Flash Edition: The Situation of Iranian Kurdistan

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, but you can call me messy mom. Because on my podcast, tell me something messy. My fantastic guests are bringing their mess like singer, songwriter, Durran Brunar, suggesting we reinstate adult sleepovers with friends. Here's the thing. Get a group that's mature enough not to be putting your hand in warm water and take a lenient. You know what I'm saying? I mean, granted, I might be the bitch in all my life. Listen to, tell me something messy on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Fourteen years in prison for killing a young woman. A 15-year sentence for a crash that caused three deaths. Twelve and a half years for killing a child and critically injuring her mother. All true stories. All caused by marijuana-impaired drivers. No matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different. So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by Nitsa and the Add Council. And the winner of the I Heart Podcast award is. You can decide who takes home the 2026 I Heart Podcast Awards podcast of the year by voting at iHeardpodcastawards.com now through February 22nd. See all the nominees and place your vote at iHeartpodcastawards.com. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at audible.com. Hey everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette Podcast. Each week we're bringing you true crime through illegal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the Diddy verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. We're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Call the media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Over the course of about a month, the general strike went from a pipe dream that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen until potentially maybe 2028 to something that happened here. We saw a one day general strike in Minneapolis and everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for general strikes. It's become a demand. It's become a tactic and it's become a term that is on the tongues of people who never would dare speak of it before. And on this show, we are going to talk about the history of general strikes, how they happen, how they're organized, how they succeed, how they fail, and what the contemporary history of the tactic looks like. Now when I originally planned this first episode, I was going to do a overview of about 100 years of history of general strikes to try to get us roughly to the modern era. And then as soon as I said, well, not as soon as I started writing that deeper into the process than it should have been, I realized there was absolutely no way I could cover 100 years of general strikes in one episode. What I kept coming back to was one specific strike. A strike that most of you have never heard of. So the general strike in Shanghai in 1925, what became known as the May 30th movement. I want to begin here because intellectually most of you have never heard of it. Notionally, you already know everything about it. Now I have written about this strike before. It was in fact the first thing I ever wrote about for behind the bastards. An episode about a Chinese warlord named Zhang Zhongcheng. But about a quarter of those episodes were about what became the May 30th movement. And so I am going to recap a little bit of what I talked about in that episode and talk about some different stuff. And yeah, we're going to get you introduced to how you get a general strike and how the course of these things can go with a strike that will look shockingly familiar to anyone who has lived through this year, which is to say this is a strike that starts when an occupying army has taken over a city and starts fucking killing people. So a little bit of background about what is going on in China in the 1920s. 1925 is in the middle of what is called the warlord period in China, which is a period where I go go listen to the bastard's episodes. The short version of this is that after the 1911 revolution that had overthrown the Chinese imperial system, China became split between a bunch of warlords composed out of different sort of parts of the armies. Now also in this period, large parts of China are under the direct control of foreign occupiers. These are countries like Japan, the UK, France, Russia. I think there's an American concession sort of in there somewhere. And these countries just own parts of China. And for our purposes, they also own parts of Shanghai. And these things, both the territories they occupy and sometimes literally, you know, the occupation is they own a rail line. When I say they own a rail line, it's not just a company or even the country own in the rail line. They own the territory. Like this rail line belongs to Japan. So the land around the rail line belongs to Japan and they can enforce their laws in it. And this is how it works also in Shanghai. Inside of these concessions, there is an armed occupation. And in Shanghai, there are British, reference, Japanese police and military personnel there who do law enforcement and will just kill you. And I heard my dear listener have we seen this before I leave that as an exercise to the reader. Listener. Yes, I guess you're the listener. Now this state of affairs came to a head in May 1925. When a Japanese foreman was meeting with Chinese union organizers, what was basically supposed to be a contract negotiation session, there's a team of Japanese foreman and business people there and a group of Chinese union organizers. And the details of what exactly happened are very, very sketchy, but a brawl broke out. And the conclusion of the brawl was that a Japanese foreman killed a fairly well-known local union leader. Now the police had also arrested several of the workers who had been in negotiations and continued to hold them even after a massive demonstration for the Chinese union organizer who had been killed funeral. So on May 30th, protesters gathered outside of a police station run by the British to demand the release of their comrades. This set off a climactic confrontation that changed the face of Chinese history forever. The British open fire on the crowd killed 10 people and wounded 50 more. Now half a decade ago when I first wrote about this for a cool zone, I read a quote from the great Chinese author and anarchist Bajin. This is quoted from author Waldron's book from Order Nationalism China's Turning Point in 1924-1925. And I want to return to it now for reasons that I think will immediately become apparent. This is about a student who witnessed the killings. At the entrance to Yunnan Road, he saw the child who had been killed a short while before. He thought about half an hour ago the crowd was marching peacefully towards the police station to ask the police to set free students who had been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human beings endowed with reason in human sympathy. That human blood flowed in their veins. They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed their human nature. But reality proved they were blood thirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people. For this there was no precedent in Chinese history. The imperialist oppression that had endured for so many years ached like a deep wound in his heart. He struggled inwardly. He felt the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted to spill his blood to sacrifice his young life. That he might show that not all among his people were lambs. [BLANK_AUDIO] allowed themselves to be led without resistance to slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the murdered child, his eyes shown with fire, his whole body began to burn as though on fire, his heart, p-filently. You, dear listener, understand this. When I first quoted this passage in 2021, it was about George Floyd. Now it's about Renee Good and Alex Pretty. You understand the horror, suffering, the rage, the overwhelming fire to do something. You understand that they are like us, and you understand why they fought. I'm Brandon Calgudman, the host of The Tell Me Something Messy Podcast. I wanted to create a safe, comfy place for all of us to talk about sex, relationships, and what it means to be human. And baby, my fantastic guests are bringing their mess to share with the class. Like singer-songwriter Durand Brunar suggesting we reinstate adult sleepovers with friends. Here's the thing. Get a group that's mature enough not to be putting your hand in warm water. And take a link. I mean, I mean, granted, I might be doing, but you know, like, and I think it's important for those examples of that of us just being gentle with one another because the world and the people that are already finding brand new ways to whip I as everything one thousand percent one day one thousand percent. So the least we could do is make strides to handle each other in a way that is with a bit more, yeah, that's with care and a bit more mindful. Listen to Tell Me Something Messy on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. 14 years in prison for killing a young woman. 12 and a half years for killing a child and critically injuring her mother. All true stories all caused by marijuana-impaired drivers. Brought to you by Nitsa and the ad council. This is Riders Strong and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was money and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commu. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and then drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years right or where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists. Whoever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies and the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. How teach you something? Come round or in my wife. Boom, boom, this is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is you can decide who takes home the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards Podcast of the Year by voting at iHeartPodcastAwards.com now through February 22nd. Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. What followed was the largest to that point general strike in the history of Shanghai. 200,000 people walked off the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes. The strike spread to almost every major city in China in some form or another. Massive student protests began. Tire cities rose as one. 250,000 people went on strike in Hong Kong. Students, workers, business owners and gangsters stood precariously as one to drive out the armed men occupying their cities. In an instant the world changed. Things that were impossible the day before suddenly began commonplace. People flooded the streets. They were attacked by cops. They fought back. And for three months they held on. Now this was a much rougher time than even contemporary 2026 America. We are in a little bit going to get to the part where a bunch of people's heads get put on spikes by the government. And, you know, unlike 1925 Shanghai for example, American cities are not contrary to the beliefs of a significant portion of the American conservative population run by networks of organized crime who control every facet of political life and also economic life and also social life to the extent that if you're a union organizer in 1920 Shanghai, you are effectively a mob organizer. Both in the sense that you probably have to belong to one of the organizations and to the extent that the people you are actually organizing this time are like you're organizing the mob guys who bring in workers to serve as the migrant worker population. This is also actually an important aspect of the strikes in 1925 which is that much of the labor population in Shanghai are migrant workers that have been brought in from other parts of the country by organized crime. Now obviously that's not really how migrant labor works in the United States but you know to some extent the pressures of the labor discipline are very similar in that right the threat that has held over the heads of migrant workers is that armed men will come in the night for you and right now what we are witnessing is the armed men coming into the night but you know as much as I talk about sort of the differences between these movements I think the immediate question for our purposes is are there things that we can learn from this movement and I think the answer is yes but in order to get to the what can we learn from this we have to talk a bit about how the movement collapsed so I said that the movement held on for about three months that was in Shanghai the history of some of the other cities is different and we kind of don't have time to for example divert talk about general strike in Hong Kong where the primary method that people used was they simply left the city it would pack home which solves some of the problems and we're going to be talking about in a little bit but okay in Shanghai what happened to this movement and why did it fall apart so I think there are roughly three factors and I think the first two are actually more important than the third one which would be surprising when we get to them but the first two factors were people being able to eat and the pressure that that put on the unions and secondarily betrayal from the business elites that they had allied with to get the strikes to work and the third is peer repression and the scale of the peer repression here is astonishing I mean some of the like one of the guys who runs this strike is just executed by the state again we're going to I'm promising we're going to get to the heads on pikes in a bit um but the repression isn't what killed the strike it was the the problem of how do people eat and it was the pressure from the business elite so we're going to talk about the business elite first now when I say the business elite here in in the early days of the movement and that this is a tension that's going to sort of haunt the Chinese nationalist party for its entire existence until it splits from the communist completely and even later than that they're in a very very uneasy alliance with left wing students workers who are rapidly becoming left wing because this is also a city that was not enormously politicized until now and suddenly becomes politicized in ways that seemed impossible like a few years before but there's like there's a tension between it because initially these sort of patriotic business owners are really really pissed off that the foreign occupiers are murdering people in their city and sort of nationalist and communist leaders are able to sort of broker alliances with them and they're able to broker alliances with organized crime which is less important for our purposes I cannot emphasize enough how important the organized crime people are in the history to the extent that like Chiang Kai Shek who you you may know as like the leader of the nationalist party and the guy who's eventually going to run type one after losing the civil war. Chiang Kai Shek was an organized crime guy like he was in the green gang so like you know very important to their story less important to our story but they they act in a very similar way to the business owners which is that in the beginning and this is something to worry about. we saw a Minneapolis too, it's been there one day, General Strike, which is that a lot of business owners, either out of just actual genuine rage and grief over just the raw fucking horror of these monsters grabbing people from their homes and shooting people in the streets, cooperated with shuttered businesses down for the day. Now, obviously, there are other business owners who do this because they are producers. Am I allowed to say that they looked outside and were like, it doesn't take a weatherend to see which way the winds are blowing, right? You know, they saw what was going on and were like, okay, me and my workers aren't going to show up or if I don't publicly support this, it's gonna get real fucked for me because everyone else around us and that meant that there was a lot of cooperation from businesses, but we also saw very quickly after like a kind of a whole bunch of businesses and like sports organizations to like sign the thing that was like, oh, we need to restore order, do, do, do, do, do, maybe end the occupation but also please stop causing disruptions, protesters. (upbeat music) - I'm Brandon Galgudman, the host of the Tell Me Something Messy Podcast. I wanted to create a safe comfy place for all of us to talk about sex, relationships, and what it means to be human. Like singer, songwriter, Durran Brunar suggesting we reinstate adult sleepovers with friends. - Here's the thing, get a group that's mature enough, not to be putting your hand in warm water and take a little nap. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - You know what I'm saying, I mean, I mean, Brandon, I might be the original, like, (laughing) and I think it's important for those examples of that of us just being gentle with one another because the world and the people that are already finding brand new ways to what buy as everything. - One thousand percent. - One day. - So the least we could do is make strides to handle each other in a way that is, with a bit more, yeah, with, that's what care and a bit more mindful. - Listen to Tell Me Something Messy on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. - 14 years in prison for killing a young woman. A 15 year sentence for a crash that caused three deaths. All true stories, all caused by marijuana-impaired drivers. - This is Ryder Strong and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. - It was money and money a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. - In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commu. - It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. - No, I am not your. (imitates gunfire) - And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. - There were years right in where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whoever I can to try to find out what actually happened. - Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies and the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? - They have had this case for 30 years. - I'll teach you something to come around or in my way. - Boom, boom, this is The Red Weather. - Listen to The Red Weather. On the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hey everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from The Legally Brunette Podcast. - Each week, we're bringing you true crime through illegal lens. - Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the Diddy verdict, we're breaking it all down, step by step. - And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. - Listen to Legally Brunette on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Now, in the Chinese case, what we see as the strike goes on is that the business elites began to see the strikes themselves and the marches and the fighting with the police. And particularly the fact that they were also not making money and they were also putting their own money into keeping the strikes going as a problem because they are business people and the only thing that they really care about fundamentally is making money. There's a marks line I wish I had here about what the national character of Britain was that it turned out that it's only fundamental principle was land rent. And that's like this, right? Like at some point, these people are like, okay, well, given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money in my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation. And this is something that in cross class movements like this, specifically if you are trying to do a general strike, you're eventually going to have to deal with this, which is that a lot of particularly large businesses. And some small business owners will follow them like with this too, right? We'll eventually get to a point where they're like, I would rather keep making money than, you know, not have my neighbors taken away and that is unbelievably fucking bleak. But that's, you know, like that's one of the things that killed this general strike in China. And eventually in the face of this, right? We come to the second problem which the people needed to eat. So the union federation that set up had been just sort of giving people money so that they could eat. But they eventually start to run out of money and they don't really have a way to organize this sort of production, movement, and logistics of providing everyone with food without relying on the bank rolling of those business owners. You know, this becomes a problem because it means that they're suddenly getting attacked by portions of the workers who weren't supposed to be their base because they don't have food. And those people also just start like walking up the chamber of commerce meetings and walking in and beating up the chamber of commerce people for not paying them and then like eating the banquet food. The chamber of commerce is a great story and it's a book called Shanghai on Strike. Why Elizabeth Ferry is a renowned scholar of Chinese labor history about this very funny. There's lots of absolutely wild stories from this strike. What of the sort of recurring themes of this period of union organizing? And again, this is a really rough time, right? Imagine like gangster movies in the 1820s New York and like that Shanghai, but like the gangs are way, way, way, way stronger. So like the way politics works to a large extent is that people beat the share of each other and like halt hits on each other and the city is technically speaking it's run by like what is a warlord army and then beneath the warlord army there are all of these organized criminal organizations. But like, you know, the unions have this thing called dog beating brigades. Where dog beating brigades, like if you like publicly started scabbing, are you very publicly were standing against a strike? Like the dog beating brigade would show up in the middle of the night and it was just like a bunch of guys with hatchets and it would just like beat the shit out of you. And this was just like a normal thing that was happening during these strikes. So this whole period of Chinese history is nuts. It's wild. There's so much shit going on. That's just, I don't know. They had the dog beating brigades. I guess in the American context, we'd call them like the scabby beating brigades or whatever. But you know, it's a rough time for everyone. But what they kind of don't have without sort of business owners, they're never really able to sort of seize control of production and repurpose it towards, you know, keeping everyone fed. And I will say this is something that actually, I think we are better at than they were. In the sense of we are better at running to logistics of getting a bunch of people food and the stuff that they need to survive. And this is something we can look at in Minneapolis where, and this is obviously coming from people's money, but a lot of the organizing in Minneapolis is about getting people who can't leave their homes food. We've also seen in the last day or so, tenant and labor union leaders are talking about a wrench strike in Minneapolis, which can help people, you know, not get affected because they can't go to work. But it's also something that if you're going to do a general strike, yeah, you probably also have to do a wrench strike. But if you want to keep a general strike going, and this is something that we're going to get to a lot more in later episodes, the Seattle general strike is a very large example of this. If you want to keep this thing going, you have to take control of the places where you're working and, you know, have them provide the food for people and have them provide the resources that people need. But in this sort of context, almost everyone who's involved in this, this is their first general strike. What really happens here, right, is that the unions are forced to call off the strike, they get minor concessions and exchange from the foreign bosses. But what it does is politicize the entire city, and it politicizes all of China in a way that is going to shape all of the politics in the country forever. I guess like it's the thing that creates modern China is the politicization that comes out of this period. you know, it's what sort of transforms Chinese politics or something that was purely that almost purely the domain of world lords and do something that's now the domain of the nationalists and the communist and obviously you know the military conflict is a large thing and this so we don't really have time to get into but you know this period transforms the entire politics of China right people who had never thought about politics before people who had never you know who had never like heard the words imperialism or like heard the words like militarism right are suddenly in the streets talking about it and they're talking about general strikes and they're talking about how how can we run these occupying armies out and I once had sort of mentioned how this whole thing ends right which the people keep organizing and they keep fighting and one year later in 1926 the first of the uprisings begins now the first uprising and these three uprisings are all sort of like holds by the Chinese Communist Party and their unions the first one fails horribly and the warlords put the heads of workers they killed on pikes they have these squads where there's two guys at broad swords and a guy with like a sheriff's badge effectively who go door to door and if they find someone who they think had like handed out leaflets they would execute them on the spot this is this is the kind of repression they're dealing with and they they did it again they tried again in in 1927 and that one failed and the second time by the way it's worth mentioning was supposed to be a general strike coordinated with an uprising and they fucked up the coordination of it but it did also the second one was a 300 thousand strong general strike and the third try was an 800 thousand strong general strike and they stazed the attraction and they run the warlord armies out of the city and for a sort of brief glorious moment Shanghai is in the hands of its workers and they're subsequent betrayal and slaughter by the USSR and Shanghai Shack mostly Shanghai Shack the USSR is also at fault here for telling them to keep allying with Shanghai Shack in the nationalists that's a story for another time but I think it flows we are used to thinking that the times that we live in our unprecedented and in some ways they are but people have fought our struggles before people have fought and died and won to stop the reign of men with guns over our cities and if we learn the lessons of both their time and ours if we use that knowledge to act in the moment of crisis we can win conscience history and the cries of the suffering demanded so let's go win the war we have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains it could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media from War Podcasts from Cool Zone Media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions thanks for listening it's me Brandon Kyle Goodman for you can call me messy mom because on my podcast tell me something messy my fantastic guests are bringing their mess like singer songwriter Durand Brunar suggesting we reinstate adult sleepovers with friends here's the thing get a group that's mature enough not to be putting your hand in warm water yeah I mean I mean granted I might be doing but you know listen to tell me something messy on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts 14 years in prison for killing a young woman a 15 year sentence for a crash that caused three deaths 12 and a half years for killing a child and critically injuring her mother all true stories all caused by marijuana impaired drivers no matter what you tell yourself if you feel different you drive different so if you're high just don't drive brought to you by Nitsa and the ad council Saturday May 2nd countries biggest stars will be in Austin Texas at hour 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by capital one tickets are on sale now get yours before they sell out at ticketmaster.com that's ticketmaster.com this is writer strong and I have a new podcast called the red weather in 1995 my neighbor Anna trainer disappeared from a commune those nature trees and praying and drugs no I am not your back then I lied to everybody. They have practiced this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the red weather on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast guaranteed human.