Part Four: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick

But um, but yeah, you know I empathize with that. I also had years ago. I had to make a really tough choice, which was to proceed with my career as a as a writer and a journalist, um, but to give up my ambitions of being a musician and and and really participating, which has been with one of the maybe the hardest choice I've ever had to make. Well, one thing, people don't know you were on the cusp. Yeah,

I was, darling. I was about to break through. Um. But you know, I made peace with the choice that I made. But but every now and then I feel the urge to get back into it. So recently I reached out to some old friends of mine from back in the day when I was when I was doing a lot of stage shows. You might have heard of a little band called Destiny's Child and we we put together a little bit of collab based on my my incredible Boston accent. So I want to just play that

for everyone right now. Is a little treats them from Okay that ought to do there? That was? That was beautiful. Wow wow. Honestly, like I'm kind of like, I mean, I'm glad we have this show, and I'm glad we have all the great work you're doing, but I do feel like this is sort of like a reminder of

sort of like the other day the music died. Yeah exact, you decided to give up your career, and I'm glad that you guys are you and Destiny's Child, that you're still you Still it's all amicable, I know you kind of they felt like you left him in the lark for a while. They had to lift up a lot of the stuff that you left behind. But she's done, okay, right, she's done. Okay for she did okay, Um, you know,

we're very proud of her. I just I really wish I could have seen, you know, that's a glimpse into the alternate reality that we could have had if you get stuck with it. You know, it's just one of those one of the tiny tragedies that is that is everyday life. But you know the upside of it is that now that we have released this in twenty five years, I do qualify for admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So I'm sure we're all looking forward

to that. I mean, you have my vote. You're you and Billy Joel um both both back in me on this one. Um, he's actually back acting you. That was That was a solid Billy Joel joke. Jeff, I hope you're proud of yourself. It's a Billy joke. Wow, Well we're doing good. So you want to talk about a piece of sh it a little bit more. I thought we just were. Wow. No, Billy, come on, he does Okay, Yeah, he's he's he's he's a good guy. William William Joel Oh God, why is my phone ringing? Stop us? Because

you're popular. Oh it's another spam call. It's one of the five spam calls I get every single day because the FCC under uh fucking Donald Trump, decided that phones should no longer be things that people can use, isn't isn't that nice? Isn't that a nice change that was made classic. Yeah, it's like it's like when commercials were allowed to be cartoons again. Yeah's just one of these decisions that his low key destroyed civilization and shaped my

entire personality. Yeah. Absolutely, I've seen all the he Man and g I Joe and stuff that I have behind me here. But yeah, you and Michael Bay completely changed as a result of that move. Um, just like I was completely changed by the fight Beyonce and I had. But you know, that's that's that's that's that's water under the bridge now? Is it in an elevator? Yeah, that would probably be the most cinematic place for us to have had a fight. Right, but on a security camera?

Did you get did you get the joke or is that over your head? No, Sophie, if you make a joke about Beyonce, you can assume I'm not going to get it. But I thought you were so close. I know out exactly exactly when you're too close to somebody. It's like, how I'm too good at basketball to to compete on camera against Lebron James. Can you just do that episode? M Yeah, of course Sophie happened up on

an episode on Lebron James. He's like a good dude. Yeah, I mean, he's okay again, he's done all right for himself. So we're talking about Nikolai chaku Um. Now when we when we had left off, we were talking about the gigantic series of palaces. He built the third largest building by volume in the world. UM. And as Czech excuse ambitions for control over the country that he was gradually grinding into the dust grew, he decided he found the need to establish and expand a state security force UM

that could surveil his populace to an unprecedented extent. In Romania, the state's security force, the secret police, whatever you wanna call them, they were called the Securitat UH and they were run by which is actually I think the name of like a local rent a cop company that you can have like do armored car ship. Here, you got some some Portland's Pinkerton's or whatever. Yeah, I mean, uh,

maybe I'm getting that wrong. I should have checked on this, but anyway, the Securitat, the Romanian one was run by Jan Pasipa, who we talked about a little bit last episode. And you know, folks talk about the KGB, they talked about the East German Stazi, you know when they talk about communist secret police forces. Yeah, none of these mother suckers had ship on the Security TOT in terms of its actual like the extent of the repression that it

was capable of carrying out. Oh oh yeah, No, these are this is a good state security force, not like an immoral sense, but in a in an efficiency sense, in an efficiency sense. Yeah, and in being perfect villains in a James Bond movie. Since and I'm gonna quote from Cattle and Gruya here, that's that Romanian journalist. In nineteen sixty five there was a central phone tapping center

and eleven regional ones. That's when Chichesco takes power. Thirteen years later there were two hundred and forty eight centers and a thousand portable stations. By the nineteen eighties, the Security TOT had become one of the most feared secret police organizations in the world. In nine it had fourteen thousand, two hundred fifty nine employees, of which eight thousand, one

hundred and fifty nine were officers. According to PACIFA, each officer had to have fifty collaborators members of the Romanian Communist Party and fifty informants outside of the Romanian Communist Party. The result was the constant surveillance of the population, so damn near everybody was either in the employee of the securitat or directly under surveillance of the security talk like both, yeah, or both in many cases both the other part. Yeah, that's I mean, it's they always used to make the

you know, the KGB jokes. We've all seen that where yeah yeah and stuff like that, but this seems less funny, Yeah, somehow less funny than the KGB. Who were who are a bunch of lab hucksters? Chuckle chuckle buddies. I did a research paper on the KGB and the title of it was Cops and Robbers. That's not a bad title, fair, And the professor was like, this is supposed to be like a serious class. Yeah, a lot of people died and were tortured, but you know that's the case with

secret police all the time. Um, it's a shame that secret police are absolutely necessary to have in every single country. Um. Yeah, I'm just gonna on a limb here. A cab includes secret police establishing WHOA I'm sorry. I know every time I come on, I cause chaos, um, and this is it. I'm sorry. But yeah, wow, that's gonna be that's gonna be really, really controversial among our listeners, fully half of

whom work in secret police forces. But you know, everybody needs to hear stuff that's difficult to listen to sometimes. So yeah, except that people disagree with you secret police officers, that's not what secret police officers do. Um. What they did in Romania, in addition to domestic repression, was carry out a steady stream of assassinations of foreign dissidents, including Romanian citizens writing for Voice of America, a US funded

Cold War era news and propaganda agency. At the most basic level, this could mean hiring gunmen or assassins with knives in other countries. There's one particular guy that they tried to kill like three different times, and they shot him and they stabbed him, and he kept like not

quite dying. I've gotta respute and everybody yeah yeah, and then it was like a year after getting stabbed, he dies of this like mysteriously virulent cancer and it's kind of come out since then that it's almost certain they slipped him radioactive poison. Um, that's the thing they did a couple of times, I think. Uh. And it's honestly,

that's kind of a cool way to kill someone. Yeah. No, no, if you're if you're if you're a journalist writing against the state and they have to use the radioactive poison against you, you know, you've that's like, that's like the Pulitzer getting getting radiation, getting like radioactive poison, Uh, slipped in your Yeah, of Jeff dying as a journalist for shure, you know, yeah, we should all be so lucky. But of course, Jeff, I don't know if you've ever priced

radioactive poison. It is not cheap. And having someone assassinated across international lines also very expensive unless they live in like Toronto. Um. So this this is something that the Romanians we're gonna have to spend a lot of money on. Um. And when titened Belts put the security tot in a budget crunch, they were able to rake in extra cash millions of dollars over time, hundreds of thousands of dollars

a year from a foreign benefactor. Now, Jeff I'm gonna you want to guess what foreign company secretly funded the Secura tot during the most repressive years of Czech excuse regime. You know what, I have a lot of guesses, Okay, but I feel like I'm not going to nail it down because my first answer was McDonald's. No, not McDonald's. You might call them the McDonald's of furniture, because it was I kea, I'm sorry, it was like Kia, I still like them. Yeah, I'm gonna go and say I'm

still going to go there. Wow, wow, bold, brave. Well, I mean, we don't know. I'm sure they're supporting a completely different series of secret police agencies now and and the good ones, you know, the secret police agencies you want to trust? Am I supposed to not eat potential horse meat balls? Because I'm gonna eat potential horse meat balls? Yeah?

Where are you gonna get horse meat? If you're not getting it somewhere sketchy, right, That's that's how I feel about And when that came out and everyone was mad about the about the meatballs maybe having horse, I was like, it's about time I get to eat horse. Yeah, exactly, exactly, And that's exactly what the securitat said. So during the nineteen eighties this was actually a thing across a lot

of Eastern Europe. A number of communist states are having these like economic crunches, and so they start opening themselves up to more capitalist businesses and being like maybe you come in a little bit in the help of sweet things, and is like, oh, yeah, you would like to be coming in. I don't know how to that's they're not from Boston. They're not from Boston. Yes, sorry, I can't do a good Swedish What was that? It was not your best? Yeah, I am a speed in modern and

I went offensive. I went Muppet pretty pretty deep in there. But it's okay to make fun of the way Swedish people talk here because they're funding a secret police force. So one of the things that KIA did was they they realized that it was really cheap to have East German political prisoners build their billy bookshelves and other you know, announceable bedframes. So that was one of the things i

KA got up to in this period. But they were really interested in Romania because Romania has these huge again is forcing people to leave rural areas and move to the cities. So there's lots of free timber in Romania that nobody's living around massively forested. Yes, there's a lot of wood anyway. It's sort of like like Siberia when you see what's and most of people are like tundra and then you look at it you're like, no, it's just like the biggest forest on the planet. Yeah, it's

just like trees all all up in everybody's business. And that's so you know that i KEA is like, well, we need trees. We have a lot of low quality, easily breakable furniture to produce. We'll take all the trees that you can give us um and Romania is like, well, how about you know, you pay our state run timber company, you know, ten million pounds ish a year for it, and we will skim a significant chunk of that off the top and send it to our secret police force

so they can buy radioactive poison. Now, IKEA denies that they knowingly funded a secret police agency through this deal. There is a lot of debate between journalists and scholars today. There is some evidence that I think the fair thing to say is that while nobody ever wrote this out directly, based on their dealings in other countries and their understanding of the situation in Romania. They absolutely knew the Secret cops were taking a cut off the top of the

money that they were paying. Where do you think your money is going after you send it to a dictatorship? Yeah, some of it's gonna pay for the secret police. Everybody knows this. Everybody. It's cheap labor. It's sort of like how people still have Amazon accounts even though they know the human toll that it takes on people. And I sure do like immediate shipping because I'm impatient and I like things being slightly cheaper, so I like the media shipping.

I'm okay that Jeff Bezos is buying radioactive reason to use on his enemies. Um, it's it's such a easy way to be like, well, they didn't tell us they were doing that. Yeah, you guys knew. Um there's some other evidence to believe that they actually had a decent amount of knowledge about how this was working. Um, but yeah, if you if you bought any products in the Billy range or any Albert chairs or any Abbo table tables

or Jonas desks from Ikea in the nineteen eighties. There's a very good chance that your purchased directly helped fund to the securit tot. So that's neat. Those are specific product lines that they really Oh. I had two and both of them broke within a year. I love Ikea. This thing right here from Ikea is great. That's good. Well, listeners, if your Ikea send us money and I will edit out that part where I talked about how billy bookshelves

are not made particularly well, Now that's how you do it. Extortion, that's how you get money, just like the securitat. Yeah. So, uh, that's good. That's that's cool stuff. And obviously, while all this is happening, this is pretty fucked up, especially the assassinations they carry out in foreign countries and like NATO countries. Um. But the West put up with it for quite a while because as horrific as Cheski was to his own people, he never failed to back up u S interests at

critical junctures. And I'm gonna quote from a ride up by the Wilson Center here in nineteen seventy nine, Shaochesku attacked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In nineteen eighty one, he counseled caution in the Warsaw Pacts response to the crisis in Poland. In the following year, he opposed packed plans to increase defense spending and in fact reduced Romania's

defense budget. In nineteen eighty three, he repeated his call for a halt to the arms race and advocated multilateral nuclear disarmament in Europe, and the following year he proposed a moratorium on the deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe. At the same time, refused to join the Soviet led boycott of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. And I'm noting this because he's he's doing this to stay in

the West good graces. That's not like necessary the bad stuff to do obviously, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was bad. It's good to disarm and advocate for nuclear disarmament. His foreign policy moves are continue to be more right than wrong kind of in this period. This is just all paired with the unspeakable levels of domestic repression that he's carrying out at home. He seems like a sleeper agent we forgot about and then things got way out

of control. Yeah, yeah, he did. He just kept right, letting it ride. Brasco energy coming out of him here on this one. For the record, the Soviets were right to boycott the Olympic Games, not necessarily because of whyever they did it. I actually have no idea why they did it, but because fun the Olympics. Anyone who boycotts the Olympics is in the right. I'll stand with whoever against the Olympics. If you hate the Olympics, you're my homie.

Get them. Yeah, so chow Chessco. You're uncanceled, buddy. Um, that's probably not a thing I should Oh wait now he refused to join it. You're still canceled, motherfucker. Um. So. Nixon had been the first U S President to visit Romania, and a follow up to his nineteen sixty seven visit, but Nikolairam maintained excellent relations with every US president during

his time in office. His success in this was close to perfect until in nineteen seventy eight he sent Yon Paspa to Germany with apparently a plan to assassinate a journalist. I say apparently because Paspa defected to the United States and offered up a comprehensive list of Romania's overseas narratives in exchange for one presumes a pile of cash in a lifetime of protection. His intel on the securitat was

obviously good because he'd been running it. But you also have to remember there's like a book that exists that stories about the Chowchcuse, but it's based on the stuff

Paspa claimed almost exclusively. And again, this guy is not necessarily a credible source on his old boss because he's defected and had invested interest in ignoring a lot of the fund up things he'd done as head of the secret police and making his boss seem more directly responsible for it um, which is not to say that Czech Ascue wasn't but just like you shouldn't take anything Paspa says at face value, right, Yeah exactly, exactly, yeah exactly

that Like that's literally what he's doing. Like he's not a hero because he came out with the story of how BADU is he was his secret police head. He's a snitch, yeah exactly, And snitches get stitches even when they're snitching on Actually, in this case, snitches get a house paid for by the US government for the rest of their lives. Um. I mean, I'll snitch on whoever. If that means I could own a house, I think

a lot of people would. So Paspa was the first public figure in the West because obviously it's big news when he defects to portray Romania and kind of like a mass sense as a totalitarian hellscape significantly worse than anywhere else in communist Europe. Kind Of before this point, there's been a lot of you know, Romania had had a lot of good press in like the US media and stuff, and that starts to turn around after this.

And then in nineteen seventy nine, the irane and revolution, you know, becomes a thing, and that brings an end to the cheapest oil Romania had been able to buy because Chesco had a pretty good relationship with the Shaw. Then you would get the Iran Iraq War, which ratchets up the price of oil more and that makes stuff

more difficult for Chochesco and for everybody. Inflation is increasing across the world at this point, but it's particularly devastating to Romania because they've been taking on all of this debt in order to build these ridiculous things that Chochesko wants to create. And as you get this kind of we all heard the term stagflation, you know, right as that starts to really hit, Romania's creditors start calling in their debts. And I'm going to quote from a book

by the Charles River editors here. As Western banks increased their own interest rates, in turn, the debt repayments became ever harder to service for many governments. At the start of the nineteen eighties, many developing countries struggled to pay the interest on their debt, leading to an era often

referred to as the debt crisis. For its part, Romania had half a billion dollars worth of debt in nineteen seventy eight, and that had risen to ten point four billion by nineteen eight two, equivalent to twenty eight scent of its GDP. In nineteen eighty one, just the interest payments alone accounted for three billion dollars. As a result, Romania applied for an I m F loan of some one point three billion, only for the I m F

Board to reneg on it. As Misha Glennie has pointed out, clearly the Western economic institutions had little faith in the reliability of Choko's regime to honor its commitments. As a result, the Romanian economy suddenly found itself in deep trouble. By nineteen eighty two, was forced to cut spending and redirect foreign currency towards interest repayments. After nineteen eighty two through most of the Romanian budget into paying down the debt.

So you've got two things going on here. One is that Romania has this crippling debt to pay off, and the other is that Chochesco gets angry at the I m F over the fact that they're not willing to give him the kind of deal he wants, and despite his creditors, he decides to make Romania totally independent from the global economy. And obviously, you know it's gonna go

great for everybody. You know, the I m F is also a bad guy in this, because it was very obvious to anyone paying attention that Romania was not going to be able to handle the kind of debt that they were taking on. Um, that these were really bad investments. But um, yeah, so there's a lot that's sucked up here. But well, well we will we will in this case

put most of the blame on Chesscu. Um, I mean just the blame kind of goes everywhere in that case, all right, Like it's yeah, it's like, yeah, it's I mean, debt happens we live. When I heard the number, I was like, oh that is cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah it is. I mean it's a lot more money for them. Um. But yeah, that is like a rounding error. Now it is funny that like Elon Musk could have paid off us debt with pocket change still has a quarter of Twitter.

Yeah exactly. Um, so two things, yeah, um. In order to do this, in order to uh pay off Romania's debt and also make it independent from the global economy, Chesscu had to radically reorganized Romanian society. Uh. He exactly. He acceler rated his plans to force citizens out of rural towns they lived in for generations. And one of the ways in which he accelerated it was by dynamiting the villages they've lived in, um and pushing everyone to labor in cities to pay down the debt by the winter.

Yeah exactly. And yeah, it's it's it's very fucked up. Like one of the things they're doing is in order to like force people out of these villages because they actually dynamiting was more of a euphemism because they don't want to spend that much money on dynamite because he's not wildly coyote. Yeah, they will. He will have his security Todd guys show up and be like, everyone has

to leave. You have forty eight hours. And then when they start, you know, getting ready to leave, he'll be like, well, I don't trust you not to come back to this village, So while we stand here with guns, you have to destroy your homesick access and ship. Um that's something interesting, Yeah, that to create a regular populacet that's not going to want to kill you real bad later. Yeah, no, it's

it's not gonna make anybody the angriest to have ever been. Um. So by the Winner of seven, things were so bad that gas consumption Bucharest was locked in about two hours a day. Um, you could again, you would get like two hours a day where the gas was on, so you could like heat your house and hopefully like close up the windows so that as much of it would remain as possible. Because this oil rich nation is trying to export all of the gas that it can in

order to get foreign currency. Cheski declared that the temperature, like if it was warmer outside than ten degrees celsius, it was illegal to burn fuel at all or to heat your house at all, and if you disobeyed, you would be prosecuted. He attempted to reduce He like set up this plan where he was like, the average Romanian only needs an x number of calories per day, So I'm going to start reducing everybody's food intake so you don't get fat. Um. But but people weren't fat, like

not that that would make it okay. Like people were already tightening their belts, and he was like, actually, you guys need a lot less food than you think. You can starve more. Yeah, you can starve more. So he dropped It was like fifteen percent across the board. He like made a technical plan to reduce the amount of calories that people got to eat. Um. And while all this is happening, obviously Nikolai and Elina are living in palaces, they're eating whatever they want they want, and this this

also makes people angry. Esko, in order to keep things clamped down, had to ramp up domestic repression to fully unhinged levels before Pacifa affected nearly all Romanians working overseas had some ties to the securitat. You had to be you know, at least be passing them a little bit of info in order to be allowed to leave. But once Passifa betrayed, Nikolai. Nikolai makes overseas travel effectively illegal, like it basically becomes a crime as a Romanian to

have contact with people outside the country. Um Romanians. So he for most of the nineteen eighties he's locked the country all in together, like he's he's barred the doors and forced everybody to stay inside with each other. Um. And the next thing he does after that is he makes it illegal to own or operate a typewriter because he's angry that people are writing things Florida. Yeah, yeah, yes,

some strong de Santa's energy there. So since nineteen sixty five, abortion had been banned um again like Florida, and as conditions eroded through the nineteen eighties, Romania was racked with several problems. For one thing, huge numbers of women were attempting to self induce abortions to avoid the expense of a new child. And again, as as we said earlier, between ten and twenty thousand, women in Romania died due

to bots botched abortions during chiscus time in power. But for another thing, this his policy of making it illegal to use contraception does massively increase the Romanian population of orphans because a huge number of moms had died and uh, you know, they'd left kids without moms, and a lot of those moms were single moms um And in addition to that, a huge number of families just had kids that they couldn't afford to feed because Chesko is cutting

the calories people have access to. So you have this large number of people who like little kids who can't be taken care of or who have no one to take care of them. And you're also cutting the standards of medical care. You're bulldozing hospitals for your palace. You have more kids who are born with serious health problems that their parents can't afford to treat. And the way this all ends up is that by nineteen eighty nine, there are a hundred and four thousand orphaned children that

are institutionalized in Romanian government facilities. Now for some context on how many kids that is in Poland, which is very close to Romania, Poland has doubled the population of Romania. They have a third as many orphaned children in institutions like that is an incredibly high rate. That that led to a massive adoption push, didn't it. Yes, there's a number of things this leads to. That is what we are talking about. So I didn't mean to jump ahead

with yeah, yeah, yeah, the orphans. Jeff, God, God, that's right, that's what. Well, don't do that in Romania term. But you know, um so throughout Czechiscuse reign, there's hundreds of thousands of kids who wind up raised in these government facilities with no family, and as a result of that, it kind of behooves us to look at how these these government institutions were run. And I'm gonna quote from

an article in The Guardian here. Florence Noire, an investigator for the Institute who spent several years gathering testimony, estimates that between nineteen sixty six and nineteen eighty nine, there were between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand unnecessary deaths of children in Romania's grim network of children's homes, with a vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children.

The most terrific abuse took place in homes for disabled children who were taken away from their families and institutionalized at the age of three. Disabled children would be sorted by hospital commissions into three categories, so called curable, partially curable, and incurable. The children who were sorted into the third categories, some of whom had minor or no disabilities, were subjected to particularly brutal conditions. Across the country, there were twenty

six institutions catering to the category three disabled children. Investigators from the Institute picked three of them to investigate and found shocking mortality levels among the children. They didn't die from the disabilities they had. Seventy of the registered deaths were for pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable, said Swar. As the investigations occurred,

they discovered ever more horrific details. There is testimony of children suffering from frostbite, and of children literally being eaten by rats, being kept in cages, or being smeared in their own feces. The investigators logged seven hundred and seventy one deaths they believed could have been prevented in three facilities in the late nineteen eighties, suggesting the number across all twenty six institutions over a longer period is much higher.

There's no document that proves this, but it is clear that the ultimate goal of this was an extermination campaign, says Swaar. So it's not a feel good story. It's not a field. Yeah, extermination campaigns rarely are a feel good story. Yeah. That whole thing with the babies and the rats, that's that's some would say. Some would say that's negative information you're delivering. Yeah, it's not like it's not like good to lock babies in dark rooms without

any adults until they're eaten by rats. It's like a bad thing. I think. I think we're able to take that stance, Sophie. Is that going to get us in trouble with the advertisers? I don't really care. Okay, Well, hopefully this show is not being advertised by Romanian orphanages in the nineteen eighties Romanian rat feed emporium. Yeah. Yeah, if so, we're going to be in some trouble. But yeah, keep the baby's coming. Um. Yeah, and why don't you keep the money coming to our sponsors? Ah? What a

good time that money came baby. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. I I I'm happy that we're we're getting paid by the by that great product. Exactly, exactly good stuff. Um. So, yeah, we're talking about Chowchescu's orphan extermination facilities. Yeah, yeah, good times. And I found a New York Times. Yeah, very very Cholley,

very cholle Um. I found a New York Times article written after he was deposed, but like in kind of the awkward period afterwards, when everyone's dealing with the the consequences of all of his ship, and it provides additional context. The children are left as they and this is the way the facilities kind of still were in the early nineties. The children are left as they were during the Chochescu era prisoners in their cribs, Romanian orphans that is estimated

received five to six minutes of attention a day. Attendant still lull in the corridor, smoking and drinking coffee, leaving the children to rock in their cots. As a result of their troubled early lives. One in tent of the children we will finish life in a psychiatric institution and all will suffer severe trauma. Doctors without Borders said, and it's Farewell report. That's a pretty blank yeah, and it's Farewell report. It's the most ominous line there, and it's

we we got a bounce. We can't fix this, man, this is fucked up. We'll see you guys in Hell Apparent. Yeah, yeah, good luck Romania. Um, but it gets worse, Jeff, because you know what, how could you make this worse? How? How could you make this story worse? I'll tell you how you can make this story worse because it's the nineteen eighties and it's the HIV virus. Well, you don't have you don't have equipped for that one. Oh? I mean yeah, I have plenty, but I don't feel like

hearing the comments about that. Yeah that's probably recently. I don't feel like having my good joke be destroyed by commentersh yeah. Well, we're also going to talk about racism, so that yeah, okay, good. So we're gonna talk about the treatment of the czeches, SCOO regime of the Roma and how it relates to all this. So in Romania, the Roman people are the largest single minority group in the country. They're about ten to twelve percent of the population.

So question, now, when you say Roma, is that Romani. Yes, yes, the Romany. Okay, so that's the same thing, okay, yes, yes, Um, well yeah, we'll use Romani because that might make it well, I don't know if that's Romani Roma Romania, all of the it's going to be a little bit u cumbersome no matter how we we write it. So it's it's all. It is what it is. It is what it is.

So while the Roma had lived traditionally on the move kind of up until the modern period, although there's like one of the things that happens prior to kind of the more democratic forms of government in Romania, like up until like the late eighteen fifties, is it's super common for Roman people to just be enslaved by the state, like there's a there's a nasty obviously it's Roma and Eastern Europe. The history is going to be unpleasant and oppressive. Um,

it's not. It's going to be good. They're treated the way Europe also treated like choos. Yeah yeah, and right up, like if they were like kind of hippies, Yeah, like that's the way they were treated and they're not. They're not going to have a good history in your No, no, it's going to be rough and in fact, as you said, they are treated in a lot of ways the way that Jewish populations are, so they are subject to a lot of the same kinds of programs, and they are

victims of the Holocaust as well. It's all across Europe, but it's particularly true in Romania because there's a lot more Roma in Romania. UM. So you know, when they were not being enslaved or massacre, the Roma for most of the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds lived the way that they kind of traditionally did, which is on the move, you know, as these kind of traveling groups

of people. UM. And this continued up until communism took hold in uh In in Romania, UM, and they kind of overtime the communists kind of pushed them to find more sort of settled areas to live. This starts as them kind of building these more stable encampments on the outskirts of major cities. UM. But they're often still kind of like living in tents or these kind of like shanty type buildings they put together. And this is kind of like I know, probably broadly good that they have

the option more often for for for quality homes. During this period that's one of the achievements of the early communist state. As we'll talk about. There some problematic aspects to that too, um, but things do get a lot better for them in the early years of communism. One of the reasons why is that most Roman people in Romania in this period are poor. They don't have any property, um, and they often do not have access did not have

access to education. And in George you Day's Romania, those are all qualifications, right, those that makes you a good proletarian, right, like, oh, you don't have any money, and you didn't go to a fancy school, like yeah, you can have jobs from the Communist party like that, you are exactly the kind of people that we want to see. Yeah, hell yeah, come on in. And a number of towns in this period they get that is literally how George you Day

handles a lot of stuff um. And a number of towns in this period they get Roman mayors um, which had been basically unheard of before this time. UM. And Roma people become commonly well represented as like local Communist Party quadra leaders and as low level functionaries like there's actually a really positive early period for the Roma in communism where yeah, they're integrated into the power structure a little bit, not never at the high levels, but at

kind of the lower levels of it um. But even during this kind of positive period, there are some early troubling signs. One of them is at the Communist Party pretty much immediately stops counting or listing the Roma as a separate population within within the country. Now, again, if you have just lived through the Holocaust, the fact that the government is no longer counting you, you might be like, well, this we this might work out. Okay, it's not great

when they're counting us. They usually don't do that for a good reason. I'd rather not have somebody with a clipboard. Yeah, looking at how many of us there are and where clipboard? Real quick? Yeah, it would be reasonable to feel good about this. But what it kind of meant in this case is that the Communist Party, obviously they don't want to do a physical genocide, but they don't want the

Roma to exist as a distinct group within society. They want to kind of erase them as a culture in the process of integrating them into mass society um, which is a thing they do not just do to the Roman. That does not just occur in communist Romania. But it's it's a thing. Um. It happens in a lot of places. It happens in many places, but we're talking about Romania. So under Chowchescu's systematization is the process by which they are bulldozing these um these rural towns and forcing people

into the cities. And another thing they do during this is they bulldoze these Roman neighborhoods um and the people. Obviously, they're not just like making them homeless. Nobody is homeless in Chowchescu's Romania. They're moving them into these new and more modern developments. And in some ways this is positive because the homes that they had lived in previously were not of good quality and we're often like somewhat dangerous, and the homes they move into are are much better

quality and much safer. But when the government is moving them, it isn't keeping these communities together. They're not like splitting up like individual families, but they're not keeping these groups that had traveled and lived together for generations together, and that's kind of a soft ethnic cleansing. There's debate about this. Yeah, I think the balance of what I'm reading suggests it's more accidental or just a byproduct of the way the

Communists felt about every group in the country. But there are allegations, and there's reason to believe them that that a significant amount of this was intentional because they also just saw it as potentially dangerous to have these people as a separate community. I'm not gonna be able to give you like. Again, a lot of stuff is is debated about this. Still, you are right that there are benefits to having like a wall. Yes, yes, yes, this

is not all negative. It's like, but it's it also you are they this is one of the things that's occurring here is kind of the destruction of the community that had existed previously. UM. Still, given how things had gone prior to the eighties, it could be argued that the situation for Roma in Romania was in most ways better than it had been for the last couple of centuries in the area. But then, as we've been talking about, the economy and Romania collapses and Chicheski forces his vaunted

austerity measures on the populace. Now, the Roma had always had larger families than most other people in Romania. UM. But prior to Chaocheski, Roma women had utilized pretty frequently legal and safe abortions to aid in family planning. Um with abortion now illegal, families had more children than they could afford to feed or take care of. Under Chichesko's new regime, and so Roma families were forced to send their children to state orphanages at the highest rates in

the country. And I'm gonna quote from an article in the Open Society Foundation here. The results were a high level of poverty and an increase and unwanted children. Romanian families, which were already traditionally larged, also increased in size at this time because even though birth control had never been

widely accepted, abortions were common among the Roma. Children of all ethnicities were now being dropped off at railway stations and churches, causing the population and orphanages to swell to an unmanageable number. State institutions were forced to deal with slash budgets. Hospitals resorted to reusing needles and other materials

that could be rinsed or quickly sterilized. Blood, however, was in large supply because donors were paid a small fee, so when the orphanage pantries were down to just powdered milk. It seemed like a good idea to give the smallest and weakest children whole blood transfusions under the theory that new blood would have more nutrients for their bodies to use. Now,

can you see how this could go vampires? Yeah, yeah, well it is a little okay, it's a little vampire e. That's a little a little too on the nose as far as your region is concerned. Yeah, it is a bit of a thing. But can you see how maybe giving sickly orphan children blood transfusions in the nineteen eighties could be a serious problem. They should have gotten like power lift or blood. Yeah, they probably shouldn't have gotten much blood in the eighties because again the AIDS crisis

is hidden. Um So there's a horrible health crisis as a result of this. In Yeah, um so, only about twenty of the blood being donated in Romania is tested for disease in nineteen because again budget cuts and the person who's in charge of all of the chemistry related things as Elena, and she doesn't really think you need to test all that much of the blood. Um well, of course she's got her her advanced degree, and yeah, she she understands blood like, yeah, it's don't tell me

my job. Yeah, blood is what you drink. Yes, this blood. How do you say oil through body? So in in nineteen eighty eight, the government reported just three cases of HIV infection to the World Health Organization UM but in nineteen eighty nine the next year, the number swelled to twelve hundred and nearly nine percent of those were in children under four years of age. Sixty of them were kids in orphanages, and all of them had had a history of multiple trains fusions. This is the start of

a children's epidemic. Forty percent increase. Yeah, it is pretty rough. And in all of these orphanages, like eight percent of the children or roma, so it is. It is primarily an AIDS crisis among forced or forcibly orphaned romani Roman children. Um. So they need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, that is hard to do when you were wasting away from a variety of AIDS related illnesses, when you were wasting away before the AIDS. And and also you have

no access to bootstraps because sold to IA. Yeah. Yeah, Ikea is using them to make those horsemeat boss. Yeah, horse is horsemeat and boot robbers very good. Somewhere around eleven thousand Roman children are believed to have been infected with AIDS as a result of all this, compared with around three thousand other Romanian orphans, which gives you an

idea of just how significant the scale of this was. Okay, and I just yeah, it's because they made the plan to just instead of like feeding these kids properly, to just give them bonus blood. Give them bonus blood. It's such a weird way that a large group of people is getting HIV or or or full blown AIDS in the case, because it's just like they're like, there's this thing that nobody should ever be doing anyways, and see how it goes in the middle of one of the

greatest epidemics in all of him in history. If AIDS had never happened, and there was just the anecdote in here that they were feeding orphans blood because there wasn't enough food, that would still be one of the worst things I've ever read. It would be fucking weird. Is what like, like this fucking weird what you do the whole country? You don't need to do this, Yeah, why are you giving why are you feeding their baby bodies blood you feel freaks, you monsters like, yeah, but it

was also AIDS blood. Yeah, that went from weird to like fully sinister. And here's here's may The one of the bleak is obviously a huge number of these children who get infect in the late eighties die fairly quickly from it because there's very little in the way of treatments for AIDS. But once the country gets liberated and and sort of Western aid agencies come in in the

mid nineties and there's also some more treatments available. You're better off in some ways being a Romanian orphan with AIDS than you are being a Romanian orphan without AIDS, because there's more international funding to take care of the kids with AIDS, there's better group homes for them, and they also because people start to get sympathetic to kids who get AIDS through blood transfusions in the West, you're

more likely to get adopted out of the country. And so after chow Chesscoo falls, some of the luckiest orphans are the AIDS orphans, which is there's an asterisk citation needed real. Yeah, it's just like one of those things where like for an example of how bleak. This is some kids were better off because they got aids in Roman and orphanages. Like that is how bad the fucking situation was. That's like, that's like winning the lottery at the asbestos factory. Yeah, and and the lottery prizes all

all of the leftover asbestos cigarettes. Um god, I could go for an asbestos cigarette. It's just the normal ones hurt my throat so much. You need a better filter, you know. That's what everyone says about asbestos. I really if we if we had the asbestos crisis today, I think with the way culture wars go in this country, we would get rid of a lot of problem voters very quickly. Yeah, it would be called mesotheliorida at this time. That's that's eighty percent of a T shirt idea. Jeff's yeah,

there is that that. You know what, That's fine, send me money. Everybody, print it, print it. So as the eighties dragged do a close. The whole Warsaw Pact is enduring shortages of basic goods and political arrests. I'm sure you all remember from like middle school or high school, you know, Glass nost In pairs Stroika and the USSR and Grbachov which are these These policies meant to kind of open up the Soviet Union and relax it from

some hardline positions. Um. This is obviously praised in the West. People are like, yeah, Glass nost In player Stroika, we're not quite as close to nuking each other as we used to be. But Chowchesku hates again, you never stops being kind of a hardline Stalinist, and he publicly mocks Glass nost In per Stroika, warning that easy to do from your palace, by the way, Yeah, yeah, exactly. When you have a palace, it's very easy to attack these ideas. If I had a palace, I would talk so much ship.

Oh my god, I would never not be talking shit. The only time I wouldn't be talking ship is when I am pouring boiling oil on the poor people gathered below the parapets of my castle. Are you I would be like, who's who's running? That's gonna keep me in the palace. I'm gonna vote for them, Yeah exactly. That is how people with palaces didn't to vote hence most

of the history of Europe. Um, So the USSR is doing this stuff, and and Chescu publicly mocks these new policies and and Gorbachev he announced that similar reforms would only come to Romania when pairs grew from apple trees. Now that's a weird thing to say, and I think a bunch of students in Bucharest felt the same way, because a group of theater kids get so incensed by this that they gather as many pairs as they could.

And again, they're all hungry, so the fact that they're using pairs for a protest is meaningful, and they hang the they hang pairs from just trees in the capital and mass as a sign of protest to be like, Okay, you said, you said we'd get changed when there's pairs growing from the tree, so we'll just make that happen. Um. This does not go well with Chowchescu. He he takes this, he takes offense at this. And I'm gonna quote from

a writer an article in the Los Angeles Times. The taughts so infuriated Chessco that he ordered his security taught secret police to identify the perpetrators and attack the students in their dormatory bories, killing many of them. Other students took to the university square were more than a hundred were slaughtered that night. So that's a lot for a college prank. Yeah, I mean I've seen worse, but m

hm yeah, not by much. Not not by much. It's it's enough that you would have trouble making a good John Landis movie about it. So, Jeff May, yeah, I've heard of him. Yeah, well you know what I've heard of, Jeff. I would love to know the things that you've heard of, the products and services that support this podcast. In fact, the only thing I hear is them. When I closed my eyes at night, when I when I put on my noise canceling here headphones, all I hear is the

repeated sounds of the ads for this podcast. And now you can have a piece of my eternal waking hell for yourself right now. Ah, oh my god. That's such as effect right there, I'm going to be closing my eyes and seeing these commercials in my head. That's how I live every day of my life, Jeff, I never get to escape. But honestly, that's just called living in America, Baby, Living in America. That was pretty good for baby. Pretty good song, Yeah, not great, pretty good. So it's a

passable song, Yeah, passable song. Acceptable song, much like my collaboration with Destiny's Child. So if you can we play that again, getting a nail from selfie getting a wow. Well, I guess that's Sophie's choice. Uh. Good times. So speaking of good times's good times are nearing an end by the process by which was forcing villagers out of their homes and into massive housing developments was not popular. People

do not like being forced out of their homes. Actually, Jeff, this is this is a thing that a lot of folks don't know about. People. Um. In nineteen eighties seven, he announced that half of Romania's remaining thirteen thousand villages were going to be bulldozed and people were given forty eight hours to move. So half of the people who live in the country, you all have to leave your homes, right the funk? Now? Um? Now, this is very unpopular

and it contributes to the protest movement against him. And while this is also happening internationally, his luck is running out. Because I don't know if you know about this, because Gorbachev became a Pizza Hut spokesman and then kind of a laughing stock and then shipped with Russia. Didn't go so great. Uh, In the post Soviet Union period either, but back in during this period in the late eighties when he's he's doing this glass nosest in perce Droika.

He is the dandy of Western media people not getting enough of How much do you remember watching where they were like Gorby Gorby, like that, like the Simpsons episode where where dude was in Mad magazine every month. Yeah, people fucking loved this guy because he had that that the birthmarket's firstingishable and he was just he was open for all forms of it's of entertainment. He was just people liked him over here. I remember that. Yeah, people liked him. I've talked to my My parents are much

more are very conservative. But one of the things that my dad said about him that did make sense to me, he's like, look, if you're growing up in the US in the nineteen sixties and it's this constant drumbeat of we are going to have a nuclear exchange with Russia, and then they finally have a guy who's like, now you know what, everything's gonna be cool. Like you feel good about him, you know, you feel good to your

television program Funky Brewster. Yeah, everybody's feeling pretty good about this. But the fact that everyone's feeling pretty good about Gorbachev means that what's the use of right, his whole value was the US and the Soviet Union are mortal enemies, but here's this guy in their backyard who's willing to work with us and like be part of a communist

power block. That's kind of posing sometimes Soviet policy. Now that the US and the Soviet Union are like becoming friendly with each other, he doesn't have any use to the United States. And you know what the United States does. Two countries that we no longer have a use to, we continue to support them. Yeah, we Yeah, that's exactly what happens. We support them like we support all of our good friends that we no longer have a vested financial interest in. Um ask I don't know roughly half

of the country's on Earth. How that works for them. Usually when that happens, we just throw Coca Cola in there to take care of the rest um. Nikolai's health begins to decline during this period too. He's he's not doing very well. Um He's less able to kind of manage his own affairs, and Elena starts taking a more and a more active role in governing, eventually becoming something

akin to the Regent of Romania. She creates a second shadow pullit bureau of her own to review all proposals before they're brought to her husband Um, and she starts spending huge amounts of state resources exp banning the personality culed around both of them. From an article by the Romanian Cultural Institute quote, the birthdays of the Chaochescus represented occasions for pompous ceremonies when the two geniuses were showered

with the numerable gifts. The range of accolades was extremely wide, grandiose manifestations on stadiums which involved tens of thousands of people, a never ending stream of messages of gratitude, works of prose and poetry written especially for the occasion, celebratory editions of the national festival, the praise of Romania, hymns, odes, songs, dances, paintings and sculptures produced by armies of artists. The zealots of the personality cult placed the dictator among the authentically

great figures of Romanian history. Thus, Chowchescu shortly evolved from being just a hero to a hero among heroes, to being the nation's hero, to being the most important hero of the nation's heroes. Painted portraits counted among the most frequent and appreciated gifts offered to Nikolai Chauchescu and his wife. The party organizations would commission various artists to create them. Depending on the budget, the artist was a household name

or a lesser known an artisan. The request could be for a painting in which Czechesko is pictured as a defender of the piece, friend and mentor to all Romanians, heir to the great forerunners and millennial ideals, the creator of the multilaterally developed socialist society. Other paintings would highlight the great scientific achievements of his poorly educated spouse, depicted as a member of the Romanian Academy and a PhD

in engineering with international scientific contributions. And she gets like a British fancy British university gives her an honorary degree because they get like strong armed into it. It's very funny. You don't want to You don't want to be the one that hands in a subpar painting. No imagine if you show up and you're just like, I've worked really hard on this, and that I did not like the way my art well, it's very funny too, because if you look at these, I'm actually gonna share screens so

you can see one of these fucking portraits. Um. Choochesco is usually portrayed kind of close to how he looks like. It's slightly idealized, obviously, as as they always are. Um, it's slightly ideal eyes, but he just kind of looks like himself, you know, his hair and his face shape is the same. He looks about the age that he is, kind of middle aged. Elena is almost exclusively portrayed in portraits as like a girl in her twenties. Yeah, like

here checked this one out. Um, oh yeah, wow, it's it's sort of like it looks like his child bride. She looks so young and that, Yeah, it is. It is unsettling when like, Yeahku can be a man in his sixties, but we gotta make his wife look twenty five. Um. But yeah, that's uh, that's the kind of you know

art that that they would apparently made them happy. Um, it did not actually make the people who lived in Romania happy, and they protested against the cult of personality, against the constant austerity, and against most like kind of the last big thing people protest is this forced push to destroy half the villages in the country and make people move to the cities. And one of the people who protest, people are just going to complain about any thing,

aren't they. I know, I know, it's it's unreasonable. Um do you have the snow flakes? Sophie and I have the same problem with our employees at cool Zone. They hate it when we forced them to leave their homes and destroy them with pick axes in order to move to insular apartment blocks in the cities that they can work in our factories making low quality televisions. We just don't understand why they're playing so much. Garrison just does

not stop with it anyway, endless. So one of the people who protests in Romania is a traveling and tenerant preacher named Laslow Tokes. Laslow refused to leave his home when he was evicted, you know, basically this village he's in, Timissoura Cichesko is like, you gotta get the funk out, I'm going to destroy it. Everybody's moving to the city, and Tokes is like the fuck. Also, it is spelled Laslow Tokes, as in if he was like a pot icon.

Hell yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool name. Actually, today he would have a podcast called Laslow Tokes where he where he reviews different Romanian strains. Um, he would be super big on the Joe Rogan Hour four Hours. Um. So he actually is a very cool guy. Um. He's so he's he's like, fuck you, I'm not leaving my home, and soldiers and police bear down on the town of

tim Asura. Because he starts getting like attention from people, this movement forms around him, and he's like, you know, when all the cops show up, he's like, don't get arrested for me. You should go home. And all of the people who have gathered are like, you know what, No, we're not gonna abandon you to get arrested by the police. Fuck these guys, we have to take a stand at some point. And they do, and so the security forces

firewater cannons into the crowd. Um that disperses most of the people and they're able to rush in and grab Laslow and they beat him half to death and they drag him out of his home. Now, this is the kind of thing we talked about that peasants uprising when that dude got hit in the face with a fucking rock. This short sort of ship again had happened all over Romania to a bunch of people for years, but this time and the way that these things happened, it ignited

something uncontrollable. Protests erupt in response to the beating of Laslow, and they erupt in Timisoura, and then they spread to the surrounding areas, and in very short order it becomes clear the securitt does not have the manpower to repress this. And you know, initially, yeah, boy, they sure don't do. Every secret police not Yeah, they that is the case always with the secret Republican Guard do in Iraq. Yeah, great, that's why Saddam Hussein is enjoying his like ninety birthday.

Uh this was, by the way, shout out to friends of the pods. Saddam um any I don't know what to take that king. Yeah, So the Securitat gets overwhelmed very quickly. Chesco and Alina at first they don't kind of recognize how serious the situation is, and then they're like, well, why don't you just start killing people, Just start firing into crowds, and the securitat is like we have been doing that the entire time, and it is not working that people. It's like trying to take a bucket at

the beach, trying to throw the water back in. Well, we have problems, we have we are shooting into crowds, but people have no fear of death because you have mismanaged country so grievously. Are you aware of events? Technic? Yeah, it turns out thousands of orphans with AIDS. He's more frightening than our bullets. We are. Um, the military, who had the ability, presumably to have put down this uprising are also just kind of do the thing that often

happens with militaries. Were like enough of them are like, well, for one thing, I don't want to murder my own family members, And for another thing, this doesn't look good. I don't know if we want to like back up the securit toad. Guys, maybe we sit this. Obviously there's places where the military cracks down, but there's enough places where the military is like, we're just gonna wait this

one out that the movement is able to really gain steam. Um, it's it's it's a little yeah, I mean, and it's obviously like the military. As with in Germany, the military had been complicit in some pretty horrible things. But they now that they see that, like, oh, we might have to we might not be able to put a lid back on this thing. They they they decide they have principled objections to the chow Chesscu regime um, much like

the principled resistors in the Wehrmacht. UM. So Nikolai organized as a speech to be delivered from the same balcony that he'd spoken from a nineteen sixty eight You know that big that was, That was his big moment. Uh. It was a good time for him this time trying to reprise his his his big moment does not go well. As Paul Kenyon describes in Children of the Night, was one minute and seventeen seconds into his address when he heard yells from somewhere in the back. Such an intervention

was unprecedented. He glanced up and stumbled over his words. Considering it is, he began losing his way. The yells became louder. Considering it is, cheers and whistles echoed around the square. Churchesco never finished his sentence. He did not have to his audience was never there for his oratory. It was a moment frozen in time and in history. Chowchesko stood with his mouth half open and his forehead

creased with confusion. And you can see this moment. You can watch him realize like, oh God, I've lost control. They're not scared of me anymore, and I no longer have the power to stop them. Yeah, and he has no improv skill and he's got no ember. Yeah, he doesn't even have a tight five ready to kind of get the crowd back. I can't imagine Chowchesky like doing the Bill Hicks where he just starts rolling around on his back shouting about how everyone needs to be killed. Um,

that's one way to deal with Heckler's certainly. Yeah. Cho's way of dealing with Heckler's is having his military form of ring of steel around the Capitol building and repeatedly shoot at everybody who gets close. Um, this does not work out well. And I should note the architects of that that that Heckling was not entirely organic. It was part of a protest campaign who was led by those theaters to who had had a bunch of their friends massacred for the pair thing. They took improv classes. They

took improv and they knew how to heckle. Yeah, the kids know how to handle a stage experience like that, and they do it very very well. The last good thing theater kids ever did it that this is this is also the case. Um, there's a lot to say about Romanian politics and the failures theater kids had in

the anyway, whatever, that's a story for another day. Cesco was effectively chased from the stage, and protests around the capitol swelled, and of course security forces get overwhelmed, and by the next day it becomes clear like we're not going to be able to hold onto the capitol building. And in fact, Nikolai and Alina barely escape a mob, Like they get into the helicopter just like seconds away from being pulled into a crowd of people who probably

would not have made that a pleasant experience for them. Yeah, they have to abandon the capital, and they like the pilot there with soon as because the pilots just like you know, some guy in the Romanian military who gets called in and he's like, wow, these protests look bad as shit. I wonder what they want before and then he winds up with the boss and his wife and no one else on the helicopter as a mob takes the capital. So this guy is like, I don't want to be doing this, and he's like, I I do

not want to be with these folks. This is not going to end well for me. He's like, this is either going to be very good for me very very bad for me. So he basically does the trouble with the helicopter. I gotta put you guys down, but don't worry. Once I let you out, I'll let you out near an army base and then I gotta I'm gonna go get another helicopter and I'll be right back and we'll we'll take care of you. Don't worry, guys. Yeah, it's a very funny story. He absolutely makes the the right

calculation in the moment. So it's also very funny to notice that this is in late December in Romania. Yeah, yeah, they are. He has just leaves two old people by the side of the road and it's by so out of here. They wind up getting to a military base and are like, this will be our new capital and we will, you know, retake the country with these forces. And the military is like, we might have a note or two on that one, but why don't we lock you in an armored vehicle for a little while? Um,

and and you can sleep there. Uh. And then they wake them up kind of after a little while in here um and the church excuse see that they're that like their military chief of staff is there, the guy who would help them escape in the helicopter, And they're like, oh good, you made it out too, And he's like, now you're all gonna be on you both are going to be on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide. Surprise. At that point in time, he probably was like, hey, guys,

like a good news and bad Yeah. The good news is I he got everyone to back off. The news is we're gonna we're gonna shoot you. We're gonna pretty bad. We're gonna we're gonna have us a show trial. And it is. It's one of those things. You can watch this. I recommend watching the footage of Choku giving that speech in realizing he has lost control of the country. I've also watched the footage of them being executed, because that's what's happened, what happens next and could not see it yeah,

how could you not see it? And if you want to see a dictator and his wife who is also a dictator get gunned down, I don't know. There is an element of it that's cathartic. I certainly get why you would feel that way if you were Romanian. It's important to recognize the people doing this. I mean, the soldiers doing this are just like kids. But the the adults, like the the leadership of Romania who make the decision to give him the show trial and execute him, are

not doing this for justice. They're doing this because maybe we don't get killed if we shoot boss. Right. Maybe you delivered that almost sheepishly. You're like, I need you to know these people weren't revolution reads that were behind this guy two days ago. No, they're trying not to get killed, and like, are you scared? As ship? That has to be Like that conversation absolutely happened the guys probably. He's like, why are you doing this? He's like, dude,

they're gonna kill me. Do you know how angry they are? Like you're clearly getting killed. I don't know how you don't understand that I might not get killed and all I have to do is do the thing that is definitely gonna happen to even way. Yeah and on Christmas, no, and yeah, it happens Christmas day nine and they get gunned down by by their own soldiers and they were caught by like on the two right, Like, yeah, it's very quick, like they spend a lot of time in

lock up. This is a a what we refer to in America as a quick and speedy trials. Yeah, this is this is they do rommate. The new regime institutes itself by en sharing the right to a speedy trial for Nikolai more like habeas corpse. That is how this all ends, and that is the life of Chescu and Nikolai, and it is they do like, look, they absolutely deserve to be shot, and they absolutely deserve to be shot unceremoniously.

That part's fine. It's just a lot of the people having them shot also probably should have been shot themselves. But hey, in't that always the case? I mean yeah, yeah, some would say broadly speaking, this is about as well as a story if a dictator ever ends and Romania, you know, obviously they're in a bad position when he falls. The next decade and change are challenging, but this is one of those cases where revolution comes and the government

that replaces it things get a shipload better. It is much better to be in Romania now than it wasn't under Ku in the eighties. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. I would like to add to that, like when you think about like Christmas, it's just like, oh, I got a game Boy and they're like, yeah, got we we got a dead ruler. Yeah we did have a game but the not we've boy. Um, so yeah, that's that's that's good. Things do get a lot better.

And it's like again it is we are I'm not gonna we don't have the time to talk about the last thirty years or so of Romanian history since all this, But one of the things that has increasingly happened, you know, especially after the kind of immediate chaos of the fall of the regime, is there have been an ongoing series of prosecutions against people who committed crimes, people who worked with a secure tat, people who were responsible for the

repression apparatus. And I don't know, again, there's actually there's a good obviously plenty of criticisms of how that process has gone down, but if you're kind of looking at the broad history of revolutions that replace dictatorships one of the better jobs of holding people to account, which again doesn't mean perfect, but things are better a lot better in Romania. This is a this is a revolution that things get a lot better after. I would like to

add to that. Um, you mentioned Laslow Tokes like he was active in politics. Yeah for a while, like that, dude was working for podcasting. Yeah, he's go we gotta get that podcast. Oh yeah, Sophie, Uh, let's reach out to Laslow Tokes and see if we can get him, get him to review marijuana for us. Sure, yeah, I bet you could be like, hey, do you want to He's seventy, He's got plenty of podcasting years left. You

reach out his Wikipedia now. In two thousand and ten, his wife filed for divorce and accused him of numerous affairs and absurd habits, and I kind of want to know what the habits. Sorry, he's token, baby, he's token. Yeah, he's taking absurdly smokes. Yeah, that's why they call him Laslow Tokes. Uh so yeah, cool guy, um ish, Probably, I gotta tell you I expected him to look a lot more widely than he shows up in photos. Yeah, he looks like a dude, yep. Um, So I don't know. Um,

I actually think he's pretty far right. But whatever, what what what what are you gonna do? Um? What are you gonna do? It's it's funny because like when you look at it and you look at like how the Soviet Bloc collapse, and you're like, Christmas, that fits the timeline, But you look at like what the finish was and you're like, oh, this is a lot different than how.

That's the thing. It's it's very interesting because the collapse of the Soviet Union, for all of the things that are ugly about it, this does not happen anywhere else. And nowhere else do you have like the people overthrow the government and massacre the leader. Um, that's just like not a thing that occurs like in in the USSR and any of the other places. Um, it only happens in Romania. And that's because of the kind of piece of ship. The church. Escu was Okay, well, let's not

go too far. Yeah, you're right, you're right. I don't want me to be rude about it. Offended. The Chowchesco stands in the audience, who are so sorry he didn't standards. Yeah, nobody's perfect. Robert Chowchesco did his best. He did his chow best. Yeah that's probably good, probably, Yeah, no, no no, no, he wouldn't you know, Yeah, sorry, sorry, he wasn't woke enough for you. Yeah, because he massacred all those people. Yeah, exactly.

Cancel culture comes for the man who created history's greatest orphan in orphan crisis. Purity politics much, Yeah, geez let he who has not accidentally and or purposefully infected tens of thousands of babies with AIDS in the ages cast the first Stone. I can't believe all of these woke skulds coming out and saying they never gave eleven thousand children AIDS because they starved them, and where us and blood transfusions to try and provide them with nutrients? Well,

among us hasn't partially starved an entire populace. That's exactly what Jesus said. Yeah, yeah, the Loaves and Fishes was about taking a little bit of a loaf and fish away from everybody. Yeah, exactly, a little bit less so that you can live in a palace, Yes, Christian palace, a Christian palace anyway, Um, Laslow tokes you actually sound like you're kind of a weird right winger. But if you want to do a marijuana focus podcast, hit us up. Uh,

that seems like a thing our audience would like. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, he seems like he get milkshake duct real fast as we It does seem like we in live for milkshake ductive a little bit. We're like, this is the real enemy of my enemy situation. And then you see that was more like the Taliban rama. Yeah. Um, yes, so I don't know. You know what I'm thinking about now that you brought up Rambo. Why did we never make Sylvester Stallone a governor? M because he wasn't a predator? Oh,

you're right. Well, like, sorry, dude, that's a pre wreck. That's like the fifteenth Amendment. I'm gonna guess is that. Yeah, governors have to have been this post episode has gone on. Oh I'm well sorry, we're adding color. Yeah, why why don't you Why don't you? Why don't you plug your plug? Doubles Jeff Row, I don't even know if I want to anymore. It's it's not fun now, Um, it is fun to talk about myself. So Hey, my name is Jeff May. You can find me across social media at

Hey There, Jeff Row. If you want to see me perform live if you are in California the second Friday of every month in Burbank at Blast from the Past on Magnolia, I do a show called Mint on Card, a lot of fun comedy in a toy store. If you were in New England, I will be there the twenty second of February. That's coming up real soon, folks at the Redemption Rock Brewery in Western Massachusetts that Wednesday,

the twenty second. Uh if And when you want to hear more of me and podcasting, I do a great show called Jeff Has Cool Friends, which you can get for free everywhere or at patreon dot com slash Jeff May. That's seven letters, and you can get early access to uncensraed episodes with bonus content, as well as monthly shows like ug Fine. You can also hear uh Nerd with Drey Alvarez, which is a deep dive into nerd stuff, which you can also get that one for free as well.

You can also hear UH Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Tom Ryman on the Game Fully Unemployed Network, and you can also hear me on you Don't Even Like Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the Unpopped Network with Adam Todd Brown. Wow there is Do you see how I just click into that plug thing? No, you did. You were incredible. You were like a Romanian mob taking over the palace. Um. I did throw a rock while I said that. Yeah, you did that a lot during podcasting,

and I salute you for it. Well, there's nothing left for me to do but play us out, Sophie. Why don't we Why don't we queue up my my track again? All right, one more, one more time, just just to make you one more time for the road, everybody. Pretty good musicians at Destiny's Child, at Destiny's Okay to do that? You know, we did that all in one take. I like Daandle's creativeness and like, all right there and there my favorite part. You are from Boston. I may be

home there and I will Boston. Thank you, Thank you, Jeff. You all sound like my friend Robert. Yeah, thank you for getting the word out. All right, all right bye, listen on that's the Jeff chess Good podcast. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool zone Media. For more from cool zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.