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

Robert is joined by Jeff May for our final episode in our series about Nicolae Ceaușescu.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastard Heart, four of our
epic series on Nikolai cha Chessco with the inimitable Jeff May. Jeff,
you know you you have an interesting background. You were
a teacher, um, and you decided, you know, you had
to make the very difficult choice to leave that career
behind to focus upon another career as a live performer.

(00:25):
I mean that's teaching. It's very live performer esque, just
with health insurance. And I will not not anymore with zoom.
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

(00:48):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:39):
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

(02:01):
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

(02:21):
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

(02:45):
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,

(03:13):
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

(03:35):
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

(03:57):
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?

(04:19):
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

(04:41):
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

(05:04):
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

(05:25):
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

(05:46):
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

(06:09):
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

(06:30):
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

(06:51):
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,

(07:12):
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

(07:33):
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

(07:57):
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

(08:20):
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

(08:43):
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

(09:03):
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

(09:25):
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

(09:49):
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

(10:12):
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

(10:38):
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

(10:59):
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

(11:21):
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

(11:47):
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

(12:09):
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

(12:29):
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,

(12:53):
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.

(13:15):
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,

(13:38):
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

(14:00):
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

(14:22):
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,

(14:44):
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

(15:05):
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,

(15:28):
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.

(15:49):
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

(16:11):
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

(16:31):
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,

(16:51):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:32):
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

(17:54):
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

(18:15):
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

(18:37):
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.

(18:58):
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

(19:20):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:26):
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

(20:46):
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.

(21:07):
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.

(21:28):
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

(21:51):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:17):
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

(23:39):
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

(24:00):
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

(24:21):
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

(24:43):
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,

(25:07):
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

(25:30):
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

(25:51):
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

(26:13):
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.

(26:33):
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,

(26:56):
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

(27:19):
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

(27:40):
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

(28:02):
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

(28:24):
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

(28:49):
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

(29:09):
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,

(29:34):
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

(29:57):
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

(30:20):
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

(30:41):
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

(31:02):
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

(31:23):
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

(31:45):
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.

(32:07):
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.

(32:29):
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

(32:50):
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,

(33:10):
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

(33:32):
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

(33:52):
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

(34:14):
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,

(34:37):
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

(34:57):
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

(35:18):
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,

(35:39):
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

(36:00):
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.

(36:20):
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

(36:42):
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

(37:05):
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

(37:25):
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

(37:46):
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

(38:06):
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

(38:28):
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

(38:48):
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

(39:08):
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,

(39:30):
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

(39:50):
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

(40:11):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:53):
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

(41:14):
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,

(41:38):
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

(42:02):
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

(42:24):
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

(42:44):
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

(43:06):
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

(43:28):
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

(43:49):
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

(44:11):
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,

(44:33):
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

(44:54):
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.

(45:15):
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.

(45:38):
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

(46:01):
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

(46:22):
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.

(46:44):
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

(47:04):
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

(47:26):
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

(47:49):
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

(48:10):
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,

(48:37):
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

(49:00):
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

(49:24):
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.

(49:47):
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

(50:11):
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

(50:32):
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,

(50:54):
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,

(51:14):
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

(51:36):
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

(51:57):
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,

(52:19):
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

(52:40):
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

(53:01):
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

(53:24):
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

(53:45):
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,

(54:06):
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

(54:29):
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

(54:49):
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

(55:12):
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

(55:34):
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

(55:57):
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,

(56:17):
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

(56:40):
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,

(57:05):
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,

(57:30):
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,

(57:51):
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

(58:11):
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

(58:32):
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,

(58:56):
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

(59:18):
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

(59:40):
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.

(01:00:02):
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

(01:00:23):
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

(01:00:43):
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

(01:01:07):
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

(01:01:30):
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

(01:01:51):
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

(01:02:12):
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

(01:02:32):
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,

(01:02:56):
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

(01:03:18):
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,

(01:03:38):
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

(01:03:58):
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,

(01:04:22):
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

(01:04:42):
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

(01:05:03):
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

(01:05:24):
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

(01:05:45):
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,

(01:06:07):
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,

(01:06:27):
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

(01:06:49):
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.

(01:07:11):
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

(01:07:32):
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

(01:07:55):
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

(01:08:18):
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

(01:08:41):
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,

(01:09:01):
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

(01:09:23):
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.

(01:09:44):
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

(01:10:04):
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

(01:10:27):
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

(01:10:47):
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

(01:11:10):
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,

(01:11:32):
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,

(01:11:55):
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,

(01:12:15):
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

(01:12:35):
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

(01:12:56):
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

(01:13:19):
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

(01:13:42):
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?

(01:14:05):
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?

(01:14:33):
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

(01:14:56):
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.