It Could Happen Here - Myanmar: Printing the Revolution, Part 2

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

We discuss the history of homemade guns in liberatory movements, and meet two fighters who battled the Burmese government. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. As 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 this 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 in 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 as local enforcers. Since most of these places had never developed their own industrial base for an arms 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 colonizing

nations went out of their way to relocate it, along with the profit it generated to the metropole. Orwell reflected on this in his novel Burmese Days, saying, in the 18th century, the Indians cast guns that were 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 colonizers, 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 US Second Amendment and 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 Gascoyne Cecil, Marquis of Salisbury, gave a speech in which he claimed he would lord the day when there was a rifle in every cottage in England. 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 Orwell 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 anarchist 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, Orwell wrote, 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 centerfire 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. Lutie. Lutie, 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, Lutie 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 Lutie gun would need to be a skilled craftsman, but they would not need access to welding rigs, forges, or other expensive industrial equipment. Lutie 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 Lutie'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. Lutie 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, Lutie 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. Ludi never succeeded in sparking a renaissance in civilian arms ownership in the UK, but his ideas were adopted by organized criminal groups all around the world. In Brazil, Ludi 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. Lootie 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 Halle, Germany, with a Lutie gun. His weapons, thankfully, did not work well. As a general rule, Lutie 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 Lutie 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 a quality 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 3D Natives. This prompted the U.S. government to demand that Defense Distributed remove the file from their site. What followed is a legal battle between Cody Wilson and the U.S. 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 DEFCAD 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 DEFCAD. 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. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 1920s, he may have carried a gun, but the people he was policing did not. In the 1930s, the British leaders allowed TAT organisations, similar to militias, to form and drill, but they weren't allowed to carry guns. Gun licences under the dictatorship were issued primarily to party members, but most were revoked after a 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 Tatmadaw has consistently used violence against marginalised ethnic groups in the country, and they have consistently taken up arms in response. But, unlike civil wars in the Middle East,

wealthy nations in the West have not been flooding Myanmar with weapons for decades, and the various EAOs, 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 Karen 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 is the black market and the prices especially of ammunition are prohibitive this is where 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. They were like, yeah, we just can't afford it. We just can't afford it. Strictly, we don't have enough ammunition to do any kind of operation. So all the operations we did were always focused on if we could capture some ammunition. If we could capture weapons, but especially ammunition.

So that's the second source of weapon, let's say, source Second source of weapons is the captures, 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. It was a bit the Albania of

Southeast Asia at this time. There is also the other ethnic groups that receive sometimes a lot of arms and ammunition from sponsors.

Some of them, like the West End armies, are sponsored by China, so their supply of ammunition is pretty good. Of weapons, I think they even have artillery and stuff. Then there is other ethnic groups that also produce locally quite good, their own arms, light arms usually. So yeah, these are the different sources of where comes the... in the time I was there. In the early weeks of the protests, once it proclaimed clear that non-violent demonstrators were going to be met with state violence,

protesters 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, protesters had taken a step further. A group calling itself the Calais 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 protesters defend their space, albeit at great cost. In that first clash, four protesters and four soldiers were killed. The protesters in Calais 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 protesters. But in early April, the Tatmadaw returned to the protest camp in Calais, with rocket-propelled 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, protesters 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 protesters just enough cover to escape police charges.

But they also gave the junta an excuse to further escalate the violence. Attitudes are hardening among the protesters 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 Pijidaugun township overnight. People living there, but kept away by security forces, return to find sixty 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. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, Uzis, 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 in return 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 landmines, 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 to produce a lot of landmines. That's what we produced at the base, yes. Okay. With, like, you know, very, very rough systems, with a little bit of different type of plastic explosive, a couple of bamboo for contactors, and, like, 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, probably a majority of AK platforms in this time, yes. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, it's more reliable and simple to operate. It's very adapted to

the to the type of guerrilla. It was it was quite correct. I mean, I swear from the moment that I switched to AKs, at least, because at first I tried to use this Superfluency M16, and it was a nightmare of malfunctions. So I switched back to AKS, which is what I best know and used all my years. no one used all my girls. And doesn't have this, I never really had any malfunction

with the case. Maybe one time with a faulty lot of ammunition, but that's it. Not really the rifle's fault. 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. They literally abide by absolutely no laws of war or health. or else. I mean, like one of the first things that I saw when we went going patrolling in the Karen villages

around our zone of operation is that there was absolutely no girl between the age of 11 to the age

of 70. And I was like, I asked, you know, my commander about it. And he says, yeah, like, obviously, if they stay here, they will be raped by the Tatmadaw and the first patrol. Like, the first time they will come, you know. So this gives you a little bit of the tone of what they are about. They constantly ransom civilians

when they don't murder them like shell villages for no reason or because there has been an operation of the KNLA and they take revenge on the civilians. This is of the KNLA, and they take revenge on who they can take revenge on,

who's the civilian. You know, 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 value. Let's say, you know, many times the units that they stuck on hilltop in the middle of a rebel zone are not the most combative, let's say. But sometimes you 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 Karenin National Liberation Army, and other EAOs relied on civilian support to survive. The KNLA operates in Karen territory, and the civilians are Karen. territory and civilians are Karen I mean pretty much

when we when we arrive in a in a village there's medics you know that 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 absolutely not, let's say, some kind of ethnicist organization or ethno-nationalist, like, you know, some hate for other ethnic groups, including the Bamar 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 and they are extremely open to work with Democrats, 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 these Bamar rebels, let's say, also trained by the Karenz and also by people I know very well since it was my commander then, Nerda Bomia. So I've seen the Karenz. I've always been extremely accommodating to

the Bamar opposition, meaning the Bamar are the main ethnic group, I'd say this for people that might not know the difference. And so the Karenz always had

representation and they took like refugees, let's say, from inside Burma in the territories they controlled. In Manor Pro, there was a student association, which is exactly my country right now. But all these are Bama organization of opposition. And so now they keep this tradition by helping these new rebels of the PDF to get military training. And yes.

By the summer of 2020, young people had flooded into the jungles, and many of them, even the ones of Burman 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, Zhao Lin, who left his home in May of 2021. It 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 technology computer colleges,

the technology computer uh 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 min online government so there was it was very tiring. We had to go up and down a lot of hills. It was two days of walking to get there, going up and down the hills and back down, up and down, until we got to the training camp. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends

and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.