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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a cast, a pod. Today, Robert Evans, me behind the ******** this podcast. We talk about bad people and I I don't do a very good job of introducing the show. That is the entirety of my job to do and also to introduce. I apologize for that. Today we have a little bit of a special episode for y'all. We're we're talking about the Golden age of terrorism and I'll explain what that is in a minute. And my guests are a couple of of of friends and colleagues of mine from the the real world and and the mean streets of Portland, OR. Welcome to the show. 2/2 of the people I get repeatedly tear gassed and grenaded and threatened with firearms, sometimes with being a line. Hello. Hi, how are y'all doing tonight? I'm doing OK. I'm not getting threatened with grenades or tear gas. Yeah, that's always a fun thing to do, especially since probably some of our friends will get threatened with grenades into your gas tonight. More likely than not. Yeah, that's most most nights. So you wanna you want to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself since you're not you're not coming into this as as as as big time stand up comedians like most of our guests. Or his local youths like Garrison. Ohh Garrison. Yeah, so my name is bee and. And half of 45th absurdist we're a journalist collective that started as a shitposting account, and then there was a curfew, and our friend Robert wanted some backup. So we went and started reporting on stuff. And now, three months later, we're still reporting on stuff. And we've been shot with a lot more tear grass and grenades and pepper balls since then. Yeah, an amount that seems almost impossible. It's sort of silly when you try to take stock of it. I have now been tear gas with you more times than I can count. Yes, yes, that is very accurate, but certainly I can confirm north of 100 times. So, yeah, that's that's being a lane. And today we're going to talk about the Golden Age of terrorism. Do you? Do you what? Do you what? Do you know anything about the Golden Age terrorism? Is that a term you've heard prior to tonight? I assume it involves bellbottoms and just massive quantities of cocaine and AK-40 sevens. Yes, to everything but the AK47. So this is a fascinating. Because when you're talking about the the Golden Age of terrorism is like the 60s up through the late 70s and. Some people would say into the 80s, one of the things that's fascinating about it is that modern body armor didn't really exist. Like you. You had some, you know, some flak vests and stuff. You had some stuff that could maybe stop some pistol rounds, but like, it was very uncommon and it didn't work well. So ******* everybody in terrorism uses machine pistols, so, like, which are like like little handguns that fire a bunch around really fast. So you can just jam in like the door of a building and just spray it down with gunfire. So it's like a lot of ******* scorpion machine pistols and stuff. 9 mills. Earlier with us and tokarevs. Yeah. Yeah. All of the all of the 80s action movies have prepared and every good James Bond film and every good. That's why I'm excited to talk about today. Cause, like terrorism. Real bummer these days, right? Like, it's mostly you're gonna kill a lot of innocent people. You're gonna specifically try to just kill innocent people most of the time. And usually if you're a terrorist now, like one way or the other, you want to like, kill everyone in the world, pretty much like your ISIS. And you want to kill all the people who aren't Muslims. You're some Nazi and you want to kill everybody. It's not like you're kind of white, like whatever, whatever kind of terrorist you are, it's a bleak *** kind of terrorist. Whereas in the 60s and 70s there were some fun terrorists like, I mean they they killed a lot of people, like, but did any of them want to drown Silicon Valley to make France the new hub of technology? Not no. But seems fun movie is that that would have been, that would have been fun. There is. There is a pretty good attack on OPEC, though. Uh, well, yeah. So it was like you, you got in this period of time #1, the world wasn't quite so bleak, so terrorism was, like, a lot more fun and it's a lot cooler. Everybody's like walking around in machine pistols. They got like, ******* bell bottoms, great, great outfits. You've got all these cool, like, different, you know, liberation movements that aren't all religious extremists and stuff. It's a fun time to talk about terrorism, and the main thing people do isn't just. Suicide bomb others too, and fire randomly into businesses full of people? Yeah, we're gonna talk a lot about plane hijackings. Skyjacking. Yeah. Yeah. I just keep thinking of now Saturday Night Live, like episodes from my childhood. Yeah, there's a lot of lot of those 80s episodes make jokes and there's like the movie airplane. There's a joke of it. We'll talk about where all that in a second. OK, so we're gonna talk about the Golden age of terrorism, and that's mostly gonna be part one, where mostly gonna talk about Sky Jackings and the Japanese Red Army, which is a fun group. And then Part 2 is going to be all Carlos the Jackal, who used to be the most wanted terrorist in the world and is a neat guy. I mean, a monster. Maybe he was definitely the one in the day of the Jackal. Well, he that's actually where his name came from. But the when they made the movie about it, it was pretty inspired. But anyway, yeah, Carlos the Jackal, who, as you can tell by his incredible nickname, one of the coolest terrorists to learn about it. Bodies, I mean. Probably open bones and sucks out the marrow somewhere in sub-saharan, was he? He was one of the guys who was, like there for all of black September. So he may have had to eat a couple of bones out in the deserts of Jordan. OK, well, this is lots of things. They'll be new to me. Yeah. So, but before we get into anything else, I want to start by talking about the phenomenon that most defined the Golden age of terrorism, which is skyjacking. And know that does not refer to ************ on an aircraft, because ************ on an aircraft isn't a crime, and in some cases, it's actually mandatory. I don't know. You're aware of that. I've seen a very specific movie from the 70s that implies that, right? Ohh, Yep. Yeah, I don't remember opening of Misty Beethoven. That's a lot of that movie. There's a lot of mandatory sex on airplanes. Well, I'm very supportive of skyjacking that kind of skyjacking and the other kind of skyjacking, actually, both kinds of skyjacking. So the kind of skyjacking that we're talking about today involves the hijacking of planes, which was the thing that used to happen back in the day before Al Qaeda kind of ruined it forever. Nobody gets to enjoy an air. It used to be fun. Hijacking airplanes used to be a joyful affair, and they they ruined it. That's really the crime. No. OK, probably shouldn't. So the first recorded skyjacking occurred on February 21st, 1931 in Arequipa, Peru. When a group of had passenger plans 1931, they would really like one of the crazy things when you study aviations. Like how ******* quick it was. Like when I was just flying these things all over the damn place. Yeah, I don't think it was your plane hijacking. And now we're Skyjack, Skyjack, skyjacking very hijacking. So the first one. Yeah, our keep our equipment, whatever. Peru. A group of rebel soldiers accosted 2 American pilots and tried to force them at gunpoint to drop profit propaganda leaflets over Lima. So the pilot said no. And so the rebels occupied their plane and kind of sat around for two weeks. Basically. They no one was good at it yet. It wasn't flying. No. They were just kind of sitting there on the tarmac being like fly drop these pamphlets fly us around. And the pilots were like, no. And then they were like, OK, yes, yeah. They weren't *****. Like they were going to murder them, but they really like like less of a skyjacking and more of a sit in it. Yeah. It was an attempted skyjacking. No one was good at it yet, but yeah, that was the first attempt at a skyjacking anywhere in the world that that is on record as far as I can, as far as I can find. And yeah, they didn't get what they wanted in the end. The pilots were just kind of like, no and like, no one else knows how to fly planes because it's 1931, so you really have no other options right now. I've just also in that two weeks, they weren't like, how else can we distribute pamphlets somewhere in Peru? You know how it is when you kind of, like, get your heart set on something? I do, yeah. And you're already there with a gun pointed at the pilot. Sure. And you're on the tarmac and there's, like, military surrounding you at the airport or something. It's 1930. Oh, it's 1930. They're all busy. Never mind. Yeah. I don't know how much attention it drew, but, yeah, that's the first one now. First US? No, said someone would have to know about it. And it's the 30s. Yeah. The first US skyjacker was a failed Carney named Ernest Pletch. And in 1939 he he shot his flight instructor in the back of the head during a during a training flight while in midair and very nearly crashed because he shot his instructor in the head who was flying. It was flying at the time. Had a career trajectory? Yes. Failed Carney to Skyjacker to first American skyjacker I'm no good at operating this Ferris wheel. Perhaps I'll try stealing an airplane. I mean. You know we all. That's life. I'm just saying there's one lever on the Ferris wheel. It's a little bit more complicated with the airplane. So the yeah. So Ernest Pletch, yeah. Shoots. His flight instructor manages to, like, I think, throw his corpse out of the plane and, like, take control. And then he kind of goes on the run with this stolen plane. But almost immediately, before he can really get into being on the run, he stops for hamburgers. I'm sorry, but he stops for hamburgers. Like he lands the plane, lands the plane at a drive-in? No, he lands the plane outside of a town, and then he walks into town to get hamburgers. Well, if you're going to go on the run, you need to be fortified. He should have packed a lunch. Yeah, so he gets caught by police immediately because he's covered in blood. And the people at the hamburger restaurant are like this guy. Seems like he might have done something bad. I'm sorry, where was this? See the I, I forget exactly where Pletch was when he. But some like some fire in the middle of ******* America, right? So yeah, you know, just the sheriff was like, hey, there's a plane and that guy's covered in blood. Caper solved. That's good police work, yeah. So the pledge case essentially invented a lot of early legal codes for air piracy, which is what it's called when you commit crimes like this in the air. And it's the coolest crime you can get charged with, right? Like, if I had to go commit federal crimes that were going to put me in prison, I would want it to be air piracy. Because then people like, what are you in here for? Well, I was an air pirate. And and you wear a little leather hat and monocle. Yeah. I have a scar on one cheek. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta get a scar on one cheek. That's something you request from law enforcement during the standoff. Like, now I'll, I'll let these people live, but you need to wound me so in such a way that I have exactly 1 rakish scar on my right cheek. That way, 20 years from now, when Nicholas Cage comes to get me released on prison in a special deal with the federal government, because I need to hijack a plane in order to get in Alcatraz. Whatever, wait, that's just my pitch for a movie about Nicola with Nicolas Cage. Isn't that the rocks like the rock, but in the air, the lime? Oh yeah, it's all. It's a Skype. Call it the clouds, the sky person. All the ground. Prisons are full, so they have sky prisons, so it's like escape from you anyway. So, uh, yeah, so. The pledge case invents a lot of the early legal code for Sky Crime air piracy. But by the time the federal government started to oversee aviation in 1958, hijacking a plane that still was not technically a crime, nobody really thought they'd need to put that in the lockup. So as long as you're not on the ground or the water, it's fine. Yeah, it was fine. There were no laws in the sky in 1958. A beautiful time. It must have been perfect. So airports had no security measures in place. There was just nobody did anything about airplanes. Everyone was like, well, why would we, why would we even think for a second about airport security? It was no reason. It was like an aggressive disregard for wanting to take, like, any precautions. I love saying it's like when we drive past the National Guard car lot. Yeah, they just assume no one can drive tanks and they just leave all the tanks sitting there and they're just push button ignitions. Which, yeah, we shouldn't talk too much about that, but it's a thing you should know. And Tulio Ortiz. Is the, uh, the first guy to hijack a plane successfully, and he gets on a flight bound for Key West, and he locks himself in the bathroom. Then he slips a note underneath the door and he warns everyone he's got a bomb, and he he says he'll detonate it if the flight isn't rerouted to Havana. Now, Ortiz timed his attempt well because the Bay of Pigs had happened just a couple of weeks earlier. Tensions were high between the United States and Cuba, and Castro basically was like, oh ****. Like, this is a great opportunity to say **** you to the United States and not actually risk. Anything. So he offers Ortiz political sanctuary. Not super romantic, though, because he's locked in the bathroom. He is threatening the plane. He's locked in the bathroom, in the plane with the bomb, right? Yeah. You you wonder, like, a number of things about this. OK and my only other question is that he just want to lift to Cuba, or was he taking the plane there for some, like, reason or like, no, he just wanted a lift to Cuba. He just wanted to go to Cuba. There's no way he could kind of weren't at that point. Really? Yeah. I mean, the Bay of Pigs had just happened. Yeah. But you go to another country and, like, just reroute a little bit. I don't know if it was that easy in that time here, you could lock yourself in the bathroom and slip the bomb note under the door. That's whatever the reasoning Ortiz decides. This is the way he's going to Cuba, and he doesn't like it there. He actually tries to leave and then gets put in prison in Cuba. It takes, like, 15 years to get back to the United States. So he. He regrets his decision very soon. Quickly. Sometimes you make your bed and then you lie in it. Yeah. Yeah. Then you gotta live in Cuba, which I don't know right now, maybe not the worst bed in the world. Right. So, yeah. So Ortiz, it doesn't work out well for him. He's not super happy with the decision that he made to hijack a plane and get to Cuba, but a lot of people suddenly realize once he's done it, like, it's that easy, like, well, all you got to do is slip up, note under door. I want to go to Cuba. So three more US planes were hijacked and taken to Cuba over the course of 1960. One. And afterwards it becomes it becomes a meme. In the next like 8 years, 177 Sky Jackings were committed worldwide and more than 70% of them involved in attempt to divert a plane to Cuba. So just putting Cuba is the place to Cuba is the ******* place to go. If you're if you're jacking a plate, yeah, if you're an airline or government, maybe just let people fly to Cuba, right? Yeah, that might have been an option. You know, there's a number of reasons. Is free, essentially. Like you can get a real cheap ticket and then just demand it go to Cuba because you've got a gun. Well, but also it was the 70s, it was real cheap to fly anywhere, everything. It was the Golden Age and you could smoke on airplanes and you could smoke everybody smoking. The like 100% of the people involved in all of these hijackings are smoking the entire time. That is something we have to keep in mind. So yeah, it Cuba becomes like the ****** ******* place to go if you're hijacking a plane and the reason to hijack a plane, so. How Cuba's got like a pretty decent airport setup, right? Like, because otherwise I could see this being a problem. I haven't ever heard that it was a problem. I think they I don't know much about the Cuba Cuban airport. I'm just imagining it being an air traffic controller in Cuba at like the nightmare of like, oh God, we got another one. Not a lot of other traffic into Cuba, I don't think in this period of time. So I just have one more question, though. What did Cuba do with the planes afterwards? They just give them back getting to that? Good. OK, getting to that. So the reasons why. People would hijack Skyjack planes and take them to Cuba. Were varied. Everybody had, like, a different purpose behind it. But Fidel Castro kind of helped make his country a more desirable destination by letting everyone in the world know that Cuba just kind of would take in anybody who stole a plane. Like, if you steal a plane, you can land in Cuba and live here was like essentially what he told everybody. And there were a lot of ways in which he benefited from the situation. For one thing, it was good propaganda. All these like, people leaving the decadent. Test like travel to to this socialist paradise of Cuba. But more than anything, it meant hard currency for Castro. See, Airlines had to pay to get their planes returned and eventually Cuba settled on a standard fee of $7500 per plane. So every time a plane got skyjacked, they got a pile of cash to return it. Yeah, so that's that's they're a little industry develops and it makes a lot of money off of this. You build your own commercial airline one plane at a time, but I guess that works. And just to crunch the numbers here. You said so there was about 120 or so. Well, no, but like 130 years, something like that, play trips to Cuba out of just Cuba. Yeah. OK. So that's not bad money. That adds up, yeah. I'd do it for a living. So, uh, yeah, now a number of people. Umm, there were a lot of reasons people skyjacked plans for Cuba, including like some folks were just kind of mentally ill and decided to do it. Other folks chose Castro's capital because they were true believers in communism. They convinced themselves that they would be greeted as revolutionary heroes if they successfully got a ransom from, you know, some government and took it to Cuba, one skyjacker recalled thinking at the start of his endeavor. In a few hours, it would be that dawn in a new world. I was about to enter Paradise. Cuba was. Creating a true democracy, a place where everyone was equal, where violence against blacks and justice and racism were things of the past. I had come to Cuba to feel freedom at least once, and there are a number of non white people whose Skyjack planes to Cuba because they're just kind of like, **** this ******** and the United States in the 70s, I'm going to Cuba. The black liberation struggle, there's a lot of people who get broken out of jail and get to Cuba somewhere. Another, so better place than jail. That's what people say. Yeah. So the reality of the situation, uh, I don't know it different for everybody, but it was less rosy than a lot of sky jackers had anticipated. For one thing, just as a general rule, governments that put a lot of value on law and order don't like people who hijack planes, even if those people believe the same things they do. So, like, thanks for the plane, we get $75,000 out of it. But 7500? I'm sorry. Oh, right, I forgot it was the 70s. Seventy 500 was was a planes. It's still like at some point $200,000 or something, it's a lot. But now that you brought us this plane, you're also the kind of person who steals planes by pointing guns and bombs at them. So we don't really trust you, is what we're saying. You're the kind of person who's not one of our highly trained doctors and our very good medical system. So, according to Wired quote, Castro had little but disdain for the hijackers themselves, whom he considered undesirable malcontents. After lying landing at Jose Marti, which I guess is the airport, hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that served as the headquarters of G2 Cuba's secret police. There they were interrogated for weeks on end, accused of working for the CIA despite all evidence to the contrary. The lucky ones were then sent to live at Casa de Transito S, the hijackers house, a decrypted dormitory in southern Havana, where each American was allocated 16 square feet of living. Space the two-story building eventually held as many as 60 hijackers who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of 40 pesos each. Skyjacker who rubbed their G2 interrogators the wrong way, meanwhile, were dispatched to squalid sugar harvesting camps where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. At these tropical gulags, inmates were punished with machete blows. Political agitators were publicly executed and captured. Escapees were dragged across razor sharp stocks of sugar cane until their flesh was stripped away. One American hijacker was beaten so badly by prison guards that he lost an eye. Another hanged himself. And his cell. So it's like, wow, kind of a mixed bag. Yeah. You stole a whole plane just for that cause. 16 feet of living space, that's that's two feet by 8 feet. That's like a cot back to talking about career trajectories of hijackers. You really got to have an end goal in mind. Better jacking itself is not, cannot be the end goal. Better to be the broker who's arranging the transfer of the planes back to their airlines. Yeah, that's a good gig. A growth industry maybe. It it's also funny that a communist country would take the people who put in the hard labor and you know. Expropriate that value, yeah. Yeah, you know. All governments are kind of the same when you get to it. Yeah. On the other hand, depending on where you live before, at least you're warm now. Yeah, you're warm now. Better beaches, you assume it works out for some of them, right? Like there's gotta be some people that like get in good with the G2 folks and I don't know, I assume it worked out for some people, but it's it's a rough, it's a rough situation for most of them. Now the stories that kind of came out about how not ideal it was to become a skyjacker and go to Cuba didn't stop people from jacking one of the jackers was a 34 year old. Even in exile, who simply couldn't live any longer without the taste of his mother's free holes, he'd apparently, like, left as a kid like that. Yeah. And like one of his mom soup, which is. I hope he got a lot more soup. I don't know. It's his mom. He missed his mom. He had to steal a plane. So we had to steal a plane. You really? That was that was a decision you could make because there were essentially no risks in it. Like, it was not dangerous to hijack a plane. Also, I don't know what their relationship was like, but after that, he and his mom got along pretty good. You would have to hope so, right? Yeah. Another was a sociology student who wanted to study communism. And of course there were non Cuba related. Jackings 28 year Old trust fund kid hijacked a Delta Airlines flight while dressed as a cowboy. He received $50,000 and parachuted out. He horribly injured himself upon landing and was immediately caught. Yeah, way to go trust fund kid. Yeah, could just kind of Cuba buddy. So Skyjacking's represented a problem for the airline industry, but not really a big one. Most guy Jackings would cost the airline between 20 and 30. $1000 and since passengers were basically never harmed, like, there wasn't really a lot of desire among, like, the people buying flights for it to be stopped. Like it wasn't wasn't a horrible issue for just the cost of doing business. You got a detour to Cuba? Yeah. Yeah, that was the thing. Like a skyjacking meant like some excitement for everybody on the plane. You might get a free night in Havana or something, you know? I assume it wasn't great for everybody, but it wasn't like it wasn't a big problem. And again, people basically never got hurt. Proposals. Were made to add X-rays to airports and begin scanning passengers, but this was shot down as an unreasonable violation. Basically like airlines were like, people will never submit to this. Unfortunately, we never did and we never, nobody ever changed their mind about that. So kind of 1 by 1, all of the airlines like looked at this problem of hijackings every year, many, many of them. And we're like, I guess we'll just kind of write it out. Yeah, I mean, what's the worst outcome you can imagine from people hijacking planes? It's fine. No one gonna, like, fly them into buildings. Uh, so the federal government had a little bit more on the line and was kind of less willing to let this keep happening. Being the federal government, all these jackings were an international embarrassment. And they also helped fund because a lot of times people would like the jackers would ransom, you know, the passengers and stuff. And this funded terrorist organizations around the world, including particularly a lot of like Palestinian liberation organizations and stuff. So that was a real issue for the the State Department and a real issue for the US government and in 1968. Senate hearing was held on the matter. Irving Rip, who represented the FAA, told the assembled congressman it's an impossible problem short of searching every passenger. If you've got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana and he has got a gun, that's all he needs and there's no way to figure out that he has that gun. No, I'm certainly wouldn't search every single passenger before they boarded a plane. That would be madness. Well, yeah, that's actually the point. I'm about to quote from Wired, Senator George Smathers of Florida countered rips. Bloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X-ray machines to screen all passengers. Preposterous. He noted that these relatively new technologies were already in place at several maximum security prisons and sensitive military facilities where they were performing admirably. I see no reason why similar devices couldn't be installed at airport check-in gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons just prior to implanting, Smathers said. But Rip dismissed the senator suggestion as certain to have a bad psychological effect on passengers. It would scare the pants off people. Plus people would complain about invasion of privacy. No one made any further inquiries about electronics, including no one. The end of it. No one is gonna fly if you someone asks you if you have guns before you get on a plane. Single solitary action to make sure people aren't carrying whatever gun they want onto a plane. Like people will not fly. It will ruin the industry. And I think history has borne that I that I I won't get on a plane without my scorpion machine pistol. You know, occasionally I think about how people believe in this idea of the forward progress March of history. And this is a solid indication that we have headed dead back. No, because they were right in the 70s by God. So two about absolutely everything, especially cigarettes. It cocaine, which is not addictive right here. It's not addictive, mixes well with cigarettes in a way that, again, absolutely not addictive. And that's what everyone says. You're high on coke and cigarettes and smoking, you know, it feels really good. God, everything. Hijacking a plane? Yeah, really. Gripping tightly. The handle of a scorpion machine pistol as you scream wildly. The word Havana over and over again to the flight attendants. I assume you have a ponytail. Yeah. Huge. Yeah, enormously. A leather vest. Like you wouldn't believe such a leather vest. I want a gold medallion that I could use as a coaster. Oh yeah? Yeah, medallions where you keep the extra bullets, too. It's like a Pez thing. So, two weeks after the Senate inquiry, a forklift operator named Orin Richards hijacks at Delta Airlines flight upgrade from a forklift. Upgrade from a forklift. He springs his trap over West Virginia, pulling a gun on the 1st man he meets in the aisle. After leaving a seat, and the the first man he met in the aisle after leaving a seat wounded up, wound up being a sitting senator from Mississippi who, like, been at that. Yeah, so the whole situation got resolved peacefully in Miami. But it spooked the federal government, who suddenly realized that elected officials could very easily be skyjacked over, like, political issues and, like, she probably had this ************ off at the pass, right? I mean, this might not end well for us, I suppose. Yeah. So the State Department. Like, again, no one knew what to do because you couldn't search people. Look, it's the air. There's no laws. The State Department actually seriously proposed offering all Americans free one way trips to Cuba in order to stop it. Like there again, if we just say any American can go to Cuba for free once the forward March of history is alive because there was a point where we all could have just taken a free trip to Cuba. Castro actually said no to that. He was like, I don't want the US just offloading all their, you know, ******* ****** people I've never had. Any reason to critique anything filled El Castro has done? But right now, that's all changed. This is this is the first thing was problematic that I'm aware of. I mean, OK, stripping people's flesh off by dragging them over sugar cane, that was not great either, but that was a little bit of that. I mean, if you're gonna, you're gonna strip people's flesh, and if you've got a strip off people's flesh, you might as well use sugar cane. Exactly. I've always said that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's basically the same thing that like those fancy salons do when they make they use the sugar to make the thing for depilating, sure, but yeah, but it's your musculature. Off of your skeleton. OK, well, we don't need to be like, you know, nobody's perfect is is kind of the point here. And that's really what we're talking about today. So, yeah, Castro is like, no, I'm not going to just take all of the Americans who want to go to Q think they might like Cuba. An alternate timeline where Cuba becomes the absolute. Like Cuba becomes Silicon Valley because they went with that plan. Could it, could have it could have been pretty sweet actually, right? Yeah, so he refuses to accept them. So the FAA forms an special anti jacking task force instead. And there I don't understand. They are deeply, deeply confused about what their job is from beginning. For reasons I will never understand, they solicit American citizens for suggestions on how to solve the problem. And they're immediately buried in just awful, awful suggestions, like thousands of letters that are all stupid as **** including installing trapdoors outside cockpits, arming stewardesses with tranquilizer darts, making passengers wear boxing gloves so should they couldn't grip guns. Yes, and playing the Cuban national anthem before takeoff and arresting anyone who knew the lyrics. I mean, I have no problem with that last one that sounds just fun impeachable. As a strategy. I think boxing gloves would be fantastic. That would be very funny. Also, just now imagining the movie airplane, but everyone is wearing boxing gloves the entire time and what a bit that would be. Yeah, quite funny. Well, they would have to rework some scenes, but they wouldn't fly to Cuba. Still, be hysterical in the lineup waiting for it. So not all of the suggestions were immediately rejected by the government. The most popular one among the FAA was the idea that they could just build a scale mock replica of the airport in Cuba in South Florida, so that they could trick Sky jackers into thinking they've reached but and right next to where they staged the moonlight. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, which of course isn't they put in Florida. That's where you put your fake moon. There's such similar anyway. Yeah. So the the FAA was like, seriously like, what if we just build a fake airport? But then they decided it would be too expensive. Wow. So the airlines, meanwhile, just decided to make like policy be to completely comply with Sky Jackers in all ways. They actually banned employees from taking any action whatsoever to Scott to stop a skyjacker. It's like if you work in a retail store, the policy about shoplift. Yes. And this actually winds up having an impact on why 911 happens the way it does because at that time, there had not been, like, a plane. Hijacking where that sort of thing had been done. And the the the wisdom was still, you know, in 2001, ohh, they're gonna ransom us or take us somewhere? They're gonna fly us somewhere. Like they want to get money or something. So that's part of why people didn't really fight back until they started, you know, that last plane kind of realized what was happening. Yeah. And no one was like they're not using. A gun there? Well, you couldn't. You know, they put some security measures by 2001, I'm pretty sure that you could no longer do the fish called Wanda and just flip the gun around. But it did used to be that easy, is it? Is it isn't like you just would carry a gun onto a plane. Some bin Laden ruined it for everybody. He really did. I know that. That's his want. No. OK, no. Only mistake. He no. So the airlines. Yeah. Again, decide. Like everybody just got to do whatever the hijackers say. So all plain cockpits in the United States were for a period of time equipped with charts of the Caribbean Sea, regardless of the flight's destination, because it was just known. Like, you might have to fly to Cuba like any flight in the country, you might wind up going to Cuba. Like just accessorize that. A little bit. You get, like some palm trees and everybody's got like some coconut drinks. Yeah, you could keep a special saddle, like, yeah, rum like Cuba. Well, probably not Cuba libres because those won't go over well once you're in Cuba. Yeah. Anyway, uh, so, yeah, skyjacking. It was a viral meme, right? For eight years or so. And really, the year in which it hit its height was 1969. Yeah. 11 US flights were commandeered in the first six weeks of the year alone. Was really excited by the number. Yeah, they really were they they wanted to make it count. One plane was taken by a released mental patient and his three-year old son, which which called the gun. I I'm sure it's a less. Fun story than it is summer, I think. I think saying that a plane was hijacked by anyone and their three-year old son maybe gives the three-year old son too much credit. I don't know, have you met most 3 year olds in the midst of a tantrum? They could totally hijack a plane. Because also that sounds like a movie. That sounds like a movie with Tom Hanks in the 80s where like you know, he gets out of the mental institution and like his kid wants to like teach him a lesson about it. Would have had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the early 90s. I don't know, you could make a fun. Feel good movie about it. Then he falls in love with the stewardess, right? Yeah. And then they go to Cuba. Yeah, yeah. Then they go to Cuba and help ignite a communist worldwide revolution like Tom Hanks has always wanted to do. So, uh, yeah, one plane in 1969 was diverted by a college student who was armed with bug spray, so you didn't really have to be all that well equipped. I'm sorry, armed with, but I think he did like a flamethrower thing, but I'm not really sure. And another was commandeered by a retired Green Beret whose plan was specifically to beat Castro to death with his fists. That's so this was, this is 1969. Yes. So this was before any of the Rambo movies would have given him that idea. Yeah. I think the best part of this idea he had on his own. I think the best part of that is that you've already described what happened once people landed in Cuba. Hmm. Yeah. So, uh, Speaking of landing in Cuba, you know what Cuba loves? Rum. Cigars, yes. Not America. But broader than that, Cuba, if anyone knows anything about them, it's that they love products and services. Ohio, huge fans of corporations, and several of those things that I've just listed are, in fact, products and services. There might be an ad for rum or for cigars, or for having a lot of doctors, like a really tremendous amount of doctors, and really good hurricane response. It's just very good, terribly good. Sponse. It could be an ad for any of those things. So here we go. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the build to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. 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It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. All right, we're back. So in this period of time, there was exactly 1 reasonable person who worked in the entire U.S. government, and he was a guy named John Daly. He was the FAA's chief psychologist. And he decided that we should probably do something about this problem and the thing that we should do rather than search every passenger or all that stuff was try to analyze like all of the different hijackings in the past and particularly all of the people who had committed them to try and determine if there were certain key behaviors that might like give away the fact that something pretty hijack a plane. Yeah, prescribe it. So his research convinced him that all these people had done things that had marked them out as potential hijackers while they were checking in. So these behaviors weren't uniform, but daily believed that if you trained airline employees to watch for a certain range of suspicious behaviors and then search the people who seemed like might be a plane hijacker, the fact that some of these folks would be innocent wouldn't **** anybody off too much if it meant less skyjacking. So you like repeatedly checking your gun and asking if anyone knew how to get to Cuba instead of saying like is repeatedly. Checking his gun. Better. Better let him get on this plane, you say that guy's repeatedly checking his gun. I'm gonna ask him if he plans to hijack the plane. But not prevent him from bringing the gun on to the plan. Well they tried to communism that would be. So it actually worked really well. Mainly it was just the fact that there was now a possibility of being searched by the law before a flight that scared off most high and that's all it took. That's really all it said. Now the episodes over. That was great thanks. There was actually terrorism. There were reports from airports around the country in this period of time for weeks after these plant like after airports started doing this of like. Report security. Finding guns and knives and bombs stashed in the bushes outside. Shake, guys they're gonna search for, they realized and dumped it outside. We gotta hide it in the bushes. They're never gonna let us take this to Cuba. Yeah. By 1970, the SKYJACKING epidemic was mostly over. So it really worked. This is part of why, like DB Cooper, that guy in 71 who died playing. Part of why it was so noteworthy is that, like, they've really gotten a handle on hijacking for the most part. And then he managed he does it. Right? Right. OK. But this, it turns out like a lot of people. We're just hijacking planes because there was literally no barrier to hijacking planes. I gotta say, if we were playing Minecraft and you were able to hijack planes and there was nothing in the game to prevent you from hijacking planes, I think a lot of people playing Minecraft or hijack a plane, I think a lot of people would, in Minecraft, hijack a plane, which is not a thing that anyone in the real nobody should ever do. Yeah, so yeah, by 1970 they've kind of gotten a handle on the jackings in the sky now. Up to this point, I mostly focused on US Sky Jackings because they were very silly, but they were sky jackings all around the world. And a lot of them were like, like I was saying earlier, like a lot of different. This is kind of like the height of kind of international solidarity with a lot of, like, Palestinian liberation movement. So there were a lot of different groups, kind of allied with different Palestinian groups who would do it to like, help fund them and stuff. And this was a big deal. They happened in the US, but also like all around the world. And it was, you know, a thing that other groups. Do to kind of fund their activities or to make political points. UM. And this kind of brings me to the story of one of the most successful and interesting jackings in all of Sky history, the story of the Japanese Red Army. OK, yeah. And there's a lot to this story. This is this is a fun one. This is one of the funniest stories in all of terrorism. There's a lot of fun to be had, fun stories. And when you're doing a terrorism, it's really just laughs all the way down. But this is a particular all the way down. Yeah, like that, like that falling man on 9, OK? So to tell this story, we have to talk a bit about Japan. In the 1960s, Japan was just 15 years out of World War Two at the start of the decade, and thus only 15 years out of like, literally centuries of rule by emperors and Shogun. And like, they didn't have a lot of experience with democracy. It had not been an open society, right? And you know, then there's a bunch of nukes going off and Douglas MacArthur is in charge for like 5 years that nothing could go wrong. We could go at all. Douglas MacArthur, by the way, a few years later. Would suggest so strenuously that he was fired for it, putting it into the Korean War by nuking all of China, basically. Like, so not they didn't go with that option, huh? No, no, no, not a not the most even tempered guy. But he opens Japan up and it's his job to, like, make sure that they democratize and stop being authoritarian. So, like, overnight, Japan's a democracy, and people who once lived or died on the words of a single man suddenly had the right to go and protest the government in the streets. Right. MacArthur also freed all political prisoners in Japanese jails, despite the fact that he himself was like a right wing radical. Or MacArthur's hard right. He frees all of Japan's imprisoned left wing radicals, including communists. And this is part of why the Japanese Communist Party during this period of time is kind of known for being more pro democracy than in your party in the country, and very different from like other communist parties in that part of the world at the time. And there's some very famous authors from the post War Japanese. OAI know is one of them. Who? Yeah, it's like hardline anti capitalist communism and also really excited about the post war Constitution. Yeah, it's really there's a lot of cool stuff in it. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons MacArthur is such an interesting dude to like. Look at his because he has a big impact on the Constitution. He's a monster also. But like, for there's a brief period of time where he's like, doing what you'd broadly say are the right things. And so the Communist Party in Japan actually goes from about 1000. Members pre war because it was illegal to 150,000 members by 1950. Just five years. Another mage to major change to Japan was the education system. The new government extended the possibility of higher education to everyone, not just a privileged few. The fact that there were now more students on campus and more possibilities for political involvement led to an explosion in Japanese activist culture. And MacArthur supported this too, under the belief that even left wing activism on campus would help flush out Japanese instructors who still held lingering nationalist beliefs. So that's kind of why he lets the left. Prizes. He's like, so it's this will flush out the nationalist right he hates communists, but he's but he hates the guys he was just fighting. Yeah right. And and anti fascism. Anti totalitarian first. Kinda. He was pretty. He was. It was more he specifically hated the old Japanese government and he knew that they really hated the left. And letting these kids March in the street would kind of. They're not going to be able to shut up about it. Exactly. Yeah, that's more the reason. Like MacArthur's not doing this because he's a nice dude. No. And and there's there's certainly things to bear that out because you have like Machinima and his shield society and there's there's some really wild right wing uprisings that happen in post war Japan. It turns people here just irate about the idea that like a switch, yeah, the emperor can't order everyone to die anymore. And that is unacceptable, the worst thing that's ever happened. So yeah, student self governing associations pop up at campuses across Japan and they functioned kind of like unions giving kids a voice. On their campus in 1948, a bunch of these associations formed up into a National League. They called themselves Zynga Curran, which is short for all Japan League of Student Self Government. Now, most of these people were communists, but there's, you know, you know, communists. There's a whole lot of different kinds of communists. It's like Skittles, right? There's there's Lenin and there's Trotsky, Stalin. At this point, most of the Stalin, hot, young Stalin. Those are all the kids that I know. And at this point, you know. 48 even the people who are like Stalinists aren't really Stalinists by what we call them. Like, because if you're a Stalinist, then you don't really know most of what Stalin did. I supposed to being a Stalinist now and denying everything. Stalin? Yeah. Well, and he hadn't done some of that stuff. He had not done all of that stuff. He's done a lot of it. Did he 48 still have a goldfish pond? Yeah, I think so. Probably, yeah. So, yeah, these guys started. These students start protesting like a big one is US bases on Japanese. Well, and like the no base movement you'd still see when I was over there, you see a bunch of graffiti for that. Like, that's a big thing is, well, because the US military presence in Japan is enormous. It's massive. Yes, absolutely. On Okinawa. And have a lot of fond memories of driving past, past like missile silos that are just like in the countryside. I have family who is stationed in Okinawa, and my impression is that there's not much to Okinawa other than military Okinawa. ******* rules. Like there's a bunch of cool **** on it. Sorry, that's what I mean, but. The best option is like. The bases are big. Like, it's it's it's a it's big. And it has a major impact on the local culture for sure. But there's like, there's a lot of cool **** going on in there now. So, yeah, so they start protesting US bases on Japanese soil, and this is where Douglas MacArthur stops being on board. He wasn't. He wasn't dead. Yeah, it wasn't. But yeah. Why not? So it won't, won't the fascists be upset that, oh, they won't be upset about that, will they? No. That's when MacArthur stops being OK with the students speaking. Their minds. So in 1949 he backs a bill that like the the Japanese government puts out that specifically the Ministry of Education pushes introduces this bill that would curtail the right to protest. So this really ****** off student in Japan who are again able to protest and organize for the first time and more than 200,000 of them take to the streets and shut down universities across the country. It was so shocking that the government was forced to backpedal and scrap the bill, but more attempts. Followed in 1952, the government tried to pass an anti subversives bill that was basically Japanese style McCarthyism. 20,000 students attempted to storm the Royal Palace, hurling stones at lines of Armored riot police who eventually beat them back with such violence that two students died in the fighting. Yeah, heck of a riot. So soon mass St battles become the norm. The Japanese government's refusal to do anything as a result of these protests caused the formation of a new movement in Japanese politics, the new left, who believed that electoral politics were hopeless. And only revolution could be bring progress. Which doesn't sound like anything that's ever happened. Ever come to that conclusion set based on police violence? Yeah, certainly not. Only happened this one time in this one country, right? Yeah. I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the Asia Pacific Journal, New Left St demonstrations steadily escalated into violent clashes resembling medieval battles. The students wore color-coded crash helmets emblazoned with the names of their organizations, carried long fighting polls, and threw stones or firebombs at the police. They confronted squads of riot police wearing medieval style helmets who battled the students with tall aluminum body Shields and police batons supported by water cannon trucks that sprayed fire hoses of water laced with tear gas at the students. At the peak of the protest cycle in 196869, Japanese authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations of thousands of students. This turned the tide in part in part by producing splits within the new left groups. So. Is part of the reason why Japan is kind of so famously disconnected from like politics and and people don't like do **** like this anymore to a large extent they arrested everybody because they arrested and beat and right yeah the color-coded crash on that sounded real cool. That does sound cool. And the long sticks, long sticks and the hurling. OK so by the early 1970s the Zynga Koran which again these like student self governing organizations it started turning away from the Japanese Communist Party and mass largely so they could have a chance of influencing. Electoral politics. So like, yeah, they they decide they don't wanna be. They're not new left, right. They wanna try and actually like make things happen at the ballot box and the radical left is increasingly being like, that's ********. It's all about fighting cops in the streets and the the, the, the the kind of more moderate people are like, but that has horrible consequences and I don't want to do it. Sounds like a summary of the entire 70s after 1968. Yep. So it's a thing that keeps happening. So yeah, the the larger number of moderate. Liberals broke away from the radical left and stopped protesting, and the radical left did what the radical left nearly always does and devoured itself over about doctor. Yes, I said yes. Is this specific to Japan or is this just? This is, this could be literally any movement that's ever happened and also anywhere in the world that's ever happened in the 1970s. After 1968 occurred. It's the thing that keeps happening. And that's why the Earth will soon be an uninhabitable anyway. Communist radicals in Japan decided that nonviolent resistance was no longer practical. Japanese riot police were too good at their jobs, and less committed members of the left were no longer trustworthy allies. The communist chunks of the left began to split between those who wanted to continue the old methods of protest and propaganda and those who wanted to actually wage global war against capitalism. And I mean a literal war in that sense. Now, these types wound up in a number of different groups, the most influential of which came to eventually be known as the Japanese Red Army. Now, my understanding from the latter 20th century is anytime that something's. Called the Red Army. Everything is good from there on. Yeah. Red Army Faction, Red Army faction, wonderful. The Red Army faction cards those are all red cards are great problem. Yeah. So Japanese Red Army, everything is coming up roses. The Soviet Red Army, famously no war crimes committed. That's why the Polish people were so happy with anyway. So I'm going to quote now from a fascinating write up in unseen Japan that really goes into these guys and they do actually a great multi part. An essay on the whole history of the Japanese Red Army? That's very cool. The leader in ideological master of the newly minted Red Army faction was one shiomi Takaya, an avowed Trotskyite for whom a violent international revolution was the goal and Xiaomi's eyes. Any attempted coexistence with the imperialist W, as was then being professed by Soviet Premier Khrushchev following his shocking repudiation of Stalinism, where a corruption of true Marxism World Revolution recall required unflinching, required unflinching action, imperialism needed to be purged from the world and Japan. Is the place to start. If they joined hands with other revolutionary forces in Cuba, Palestine, Korea, and Vietnam, soon the entire world might glow red. The struggle first took the form of an internecine battles with their within their parent organization, the Communist League. Hostages were taken and the headquarters stormed. 1 Red Army Soldier died after he slipped and fell from a high window while escaping being held hostage at the league headquarters at Nihon University. Death. Death had become a part of the Red Army mythos from its very first days, so they're taking hostages. From their own in their own headquarters. How it's going to end? Well, how can you go and fight the capitalist if you cannot even properly purge your own ranks? Exactly. I mean, yeah, if there's one thing to clean the house, you got to clean your closet, and this is a story with a real purgy ending, you are gonna enjoy this good. So good. The Red Army differed from many of its fellow lefties by stating openly their desire to commit violent actions against the state. Their propaganda heavily cited Leon Trotsky to make the case that violent tactics would help spark a worldwide socialist revolution, which would inspire a global revolutionary. Army to rise up in armed revolt with bombs and guns. This this is the part that I always find delightful is. You have all of these guys throughout history who keep being like, so we're gonna do this thing and then when we do this thing, a global army is going to materialize and all of a sudden the thing we want is going to happen. I mean it worked that one time in as opposed for like, hey guys, what if we put it to you that you wear a mask for like 4 weeks and it basically being the seed of a civil war? There's one thing that seems to be true. It's doing one thing doesn't lead to unified action across the planet. If there's one people thing people hate, it's doing things they really do. They don't like it. And this was before Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. This is before. Yeah. So you had a chance but still wasn't great. So yeah, they started publicizing this. The Red Army faction starts publicizing their desire to spark a global armed socialist revolution before they even hold their first meeting. This created a lot of buzz around the new organization. Publicized that, by the way, is that, like, pamphlets and ****? OK, I'm just wondering if that's like, the back page of the newspaper and like the help wanted ads revolution wanted? Yeah, I'm gonna tell a lot of people there's a lot of lot of buzz around them, as this quote from an article in the Journal of Asian Studies by Patricia Steinhoff makes clear. The organization's first public meeting, held at a public hall in Tokyo in early September 1969, featured a massive display of state authority. In addition to the ring of uniformed police surrounding the building, plainclothes police photographed the 300 people who entered, and more police stood around the back of the hall watching on stage. Kind of make you maybe a little bit less excited about openly calling for violent insurrection against they love this **** they loved this ****. They all made speeches wearing, like, ski masks and stuff, so they couldn't be OK, fine, you're right. And they didn't get arrested that day because it's not it wasn't illegal to say that stuff, but everyone knew they were saying we're going to break the law very soon. Hmm. And so, yeah, and they're all messed up and it's pretty good, pretty good propaganda coup. Because people hadn't done anything like that at that point. Yeah, so the various cells of the Red Army ran a handful of mass gatherings, protesting US bases and that sort of thing. But the fiery young men and women in the Red Army faction proved to have very little patience for such things. They moved almost immediately to hijacking vehicles, bombing police stations, and robbing banks. Once they hit a few months of this under their belt, the leadership cadres of different Red Army chapters decided to attempt to spark uprisings in three different cities. In keeping with their international revolution obsession, they timed this with the days of rage planned by the weatherman and a Black Panther. Rally in Chicago, which is, I mean, it's not bad, not necessarily bad. I think that news cycle, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna dominate. You're gonna dominate in the news cycle. Yeah, maybe. Said 1968. It was a very busy year. It was a year to try that sort of thing. You gotta give him that. So I'm gonna quote from Patricia Steinhoff again. Seki gun, which is like the Red Army factions Japanese name, organized its fall uprisings with only slightly more secrecy than it would have used for a public demonstration. Prior publicity about the events prompted a series of riot police raids on university. Campuses where local secun chapters were stockpiling poles and iron pipes for street fighting and glass bottles for making Molotov cocktails. The Osaka and Kyoto raids involved over 2000 riot police and resulted in nearly 100 arrests and 64 indictments. These raids contributed directly to a huge increase in student weaponry confiscated by police in the second-half of 1969. In the end, the uprisings turned out to be relatively minor skirmishes in which Secun members ran around the streets throwing fire bombs at police stations. 1 area of Secun innovation weaponry was handled. Secretly from the beginning, so Keegan threatened publicly to use more powerful weapons, but the specific details were restricted to those directly involved. A small sticky gun research and development group composed of physics, chemistry, and medical students quickly invented a hand grenade made by packing dynamite, pachinko balls and a fuse into round metal containers in which peace brand cigarettes are sold. Soon after, a more powerful hand grenade was devised using a length of iron pipe as the casing. Both weapons were designed to be thrown with a lit fuse. Small groups of Seiki gun members were taught the new technology and manufactured. Bombs as a cottage industry. So that's. Yeah they they they they get really going. So and they. I like that there's a specific brand of cigarettes where they're like, this is this is the grenade brand called them peace bombs. Yeah. Yeah they did. And if, I don't know if you know, this won't mean much if you don't know a lot about Japan. But if you know Japan. The fact that they're grenades had pachinko balls in them is the most Japanese thing they could have possibly done. Like that's it's it's like what it like you know what old people in America do when they go to gamble in Vegas. Like pachinko's that. But like Countrywide, it's just like a. It's like a. It's like a, like a A I don't know how to describe it. If they've ever seen people play pachinko. Yeah, it's kind of like bingo. It's kind of like bingo. And they use it to make grenades, which is very fun. That's cute. Yeah. So whatever else you can say about the Japanese Red Army, they didn't lack chutzpah. Shihomi, the leader and his top officers next launched a plan to raid the Prime Minister's home and kidnap him in the dead of night in order to stop him from Reading, meeting with Richard Nixon, and finalizing the return of Okinawa to Japan. Uh, this action was disguised as a mass training event and the mountains where members would learn to use explosive steering assaults now. Sorry, they they disguised their plan to kidnap the Prime Minister as we, an organization that has repeatedly said that we are going to violently overthrow the government, are going to get all our people together up in the mountains to practice making bombs. That's our cover story. Have you noted an error in their thinking? A tactical shortcoming? I have not, but I'm excited to see. There it goes. And everyone was like, you should go do that. That seems like a really good plan it that way. You'll be out of the way during that. And and this was in 196099, I think. Yeah, I can't imagine that. Less than you know, less than 30 years out from World War Two, the Japanese government is going to have any problem with this whatsoever. Well, you're going to be shocked then, because they send hundreds of riot police to bust their their explosives training drill in the mountain. Why? And enough, enough of the group gets arrested at this point that the Red Army goes underground. Their founder himself got arrested, and he lost control of the movement shortly thereafter. And I'm going to continue quoting from that write up in unseen Japan here. Ironically, the discovered materials revealed that the Red Army faction had functioned on higher on a hierarchical structure that was anything but revolutionary. Those from the most elite universities, such as Tokyo or Meiji, were selected for the highest level of authority. Secondary authority went to those from major public universities, with the next level being local establishments, those without a college education, or those who were in vocational school or high school with the grunts of the organization. So this is like such typical like. Yeah, business firm company man. ********. Like, I don't know, you went to a state school so you get but for violent communist insurrection. And you can tell that like the people who went to those good schools are the ones capable of making the really important good decisions like to disguise kidnapping the Prime Minister as a an illegal bomb building party. Look, when I went to my elite university we did an entire class in how the Prime Minister doesn't care if you say you're going to make bombs for a massive insurrection. Now you did go to Brown. So, I mean, I'm just going to put out there, considering that you went to a fancier college than I went to. I get to be in charge of the Communist insurrection and you have to be a Lieutenant. I get to know because I dropped out of college, but you definitely recount to me way more ridiculous conversations with people you went to college with as though they were normal. I I'm sure that's true, and I'm equally sure that I have been so broken by higher education that I don't know which conversations you're talking about. Good country and system we all. So as time went on, the Red Army drew in smaller and smaller numbers of very committed communists. Those who were left after the disastrous raid attempt were desperate to carry off something big and successful to wash away the tarnish of defeat. So they launched another series of bank robberies. And these weren't the haphazard affairs from earlier in their history, but actually well planned actions whose perpetrators would like switch multiple train lines as they fled and disappear into these networks of safe houses. They they they they they kind of like stuck the landing. After a real bad, real bad. I don't know. I don't know enough about gymnastics. The Red Army kept careful watch in the police. You know, whenever the law caught on to one of their properties and they would like became famous for like right as the police were about to raid them, they would like close out their lease and leave and they were just be the spotless apartment behind and they give like they got they got mood. It's true. Yeah. That's like that if you if you've seen the departed, like that's the the little booties on your shoes at the end of just like just nailing it. Yeah. Yeah, like we we're so ready, we're back that we cleaned, yeah. Umm. So yeah, the switching tactics actually enraged most of the imprisoned founders of the group which saw theft that harmed normal working people as counter revolutionary. But the remaining said it was bank robbery where their banks insured. But I don't know if their banks were like, I don't know anything about Japanese banking. This is they don't have the FDIC. This is the issue that people had that like some of the imprisoned founders had. Maybe the imprisoned founders should have advocated for the FDIC in Japan and then they could have been fine. I don't know. So the remaining free members of the Red Army saw it more as a question of survival. They use the money to buy samurai swords and pipe bombs and plane tickets for nine men on a March 30th, 1970 flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka. I realized tukan. But you did just say matter of survival and then move straight to samurai swords and pipe bombs. Yeah. Which having to the necessities, having having taught something about survival over the course of my life, and I understand that, yeah. You're going out in the woods first thing you need samurai swords and pipe. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's. How else are you going to start a fire? You cook a rabbit, right? Yeah. And are you gonna hunt that rap without a samurai sword? I thought you were gonna hunt it with the pipe bomb. You can hunt anything with whatever. That's the beauty of hunting. So yeah, they buy they buy tickets for this flight to Fukuoka. And as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, the members of the Red Army stood up and grabbed the weird tube like pieces of luggage they'd all stowed under their seats. And they pull out samurai swords and thought they were hard students. They assumed it was just. You really start searching things at one, at least one time, one of these days. It's not. We should. Under no circumstances should we search things, because that way lies totalitarianism. People will get angry. Unlike these nice young men with all their tubes. Oht me help you. We are supplied, Sir. So they pull out samurai swords and bombs and their leader screams to the other passengers, raise your hands. We're going to North Korea, which is not what you wanna hear on a flight. So in, in 19, this is still 1969, yeah, yeah, 7070, yeah. I think is, is we're going to North Korea as bad a thing to hear in 1970 as it is and say 2020, it's not a great thing to hear. OK. Yeah, it's not a great thing to hear. Not as bad for sure, right. I think the, the mass starvation and stuff hadn't really because like Kim number one is still around at that point. This is actually kind of like what a lot of North Koreans would call like a Golden Age sort of. So like they had many tractors. Are any of these, are any of these? People from Japan, part of the Korean diaspora that was in Japan at that time, I'm aware of. No, yeah, but I I, you know, maybe, but I think these are all like specifically kind of like Japanese middle class and upper middle class kids. So the problem and problem immediately arose as soon as they announced that the destination was North Korea, which is that the flight didn't have the fuel necessary to reach North Korea. No, I mean details. Yeah, the pilot pointed this out and he convinced the sky jackers to let him land as scheduled and refueled. Uh, they took this bait, and of course the police had a **** load of people on the tarmac there to meet them. So there's a bunch of tense conversations and afterlife negotiations. They released 23 people from the plane, women, children and the elderly. And then the flight takes off again and the pilot starts getting like, navigational instructions from a source that's like loudly claiming to be from Pyongyang. And so he lands the plane again in what is supposed to look like the North Korean tarmac with like a bunch of soldiers in North Korean uniform. It's a fake airport that the Japanese very quickly threw together, which, so after the US is like, no, we can't, despite being like an hour, yeah. She says every yeah, we could have just had a fake Havana airport in Miami instead of the TSA. We could anyone ever think, honestly, we could have had? The normal Miami airport look like the Havana airport. No one would have known Miami lives under Cuba law now. Like, whether or not Cuba wants it and the US is washing its hands of the matter. Let's see what happens. Yeah. So? So Japan builds an airport in an hour. Yeah. They built a fake airport very quickly. And yeah, it it it it it. It's pretty good. They're fake airport, but they forget to cover up the tail markings of a Northwest Airlines flight. Yeah. So the hijackers. Northwest Airlines not flying to Pyongyang at that time, you know, they didn't do a lot of, not a lot of, not a lot of Seattle to Pyongyang flights at this point. You know, it's a big, it's a big route now. But if it had just been Panama, everything would have been fine. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the hijackers realize something is wrong because they're pretty smart cookies. And yeah, they refused to let anyone leave the plane before the airport officials showed them a massive portrait of Kim Il Sung. Like, they demand to see, we want to see the biggest ******* portrait of Kimmel song you have. Because there's no way that a big picture of the leader of North Korea could possibly exist outside of North Korea. I think more of what it was is that there's no way that a picture big enough for it to like. I think they all knew that. Like if if we say a big picture of Kim. Young any picture they bring out if this isn't North Korea isn't gonna be big enough to believably be what N Koreans would say. Oh, you want the big picture? It's gonna take like 6 days. You landed on it when you arrived. It's actually a pretty smart thing to do because they're gonna bring out like what normal people would think is a big picture. Maybe. And anyone who knows anything about North Korea, it's going to be like, that's not a big picture of Kim I'll sung. That's the wallet. And we're not flying right now. Yeah, yeah. It's actually a pretty smart move. So yeah, they they they realize what's happening and they refused to let the passengers off. And yeah, so eventually the Japanese government is forced to compromise with them. And it's actually like kind of an impressive compromise. Like, this is the one member of Government maybe ever that I'm, I'm, I'm proud of. Japan's vice Minister of Transportation comes out and he's like, what have you let everybody else off and you just take me prisoner and you fly me to North Korea. Damn. And the hijackers are like, sure. And that's a good thing to do, you say a politician. Yeah. Putting themselves on the line instead of their constituents. Yeah. It happened once. Well, and this exact time is the one time that he said he was impressed. Well, that and the Jonestown congressman. Yeah. Yeah. There's. You also said this is the guy who's in charge of the Vice Minister for transportation. So he's also like, this is my. This is my duty. Yeah. Yeah. We're going down things. Yeah. Thing and better. Yeah. And yeah. And to their credit, the Red Army guys were like, Oh yeah, that works great. And so, yeah, they all fly to North Korea. Didn't did Harrison Ford do that in that movie where he was the president? Yes. This was actually, he did that during the period of time where he was the Vice Minister of Transportation for Japan. That's that's what I remember about that. There's an entire problematic anthropology book about this, about Harrison Ford being the Vice Minister of. Oh, because that was why so many Japanese planes crashed that OK. UM, is it here? He's he's not a good pilot. No, he's terrible. He's one of the worst. So yeah, the Red Army, uh, they they succeed. It's a big caper. It's big international news. They Jack up plane and take it to North Korea. I do like calling it a caper. It is a good game. Makes it sound real whimsical. Now, they're pretty much all miserable in North Korea, so they're not like it there. The North Korean government didn't really want them because, again, North Korea doesn't really trust people who hijack planes are from not North Korea, are from not North Korea, or are from North Korea. And the hijackers, like a lot of them, wound up wanting to return to like they they all kind of, they all wanted initially to return to Japan, like their goal was to get arms and military training from the North Korean military and then fly back and launch an insurgency. And North Korea was like, we have all these surplus resources which we will give to you to take out of the country. Yes. Have you met us where? North Korea. We're North Korea. We love to do this. So North Korea didn't really like the idea of giving these guys military training. And they keep telling them maybe later. Umm. And a bunch of these dudes wound up in Japan decades later. So they gave interviews and stuff. And I found a really funny article about their experiences. Here's one guy, Abe Kimihiro, discussing their desire to be trained as soldiers and how North Korea responded. Quote, military training, military training, always military training. If we didn't get military training, then we had no reason for coming because one of our motives for coming to North Korea was to receive military training. Our daily routine also included running in the mornings and felt very good to run in the fresh early morning air far away from the city. We agreed that we shouldn't just run, but what? But we should run in the spirit of activism. So we shattered the still of the early Korean mornings by shouting our Red Army slogan of achieve the uprising, victory and war. However, they were immediately obliged to stop this demonstration. They received a message from the Workers Party. You can be heard in all the neighboring farms. Wouldn't be best if you stopped shouting your slogan. So like, North Korea is like, OK guys, it's early, we get yelling, it's early, but maybe not. And they're also like the Red Army again, their their whole thing is simultaneous. Worldwide Revolution and North Korea's got their own thing that's very different from that, which is we have a sort of semi deified. To be completely autonomous, yeah, yeah, that like Juche stuff. So considered leaving us the **** alone. Yeah right. We would like. Well, instead they have all these guys, these ******* college students, running in circles yelling. So what they do is they forcibly indoctrinate them for years until they all agree that is the way to go. Fortunately, I have never heard anything bad about the detention facilities in North Korea. They seem not sure it was fine for those guys. Two of them were trying. Still trying to flee? Yeah. And a couple of them, they've stopped their training running every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a couple others made it out. Under the guise of continuing their revolutionary activity. Four members remained in North Korea, where they spent years faking a conversion to Juche philosophy. In 2004, they announced their desire to return to Japan. And yeah, it's it's a it's not a perfect story. Pretty good hijacking. I do like that. You said spent years faking their conversion to Juche philosophy, which puts them in good company. From what I understand with most people in North Korea, yeah, yeah. So you know who doesn't fake their commitment to the ideas of Kim Il Sung? Could it possibly be products and service? It is products and service. Are you sure they don't? Yeah. This we're entirely supported by the North Korean defense industry. We're ********. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Uh. I don't know. Here's the ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you. For the first time ever in a book format, you can preorder stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Ah, we're back. Oh my gosh. How good was that? So that was all very silly, but it was a pretty good hijacking. And it shows that, like, there were some steel in the Japanese Red Army, right? Like, they did some silly **** but like, they're color-coded grasshoppers and long sticks. There were some ******** ************* in that group and they didn't all go to that plane caper. In fact, there were thousands and thousands of kids left over in Japan. And yeah, the Red Army kind of splintered in the absence because, like, the the folks who went to North Korea, a lot of them were like the intellectual leaders of the movement and one fragment who went to good colleges. Yes. One fragment of the remaining movement decided to really commit to the international nature of their political philosophy. They fled to Lebanon, where they met up with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Hmm. So, you know, for people who might not know as much about that history, we're not gonna do it nearly the justice that it deserves. But, you know, Israel became a thing and kind of the term that's used to refer to that is the Nakba or catastrophe by the Palestinian people. And that word refers to the refers to the forced expulsion of. Palestinian people from the land that's now the nation of Israel, about 700 to 800,000 people forced out. And that happened about 20 years ago at this point, right. So it's really fresh. And the revolutionary movement dedicated to taking it back is also really fresh. There's no way to talk about this where I won't make a lot of people angry. So I think I'm just going to say I think what was done to Palestine is a real bummer. And a lot of Palestinians agreed, which is why they formed organizations like the Popular Front, which was a Marxist Leninist organization. In addition to being, you know, liberation and stuff, we'll talk more about them tomorrow because Carlos the Jackal is all real tight up in this ****. Yeah, but the Red Army here about, like, you know, they they they're paying attention to what's happening in Palestine. It's like a big cause, particularly on the international left at this point. And they're like, well, if we're going to do this international revolution thing, here's a great place to do it. But there's a bunch of other armed people. They all want us to go fight for them. Let's go leave Japan and go fight in the Middle East. We're the Japanese red. For me. And that's what we're gonna do and that's exactly what they do. They cannot see how this plan would go wrong at all. They're actually kind of great at it. Really. OK. OK. Actually gonna say this is, I don't know. Yeah. I'm curious to see how this plays out. So they go and like, unlike, you know, North Korea. Either front is like, we're ******* trained, you guys. We need like, no, we're so short on people to go to go pick up guys like Palestine. Yeah. Before, like before the Nakba. Palestine is like the size of New Jersey. It's not giant. No. Tiny. Yeah. They need if they're going to need people, they need, they're not actually a ton of people there. Yeah. And these communists, you know, the Japanese Red Army guys are all like really smart and really dedicated and like they so they they wind up in Lebanon and they get trained by the Popular Front. And then they go out and they start, they start doing ****. In May of 1972, three Japanese Red Army members opened fire with automatic rifles at the Tel Aviv Airport. They fire at random, killing 24 people and wounding 76. So not, yeah, some pretty serious terrorism right out that ******* gate. Yeah. It's also could you imagine how many planes they could have stolen with those they could have stolen, they could have stolen hundreds of planes with this three people, one for everybody. Not not great tactics there, maybe. I don't think that was their goal. I think it was more of a. What we would kind of modern terrorism. Yeah. They're kind of like more. This is terrible. Yeah. Because terror instead of. Yeah. Hey, look, we got a plane, and the Japanese Red Army went on to rack up, like, a pretty terrifying pedigree of violence over the course of like, the next few years, they seized foreign embassies, they hijacked aircraft, they massacred civilians, kidnapped form dignitaries. On several occasions, the Government of Japan was forced to release imprisoned red or Red Army members in order to free ransom captives. And there's still some Red Army. Folks out there today, although they're all pretty old at this point and not super active, but it would be fair to say that the chunk of the Japanese Red Army who went to Lebanon were like pretty terrifying people. Yeah, and we'll get, we'll talk about them more tomorrow, but they're like a big deal in terrorism this time, like the Japanese Red Army. Pretty scary ************* outside of Japan now. The folks who remained behind in Japan, on the other hand, they less committed. No, they were actually more committed, but in a real dumb way. Do we get purgy? Yeah, we're gonna get purgy get real person like the dumbest. Some of these people ascribe you slightly different versions of Communism than other versions of these people. I'm just, I just kind of imagine it being the B list. Yeah, yeah, you get your B list, kids. So they're behind in Japan. And, you know, they don't really have a leadership cadre anymore because those people. All gone on to, like, do better things than and, you know, and hierarchical communist organizations do fine with leadership vacuums. Yeah, like, really just great. So all of the leadership to the Red Army in Japan kinda falls on one dumb kid named Maurice Sunio. He was not a great master of Communist political theory, nor was he an inspiring leader. But he'd done his time and once all of the cool people were arrested or in North Korea, he was just kind of the guy who was was there. So he just kind of aged into it, like by seniority. Yeah, OK. I mean. Also, this doesn't bear any similarity to any other dictators or leaders that you have ever mentioned ever before. This is a thing that only these specific communists did, and no other groups or political preferences in history. You know, there's a lot to be said for standing quietly in the background and just letting everyone else go into the adventurous thing. We call it taking a Kennedy. Yeah, yeah. I was speaking about the most recent Kennedy who just lost his election because that's clearly he was trying to do anyway, not the ones who got shot by Bernie Sanders. So yeah. Wait. Did both of them? Yeah. Oh, I thought it was. I thought it was just JFK, Sir Han. Sir Han. Like, same number of letters as Bernie gonna pull pull off his face from Tom Cruise style from time. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. The the guys. Yeah. We're going to tell the this is probably honestly probably the dumbest story in the history of terrorism. And that's that's hard because there's a lot of fun videos of, like, militant groups accidentally shooting each other and like, yeah, yeah. So. Yeah. After all the smart people left, yeah. Mori Suneo winds up on top. I like to. I know, I know it's different name, but I love that his name is Maury. Yeah, it is kind of funny. So the Red Army at this point is the most wanted militant organization in Japan. So more he kind of has his work cut out for him. And again, they go to the ground carrying out small scale bombings and robberies and tiny isolated cells. This limits to this limited domestic focus causes a lot of grumbling within the ranks, as did Maurice. Undeserved dissent. There were vicious struggles within the organization. And those made some Members leave and others fled to Lebanon. Morey knew the Red Army needed a new caper to keep their name in the news, so he hooked up with another radical group who'd recently pulled off a daring gun store robbery. Which obviously made them valuable. Because it's not real easy to find guns in Japan, right? So these kids have guns. And this also sounds like the start of a Western. Like one of the sad Western kind of yeah. They get pretty good Quentin Tarantino movie out of this story. So yeah, they they they hook up with this group that's just robbed a gun store because the Red Army's got like, money and fame and this group has guns. But both different organizations differed significantly in their political beliefs, so, you know, it's not easy mashing them together. So the two groups formed an organization called the United Red Army. So, like, that's that's what happens when they merge. And the leader of this organization that had stolen the guns, a woman named Nagata Heroku. Becomes like Co leader with this guy Mori. UM. So Nagata, who was just about as competent as Mori, knew that the right first move once she was in power was to order the brutal executions of two former members of her organization who chosen to dessert. And dessert is a word here that means like go back to college. So they were like dragged out of their dormitories and strangled to death brutally by men and women who had once been their best friends. Then they were buried in shallow graves outside of town. Now when Mori hears about this. He gets jealous because he's always been too much of a jealous. He's not the word I expect. OK, no. If your organization joins with my organization and I go ohh good. In order to show how good our organizations are together, I'm going to have some deserters brutally murdered by their best friends. I appreciate you as a comrade, but I don't think I want to be in your organization anymore. And if you don't show that you're nearly as strong and powerful as me, I might not think that either. To take a trip to the United States and then slip a note under a plane door so that we don't have to hang out anymore. I bet you that's not the choice he made so well, no, Mori actually this like he feel he'd never had, like the guts to have disorders executed. But he now that a girl had kind of beat him to doing it. Like he decided he had to do something like a thing in order to like, exert his power. He throws a leadership training camp for the top leaders of the new organized group. Bad camp. Don't go to that camp. That seems like a bad camp. It was a bad camp. So it was going to be like a leadership summit and a bonding experience for everybody but most already. No, like I don't. Not knowing any other contacts. Most importantly, it was going to be a chance for Mori to flex his power on a captive audience by corrupting an essential tool of many leftist revolutionary groups, self criticism. Yeah, I'm gonna quote here from a write up and unseen Japan. The sort of group self criticism Mori had in mind has long been practiced by various Japanese corporations and has become quite common among Japanese amongst Japanese new left groups who called the process Okatsu. Operations, once completed would become the subject of group discussion where criticism of others and of oneself was used to find whatever weakness had led to any form of failure during the planning of the next operation. They would then seek to overcome whatever internal problems had been discovered within leftist groups. Any such failures were often seen as ideological errors, however. The United Red Army was forced. As the United Red Army was forced further underground, and group interaction became limited, criticism increasingly became aimed towards the personal weakness of individual members rather than the failures of group ideology. In the first days of December 19, 7129, people consisting of 19 men and ten women made their way to the Sangu Sangaku base lodged deep in mountainous, rural Gunma Prefecture. For days they lived in, strategized, and engaged in sessions. So. Yeah, they start doing these big self criticism sessions isolated, alone in the mountains and I things don't go well. Members of like the group that had stolen the guns have all these criticisms of the Red Army and the Red Army members have all these criticisms of the other group. And then there's punishments when people are found out, when enough of the group agrees that like someone did something wrong. So it starts with like forcing people to go days without eating or sitting for long periods of time and like this really uncomfortable position. Take a yoga position that hurts after awhile, and Mori and Nagata are kind of like the judges at all of this to determine like, oh good, what people have to do to be punished properly before they get to rest. So not a level not starting out in a healthy place. So until you got to the punishment part, I was going to say sarcastically that I've never ever been part of any leftist group that engaged in this type of behavior, or for that matter, any, you know, business that engaged in that kind of. It's a thing that only happened to this one time. So, but actually this actual thing maybe did only happen this one time because it gets way really out of hand very quickly. Like it's a kind of situation you expect people to be petty and ****** and cruel to each other, but you also are talking about a underground communist insurrectionary group and the group they teamed up with for no other reason than that they stole a **** ton of guns. Yeah, and we already know that somebody got strangled and buried in shallow to two people. A group self critique session that also involves arbitrarily designated punishment. You don't think that that's gonna end well? Yeah, it doesn't like, no. Yeah, I don't. So by like after 20 days of this. People were on the ship for three, yeah. People still aren't getting along, like the two groups haven't come together well enough, they don't feel good about everything. Yeah, and so more and Nagata are like, we've gotta we've gotta be more brutal about our punishment. That's how you get people to get along. People are not don't have the right amount of revolutionary fervor, right? So we have to punish them more. It's like when when you get in a fight with your buddy and you're like, let's retreat to the mountains for three weeks and be brutally punished for our disagreements. Do not have drugs. I don't think they did. I'll see there's there's the problem. Probably drinking a bit. I don't know. No. Yeah. And I'm gonna the write up an unseen Japan does a really good job of kind of laying this all out beautifully and terribly. So I'm going to read that it all began with Ozaki Mitsuo. At 21 years old, the Tokyo University of Fisheries Student had joined the United Red Army as part of the merger with that other group. The crimes for which he stood accused by his fellow comrades during the self criticism session were of discussing the whereabouts of Red Army hideouts and weapons stashes with unauthorized persons. Additionally, he was seen as lacking the correct amount of revolutionary zeal. Maurice collective punishment for these offenses was to have Ozaki face off in a no holds bout. In a no holds bout with a much bulkier Co revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters ensuring Osaka could not run away. And then the larger man began wailing on Ozaki. Beaten to the ground time and time again Ozaki bloodied still, rose for more punishment. He knew the only way out was to accept his physically imposed chastisement. Finally, the badly beaten Ozaki was allowed some rest. He then made a fatal mistake. He thanked Mori. The chance to allow himself to become a better revolutionary. There was murmuring from the surrounding group. Was Ozaki trying to flatter his way out of proper training? Surely this represented more spiritual weakness on his part. The solution was to have Ozaki spend the night standing at attention outside the mountain in the mountainous sub-zero temperatures. After some hours of this, Ozaki, shaking and injured, asked to be allowed to lay down. This was the last straw that his weakness no no bounds. He was brought back into the warmth of the lodge only to face another intense beating. His comrades then carried osaki's broken body back outside. Where he was tied to a post that, in lieu of ideological metal, would keep him standing. He hung there for hours and hours as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak cries for help. Occasionally, members were sent out to beat him again. By next morning, he was dead. And they didn't get along. After that, it didn't help. This did not bring them together is an unlikely family. It's also just such textbook cult **** right? Yeah. That you're like, ohh we're we're gonna make people do horrible things to the only other people they are close to in the world. Yeah. To demonstrate their allegiance to what I have told them is our ideological commitment. And Mori spends this pretty much immediately and tells everybody that Ozaki had chosen to die because he'd like seen that he was fundamentally flawed and he'd bring the revolution down because of his weakness. So he he had to kill himself. In order to save the revolution of suicide was calling for help. He knew they'd beat him to death for it well. Yeah, yeah. So they decided to, like, celebrate this guy's death cause he'd made the movement stronger. Ohh, did they have a little party? A little party? Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. So the self criticism sessions continue and, you know, self criticism is a strong characterization. It's gonna put out there that like some people calling outside consultants and kind of look like. They really are taking a deep dive down this one hole, right? They could have done a ropes course, they could have they they did strangle some of them. They still played paintball. They could have played paintball. Yeah, to make a really horrible story a little bit shorter they this keeps happening every night to someone new. They just keep murdering each other for ideological. Last three left the most pure. Well, by the time it's over, 14 of the 29 people who went out there had been killed. Ohh, that's less than I thought. Yeah, yeah, and the remaining 15 get along really well. They do get into a gunfight with the cops. I mean, you know, maybe they should have led with that, probably would have formed some, you know, trauma bonds. Yeah. So they purge like half of themselves. Well, you know, everyone will get along really well if you just kill everyone that doesn't agree with you already have always said that. And that's why Stalinist Russia had no backstabbing at all. Zero Russia, the place where everyone got along. That's what they call it. So that's the podcast episode being Elaine. You wanna tell people where they can find you? Yeah. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and Medium at 45th absurdist. And you can find me in the mountains with 28 of my closest friends, where we all try to make each other into better, better people. Better people not going on that camping get up. Just so you know, pile of rocks for self improvement purposes and a post and a post for self improvement. I'm going to beat you that day. Yeah, yeah, Mom, we'll see. So three weeks, that's the episode. Go. Oh yeah, you can find us.online@behindthebastards.com, but we'll have all the sources for this episode. You can buy one of our FDA approved to cure all diseases or prevent all diseases. I forget which illegal claim we're making on the masks that we sell. Umm. Goodbye. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. 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