmers like I saw that there was a thing with Ukrainian equivalent of the IRS had said like don't worry you don't need to declare this tank on your income tax right how does one tax a person who has a tank.

Yeah, or in the case of some of them has a $20 million anti aircraft system yeah who is the tax man who is willing to go and collect that put like they have become ungovernable. Yeah, I mean it's we're there in the thick of it and maybe for the rest of all of our lives nobody knows how long this thing is going to last but if. If the war does end in any kind of reasonable time frame the what's Ukraine going back to I don't know how they go back to being a normal state when they have when they have opened the floodgates to everyone is the army now. Well I think it's yeah it calls into question number things right like that maybe you don't necessarily always need this very strict disciplinary and structure to fight very effectively. But also yeah that like do you need the state right people are just doing their own thing right now and I yeah I don't know how you really take that back like how do you go and collect the tanks from people they know how to kill tanks that's what they've been doing. Yeah, the Ukrainian government in the future if we imagine a time of peace will peace it'll be quite a while before there's any chance of like. Well we better send in the riot troops to crack down on this protest it's like no you're not going to get those riot troops to go anywhere near there. Yeah like yeah we're testing out this armed society as a polite society thesis right but yeah I don't know how the police return to a country which is seemingly at least holding off if not defeating a military superpower.

Yeah. Yeah it is a fascinating question and no one really has a clear answer but I do think it's interesting of course they have embraced the Molotov as you've kind of made the case here that's it really has this history as this great kind of democratizing force within conflicts between people and governments and governments and governments. Yeah and people and capital right like if you're prepared to destroy capital goods like people have done for centuries and that that seems to be the way to make change right. The kind of interesting thing to reflect on from my Myanmar podcast I thought was that they had very strict gun ownership laws before this very very strict apart from for one ethnic group called the chin but what they've promised to do afterwards at least according to our sources is to allow people to keep and bear arms right because I guess they kind of have to right because a they can't stop them anymore these people are 3d printing guns and be the only way they got freedom or if this is if the if they're able to defeat the Tatmador then the only way they've they've become free is through fighting for their freedom and it seems that they're not going to be willing to give that up, especially for the ethnic groups there so yeah it's really interesting to see like what kind of a state emerges from a sort of what sorts of word like like it's it's not an authoritarian structure right the militaries are not like a lot of people in Ukraine are not necessarily authoritarian structures so what emerges for the state when we've had this

horizontal resistance. Yeah, these are these are fascinating questions and ones that I think will all be continuing to ask an answer for for the foreseeable future. For now, do you have anything you want to plug before we roll out James. No, you should listen to our podcast on Myanmar you can follow me on Twitter that's my name at James stout. I have a patron arrived some other things I teach at the Community College if you want to take some history courses we can learn about Molotovs have a lecture about that. But otherwise, no, that's about all. Well, that's going to do it for us here until next time. Don't make a Molotov if it's illegal where you live but but do think about Molotovs because as the last couple of weeks have shown us.

You could by next week be living in a state where it's very legal to make Molotov cocktails that could happen any of us you never know you know you never know so you know do some reading online. Use a use a VPN to do that reading browser if you're going to be how to make Molotov do some very careful reading and you know, keep an eye on the world. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visitor website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.