Season 10, Episode 23: Under the Sign of the Z (Patreon)

This week on MSB: Victory Gundam episode 23.

The best laid plans of mice and men go awry this week as everything Uso and the Hiland crew do to avoid battle seems to backfire; Warren fires the missiles, a man sees his lifelong dream come to fruition, and we get a glimpse into life within Zanscare. Spoiler alert! It looks bad!

Please listen to it!

Show Notes

Tomáš Masaryk

• Tomáš's surname, Masaryk / マサリク, is listed on the official Victory Gundam webpage.

• A timeline of the real Tomáš Masaryk's life is provided by the government of Czechia.

• General biographies of Tomáš Masaryk can be found at Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

  • Masaryk's wife, Charlotte Garrigue, has her own Wikipedia page.

• Masaryk's work as a writer and philosopher:

  • Masaryk's first major published work was 'Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization,' based on his PhD thesis. It's regarded as a forerunner of sociology as a discipline. An English translation by William B. Weist and Robert G. Batson was published in 1970 for Chicago UP. It's available for temporary loan at the Internet Archive.

  • Commentary on his contributions to sociology can be found in, e.g., Kolegar, Ferdinand. (1968). T. G. Masaryk's Contribution to Sociology. 10.1515/9783111562575-046.

  • Masaryk's writing on Marxist interpretations of socialism are available in partial translation in, e.g., T. G. Masaryk, Masaryk on Marx, trans. Erazim V. Kohak, Bucknell UP (1972). 

• Before his rise to prominence, Masaryk intervened to help the defense in two sensational cases:

  • The blood libel prosecution of Leopold Hilsner.

  • The High Treason Trial of Serbian and Croatian separatist leaders in 1909.

• Masaryk's younger brother, Ludvík Karel Masaryk, has a page on Czech Wikipedia. It doesn't mention his middle name, but his Geni.com profile does.

• Fun side note:

  • There's a conspiracy theory floating around that Masaryk was not, in fact, the son of an obscure coachman who rose to prominence thanks to his own talents, but rather the secret lovechild of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, who was protected and preferred at every stage of his career by powerful patrons within the Imperial bureaucracy. In 2016 there was a plan to test the theory by comparing DNA samples. However Masaryk's descendents refused to permit the test on the ground that the whole thing was ghoulish and pointless. You can read articles about it here:

    • Announcing the plan to test and compare DNA samples.

    • Confirmation that the tests would not go forward.

Václav Havel

• General biographies of Havel are available from Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica,  and in this obituary from The Independent, published on December 19, 2011.

• The 'Prague Spring' period of democratization in 1968, and the repressive 'Normalization' that followed are discussed on Wikipedia, and in:

  • In 'Czechoslovakia: Lines of Tanks in Prague' by Petruška Šustrová for the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute's retrospective on the revolts that broke out all over the world in 1968, available at: https://www.ghi-dc.org/fileadmin/publications/Bulletin_Supplement/Supplement_6/supp6.pdf.

Karel Čapek:

• Čapek's biography of Masaryk is Talks with T. G. Masaryk, originally published in three volumes from 1928 to 1935. An English translation by Dora Round was published in 1995 by Catbird Press.

  • The Japanese translation by Ishikawa Tatsuo was published in 1993 by Seibunsha.

• Čapek's general biography on Wikipedia. 

• The Japanese Wikipedia page for Čapek lists various translations of his work and notes that there was a boom in interest during the early 1990s.

• Tomino mentions his interest in Eastern European literature during the production of Victory in this interview, translated by Mark Simmons.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

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