One of the key problems with conventional anarchist histories is that they tend to end with the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1939 - yet this is a very Eurocentric view, for though World War II dealt a real hammer-blow to the anarchist movements in Europe, with the SAC in neutral Sweden being the only significant organisation to survive unscathed, the movements in Latin America and the Far East in particular were barely affected by the war.
Sure, they had their own problems - the Americans were mostly organising underground in a period of dictatorship, while the Asians had their own battles against warlords and Japanese imperialism that predated the war - but their organisations were virile, combative and not crushed by these circumstances. So, many organisational and ideological lineages continued through the war years into the Cold War era and I dedicated myself to detailing these linkages.
One of the most significant anarchist movements was the Korean, which arose in 1910 with the Japanese invasion of the Korean peninsula. In 1919, during a wave of unrest that swept across East and Southeast Asia, the first significant organisation, the Band of Heroes, was founded, seeding a lineage that saw the establishment in 1924 of the Korean Anarchist Federation (KAF) and what became the Korean Revolutionist Federation (KRF), and of numerous "black societies" - anarchist resistance cells - seven of which in 1929 formed the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF).
The KAF and KACF launched the Manchurian Revolution over 1929-1932, so they and their legacy are important to understand. Yesterday I sketched the lineages of these three organisations, down to the 2000s (notepad image above), which I formalised in a PowerPoint diagramme (image below).
I will do the same for all the organisations represented in my Anarchist-Communist Mass Line series (the Bulgarian, Uruguayan, and Ukrainian movements) and will add other significant lineages such as the French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Chilean, Argentine, Cuban and Mexican. I will then get a designer to produce professional graphics of these lineages and include them in future editions of Mass Line, Cartography, and Wildfire.
