Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastard Heart, four of our
Speaker 1: epic series on Nikolai cha Chessco with the inimitable Jeff May. Jeff,
Speaker 1: you know you you have an interesting background. You were
Speaker 1: a teacher, um, and you decided, you know, you had
Speaker 1: to make the very difficult choice to leave that career
Speaker 1: behind to focus upon another career as a live performer.
Speaker 1: I mean that's teaching. It's very live performer esque, just
Speaker 1: with health insurance. And I will not not anymore with zoom.
Speaker 1: But um, but yeah, you know I empathize with that.
Speaker 1: I also had years ago. I had to make a
Speaker 1: really tough choice, which was to proceed with my career
Speaker 1: as a as a writer and a journalist, um, but
Speaker 1: to give up my ambitions of being a musician and
Speaker 1: and and really participating, which has been with one of
Speaker 1: the maybe the hardest choice I've ever had to make. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing, people don't know you were on the cusp. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was, darling. I was about to break through. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, I made peace with the choice that
Speaker 1: I made. But but every now and then I feel
Speaker 1: the urge to get back into it. So recently I
Speaker 1: reached out to some old friends of mine from back
Speaker 1: in the day when I was when I was doing
Speaker 1: a lot of stage shows. You might have heard of
Speaker 1: a little band called Destiny's Child and we we put
Speaker 1: together a little bit of collab based on my my
Speaker 1: incredible Boston accent. So I want to just play that
Speaker 1: for everyone right now. Is a little treats them from
Speaker 1: Okay that ought to do there? That was? That was beautiful.
Speaker 1: Wow wow. Honestly, like I'm kind of like, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm glad we have this show, and I'm glad we
Speaker 1: have all the great work you're doing, but I do
Speaker 1: feel like this is sort of like a reminder of
Speaker 1: sort of like the other day the music died. Yeah exact,
Speaker 1: you decided to give up your career, and I'm glad
Speaker 1: that you guys are you and Destiny's Child, that you're
Speaker 1: still you Still it's all amicable, I know you kind
Speaker 1: of they felt like you left him in the lark
Speaker 1: for a while. They had to lift up a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff that you left behind. But she's done, okay, right,
Speaker 1: she's done. Okay for she did okay, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we're very proud of her. I just I really wish
Speaker 1: I could have seen, you know, that's a glimpse into
Speaker 1: the alternate reality that we could have had if you
Speaker 1: get stuck with it. You know, it's just one of
Speaker 1: those one of the tiny tragedies that is that is
Speaker 1: everyday life. But you know the upside of it is
Speaker 1: that now that we have released this in twenty five years,
Speaker 1: I do qualify for admission to the Rock and Roll
Speaker 1: Hall of Fame. So I'm sure we're all looking forward
Speaker 1: to that. I mean, you have my vote. You're you
Speaker 1: and Billy Joel um both both back in me on
Speaker 1: this one. Um, he's actually back acting you. That was
Speaker 1: That was a solid Billy Joel joke. Jeff, I hope
Speaker 1: you're proud of yourself. It's a Billy joke. Wow, Well
Speaker 1: we're doing good. So you want to talk about a
Speaker 1: piece of sh it a little bit more. I thought
Speaker 1: we just were. Wow. No, Billy, come on, he does Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's he's a good guy. William William Joel
Speaker 1: Oh God, why is my phone ringing? Stop us? Because
Speaker 1: you're popular. Oh it's another spam call. It's one of
Speaker 1: the five spam calls I get every single day because
Speaker 1: the FCC under uh fucking Donald Trump, decided that phones
Speaker 1: should no longer be things that people can use, isn't
Speaker 1: isn't that nice? Isn't that a nice change that was
Speaker 1: made classic. Yeah, it's like it's like when commercials were
Speaker 1: allowed to be cartoons again. Yeah's just one of these
Speaker 1: decisions that his low key destroyed civilization and shaped my
Speaker 1: entire personality. Yeah. Absolutely, I've seen all the he Man
Speaker 1: and g I Joe and stuff that I have behind
Speaker 1: me here. But yeah, you and Michael Bay completely changed
Speaker 1: as a result of that move. Um, just like I
Speaker 1: was completely changed by the fight Beyonce and I had.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's that's that's that's that's water under
Speaker 1: the bridge now? Is it in an elevator? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: would probably be the most cinematic place for us to
Speaker 1: have had a fight. Right, but on a security camera?
Speaker 1: Did you get did you get the joke or is
Speaker 1: that over your head? No, Sophie, if you make a
Speaker 1: joke about Beyonce, you can assume I'm not going to
Speaker 1: get it. But I thought you were so close. I
Speaker 1: know out exactly exactly when you're too close to somebody.
Speaker 1: It's like, how I'm too good at basketball to to
Speaker 1: compete on camera against Lebron James. Can you just do
Speaker 1: that episode? M Yeah, of course Sophie happened up on
Speaker 1: an episode on Lebron James. He's like a good dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's okay again, he's done all right for himself.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about Nikolai chaku Um. Now when we
Speaker 1: when we had left off, we were talking about the
Speaker 1: gigantic series of palaces. He built the third largest building
Speaker 1: by volume in the world. UM. And as Czech excuse
Speaker 1: ambitions for control over the country that he was gradually
Speaker 1: grinding into the dust grew, he decided he found the
Speaker 1: need to establish and expand a state security force UM
Speaker 1: that could surveil his populace to an unprecedented extent. In Romania,
Speaker 1: the state's security force, the secret police, whatever you wanna
Speaker 1: call them, they were called the Securitat UH and they
Speaker 1: were run by which is actually I think the name
Speaker 1: of like a local rent a cop company that you
Speaker 1: can have like do armored car ship. Here, you got
Speaker 1: some some Portland's Pinkerton's or whatever. Yeah, I mean, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm getting that wrong. I should have checked on this,
Speaker 1: but anyway, the Securitat, the Romanian one was run by
Speaker 1: Jan Pasipa, who we talked about a little bit last episode.
Speaker 1: And you know, folks talk about the KGB, they talked
Speaker 1: about the East German Stazi, you know when they talk
Speaker 1: about communist secret police forces. Yeah, none of these mother
Speaker 1: suckers had ship on the Security TOT in terms of
Speaker 1: its actual like the extent of the repression that it
Speaker 1: was capable of carrying out. Oh oh yeah, No, these
Speaker 1: are this is a good state security force, not like
Speaker 1: an immoral sense, but in a in an efficiency sense,
Speaker 1: in an efficiency sense. Yeah, and in being perfect villains
Speaker 1: in a James Bond movie. Since and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from Cattle and Gruya here, that's that Romanian journalist. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five there was a central phone tapping center
Speaker 1: and eleven regional ones. That's when Chichesco takes power. Thirteen
Speaker 1: years later there were two hundred and forty eight centers
Speaker 1: and a thousand portable stations. By the nineteen eighties, the
Speaker 1: Security TOT had become one of the most feared secret
Speaker 1: police organizations in the world. In nine it had fourteen thousand,
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty nine employees, of which eight thousand, one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty nine were officers. According to PACIFA, each
Speaker 1: officer had to have fifty collaborators members of the Romanian
Speaker 1: Communist Party and fifty informants outside of the Romanian Communist Party.
Speaker 1: The result was the constant surveillance of the population, so
Speaker 1: damn near everybody was either in the employee of the
Speaker 1: securitat or directly under surveillance of the security talk like both, yeah,
Speaker 1: or both in many cases both the other part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, it's they always used to make the
Speaker 1: you know, the KGB jokes. We've all seen that where
Speaker 1: yeah yeah and stuff like that, but this seems less funny, Yeah,
Speaker 1: somehow less funny than the KGB. Who were who are
Speaker 1: a bunch of lab hucksters? Chuckle chuckle buddies. I did
Speaker 1: a research paper on the KGB and the title of
Speaker 1: it was Cops and Robbers. That's not a bad title, fair,
Speaker 1: And the professor was like, this is supposed to be
Speaker 1: like a serious class. Yeah, a lot of people died
Speaker 1: and were tortured, but you know that's the case with
Speaker 1: secret police all the time. Um, it's a shame that
Speaker 1: secret police are absolutely necessary to have in every single country. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna on a limb here. A cab includes
Speaker 1: secret police establishing WHOA I'm sorry. I know every time
Speaker 1: I come on, I cause chaos, um, and this is it.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. But yeah, wow, that's gonna be that's gonna
Speaker 1: be really, really controversial among our listeners, fully half of
Speaker 1: whom work in secret police forces. But you know, everybody
Speaker 1: needs to hear stuff that's difficult to listen to sometimes.
Speaker 1: So yeah, except that people disagree with you secret police officers,
Speaker 1: that's not what secret police officers do. Um. What they
Speaker 1: did in Romania, in addition to domestic repression, was carry
Speaker 1: out a steady stream of assassinations of foreign dissidents, including
Speaker 1: Romanian citizens writing for Voice of America, a US funded
Speaker 1: Cold War era news and propaganda agency. At the most
Speaker 1: basic level, this could mean hiring gunmen or assassins with
Speaker 1: knives in other countries. There's one particular guy that they
Speaker 1: tried to kill like three different times, and they shot
Speaker 1: him and they stabbed him, and he kept like not
Speaker 1: quite dying. I've gotta respute and everybody yeah yeah, and
Speaker 1: then it was like a year after getting stabbed, he
Speaker 1: dies of this like mysteriously virulent cancer and it's kind
Speaker 1: of come out since then that it's almost certain they
Speaker 1: slipped him radioactive poison. Um, that's the thing they did
Speaker 1: a couple of times, I think. Uh. And it's honestly,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a cool way to kill someone. Yeah. No, no,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're if you're a journalist writing against
Speaker 1: the state and they have to use the radioactive poison
Speaker 1: against you, you know, you've that's like, that's like the
Speaker 1: Pulitzer getting getting radiation, getting like radioactive poison, Uh, slipped
Speaker 1: in your Yeah, of Jeff dying as a journalist for shure,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, we should all be so lucky. But
Speaker 1: of course, Jeff, I don't know if you've ever priced
Speaker 1: radioactive poison. It is not cheap. And having someone assassinated
Speaker 1: across international lines also very expensive unless they live in
Speaker 1: like Toronto. Um. So this this is something that the
Speaker 1: Romanians we're gonna have to spend a lot of money on. Um.
Speaker 1: And when titened Belts put the security tot in a
Speaker 1: budget crunch, they were able to rake in extra cash
Speaker 1: millions of dollars over time, hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: a year from a foreign benefactor. Now, Jeff I'm gonna
Speaker 1: you want to guess what foreign company secretly funded the
Speaker 1: Secura tot during the most repressive years of Czech excuse regime.
Speaker 1: You know what, I have a lot of guesses, Okay,
Speaker 1: but I feel like I'm not going to nail it
Speaker 1: down because my first answer was McDonald's. No, not McDonald's.
Speaker 1: You might call them the McDonald's of furniture, because it
Speaker 1: was I kea, I'm sorry, it was like Kia, I
Speaker 1: still like them. Yeah, I'm gonna go and say I'm
Speaker 1: still going to go there. Wow, wow, bold, brave. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, we don't know. I'm sure they're supporting a
Speaker 1: completely different series of secret police agencies now and and
Speaker 1: the good ones, you know, the secret police agencies you
Speaker 1: want to trust? Am I supposed to not eat potential
Speaker 1: horse meat balls? Because I'm gonna eat potential horse meat balls? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Where are you gonna get horse meat? If you're not
Speaker 1: getting it somewhere sketchy, right, That's that's how I feel
Speaker 1: about And when that came out and everyone was mad
Speaker 1: about the about the meatballs maybe having horse, I was like,
Speaker 1: it's about time I get to eat horse. Yeah, exactly, exactly,
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what the securitat said. So during the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties this was actually a thing across a lot
Speaker 1: of Eastern Europe. A number of communist states are having
Speaker 1: these like economic crunches, and so they start opening themselves
Speaker 1: up to more capitalist businesses and being like maybe you
Speaker 1: come in a little bit in the help of sweet things,
Speaker 1: and is like, oh, yeah, you would like to be
Speaker 1: coming in. I don't know how to that's they're not
Speaker 1: from Boston. They're not from Boston. Yes, sorry, I can't
Speaker 1: do a good Swedish What was that? It was not
Speaker 1: your best? Yeah, I am a speed in modern and
Speaker 1: I went offensive. I went Muppet pretty pretty deep in there.
Speaker 1: But it's okay to make fun of the way Swedish
Speaker 1: people talk here because they're funding a secret police force.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that KIA did was they
Speaker 1: they realized that it was really cheap to have East
Speaker 1: German political prisoners build their billy bookshelves and other you know,
Speaker 1: announceable bedframes. So that was one of the things i
Speaker 1: KA got up to in this period. But they were
Speaker 1: really interested in Romania because Romania has these huge again
Speaker 1: is forcing people to leave rural areas and move to
Speaker 1: the cities. So there's lots of free timber in Romania
Speaker 1: that nobody's living around massively forested. Yes, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of wood anyway. It's sort of like like Siberia when
Speaker 1: you see what's and most of people are like tundra
Speaker 1: and then you look at it you're like, no, it's
Speaker 1: just like the biggest forest on the planet. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just like trees all all up in everybody's business. And
Speaker 1: that's so you know that i KEA is like, well,
Speaker 1: we need trees. We have a lot of low quality,
Speaker 1: easily breakable furniture to produce. We'll take all the trees
Speaker 1: that you can give us um and Romania is like, well,
Speaker 1: how about you know, you pay our state run timber company,
Speaker 1: you know, ten million pounds ish a year for it,
Speaker 1: and we will skim a significant chunk of that off
Speaker 1: the top and send it to our secret police force
Speaker 1: so they can buy radioactive poison. Now, IKEA denies that
Speaker 1: they knowingly funded a secret police agency through this deal.
Speaker 1: There is a lot of debate between journalists and scholars today.
Speaker 1: There is some evidence that I think the fair thing
Speaker 1: to say is that while nobody ever wrote this out directly,
Speaker 1: based on their dealings in other countries and their understanding
Speaker 1: of the situation in Romania. They absolutely knew the Secret
Speaker 1: cops were taking a cut off the top of the
Speaker 1: money that they were paying. Where do you think your
Speaker 1: money is going after you send it to a dictatorship? Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of it's gonna pay for the secret police. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows this. Everybody. It's cheap labor. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: how people still have Amazon accounts even though they know
Speaker 1: the human toll that it takes on people. And I
Speaker 1: sure do like immediate shipping because I'm impatient and I
Speaker 1: like things being slightly cheaper, so I like the media shipping.
Speaker 1: I'm okay that Jeff Bezos is buying radioactive reason to
Speaker 1: use on his enemies. Um, it's it's such a easy
Speaker 1: way to be like, well, they didn't tell us they
Speaker 1: were doing that. Yeah, you guys knew. Um there's some
Speaker 1: other evidence to believe that they actually had a decent
Speaker 1: amount of knowledge about how this was working. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you bought any products in the Billy
Speaker 1: range or any Albert chairs or any Abbo table tables
Speaker 1: or Jonas desks from Ikea in the nineteen eighties. There's
Speaker 1: a very good chance that your purchased directly helped fund
Speaker 1: to the securit tot. So that's neat. Those are specific
Speaker 1: product lines that they really Oh. I had two and
Speaker 1: both of them broke within a year. I love Ikea.
Speaker 1: This thing right here from Ikea is great. That's good. Well, listeners,
Speaker 1: if your Ikea send us money and I will edit
Speaker 1: out that part where I talked about how billy bookshelves
Speaker 1: are not made particularly well, Now that's how you do it. Extortion,
Speaker 1: that's how you get money, just like the securitat. Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: that's good. That's that's cool stuff. And obviously, while all
Speaker 1: this is happening, this is pretty fucked up, especially the
Speaker 1: assassinations they carry out in foreign countries and like NATO countries. Um.
Speaker 1: But the West put up with it for quite a
Speaker 1: while because as horrific as Cheski was to his own people,
Speaker 1: he never failed to back up u S interests at
Speaker 1: critical junctures. And I'm gonna quote from a ride up
Speaker 1: by the Wilson Center here in nineteen seventy nine, Shaochesku
Speaker 1: attacked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: he counseled caution in the Warsaw Pacts response to the
Speaker 1: crisis in Poland. In the following year, he opposed packed
Speaker 1: plans to increase defense spending and in fact reduced Romania's
Speaker 1: defense budget. In nineteen eighty three, he repeated his call
Speaker 1: for a halt to the arms race and advocated multilateral
Speaker 1: nuclear disarmament in Europe, and the following year he proposed
Speaker 1: a moratorium on the deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe.
Speaker 1: At the same time, refused to join the Soviet led
Speaker 1: boycott of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. And I'm
Speaker 1: noting this because he's he's doing this to stay in
Speaker 1: the West good graces. That's not like necessary the bad
Speaker 1: stuff to do obviously, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
Speaker 1: was bad. It's good to disarm and advocate for nuclear disarmament.
Speaker 1: His foreign policy moves are continue to be more right
Speaker 1: than wrong kind of in this period. This is just
Speaker 1: all paired with the unspeakable levels of domestic repression that
Speaker 1: he's carrying out at home. He seems like a sleeper
Speaker 1: agent we forgot about and then things got way out
Speaker 1: of control. Yeah, yeah, he did. He just kept right,
Speaker 1: letting it ride. Brasco energy coming out of him here
Speaker 1: on this one. For the record, the Soviets were right
Speaker 1: to boycott the Olympic Games, not necessarily because of whyever
Speaker 1: they did it. I actually have no idea why they
Speaker 1: did it, but because fun the Olympics. Anyone who boycotts
Speaker 1: the Olympics is in the right. I'll stand with whoever
Speaker 1: against the Olympics. If you hate the Olympics, you're my homie.
Speaker 1: Get them. Yeah, so chow Chessco. You're uncanceled, buddy. Um,
Speaker 1: that's probably not a thing I should Oh wait now
Speaker 1: he refused to join it. You're still canceled, motherfucker. Um. So.
Speaker 1: Nixon had been the first U S President to visit Romania,
Speaker 1: and a follow up to his nineteen sixty seven visit,
Speaker 1: but Nikolairam maintained excellent relations with every US president during
Speaker 1: his time in office. His success in this was close
Speaker 1: to perfect until in nineteen seventy eight he sent Yon
Speaker 1: Paspa to Germany with apparently a plan to assassinate a journalist.
Speaker 1: I say apparently because Paspa defected to the United States
Speaker 1: and offered up a comprehensive list of Romania's overseas narratives
Speaker 1: in exchange for one presumes a pile of cash in
Speaker 1: a lifetime of protection. His intel on the securitat was
Speaker 1: obviously good because he'd been running it. But you also
Speaker 1: have to remember there's like a book that exists that
Speaker 1: stories about the Chowchcuse, but it's based on the stuff
Speaker 1: Paspa claimed almost exclusively. And again, this guy is not
Speaker 1: necessarily a credible source on his old boss because he's
Speaker 1: defected and had invested interest in ignoring a lot of
Speaker 1: the fund up things he'd done as head of the
Speaker 1: secret police and making his boss seem more directly responsible
Speaker 1: for it um, which is not to say that Czech
Speaker 1: Ascue wasn't but just like you shouldn't take anything Paspa
Speaker 1: says at face value, right, Yeah exactly, exactly, yeah exactly
Speaker 1: that Like that's literally what he's doing. Like he's not
Speaker 1: a hero because he came out with the story of
Speaker 1: how BADU is he was his secret police head. He's
Speaker 1: a snitch, yeah exactly, And snitches get stitches even when
Speaker 1: they're snitching on Actually, in this case, snitches get a
Speaker 1: house paid for by the US government for the rest
Speaker 1: of their lives. Um. I mean, I'll snitch on whoever.
Speaker 1: If that means I could own a house, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people would. So Paspa was the first
Speaker 1: public figure in the West because obviously it's big news
Speaker 1: when he defects to portray Romania and kind of like
Speaker 1: a mass sense as a totalitarian hellscape significantly worse than
Speaker 1: anywhere else in communist Europe. Kind Of before this point,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of you know, Romania had had
Speaker 1: a lot of good press in like the US media
Speaker 1: and stuff, and that starts to turn around after this.
Speaker 1: And then in nineteen seventy nine, the irane and revolution,
Speaker 1: you know, becomes a thing, and that brings an end
Speaker 1: to the cheapest oil Romania had been able to buy
Speaker 1: because Chesco had a pretty good relationship with the Shaw.
Speaker 1: Then you would get the Iran Iraq War, which ratchets
Speaker 1: up the price of oil more and that makes stuff
Speaker 1: more difficult for Chochesco and for everybody. Inflation is increasing
Speaker 1: across the world at this point, but it's particularly devastating
Speaker 1: to Romania because they've been taking on all of this
Speaker 1: debt in order to build these ridiculous things that Chochesko
Speaker 1: wants to create. And as you get this kind of
Speaker 1: we all heard the term stagflation, you know, right as
Speaker 1: that starts to really hit, Romania's creditors start calling in
Speaker 1: their debts. And I'm going to quote from a book
Speaker 1: by the Charles River editors here. As Western banks increased
Speaker 1: their own interest rates, in turn, the debt repayments became
Speaker 1: ever harder to service for many governments. At the start
Speaker 1: of the nineteen eighties, many developing countries struggled to pay
Speaker 1: the interest on their debt, leading to an era often
Speaker 1: referred to as the debt crisis. For its part, Romania
Speaker 1: had half a billion dollars worth of debt in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, and that had risen to ten point four
Speaker 1: billion by nineteen eight two, equivalent to twenty eight scent
Speaker 1: of its GDP. In nineteen eighty one, just the interest
Speaker 1: payments alone accounted for three billion dollars. As a result,
Speaker 1: Romania applied for an I m F loan of some
Speaker 1: one point three billion, only for the I m F
Speaker 1: Board to reneg on it. As Misha Glennie has pointed out,
Speaker 1: clearly the Western economic institutions had little faith in the
Speaker 1: reliability of Choko's regime to honor its commitments. As a result,
Speaker 1: the Romanian economy suddenly found itself in deep trouble. By
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, was forced to cut spending and redirect
Speaker 1: foreign currency towards interest repayments. After nineteen eighty two through
Speaker 1: most of the Romanian budget into paying down the debt.
Speaker 1: So you've got two things going on here. One is
Speaker 1: that Romania has this crippling debt to pay off, and
Speaker 1: the other is that Chochesco gets angry at the I
Speaker 1: m F over the fact that they're not willing to
Speaker 1: give him the kind of deal he wants, and despite
Speaker 1: his creditors, he decides to make Romania totally independent from
Speaker 1: the global economy. And obviously, you know it's gonna go
Speaker 1: great for everybody. You know, the I m F is
Speaker 1: also a bad guy in this, because it was very
Speaker 1: obvious to anyone paying attention that Romania was not going
Speaker 1: to be able to handle the kind of debt that
Speaker 1: they were taking on. Um, that these were really bad investments.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, so there's a lot that's sucked up here.
Speaker 1: But well, well we will we will in this case
Speaker 1: put most of the blame on Chesscu. Um, I mean
Speaker 1: just the blame kind of goes everywhere in that case,
Speaker 1: all right, Like it's yeah, it's like, yeah, it's I mean,
Speaker 1: debt happens we live. When I heard the number, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh that is cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a lot more money for them. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that is like a rounding error. Now it
Speaker 1: is funny that like Elon Musk could have paid off
Speaker 1: us debt with pocket change still has a quarter of Twitter.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. Um, so two things, yeah, um. In order
Speaker 1: to do this, in order to uh pay off Romania's
Speaker 1: debt and also make it independent from the global economy,
Speaker 1: Chesscu had to radically reorganized Romanian society. Uh. He exactly.
Speaker 1: He acceler rated his plans to force citizens out of
Speaker 1: rural towns they lived in for generations. And one of
Speaker 1: the ways in which he accelerated it was by dynamiting
Speaker 1: the villages they've lived in, um and pushing everyone to
Speaker 1: labor in cities to pay down the debt by the winter.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. And yeah, it's it's it's very fucked up.
Speaker 1: Like one of the things they're doing is in order
Speaker 1: to like force people out of these villages because they
Speaker 1: actually dynamiting was more of a euphemism because they don't
Speaker 1: want to spend that much money on dynamite because he's
Speaker 1: not wildly coyote. Yeah, they will. He will have his
Speaker 1: security Todd guys show up and be like, everyone has
Speaker 1: to leave. You have forty eight hours. And then when
Speaker 1: they start, you know, getting ready to leave, he'll be like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't trust you not to come back to this village,
Speaker 1: So while we stand here with guns, you have to
Speaker 1: destroy your homesick access and ship. Um that's something interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that to create a regular populacet that's not going to
Speaker 1: want to kill you real bad later. Yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: it's not gonna make anybody the angriest to have ever been. Um.
Speaker 1: So by the Winner of seven, things were so bad
Speaker 1: that gas consumption Bucharest was locked in about two hours
Speaker 1: a day. Um, you could again, you would get like
Speaker 1: two hours a day where the gas was on, so
Speaker 1: you could like heat your house and hopefully like close
Speaker 1: up the windows so that as much of it would
Speaker 1: remain as possible. Because this oil rich nation is trying
Speaker 1: to export all of the gas that it can in
Speaker 1: order to get foreign currency. Cheski declared that the temperature,
Speaker 1: like if it was warmer outside than ten degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: it was illegal to burn fuel at all or to
Speaker 1: heat your house at all, and if you disobeyed, you
Speaker 1: would be prosecuted. He attempted to reduce He like set
Speaker 1: up this plan where he was like, the average Romanian
Speaker 1: only needs an x number of calories per day, So
Speaker 1: I'm going to start reducing everybody's food intake so you
Speaker 1: don't get fat. Um. But but people weren't fat, like
Speaker 1: not that that would make it okay. Like people were
Speaker 1: already tightening their belts, and he was like, actually, you
Speaker 1: guys need a lot less food than you think. You
Speaker 1: can starve more. Yeah, you can starve more. So he
Speaker 1: dropped It was like fifteen percent across the board. He
Speaker 1: like made a technical plan to reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: calories that people got to eat. Um. And while all
Speaker 1: this is happening, obviously Nikolai and Elina are living in palaces,
Speaker 1: they're eating whatever they want they want, and this this
Speaker 1: also makes people angry. Esko, in order to keep things
Speaker 1: clamped down, had to ramp up domestic repression to fully
Speaker 1: unhinged levels before Pacifa affected nearly all Romanians working overseas
Speaker 1: had some ties to the securitat. You had to be
Speaker 1: you know, at least be passing them a little bit
Speaker 1: of info in order to be allowed to leave. But
Speaker 1: once Passifa betrayed, Nikolai. Nikolai makes overseas travel effectively illegal,
Speaker 1: like it basically becomes a crime as a Romanian to
Speaker 1: have contact with people outside the country. Um Romanians. So
Speaker 1: he for most of the nineteen eighties he's locked the
Speaker 1: country all in together, like he's he's barred the doors
Speaker 1: and forced everybody to stay inside with each other. Um.
Speaker 1: And the next thing he does after that is he
Speaker 1: makes it illegal to own or operate a typewriter because
Speaker 1: he's angry that people are writing things Florida. Yeah, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: some strong de Santa's energy there. So since nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: abortion had been banned um again like Florida, and as
Speaker 1: conditions eroded through the nineteen eighties, Romania was racked with
Speaker 1: several problems. For one thing, huge numbers of women were
Speaker 1: attempting to self induce abortions to avoid the expense of
Speaker 1: a new child. And again, as as we said earlier,
Speaker 1: between ten and twenty thousand, women in Romania died due
Speaker 1: to bots botched abortions during chiscus time in power. But
Speaker 1: for another thing, this his policy of making it illegal
Speaker 1: to use contraception does massively increase the Romanian population of
Speaker 1: orphans because a huge number of moms had died and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they'd left kids without moms, and a lot
Speaker 1: of those moms were single moms um And in addition
Speaker 1: to that, a huge number of families just had kids
Speaker 1: that they couldn't afford to feed because Chesko is cutting
Speaker 1: the calories people have access to. So you have this
Speaker 1: large number of people who like little kids who can't
Speaker 1: be taken care of or who have no one to
Speaker 1: take care of them. And you're also cutting the standards
Speaker 1: of medical care. You're bulldozing hospitals for your palace. You
Speaker 1: have more kids who are born with serious health problems
Speaker 1: that their parents can't afford to treat. And the way
Speaker 1: this all ends up is that by nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: there are a hundred and four thousand orphaned children that
Speaker 1: are institutionalized in Romanian government facilities. Now for some context
Speaker 1: on how many kids that is in Poland, which is
Speaker 1: very close to Romania, Poland has doubled the population of Romania.
Speaker 1: They have a third as many orphaned children in institutions
Speaker 1: like that is an incredibly high rate. That that led
Speaker 1: to a massive adoption push, didn't it. Yes, there's a
Speaker 1: number of things this leads to. That is what we
Speaker 1: are talking about. So I didn't mean to jump ahead
Speaker 1: with yeah, yeah, yeah, the orphans. Jeff, God, God, that's right,
Speaker 1: that's what. Well, don't do that in Romania term. But
Speaker 1: you know, um so throughout Czechiscuse reign, there's hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of kids who wind up raised in these government
Speaker 1: facilities with no family, and as a result of that,
Speaker 1: it kind of behooves us to look at how these
Speaker 1: these government institutions were run. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: an article in The Guardian here. Florence Noire, an investigator
Speaker 1: for the Institute who spent several years gathering testimony, estimates
Speaker 1: that between nineteen sixty six and nineteen eighty nine, there
Speaker 1: were between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand unnecessary deaths of
Speaker 1: children in Romania's grim network of children's homes, with a
Speaker 1: vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children.
Speaker 1: The most terrific abuse took place in homes for disabled
Speaker 1: children who were taken away from their families and institutionalized
Speaker 1: at the age of three. Disabled children would be sorted
Speaker 1: by hospital commissions into three categories, so called curable, partially curable,
Speaker 1: and incurable. The children who were sorted into the third categories,
Speaker 1: some of whom had minor or no disabilities, were subjected
Speaker 1: to particularly brutal conditions. Across the country, there were twenty
Speaker 1: six institutions catering to the category three disabled children. Investigators
Speaker 1: from the Institute picked three of them to investigate and
Speaker 1: found shocking mortality levels among the children. They didn't die
Speaker 1: from the disabilities they had. Seventy of the registered deaths
Speaker 1: were for pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that
Speaker 1: were preventable and treatable, said Swar. As the investigations occurred,
Speaker 1: they discovered ever more horrific details. There is testimony of
Speaker 1: children suffering from frostbite, and of children literally being eaten
Speaker 1: by rats, being kept in cages, or being smeared in
Speaker 1: their own feces. The investigators logged seven hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: one deaths they believed could have been prevented in three
Speaker 1: facilities in the late nineteen eighties, suggesting the number across
Speaker 1: all twenty six institutions over a longer period is much higher.
Speaker 1: There's no document that proves this, but it is clear
Speaker 1: that the ultimate goal of this was an extermination campaign,
Speaker 1: says Swaar. So it's not a feel good story. It's
Speaker 1: not a field. Yeah, extermination campaigns rarely are a feel
Speaker 1: good story. Yeah. That whole thing with the babies and
Speaker 1: the rats, that's that's some would say. Some would say
Speaker 1: that's negative information you're delivering. Yeah, it's not like it's
Speaker 1: not like good to lock babies in dark rooms without
Speaker 1: any adults until they're eaten by rats. It's like a
Speaker 1: bad thing. I think. I think we're able to take
Speaker 1: that stance, Sophie. Is that going to get us in
Speaker 1: trouble with the advertisers? I don't really care. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully this show is not being advertised by Romanian orphanages
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties Romanian rat feed emporium. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if so, we're going to be in some trouble. But yeah,
Speaker 1: keep the baby's coming. Um. Yeah, and why don't you
Speaker 1: keep the money coming to our sponsors? Ah? What a
Speaker 1: good time that money came baby. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1: I I I'm happy that we're we're getting paid by
Speaker 1: the by that great product. Exactly, exactly good stuff. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking about Chowchescu's orphan extermination facilities. Yeah, yeah, good times.
Speaker 1: And I found a New York Times. Yeah, very very Cholley,
Speaker 1: very cholle Um. I found a New York Times article
Speaker 1: written after he was deposed, but like in kind of
Speaker 1: the awkward period afterwards, when everyone's dealing with the the
Speaker 1: consequences of all of his ship, and it provides additional context.
Speaker 1: The children are left as they and this is the
Speaker 1: way the facilities kind of still were in the early nineties.
Speaker 1: The children are left as they were during the Chochescu
Speaker 1: era prisoners in their cribs, Romanian orphans that is estimated
Speaker 1: received five to six minutes of attention a day. Attendant
Speaker 1: still lull in the corridor, smoking and drinking coffee, leaving
Speaker 1: the children to rock in their cots. As a result
Speaker 1: of their troubled early lives. One in tent of the
Speaker 1: children we will finish life in a psychiatric institution and
Speaker 1: all will suffer severe trauma. Doctors without Borders said, and
Speaker 1: it's Farewell report. That's a pretty blank yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: Farewell report. It's the most ominous line there, and it's
Speaker 1: we we got a bounce. We can't fix this, man,
Speaker 1: this is fucked up. We'll see you guys in Hell Apparent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: good luck Romania. Um, but it gets worse, Jeff, because
Speaker 1: you know what, how could you make this worse? How?
Speaker 1: How could you make this story worse? I'll tell you
Speaker 1: how you can make this story worse because it's the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties and it's the HIV virus. Well, you don't
Speaker 1: have you don't have equipped for that one. Oh? I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, I have plenty, but I don't feel like
Speaker 1: hearing the comments about that. Yeah that's probably recently. I
Speaker 1: don't feel like having my good joke be destroyed by
Speaker 1: commentersh yeah. Well, we're also going to talk about racism,
Speaker 1: so that yeah, okay, good. So we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: the treatment of the czeches, SCOO regime of the Roma
Speaker 1: and how it relates to all this. So in Romania,
Speaker 1: the Roman people are the largest single minority group in
Speaker 1: the country. They're about ten to twelve percent of the population.
Speaker 1: So question, now, when you say Roma, is that Romani. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: the Romany. Okay, so that's the same thing, okay, yes, yes, Um,
Speaker 1: well yeah, we'll use Romani because that might make it well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's Romani Roma Romania, all of
Speaker 1: the it's going to be a little bit u cumbersome
Speaker 1: no matter how we we write it. So it's it's all.
Speaker 1: It is what it is. It is what it is.
Speaker 1: So while the Roma had lived traditionally on the move
Speaker 1: kind of up until the modern period, although there's like
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens prior to kind of
Speaker 1: the more democratic forms of government in Romania, like up
Speaker 1: until like the late eighteen fifties, is it's super common
Speaker 1: for Roman people to just be enslaved by the state,
Speaker 1: like there's a there's a nasty obviously it's Roma and
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe. The history is going to be unpleasant and oppressive. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's going to be good. They're treated the
Speaker 1: way Europe also treated like choos. Yeah yeah, and right up,
Speaker 1: like if they were like kind of hippies, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's the way they were treated and they're not. They're
Speaker 1: not going to have a good history in your No, no,
Speaker 1: it's going to be rough and in fact, as you said,
Speaker 1: they are treated in a lot of ways the way
Speaker 1: that Jewish populations are, so they are subject to a
Speaker 1: lot of the same kinds of programs, and they are
Speaker 1: victims of the Holocaust as well. It's all across Europe,
Speaker 1: but it's particularly true in Romania because there's a lot
Speaker 1: more Roma in Romania. UM. So you know, when they
Speaker 1: were not being enslaved or massacre, the Roma for most
Speaker 1: of the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds lived the
Speaker 1: way that they kind of traditionally did, which is on
Speaker 1: the move, you know, as these kind of traveling groups
Speaker 1: of people. UM. And this continued up until communism took
Speaker 1: hold in uh In in Romania, UM, and they kind
Speaker 1: of overtime the communists kind of pushed them to find
Speaker 1: more sort of settled areas to live. This starts as
Speaker 1: them kind of building these more stable encampments on the
Speaker 1: outskirts of major cities. UM. But they're often still kind
Speaker 1: of like living in tents or these kind of like
Speaker 1: shanty type buildings they put together. And this is kind
Speaker 1: of like I know, probably broadly good that they have
Speaker 1: the option more often for for for quality homes. During
Speaker 1: this period that's one of the achievements of the early
Speaker 1: communist state. As we'll talk about. There some problematic aspects
Speaker 1: to that too, um, but things do get a lot
Speaker 1: better for them in the early years of communism. One
Speaker 1: of the reasons why is that most Roman people in
Speaker 1: Romania in this period are poor. They don't have any property, um,
Speaker 1: and they often do not have access did not have
Speaker 1: access to education. And in George you Day's Romania, those
Speaker 1: are all qualifications, right, those that makes you a good proletarian, right, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you don't have any money, and you didn't go to
Speaker 1: a fancy school, like yeah, you can have jobs from
Speaker 1: the Communist party like that, you are exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of people that we want to see. Yeah, hell yeah,
Speaker 1: come on in. And a number of towns in this
Speaker 1: period they get that is literally how George you Day
Speaker 1: handles a lot of stuff um. And a number of
Speaker 1: towns in this period they get Roman mayors um, which
Speaker 1: had been basically unheard of before this time. UM. And
Speaker 1: Roma people become commonly well represented as like local Communist
Speaker 1: Party quadra leaders and as low level functionaries like there's
Speaker 1: actually a really positive early period for the Roma in
Speaker 1: communism where yeah, they're integrated into the power structure a
Speaker 1: little bit, not never at the high levels, but at
Speaker 1: kind of the lower levels of it um. But even
Speaker 1: during this kind of positive period, there are some early
Speaker 1: troubling signs. One of them is at the Communist Party
Speaker 1: pretty much immediately stops counting or listing the Roma as
Speaker 1: a separate population within within the country. Now, again, if
Speaker 1: you have just lived through the Holocaust, the fact that
Speaker 1: the government is no longer counting you, you might be like, well,
Speaker 1: this we this might work out. Okay, it's not great
Speaker 1: when they're counting us. They usually don't do that for
Speaker 1: a good reason. I'd rather not have somebody with a clipboard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: looking at how many of us there are and where clipboard?
Speaker 1: Real quick? Yeah, it would be reasonable to feel good
Speaker 1: about this. But what it kind of meant in this
Speaker 1: case is that the Communist Party, obviously they don't want
Speaker 1: to do a physical genocide, but they don't want the
Speaker 1: Roma to exist as a distinct group within society. They
Speaker 1: want to kind of erase them as a culture in
Speaker 1: the process of integrating them into mass society um, which
Speaker 1: is a thing they do not just do to the Roman.
Speaker 1: That does not just occur in communist Romania. But it's
Speaker 1: it's a thing. Um. It happens in a lot of places.
Speaker 1: It happens in many places, but we're talking about Romania.
Speaker 1: So under Chowchescu's systematization is the process by which they
Speaker 1: are bulldozing these um these rural towns and forcing people
Speaker 1: into the cities. And another thing they do during this
Speaker 1: is they bulldoze these Roman neighborhoods um and the people. Obviously,
Speaker 1: they're not just like making them homeless. Nobody is homeless
Speaker 1: in Chowchescu's Romania. They're moving them into these new and
Speaker 1: more modern developments. And in some ways this is positive
Speaker 1: because the homes that they had lived in previously were
Speaker 1: not of good quality and we're often like somewhat dangerous,
Speaker 1: and the homes they move into are are much better
Speaker 1: quality and much safer. But when the government is moving them,
Speaker 1: it isn't keeping these communities together. They're not like splitting
Speaker 1: up like individual families, but they're not keeping these groups
Speaker 1: that had traveled and lived together for generations together, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of a soft ethnic cleansing. There's debate about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the balance of what I'm reading suggests it's
Speaker 1: more accidental or just a byproduct of the way the
Speaker 1: Communists felt about every group in the country. But there
Speaker 1: are allegations, and there's reason to believe them that that
Speaker 1: a significant amount of this was intentional because they also
Speaker 1: just saw it as potentially dangerous to have these people
Speaker 1: as a separate community. I'm not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: give you like. Again, a lot of stuff is is
Speaker 1: debated about this. Still, you are right that there are
Speaker 1: benefits to having like a wall. Yes, yes, yes, this
Speaker 1: is not all negative. It's like, but it's it also
Speaker 1: you are they this is one of the things that's
Speaker 1: occurring here is kind of the destruction of the community
Speaker 1: that had existed previously. UM. Still, given how things had
Speaker 1: gone prior to the eighties, it could be argued that
Speaker 1: the situation for Roma in Romania was in most ways
Speaker 1: better than it had been for the last couple of
Speaker 1: centuries in the area. But then, as we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: the economy and Romania collapses and Chicheski forces his vaunted
Speaker 1: austerity measures on the populace. Now, the Roma had always
Speaker 1: had larger families than most other people in Romania. UM.
Speaker 1: But prior to Chaocheski, Roma women had utilized pretty frequently
Speaker 1: legal and safe abortions to aid in family planning. Um
Speaker 1: with abortion now illegal, families had more children than they
Speaker 1: could afford to feed or take care of. Under Chichesko's
Speaker 1: new regime, and so Roma families were forced to send
Speaker 1: their children to state orphanages at the highest rates in
Speaker 1: the country. And I'm gonna quote from an article in
Speaker 1: the Open Society Foundation here. The results were a high
Speaker 1: level of poverty and an increase and unwanted children. Romanian families,
Speaker 1: which were already traditionally larged, also increased in size at
Speaker 1: this time because even though birth control had never been
Speaker 1: widely accepted, abortions were common among the Roma. Children of
Speaker 1: all ethnicities were now being dropped off at railway stations
Speaker 1: and churches, causing the population and orphanages to swell to
Speaker 1: an unmanageable number. State institutions were forced to deal with
Speaker 1: slash budgets. Hospitals resorted to reusing needles and other materials
Speaker 1: that could be rinsed or quickly sterilized. Blood, however, was
Speaker 1: in large supply because donors were paid a small fee,
Speaker 1: so when the orphanage pantries were down to just powdered milk.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a good idea to give the smallest
Speaker 1: and weakest children whole blood transfusions under the theory that
Speaker 1: new blood would have more nutrients for their bodies to use. Now,
Speaker 1: can you see how this could go vampires? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it is a little okay, it's a little vampire e.
Speaker 1: That's a little a little too on the nose as
Speaker 1: far as your region is concerned. Yeah, it is a
Speaker 1: bit of a thing. But can you see how maybe
Speaker 1: giving sickly orphan children blood transfusions in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: could be a serious problem. They should have gotten like
Speaker 1: power lift or blood. Yeah, they probably shouldn't have gotten
Speaker 1: much blood in the eighties because again the AIDS crisis
Speaker 1: is hidden. Um So there's a horrible health crisis as
Speaker 1: a result of this. In Yeah, um so, only about
Speaker 1: twenty of the blood being donated in Romania is tested
Speaker 1: for disease in nineteen because again budget cuts and the
Speaker 1: person who's in charge of all of the chemistry related
Speaker 1: things as Elena, and she doesn't really think you need
Speaker 1: to test all that much of the blood. Um well,
Speaker 1: of course she's got her her advanced degree, and yeah,
Speaker 1: she she understands blood like, yeah, it's don't tell me
Speaker 1: my job. Yeah, blood is what you drink. Yes, this blood.
Speaker 1: How do you say oil through body? So in in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight, the government reported just three cases of
Speaker 1: HIV infection to the World Health Organization UM but in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine the next year, the number swelled to
Speaker 1: twelve hundred and nearly nine percent of those were in
Speaker 1: children under four years of age. Sixty of them were
Speaker 1: kids in orphanages, and all of them had had a
Speaker 1: history of multiple trains fusions. This is the start of
Speaker 1: a children's epidemic. Forty percent increase. Yeah, it is pretty rough.
Speaker 1: And in all of these orphanages, like eight percent of
Speaker 1: the children or roma, so it is. It is primarily
Speaker 1: an AIDS crisis among forced or forcibly orphaned romani Roman children. Um.
Speaker 1: So they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Well,
Speaker 1: that is hard to do when you were wasting away
Speaker 1: from a variety of AIDS related illnesses, when you were
Speaker 1: wasting away before the AIDS. And and also you have
Speaker 1: no access to bootstraps because sold to IA. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Ikea is using them to make those horsemeat boss. Yeah,
Speaker 1: horse is horsemeat and boot robbers very good. Somewhere around
Speaker 1: eleven thousand Roman children are believed to have been infected
Speaker 1: with AIDS as a result of all this, compared with
Speaker 1: around three thousand other Romanian orphans, which gives you an
Speaker 1: idea of just how significant the scale of this was. Okay,
Speaker 1: and I just yeah, it's because they made the plan
Speaker 1: to just instead of like feeding these kids properly, to
Speaker 1: just give them bonus blood. Give them bonus blood. It's
Speaker 1: such a weird way that a large group of people
Speaker 1: is getting HIV or or or full blown AIDS in
Speaker 1: the case, because it's just like they're like, there's this
Speaker 1: thing that nobody should ever be doing anyways, and see
Speaker 1: how it goes in the middle of one of the
Speaker 1: greatest epidemics in all of him in history. If AIDS
Speaker 1: had never happened, and there was just the anecdote in
Speaker 1: here that they were feeding orphans blood because there wasn't
Speaker 1: enough food, that would still be one of the worst
Speaker 1: things I've ever read. It would be fucking weird. Is
Speaker 1: what like, like this fucking weird what you do the
Speaker 1: whole country? You don't need to do this, Yeah, why
Speaker 1: are you giving why are you feeding their baby bodies
Speaker 1: blood you feel freaks, you monsters like, yeah, but it
Speaker 1: was also AIDS blood. Yeah, that went from weird to
Speaker 1: like fully sinister. And here's here's may The one of
Speaker 1: the bleak is obviously a huge number of these children
Speaker 1: who get infect in the late eighties die fairly quickly
Speaker 1: from it because there's very little in the way of
Speaker 1: treatments for AIDS. But once the country gets liberated and
Speaker 1: and sort of Western aid agencies come in in the
Speaker 1: mid nineties and there's also some more treatments available. You're
Speaker 1: better off in some ways being a Romanian orphan with
Speaker 1: AIDS than you are being a Romanian orphan without AIDS,
Speaker 1: because there's more international funding to take care of the
Speaker 1: kids with AIDS, there's better group homes for them, and
Speaker 1: they also because people start to get sympathetic to kids
Speaker 1: who get AIDS through blood transfusions in the West, you're
Speaker 1: more likely to get adopted out of the country. And
Speaker 1: so after chow Chesscoo falls, some of the luckiest orphans
Speaker 1: are the AIDS orphans, which is there's an asterisk citation
Speaker 1: needed real. Yeah, it's just like one of those things
Speaker 1: where like for an example of how bleak. This is
Speaker 1: some kids were better off because they got aids in
Speaker 1: Roman and orphanages. Like that is how bad the fucking
Speaker 1: situation was. That's like, that's like winning the lottery at
Speaker 1: the asbestos factory. Yeah, and and the lottery prizes all
Speaker 1: all of the leftover asbestos cigarettes. Um god, I could
Speaker 1: go for an asbestos cigarette. It's just the normal ones
Speaker 1: hurt my throat so much. You need a better filter,
Speaker 1: you know. That's what everyone says about asbestos. I really
Speaker 1: if we if we had the asbestos crisis today, I
Speaker 1: think with the way culture wars go in this country,
Speaker 1: we would get rid of a lot of problem voters
Speaker 1: very quickly. Yeah, it would be called mesotheliorida at this time.
Speaker 1: That's that's eighty percent of a T shirt idea. Jeff's yeah,
Speaker 1: there is that that. You know what, That's fine, send
Speaker 1: me money. Everybody, print it, print it. So as the
Speaker 1: eighties dragged do a close. The whole Warsaw Pact is
Speaker 1: enduring shortages of basic goods and political arrests. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you all remember from like middle school or high school,
Speaker 1: you know, Glass nost In pairs Stroika and the USSR
Speaker 1: and Grbachov which are these These policies meant to kind
Speaker 1: of open up the Soviet Union and relax it from
Speaker 1: some hardline positions. Um. This is obviously praised in the West.
Speaker 1: People are like, yeah, Glass nost In player Stroika, we're
Speaker 1: not quite as close to nuking each other as we
Speaker 1: used to be. But Chowchesku hates again, you never stops
Speaker 1: being kind of a hardline Stalinist, and he publicly mocks
Speaker 1: Glass nost In per Stroika, warning that easy to do
Speaker 1: from your palace, by the way, Yeah, yeah, exactly. When
Speaker 1: you have a palace, it's very easy to attack these ideas.
Speaker 1: If I had a palace, I would talk so much ship.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I would never not be talking shit.
Speaker 1: The only time I wouldn't be talking ship is when
Speaker 1: I am pouring boiling oil on the poor people gathered
Speaker 1: below the parapets of my castle. Are you I would
Speaker 1: be like, who's who's running? That's gonna keep me in
Speaker 1: the palace. I'm gonna vote for them, Yeah exactly. That
Speaker 1: is how people with palaces didn't to vote hence most
Speaker 1: of the history of Europe. Um, So the USSR is
Speaker 1: doing this stuff, and and Chescu publicly mocks these new
Speaker 1: policies and and Gorbachev he announced that similar reforms would
Speaker 1: only come to Romania when pairs grew from apple trees.
Speaker 1: Now that's a weird thing to say, and I think
Speaker 1: a bunch of students in Bucharest felt the same way,
Speaker 1: because a group of theater kids get so incensed by
Speaker 1: this that they gather as many pairs as they could.
Speaker 1: And again, they're all hungry, so the fact that they're
Speaker 1: using pairs for a protest is meaningful, and they hang
Speaker 1: the they hang pairs from just trees in the capital
Speaker 1: and mass as a sign of protest to be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you said, you said we'd get changed when there's pairs
Speaker 1: growing from the tree, so we'll just make that happen. Um.
Speaker 1: This does not go well with Chowchescu. He he takes this,
Speaker 1: he takes offense at this. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: a writer an article in the Los Angeles Times. The
Speaker 1: taughts so infuriated Chessco that he ordered his security taught
Speaker 1: secret police to identify the perpetrators and attack the students
Speaker 1: in their dormatory bories, killing many of them. Other students
Speaker 1: took to the university square were more than a hundred
Speaker 1: were slaughtered that night. So that's a lot for a
Speaker 1: college prank. Yeah, I mean I've seen worse, but m
Speaker 1: hm yeah, not by much. Not not by much. It's
Speaker 1: it's enough that you would have trouble making a good
Speaker 1: John Landis movie about it. So, Jeff May, yeah, I've
Speaker 1: heard of him. Yeah, well you know what I've heard of, Jeff.
Speaker 1: I would love to know the things that you've heard of,
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast. In fact,
Speaker 1: the only thing I hear is them. When I closed
Speaker 1: my eyes at night, when I when I put on
Speaker 1: my noise canceling here headphones, all I hear is the
Speaker 1: repeated sounds of the ads for this podcast. And now
Speaker 1: you can have a piece of my eternal waking hell
Speaker 1: for yourself right now. Ah, oh my god. That's such
Speaker 1: as effect right there, I'm going to be closing my
Speaker 1: eyes and seeing these commercials in my head. That's how
Speaker 1: I live every day of my life, Jeff, I never
Speaker 1: get to escape. But honestly, that's just called living in America, Baby,
Speaker 1: Living in America. That was pretty good for baby. Pretty
Speaker 1: good song, Yeah, not great, pretty good. So it's a
Speaker 1: passable song, Yeah, passable song. Acceptable song, much like my
Speaker 1: collaboration with Destiny's Child. So if you can we play
Speaker 1: that again, getting a nail from selfie getting a wow. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess that's Sophie's choice. Uh. Good times. So speaking
Speaker 1: of good times's good times are nearing an end by
Speaker 1: the process by which was forcing villagers out of their
Speaker 1: homes and into massive housing developments was not popular. People
Speaker 1: do not like being forced out of their homes. Actually, Jeff,
Speaker 1: this is this is a thing that a lot of
Speaker 1: folks don't know about. People. Um. In nineteen eighties seven,
Speaker 1: he announced that half of Romania's remaining thirteen thousand villages
Speaker 1: were going to be bulldozed and people were given forty
Speaker 1: eight hours to move. So half of the people who
Speaker 1: live in the country, you all have to leave your homes,
Speaker 1: right the funk? Now? Um? Now, this is very unpopular
Speaker 1: and it contributes to the protest movement against him. And
Speaker 1: while this is also happening internationally, his luck is running out.
Speaker 1: Because I don't know if you know about this, because
Speaker 1: Gorbachev became a Pizza Hut spokesman and then kind of
Speaker 1: a laughing stock and then shipped with Russia. Didn't go
Speaker 1: so great. Uh, In the post Soviet Union period either,
Speaker 1: but back in during this period in the late eighties
Speaker 1: when he's he's doing this glass nosest in perce Droika.
Speaker 1: He is the dandy of Western media people not getting
Speaker 1: enough of How much do you remember watching where they
Speaker 1: were like Gorby Gorby, like that, like the Simpsons episode
Speaker 1: where where dude was in Mad magazine every month. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people fucking loved this guy because he had that that
Speaker 1: the birthmarket's firstingishable and he was just he was open
Speaker 1: for all forms of it's of entertainment. He was just
Speaker 1: people liked him over here. I remember that. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: liked him. I've talked to my My parents are much
Speaker 1: more are very conservative. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: my dad said about him that did make sense to me,
Speaker 1: he's like, look, if you're growing up in the US
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties and it's this constant drumbeat of
Speaker 1: we are going to have a nuclear exchange with Russia,
Speaker 1: and then they finally have a guy who's like, now
Speaker 1: you know what, everything's gonna be cool. Like you feel
Speaker 1: good about him, you know, you feel good to your
Speaker 1: television program Funky Brewster. Yeah, everybody's feeling pretty good about this.
Speaker 1: But the fact that everyone's feeling pretty good about Gorbachev
Speaker 1: means that what's the use of right, his whole value
Speaker 1: was the US and the Soviet Union are mortal enemies,
Speaker 1: but here's this guy in their backyard who's willing to
Speaker 1: work with us and like be part of a communist
Speaker 1: power block. That's kind of posing sometimes Soviet policy. Now
Speaker 1: that the US and the Soviet Union are like becoming
Speaker 1: friendly with each other, he doesn't have any use to
Speaker 1: the United States. And you know what the United States does.
Speaker 1: Two countries that we no longer have a use to,
Speaker 1: we continue to support them. Yeah, we Yeah, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happens. We support them like we support all of
Speaker 1: our good friends that we no longer have a vested
Speaker 1: financial interest in. Um ask I don't know roughly half
Speaker 1: of the country's on Earth. How that works for them.
Speaker 1: Usually when that happens, we just throw Coca Cola in
Speaker 1: there to take care of the rest um. Nikolai's health
Speaker 1: begins to decline during this period too. He's he's not
Speaker 1: doing very well. Um He's less able to kind of
Speaker 1: manage his own affairs, and Elena starts taking a more
Speaker 1: and a more active role in governing, eventually becoming something
Speaker 1: akin to the Regent of Romania. She creates a second
Speaker 1: shadow pullit bureau of her own to review all proposals
Speaker 1: before they're brought to her husband Um, and she starts
Speaker 1: spending huge amounts of state resources exp banning the personality
Speaker 1: culed around both of them. From an article by the
Speaker 1: Romanian Cultural Institute quote, the birthdays of the Chaochescus represented
Speaker 1: occasions for pompous ceremonies when the two geniuses were showered
Speaker 1: with the numerable gifts. The range of accolades was extremely wide,
Speaker 1: grandiose manifestations on stadiums which involved tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: a never ending stream of messages of gratitude, works of
Speaker 1: prose and poetry written especially for the occasion, celebratory editions
Speaker 1: of the national festival, the praise of Romania, hymns, odes, songs, dances,
Speaker 1: paintings and sculptures produced by armies of artists. The zealots
Speaker 1: of the personality cult placed the dictator among the authentically
Speaker 1: great figures of Romanian history. Thus, Chowchescu shortly evolved from
Speaker 1: being just a hero to a hero among heroes, to
Speaker 1: being the nation's hero, to being the most important hero
Speaker 1: of the nation's heroes. Painted portraits counted among the most
Speaker 1: frequent and appreciated gifts offered to Nikolai Chauchescu and his wife.
Speaker 1: The party organizations would commission various artists to create them.
Speaker 1: Depending on the budget, the artist was a household name
Speaker 1: or a lesser known an artisan. The request could be
Speaker 1: for a painting in which Czechesko is pictured as a
Speaker 1: defender of the piece, friend and mentor to all Romanians,
Speaker 1: heir to the great forerunners and millennial ideals, the creator
Speaker 1: of the multilaterally developed socialist society. Other paintings would highlight
Speaker 1: the great scientific achievements of his poorly educated spouse, depicted
Speaker 1: as a member of the Romanian Academy and a PhD
Speaker 1: in engineering with international scientific contributions. And she gets like
Speaker 1: a British fancy British university gives her an honorary degree
Speaker 1: because they get like strong armed into it. It's very funny.
Speaker 1: You don't want to You don't want to be the
Speaker 1: one that hands in a subpar painting. No imagine if
Speaker 1: you show up and you're just like, I've worked really
Speaker 1: hard on this, and that I did not like the
Speaker 1: way my art well, it's very funny too, because if
Speaker 1: you look at these, I'm actually gonna share screens so
Speaker 1: you can see one of these fucking portraits. Um. Choochesco
Speaker 1: is usually portrayed kind of close to how he looks like.
Speaker 1: It's slightly idealized, obviously, as as they always are. Um,
Speaker 1: it's slightly ideal eyes, but he just kind of looks
Speaker 1: like himself, you know, his hair and his face shape
Speaker 1: is the same. He looks about the age that he is,
Speaker 1: kind of middle aged. Elena is almost exclusively portrayed in
Speaker 1: portraits as like a girl in her twenties. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: here checked this one out. Um, oh yeah, wow, it's
Speaker 1: it's sort of like it looks like his child bride.
Speaker 1: She looks so young and that, Yeah, it is. It
Speaker 1: is unsettling when like, Yeahku can be a man in
Speaker 1: his sixties, but we gotta make his wife look twenty five. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's uh, that's the kind of you know
Speaker 1: art that that they would apparently made them happy. Um,
Speaker 1: it did not actually make the people who lived in
Speaker 1: Romania happy, and they protested against the cult of personality,
Speaker 1: against the constant austerity, and against most like kind of
Speaker 1: the last big thing people protest is this forced push
Speaker 1: to destroy half the villages in the country and make
Speaker 1: people move to the cities. And one of the people
Speaker 1: who protest, people are just going to complain about any thing,
Speaker 1: aren't they. I know, I know, it's it's unreasonable. Um
Speaker 1: do you have the snow flakes? Sophie and I have
Speaker 1: the same problem with our employees at cool Zone. They
Speaker 1: hate it when we forced them to leave their homes
Speaker 1: and destroy them with pick axes in order to move
Speaker 1: to insular apartment blocks in the cities that they can
Speaker 1: work in our factories making low quality televisions. We just
Speaker 1: don't understand why they're playing so much. Garrison just does
Speaker 1: not stop with it anyway, endless. So one of the
Speaker 1: people who protests in Romania is a traveling and tenerant
Speaker 1: preacher named Laslow Tokes. Laslow refused to leave his home
Speaker 1: when he was evicted, you know, basically this village he's in,
Speaker 1: Timissoura Cichesko is like, you gotta get the funk out,
Speaker 1: I'm going to destroy it. Everybody's moving to the city,
Speaker 1: and Tokes is like the fuck. Also, it is spelled
Speaker 1: Laslow Tokes, as in if he was like a pot icon.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool name. Actually,
Speaker 1: today he would have a podcast called Laslow Tokes where
Speaker 1: he where he reviews different Romanian strains. Um, he would
Speaker 1: be super big on the Joe Rogan Hour four Hours. Um.
Speaker 1: So he actually is a very cool guy. Um. He's
Speaker 1: so he's he's like, fuck you, I'm not leaving my home,
Speaker 1: and soldiers and police bear down on the town of
Speaker 1: tim Asura. Because he starts getting like attention from people,
Speaker 1: this movement forms around him, and he's like, you know,
Speaker 1: when all the cops show up, he's like, don't get
Speaker 1: arrested for me. You should go home. And all of
Speaker 1: the people who have gathered are like, you know what, No,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna abandon you to get arrested by the police.
Speaker 1: Fuck these guys, we have to take a stand at
Speaker 1: some point. And they do, and so the security forces
Speaker 1: firewater cannons into the crowd. Um that disperses most of
Speaker 1: the people and they're able to rush in and grab
Speaker 1: Laslow and they beat him half to death and they
Speaker 1: drag him out of his home. Now, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing we talked about that peasants uprising when
Speaker 1: that dude got hit in the face with a fucking rock.
Speaker 1: This short sort of ship again had happened all over
Speaker 1: Romania to a bunch of people for years, but this
Speaker 1: time and the way that these things happened, it ignited
Speaker 1: something uncontrollable. Protests erupt in response to the beating of Laslow,
Speaker 1: and they erupt in Timisoura, and then they spread to
Speaker 1: the surrounding areas, and in very short order it becomes
Speaker 1: clear the securitt does not have the manpower to repress this.
Speaker 1: And you know, initially, yeah, boy, they sure don't do.
Speaker 1: Every secret police not Yeah, they that is the case
Speaker 1: always with the secret Republican Guard do in Iraq. Yeah, great,
Speaker 1: that's why Saddam Hussein is enjoying his like ninety birthday.
Speaker 1: Uh this was, by the way, shout out to friends
Speaker 1: of the pods. Saddam um any I don't know what
Speaker 1: to take that king. Yeah, So the Securitat gets overwhelmed
Speaker 1: very quickly. Chesco and Alina at first they don't kind
Speaker 1: of recognize how serious the situation is, and then they're like, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you just start killing people, Just start firing
Speaker 1: into crowds, and the securitat is like we have been
Speaker 1: doing that the entire time, and it is not working
Speaker 1: that people. It's like trying to take a bucket at
Speaker 1: the beach, trying to throw the water back in. Well,
Speaker 1: we have problems, we have we are shooting into crowds,
Speaker 1: but people have no fear of death because you have
Speaker 1: mismanaged country so grievously. Are you aware of events? Technic? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it turns out thousands of orphans with AIDS. He's more
Speaker 1: frightening than our bullets. We are. Um, the military, who
Speaker 1: had the ability, presumably to have put down this uprising
Speaker 1: are also just kind of do the thing that often
Speaker 1: happens with militaries. Were like enough of them are like, well,
Speaker 1: for one thing, I don't want to murder my own
Speaker 1: family members, And for another thing, this doesn't look good.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we want to like back up
Speaker 1: the securit toad. Guys, maybe we sit this. Obviously there's
Speaker 1: places where the military cracks down, but there's enough places
Speaker 1: where the military is like, we're just gonna wait this
Speaker 1: one out that the movement is able to really gain steam. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a little yeah, I mean, and it's
Speaker 1: obviously like the military. As with in Germany, the military
Speaker 1: had been complicit in some pretty horrible things. But they
Speaker 1: now that they see that, like, oh, we might have
Speaker 1: to we might not be able to put a lid
Speaker 1: back on this thing. They they they decide they have
Speaker 1: principled objections to the chow Chesscu regime um, much like
Speaker 1: the principled resistors in the Wehrmacht. UM. So Nikolai organized
Speaker 1: as a speech to be delivered from the same balcony
Speaker 1: that he'd spoken from a nineteen sixty eight You know
Speaker 1: that big that was, That was his big moment. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was a good time for him this time trying
Speaker 1: to reprise his his his big moment does not go well.
Speaker 1: As Paul Kenyon describes in Children of the Night, was
Speaker 1: one minute and seventeen seconds into his address when he
Speaker 1: heard yells from somewhere in the back. Such an intervention
Speaker 1: was unprecedented. He glanced up and stumbled over his words.
Speaker 1: Considering it is, he began losing his way. The yells
Speaker 1: became louder. Considering it is, cheers and whistles echoed around
Speaker 1: the square. Churchesco never finished his sentence. He did not
Speaker 1: have to his audience was never there for his oratory.
Speaker 1: It was a moment frozen in time and in history.
Speaker 1: Chowchesko stood with his mouth half open and his forehead
Speaker 1: creased with confusion. And you can see this moment. You
Speaker 1: can watch him realize like, oh God, I've lost control.
Speaker 1: They're not scared of me anymore, and I no longer
Speaker 1: have the power to stop them. Yeah, and he has
Speaker 1: no improv skill and he's got no ember. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: doesn't even have a tight five ready to kind of
Speaker 1: get the crowd back. I can't imagine Chowchesky like doing
Speaker 1: the Bill Hicks where he just starts rolling around on
Speaker 1: his back shouting about how everyone needs to be killed. Um,
Speaker 1: that's one way to deal with Heckler's certainly. Yeah. Cho's
Speaker 1: way of dealing with Heckler's is having his military form
Speaker 1: of ring of steel around the Capitol building and repeatedly
Speaker 1: shoot at everybody who gets close. Um, this does not
Speaker 1: work out well. And I should note the architects of
Speaker 1: that that that Heckling was not entirely organic. It was
Speaker 1: part of a protest campaign who was led by those
Speaker 1: theaters to who had had a bunch of their friends
Speaker 1: massacred for the pair thing. They took improv classes. They
Speaker 1: took improv and they knew how to heckle. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: kids know how to handle a stage experience like that,
Speaker 1: and they do it very very well. The last good
Speaker 1: thing theater kids ever did it that this is this
Speaker 1: is also the case. Um, there's a lot to say
Speaker 1: about Romanian politics and the failures theater kids had in
Speaker 1: the anyway, whatever, that's a story for another day. Cesco
Speaker 1: was effectively chased from the stage, and protests around the
Speaker 1: capitol swelled, and of course security forces get overwhelmed, and
Speaker 1: by the next day it becomes clear like we're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to hold onto the capitol building.
Speaker 1: And in fact, Nikolai and Alina barely escape a mob,
Speaker 1: Like they get into the helicopter just like seconds away
Speaker 1: from being pulled into a crowd of people who probably
Speaker 1: would not have made that a pleasant experience for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have to abandon the capital, and they like the
Speaker 1: pilot there with soon as because the pilots just like
Speaker 1: you know, some guy in the Romanian military who gets
Speaker 1: called in and he's like, wow, these protests look bad
Speaker 1: as shit. I wonder what they want before and then
Speaker 1: he winds up with the boss and his wife and
Speaker 1: no one else on the helicopter as a mob takes
Speaker 1: the capital. So this guy is like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be doing this, and he's like, I I do
Speaker 1: not want to be with these folks. This is not
Speaker 1: going to end well for me. He's like, this is
Speaker 1: either going to be very good for me very very
Speaker 1: bad for me. So he basically does the trouble with
Speaker 1: the helicopter. I gotta put you guys down, but don't worry.
Speaker 1: Once I let you out, I'll let you out near
Speaker 1: an army base and then I gotta I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: get another helicopter and I'll be right back and we'll
Speaker 1: we'll take care of you. Don't worry, guys. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a very funny story. He absolutely makes the the right
Speaker 1: calculation in the moment. So it's also very funny to
Speaker 1: notice that this is in late December in Romania. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they are. He has just leaves two old people by
Speaker 1: the side of the road and it's by so out
Speaker 1: of here. They wind up getting to a military base
Speaker 1: and are like, this will be our new capital and
Speaker 1: we will, you know, retake the country with these forces.
Speaker 1: And the military is like, we might have a note
Speaker 1: or two on that one, but why don't we lock
Speaker 1: you in an armored vehicle for a little while? Um,
Speaker 1: and and you can sleep there. Uh. And then they
Speaker 1: wake them up kind of after a little while in
Speaker 1: here um and the church excuse see that they're that
Speaker 1: like their military chief of staff is there, the guy
Speaker 1: who would help them escape in the helicopter, And they're like,
Speaker 1: oh good, you made it out too, And he's like,
Speaker 1: now you're all gonna be on you both are going
Speaker 1: to be on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide. Surprise.
Speaker 1: At that point in time, he probably was like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: like a good news and bad Yeah. The good news
Speaker 1: is I he got everyone to back off. The news
Speaker 1: is we're gonna we're gonna shoot you. We're gonna pretty bad.
Speaker 1: We're gonna we're gonna have us a show trial. And
Speaker 1: it is. It's one of those things. You can watch this.
Speaker 1: I recommend watching the footage of Choku giving that speech
Speaker 1: in realizing he has lost control of the country. I've
Speaker 1: also watched the footage of them being executed, because that's
Speaker 1: what's happened, what happens next and could not see it yeah,
Speaker 1: how could you not see it? And if you want
Speaker 1: to see a dictator and his wife who is also
Speaker 1: a dictator get gunned down, I don't know. There is
Speaker 1: an element of it that's cathartic. I certainly get why
Speaker 1: you would feel that way if you were Romanian. It's
Speaker 1: important to recognize the people doing this. I mean, the
Speaker 1: soldiers doing this are just like kids. But the the adults,
Speaker 1: like the the leadership of Romania who make the decision
Speaker 1: to give him the show trial and execute him, are
Speaker 1: not doing this for justice. They're doing this because maybe
Speaker 1: we don't get killed if we shoot boss. Right. Maybe
Speaker 1: you delivered that almost sheepishly. You're like, I need you
Speaker 1: to know these people weren't revolution reads that were behind
Speaker 1: this guy two days ago. No, they're trying not to
Speaker 1: get killed, and like, are you scared? As ship? That
Speaker 1: has to be Like that conversation absolutely happened the guys probably.
Speaker 1: He's like, why are you doing this? He's like, dude,
Speaker 1: they're gonna kill me. Do you know how angry they are?
Speaker 1: Like you're clearly getting killed. I don't know how you
Speaker 1: don't understand that I might not get killed and all
Speaker 1: I have to do is do the thing that is
Speaker 1: definitely gonna happen to even way. Yeah and on Christmas, no,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it happens Christmas day nine and they get
Speaker 1: gunned down by by their own soldiers and they were
Speaker 1: caught by like on the two right, Like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very quick, like they spend a lot of time in
Speaker 1: lock up. This is a a what we refer to
Speaker 1: in America as a quick and speedy trials. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is this is they do rommate. The new regime institutes
Speaker 1: itself by en sharing the right to a speedy trial
Speaker 1: for Nikolai more like habeas corpse. That is how this
Speaker 1: all ends, and that is the life of Chescu and Nikolai,
Speaker 1: and it is they do like, look, they absolutely deserve
Speaker 1: to be shot, and they absolutely deserve to be shot unceremoniously.
Speaker 1: That part's fine. It's just a lot of the people
Speaker 1: having them shot also probably should have been shot themselves.
Speaker 1: But hey, in't that always the case? I mean yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: some would say broadly speaking, this is about as well
Speaker 1: as a story if a dictator ever ends and Romania,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously they're in a bad position when he falls.
Speaker 1: The next decade and change are challenging, but this is
Speaker 1: one of those cases where revolution comes and the government
Speaker 1: that replaces it things get a shipload better. It is
Speaker 1: much better to be in Romania now than it wasn't
Speaker 1: under Ku in the eighties. I don't think anyone would
Speaker 1: disagree with that. I would like to add to that,
Speaker 1: like when you think about like Christmas, it's just like, oh,
Speaker 1: I got a game Boy and they're like, yeah, got
Speaker 1: we we got a dead ruler. Yeah we did have
Speaker 1: a game but the not we've boy. Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's good. Things do get a lot better.
Speaker 1: And it's like again it is we are I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna we don't have the time to talk about the
Speaker 1: last thirty years or so of Romanian history since all this,
Speaker 1: But one of the things that has increasingly happened, you know,
Speaker 1: especially after the kind of immediate chaos of the fall
Speaker 1: of the regime, is there have been an ongoing series
Speaker 1: of prosecutions against people who committed crimes, people who worked
Speaker 1: with a secure tat, people who were responsible for the
Speaker 1: repression apparatus. And I don't know, again, there's actually there's
Speaker 1: a good obviously plenty of criticisms of how that process
Speaker 1: has gone down, but if you're kind of looking at
Speaker 1: the broad history of revolutions that replace dictatorships one of
Speaker 1: the better jobs of holding people to account, which again
Speaker 1: doesn't mean perfect, but things are better a lot better
Speaker 1: in Romania. This is a this is a revolution that
Speaker 1: things get a lot better after. I would like to
Speaker 1: add to that. Um, you mentioned Laslow Tokes like he
Speaker 1: was active in politics. Yeah for a while, like that,
Speaker 1: dude was working for podcasting. Yeah, he's go we gotta
Speaker 1: get that podcast. Oh yeah, Sophie, Uh, let's reach out
Speaker 1: to Laslow Tokes and see if we can get him,
Speaker 1: get him to review marijuana for us. Sure, yeah, I
Speaker 1: bet you could be like, hey, do you want to
Speaker 1: He's seventy, He's got plenty of podcasting years left. You
Speaker 1: reach out his Wikipedia now. In two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: his wife filed for divorce and accused him of numerous
Speaker 1: affairs and absurd habits, and I kind of want to
Speaker 1: know what the habits. Sorry, he's token, baby, he's token. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's taking absurdly smokes. Yeah, that's why they call him
Speaker 1: Laslow Tokes. Uh so yeah, cool guy, um ish, Probably,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you I expected him to look a
Speaker 1: lot more widely than he shows up in photos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he looks like a dude, yep. Um, So I don't know. Um,
Speaker 1: I actually think he's pretty far right. But whatever, what
Speaker 1: what what what are you gonna do? Um? What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? It's it's funny because like when you
Speaker 1: look at it and you look at like how the
Speaker 1: Soviet Bloc collapse, and you're like, Christmas, that fits the timeline,
Speaker 1: But you look at like what the finish was and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, this is a lot different than how.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. It's it's very interesting because the collapse
Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union, for all of the things that
Speaker 1: are ugly about it, this does not happen anywhere else.
Speaker 1: And nowhere else do you have like the people overthrow
Speaker 1: the government and massacre the leader. Um, that's just like
Speaker 1: not a thing that occurs like in in the USSR
Speaker 1: and any of the other places. Um, it only happens
Speaker 1: in Romania. And that's because of the kind of piece
Speaker 1: of ship. The church. Escu was Okay, well, let's not
Speaker 1: go too far. Yeah, you're right, you're right. I don't
Speaker 1: want me to be rude about it. Offended. The Chowchesco
Speaker 1: stands in the audience, who are so sorry he didn't standards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody's perfect. Robert Chowchesco did his best. He did his
Speaker 1: chow best. Yeah that's probably good, probably, Yeah, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't you know, Yeah, sorry, sorry, he wasn't woke
Speaker 1: enough for you. Yeah, because he massacred all those people. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Cancel culture comes for the man who created history's greatest
Speaker 1: orphan in orphan crisis. Purity politics much, Yeah, geez let
Speaker 1: he who has not accidentally and or purposefully infected tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of babies with AIDS in the ages cast
Speaker 1: the first Stone. I can't believe all of these woke
Speaker 1: skulds coming out and saying they never gave eleven thousand
Speaker 1: children AIDS because they starved them, and where us and
Speaker 1: blood transfusions to try and provide them with nutrients? Well,
Speaker 1: among us hasn't partially starved an entire populace. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what Jesus said. Yeah, yeah, the Loaves and Fishes was
Speaker 1: about taking a little bit of a loaf and fish
Speaker 1: away from everybody. Yeah, exactly, a little bit less so
Speaker 1: that you can live in a palace, Yes, Christian palace,
Speaker 1: a Christian palace anyway, Um, Laslow tokes you actually sound
Speaker 1: like you're kind of a weird right winger. But if
Speaker 1: you want to do a marijuana focus podcast, hit us up. Uh,
Speaker 1: that seems like a thing our audience would like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, he seems like he get milkshake
Speaker 1: duct real fast as we It does seem like we
Speaker 1: in live for milkshake ductive a little bit. We're like,
Speaker 1: this is the real enemy of my enemy situation. And
Speaker 1: then you see that was more like the Taliban rama. Yeah. Um, yes,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. You know what I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: now that you brought up Rambo. Why did we never
Speaker 1: make Sylvester Stallone a governor? M because he wasn't a predator? Oh,
Speaker 1: you're right. Well, like, sorry, dude, that's a pre wreck.
Speaker 1: That's like the fifteenth Amendment. I'm gonna guess is that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: governors have to have been this post episode has gone on.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm well sorry, we're adding color. Yeah, why why
Speaker 1: don't you Why don't you? Why don't you plug your plug?
Speaker 1: Doubles Jeff Row, I don't even know if I want
Speaker 1: to anymore. It's it's not fun now, Um, it is
Speaker 1: fun to talk about myself. So Hey, my name is
Speaker 1: Jeff May. You can find me across social media at
Speaker 1: Hey There, Jeff Row. If you want to see me
Speaker 1: perform live if you are in California the second Friday
Speaker 1: of every month in Burbank at Blast from the Past
Speaker 1: on Magnolia, I do a show called Mint on Card,
Speaker 1: a lot of fun comedy in a toy store. If
Speaker 1: you were in New England, I will be there the
Speaker 1: twenty second of February. That's coming up real soon, folks
Speaker 1: at the Redemption Rock Brewery in Western Massachusetts that Wednesday,
Speaker 1: the twenty second. Uh if And when you want to
Speaker 1: hear more of me and podcasting, I do a great
Speaker 1: show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, which you can get
Speaker 1: for free everywhere or at patreon dot com slash Jeff May.
Speaker 1: That's seven letters, and you can get early access to
Speaker 1: uncensraed episodes with bonus content, as well as monthly shows
Speaker 1: like ug Fine. You can also hear uh Nerd with
Speaker 1: Drey Alvarez, which is a deep dive into nerd stuff,
Speaker 1: which you can also get that one for free as well.
Speaker 1: You can also hear UH Tom and Jeff watch Batman
Speaker 1: with Tom Ryman on the Game Fully Unemployed Network, and
Speaker 1: you can also hear me on you Don't Even Like
Speaker 1: Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the Unpopped Network with
Speaker 1: Adam Todd Brown. Wow there is Do you see how
Speaker 1: I just click into that plug thing? No, you did.
Speaker 1: You were incredible. You were like a Romanian mob taking
Speaker 1: over the palace. Um. I did throw a rock while
Speaker 1: I said that. Yeah, you did that a lot during podcasting,
Speaker 1: and I salute you for it. Well, there's nothing left
Speaker 1: for me to do but play us out, Sophie. Why
Speaker 1: don't we Why don't we queue up my my track again?
Speaker 1: All right, one more, one more time, just just to
Speaker 1: make you one more time for the road, everybody. Pretty
Speaker 1: good musicians at Destiny's Child, at Destiny's Okay to do that?
Speaker 1: You know, we did that all in one take. I
Speaker 1: like Daandle's creativeness and like, all right there and there
Speaker 1: my favorite part. You are from Boston. I may be
Speaker 1: home there and I will Boston. Thank you, Thank you, Jeff.
Speaker 1: You all sound like my friend Robert. Yeah, thank you
Speaker 1: for getting the word out. All right, all right bye,
Speaker 1: listen on that's the Jeff chess Good podcast. Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is a production of cool zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: from cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.