It Could Happen Here - The Japanese Red Army Do A Whoopsy feat. Andrew

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Andrew tells Garrison about what happened to the Japanese Red Army.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Good Happening. I'm Andrew Sage of the YouTube channel AndrewZone. And one of the last times I was on here, I was discussing political cults generally,

drawn from the work of Dennis Turish and Tim Walforth in their book On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right. We learned about the rollercoaster emotional ride that individuals experience during cult recruitment, where their feelings and ideas are manipulated and they are drawn into an exclusive and isolating group. We explored the common techniques used by political cults, including creating rigid belief systems, immunity to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism, and the use of loaded language. We also highlighted the contradictory positions often held by members of political cults, such as advocating for liberty while supporting totalitarianism, believing in equality alongside

leaders accumulating privileges, promoting sexual morality while exploiting members, and demanding free speech rights while suppressing dissent within the group. And we also examined Robert Lifton's eight conditions that indicate the presence of ideological totalism within cults, which include milieu control, mystical manipulation, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, the secret science, luring the language, doctrine over person, and the dispense of existence. If you want the details on all that, you can check out the first episode in the Political Cults series, or you can pick up the book on Political Cults yourself, as I said, On the Edge, Political Cults Left and Right by Dennis Turish and Tim Walforth.

I also had an episode where I spoke about the Trotskyist and right-wing cult of Lyndon LaRouche, which was primarily based in USA. But today, joined by Garrison, I want to take a look at the deadly cult that arose from the Japanese student movement, the United Red Army. Very exciting stuff.

In my research for this episode, I looked at Dead Bodies and Living Guns by Yoshikuni Igarashi, the Japanese Women's Liberation Movement, the United Red Army by Setsu Shigematsu, and Hijackers, Bombers, and Bancroppers by Patricia G. Steinhoff. So, let's get into it. And to do so, we're going to need some historical context. Not necessarily as in-depth as digging into the evolution of post-war Japan, which is such a deep and complex period in history that it really deserves and is given special attention by historians that I have not the knowledge to muster. We do, however, need to take a look more

specifically at what the conditions were like in the country in the late 60s and early 70s. After the war, Japan was transitioned into something of a liberal democracy, with all that that entails. The US rolled in and occupied Japan and forced all these changes and reforms. And so by the late 60s and 70s, you have post-war children who were now adults and had gone through and witnessed these systems firsthand. They saw the limits of democracy and capitalism. Japanese society was firmly under the thumb of the US as well, which created its own grievances amongst the population. The Japanese government had become a key supporter of US imperialism in the Cold War era. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were

facilitated through the US's military bases in Japan and the Japanese left did not like that at all. Naturally, in response, the state would crush them as states are apt to do. When the Japanese were taken to the streets in solidarity, the state increased their surveillance, repression and incarceration. Some on the Japanese left would come to see Japan as a police state with US backing. But that wasn't the left's only issue with Japanese society. Japan's economic success post-war, thanks to the US, had brought the establishment of a mass consumer society that gave the population, even in rural areas and among poor factory workers, greater access to information and consumer goods. And that ended up posing an issue for the left

in Japan because many of the organizations were struggling to adjust to the shifting tides. To quote Yoshikuni Igarashi directly, the new left's critique of post-war society had long been too rigid to address the rapidly changing social conditions of Japan. Each person was complicit with the political and economic mechanisms that produced social injustice insofar as he or she took advantage of them. It was simply impossible to undo the effects of the system when many in society cherished their newly found agency as consumers. So the left in Japan was fixated on this very romanticized image of the rugged workers and not really engaging with what the workers themselves thought about and wanted to see

transformed in their circumstances. Like yeah, it's understandable that workers, despite being exploited, would also cling to some of the comforts they've gained even under those poor circumstances and these left organizations weren't adequately engaging with that they were engaging the fact that yeah this poor factory workers poor and suffering but they also appreciate the fact that they have like access to all this these new new technologies and all this new entertainment media and all that stuff. They were still stuck in this very late 19th and early 20th century sort of understanding. Yeah, so they were kind of ideologically stuck and disconnected.

They had this one vision of the struggle and it wasn't really being updated with the changing times. So it's no surprise really what would result from this late 60s status quo. First, I think we should start by understanding the various associations of Sekigun, which is the Red Army. There were three major related groups under the label of Sekigun that shared a very particular vision. To quote Patricia G. Steinhoff, 1. You have the original group led by Shio Mitakaya, which began as the Sekiguna of a major student organization in 1968 and dropped the Ha designation, original sekigun which in 1971 joined with another group

to become rengo sekigun united red army and remember that because of the focus of today and they became under the leadership of the sekigun head mori sunyo and then three lastly you had a group that developed in lebanon beginning in 1971 under the leadership of Okidaira Takeshi and Sekigun member Shigenobu Fusako and formally broke with Renko Sekigun. And this group formally broke with Renko Sekigun, the United Red Army, in 1972. They were called the Japanese Red Army. So you have the Red Army faction, Sekigun Ha which dropped the Ha designation

and became Sekigun and you had a remnant from the original Sekigun which joined with another group to become Rengo Sekigun, the United Red Army and then you had a group that broke away from the United Red Army and became the Japanese Red Army, very classic

Marxist-Leninist party-splitting practices. So in the early days, Sekiguna, the parent revolutionary org of the later two groups, beckoned Japan's brightest students, the children of many elites. And when I say elites, I mean these youths would have been regular-degular academics, doctors, bureaucrats, and corporate careerists if not for them joining this organization. Having passed their entrance exams, immersed in the anti-mainstream culture of the universities at the time, they seized that freedom to create organizations against mainstream Japanese society. The Red Army Sekiguna had

split from its parent group, a national student organization called the Communist League, informally BUND, over a quote, unresolvable policy dispute. And the BUND itself had come out of the first major factional split in 1958 in the post-war Japanese National Student Organization, known as Zengakuren, which was formed by folks who had been expelled from or left the Japanese Communist Party. by folks who had been expelled from or left the Japanese Communist Party. So just to bring you up to speed there, you have the Japanese Communist Party, and then some people who were expelled from that party created their own organization, known as Zengakuren, and then that Zengakuren organization split. Do you know what else could benefit from a split right now? It's this episode with this to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help

real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head

and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. it's the one with the green guy on it and we're back one of the splits that came out of that was the communist league which became known as the bund and the bund had a split within it that birthed the Red Army. And the Red Army had its own splits. Yes, as all these groups love to do. Yes, lots of splits. And according to Sineoff, Bund actually had a really remarkable history of internal factional splits. In fact, even for its own cohort it was quite exceptional it generated

over 50 separate groups in addition to sekiguna which had become sekigun dropping the ha as i said after became independent from bund in 1969 again nice and then after the split sekigun immediately copied the already outdated Communist Party setup that Bund had initially inherited from its own parent organization. I mean everything from the Central Committee, to the Politburo, to the Secretariat, to the formal representation from regional and local units, though a lot of these structures mainly existed on paper according to former members. according to former members. So, what was Sekigun doing?

Well, the members were already experienced in orchestrating mass activities typical of the era's student movement. They excelled in producing and disseminating political publications, organizing meetings, and coordinating street demonstrations. But eventually, they realized this stuff just isn't working. They needed something bolder. the group aimed for innovative action rather than organizational innovation adopted the red army moniker and aligned themselves as soldiers within a loosely structured central committee and despite being a legal entity in post-war Japan, Sekigun quickly found itself at odds with the state due to its provocative intentions and actions.

The group openly declared its intention to engage in legal activities, no kind of upset whatsoever, triggering intense police surveillance and a confrontational relationship from the outset their journey transitioned swiftly from public legal events to clandestine and unlawful activities such as weapon making hijackings bombings weapon theft and bank robberies and with that unfamiliar territory came many mistakes and much reeling in so they went from having meetings and making zines to doing other stuff is what I take it for, translated to a modern politically active audience. that sort of thing to like bank robberies yeah bombings yeah and on top of that they really had the they had the inflated sense of self to grandiously label their attempted uprisings as the tokyo war the osaka war sure sure kyoto war i mean their actions in a sense it is some urban guerrilla warfare that they might have been engaging in with some of these actions very clandestine very direct and and violent and stuff and there was a steep response a lot of a lot of like more of these like extremely violent

militant insurrectory type can kind of get that inflated sense of what they're doing and even though I don't think Ted K is an insurrectionist but still it's a it kind of um it's it's like did he think that blowing someone's fingers off every five years was gonna trigger the collapse of

industrial civilization and you're like maybe maybe not but that doesn't seem like a really great plan um yeah if you're just taking someone's fingers off yet you think you're like the only one who's standing in the way between industrial society and uh and the future of a desolate earth but i don't know it is it is a complicated thing sometimes. Yeah, yeah. It's always hard to gauge the successfulness of your own actions. Indeed, indeed.

But I mean, in this case, I think we can gauge the success because, well, first of all, the actions all eventually led to police raids, arrests, and indictments. Sure. And also, we could measure success based on the achievement of particular goals and all of their attempted uprisings were made with the aim of global revolution based on trotsky's ideas okay yeah so they were trying to build an army that would not only lead in revolution in japan but also aid in revolutionary activities worldwide so some of the members even sought support and training from groups like the popular front for the liberation of palestine huh yeah and eventually uh they tried to organize guerrilla training with intent to attack the prime minister's residence but a police raid foiled their plans and

arrested 53 of their members which led to the core of the organization Sekigun to go underground and then while they were underground their style of organization had to evolve initially they resembled the sort of cumbersome bureaucracy of a communist party but eventually they reinvented themselves to become similar rather

to the Japanese managerial styles of the time period in short because I'm really trying to get to the juicy bits of what was happening, the communication hurdles that they faced due to that underground police surveillance led to a sophisticated telephone network managed by leaders' wives and girlfriends.

Organizational decision-making went from egalitarian debates to hierarchical orders, and after any activities, they engaged in evaluations, like quarterly reports in a corporate office, to refine their approach for next time. So given all that history and context, what happens next really shouldn't be all too surprising. the few remaining not arrested or dead members of Sekigun's underground army joined forces with another group in a similar situation called Kakomei Saha or Revolutionary Left to form the United Red Army aka Rengo Sekigun which established themselves in a remote cabin in the Japanese Alps in the dead of winter in Guma Prefecture and tried to work out the ideological and organizational differences that came from uniting the two organizations. The new group was led by the Red Army faction leader

Tsunio Mori and second in command by Hiroko Nagata, the leader of the revolutionary left. And quick, quick digression, it's actually a big deal. Nagata was a woman. And that was sort of a win in a sense. I mean, a win, not in a broader sense, probably not a win considering what happens next. But a win in the sense that at the time there was a big issue with the Japanese New Left and its patriarchal nature. Where women typically only had any kind of say or authority in relation to their male partners. So it was kind of nice to see

Nagata get elevated to a position where she didn't have to be connected to a male figure in the movement in order to have any kind of say or any kind of political sway of course what she did with that say uh what she did with that political sway was not uh all too hot but yeah i digress under the direction of mori and girl boss nagata about 25 united red army members underwent revolutionary training to prepare for armed struggle against the state at this point though you have to wonder what exactly they were hoping

to achieve they weren't even connected to any legitimate worker struggles in the country they weren't organizing their communities they just created these revolutionary cells where they would hold firm to their rigid political aims and refuse to engage in reality. To quote Yoshikuni Igarashi directly, from the earliest days of the new left, confrontations with the police were endowed with performative value. By taking the beatings of police batons on their heads and being sprayed with tear gas, rally participants presented themselves both as victims of the state's repressive power and as agents of resistance against it. However, by the early 1970s, it became obvious that their performances were not enough to break through this status quo.

It was also apparent that popular support for the movements had reached its limit and was starting to wane. As new left organizations began to see the futility of trying to build widespread support, their acts of violence lost their performative aspect. Rather than presenting themselves as both victims and agents of resistance, as they had done before, many organizations, including the Red Army and the revolutionary left, began to escalate their violence. The activists engaged in this increasingly brutal struggle became a sort of self-appointed revolutionary elite, a group that demanded of its members a stepped-up bodily commitment in the form of an ever-intensifying regimen of physical training and corporeal deprivation and a willingness to die for the cause. The United Red Army's revolutionary struggles at the mountain bases demonstrated the process through which violence came to dominate the lives of its members. At another point in the journal article, he says

that while the paradigmatic shift caused by Japan's high-growth economy demanded a new theory and practice of political engagement, United Red Army members merely wished to undo the effects of economic development, literally seeking to establish a critical purchase outside of the existing system. Aspiring to transform themselves into a revolutionary elite, they physically distanced themselves in mountain bases, while valorizing violence as a means to achieve alternative political conditions. Their two-stage strategy of exiting and then striking back at the system, however, proved completely inadequate. At one point early on, two members in this mountain cabin in the Japanese Alps

decided that they wanted to peace out of the United Red Army, probably go back to living a normal life. So in retaliation, Nagata organized their assassination with the help of United Red Army members. Yeah, like, how dare you leave?

Yeah, I mean, this whole Red Army saga is a really great example of how an extremely militant leftist force really, really does mirror so many cult dynamics. And like, the stakes are high, I get it. Like, you have a lot of like intense shared experiences with people it can produce a whole bunch of emotional volatile reactions i'm sure what they all went through i can oh i can barely even begin to understand with with my like with

my background in more like a like anarchist instructionary um action but yeah you know it's the whole the whole hitman squad for whenever members like age out in their like late 20s is is certainly an interesting move indeed and if that wasn't bad enough it gets worse And if that wasn't bad enough, it gets worse. So, clearly, the fact that people want to leave means that the character of their members are not good enough. So the United Red Army wanted to improve the character of its members. So under Mori and Nagata's directives, they underwent a purge through a process of collective and individual self-criticism it's always self-criticism with these people so before long self-criticism became this sort of high-stakes test of each member's revolutionary commitment calling to question everything from

their engagement in romantic relationships to their appreciation of material possessions any such attachments were seen as evidence that these members were not committed enough to the cause. In fact, they were the worst thing you could possibly be, a counter-revolutionary. And then things got worse. So just to clarify, and this is according to Patricia G. Steinhoff, who studied the organizational structure of these groups,

when the United Red Army came together, they engaged in standard consensus decision-making procedures, which is how they came into agreement that the members needed to be toughened into revolutionaries capable of fighting the police. But despite engagement and consensus from time to time, the organization was very strictly vertical. The central committee had a separate room from everyone else in the cabin, and the intimate conditions made it easier to stand out if you weren't cooperating with directives. To quote one section of the article, when the top leaders introduced violence in order to speed up the transformation of the weakest members, no one was able to confront leadership to stop it. Those who disagreed

tended to use traditional Japanese methods of indirection, expressing opposition by silence and withdrawal. And given the purpose of the group's activity and the expectation of full participation that is built into the ground rules of consensus decision-making, silence and withdrawal were interpreted as unrevolutionary weakness, and participating in violence against others was soon defined as evidence of one's own sincere commitment to become a better revolutionary.

Those who failed to participate energetically in the violence against others became the next victims of the purge. Yeah, that all makes perfect sense to me, actually. Yeah. And when they deemed somebody to be a counter-revolutionary,

the others would be ordered to punish them through beatings, torture, and exposure to the elements without food or shelter. As you can imagine, people died. So when the first victims died, the leaders said that they had died of defeatism because they couldn't overcome their own weakness. Uh-huh. Six weeks later, in February 1972, 12 of the 25 members were dead.

purge the united red army members were able to break into work groups and carry out tasks like building a new cabin planning the next attack and burying the bodies of the dead comrades yeah so much of that you're like jumping between these purge sessions and like building a cabin with your buds you know honestly i don't doubt it like i this this all does make a sort of weird sense to me like i've seen, I've seen, I've seen radical groups kind of fall apart in not ways that lead to like mass purging as in like murder. Um, but I've seen groups fall apart in similar ways to this, but you'll, you'll have like a smaller insular click who tries to remain really active and like keep going and doing stuff while also spending all their extra time towards continually purifying

their member base because once you once you start that like purification and uh process like you can't stop you you have to keep the spotlight on someone else so then it's not on you like you have to be proactive in constantly purifying the member group um or else someone's going to set their target on you. Like, it has, I can totally see how this would have gone down. And I think smaller versions of this still remain to be a massive problem among radical organization structures, even structures that claim to be horizontal. They still have like an ins insular a click of like the people who are like the cool group who's going to replicate a lot of these same things and how even though it's not technically vertical in practice they still are able to do a lot of these same um like

top down and overriding decision making uh processes. Yeah, it's... And this is really what sort of motivated me to start to talk about political cults a bit more. I mean, that and reading the book, looking at this case and reading the book, because I really... I want people to recognize that it's not like this strange, out-of- of this world thing that could never

take place in your personal life like it's very easy for any political organization to become a cult like there's no ideology that's immune to that and so through these case studies and through the breakdown to the various components and elements of cult uh cult and cult behavior cult tactics i want people to be able to recognize the signs because what i really hate the most and this is why i focus mostly on left-wing cults not as much right-wing cults is to see people who had so much potential to contribute meaningfully to like revolutionary change and then they just get all their energies redirected into

self-criticism sessions and purification rituals and revolutionary lopping let's take a dad break here and we'll be right back to continue talking about the body count of the red army hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building I found out that Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

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okay we are back so 12 bodies dead and buried but on the upside they have a new cabin so true come on you know it's it's it's a small price to pay so eventually the leaders uh mori and nagata left which gave each of the united red army members a chance to escape before they too succumb to the fate of death so i find really interesting is that all of them wanted to leave but they didn't find it in themselves to leave until after the leadership left they were all too scared of each other yeah and so they want they took that opportunity to escape before they too died. And of course the police were hot on all of their tails. Mori and Nagata got arrested and eventually

there were only five members left. And they were armed to the teeth. They ended up hiding in a mountain lodge and managed to capture a hostage which was the wife of the owner of the mountain lodge. And Setsu shigematsu describes

very succinctly what came next quote between 19th and 28th february these five remaining members of the united red army held off over 1500 riot police at the lodge which was called asama sansu and this armed standoff and hostage-taking incident became an unprecedented television spectacle. Television news coverage of the incident began on 19th February, with hundreds of media staff on site to work the story. On 28th February, continuous live televised news coverage lasted for 10 hours and 40 minutes.

This constituted an unprecedented broadcasting event in Japan. This constituted an unprecedented broadcasting event in Japan's media history that has never been surpassed in terms of its duration and ratings. At the climax of the police operation on the 20th of February, with 89.7% viewer ratings, according to the National Broadcasting Corporation, almost the entire country was watching the same thing on TV. The United Red Army's form of small-scale insurgency against the state was thus rendered hyper-visible, and this drew unprecedented attention to this new left sect. So after the remaining members were captured between the interrogations, media interviews, and autobiographies, the whole of Japan and the world got to hear what really went on.

Immediately after the hostage situation, despite their rather fringe style, the U.R.A. actually had some public sympathy until the truth of how bad things were came to light. They even made a movie about it. The news of the purge practically devastated not only the broader Sekigun organization, but also transformed the course of the radical left in Japan and beyond. Remember, they did have a branch in Lebanon, which thankfully did not make the same purging mistakes. Still though, many inapan lost hope in revolution as a result of the publicity of those actions political activism had already been on a decline in the late 60s and early 70s but the shock of the purge was like a nail in the coffin a lot of people literally distanced

themselves from their own leftist movements because of how staggering that news was the purge literally purged leftism as a major force in japanese society and it's only recently with writers like kohai saito that marxism has started to gain some attention again and this is like around what this is like the are we in the 60s, 70s? Yeah, yeah. All this took place in the, the purge took place between December 1971 and February 1972. Really, really the last dying breath of the militant Trotskyites, I guess. Indeed, indeed. indeed indeed if we look at the techniques used by political cults uh rigid belief systems check you know immunity to falsification check authoritarianism check arbitrary leadership check defecation of leaders most likely although i didn't uh see any evidence of that specifically i wouldn't be surprised

intense activism check use of loaded language i'm sure yeah i i bet you see basically all of those tactics employed in this organization and you just see the result of it and i think it's stories like these that need to be known so that such mistakes can be avoided in the future. So yeah, that's the story of the United Red Army. This has been It Could Happen Here. It certainly could happen. No, I think it is a really good example. example now it doesn't map on one-to-one

because i don't think many many people are are uh doing exactly what the red army did in terms of their their style of militant struggle but there's there's there's smaller scale versions and there's still the kind of insular group dynamics whether that's like just an affinity group whether that's like a larger collective i think there's a lot of a lot of lessons to learn from the red army and it'd be wrong just to dismiss this whole example as being a little bit too far-fetched or just like too different because it is it is a really tragic story and I feel like people could learn more from this than what they initially think

indeed I agree so don't go out there and start to United Red Army folks try and avoid that if you want to build a cabin you can do it without burying 12 of your friends anyway thank you If you want to build a cabin, you can do it without burying 12 of your friends.

Anyway, thank you. Thank you for that, Andrew. No problem. Where can the fine listeners find you on the internet? YouTube.com slash Andrewism and nowhere else. Oh, I guess also patreon.com slash stdrew. But other than that, I can't be found on the internet. I don't exist.

Good for you. Good for you. Just like the Red Army, who doesn't exist anymore. 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. Thanks for listening.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative

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