Behind the Bastards - Part Four: Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Dracula of Being A Dick

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Robert is joined by Jeff May for our final episode in our series about Nicolae Ceaușescu.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My name is M. William Phelps. For the past several years, I've been reinvestigating the cases of two young women abducted from their small towns, their bodies dumped deep in the Ozark woods with a connection to one very familiar name. Find them, torture them, kill them, BTK. Secrets finally revealed, sending authorities rushing to confront a suspect who's been hiding in plain sight for decades. Listen to Paper Ghosts Season 4 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition Podcast. The Daily Show Podcast has everything you need

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bailey was never born join the many partaking in this one-of-a-kind podcast experience listen to all 10 episodes available now on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. SaveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part four of our epic series on Nikolai Ceausescu with the inimitable Jeff May. Jeff, you know, you have an interesting background. You were a teacher 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 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 i empathize with that i also 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. But to give up my ambitions of, of being a musician and, and, and really participating,

which has been one of the, maybe the hardest choice I ever had to make. Well, one thing people don't know you were on the cusp. Yeah. I was about to break through. I was about to break through. But, and you know, I'm, I made peace with the choice that I made.

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 doing a lot of stage shows. You might have heard of them. They're a little band called Destiny's Child. And we put together a little bitty collab based on my incredible Boston accent. So I want to just play that for everyone right now as a little treat. I'm from Boston.

I'm from Boston. I'm from Boston. Okay, that ought to do there. 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, exactly. And that's when you decided to give up your career and i'm glad that you guys uh you and destiny's child that you're still you you still it's all amicable i know oh yeah kind of they felt like you left them in the lark for a while yeah beyonce had to lift up a lot of the stuff that you left behind but i gotta be honest she's done okay right she's done okay for herself okay 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 he had stuck with it.

You know, it's just one of those, one of the tiny tragedies that is everyday life. But, you know, the upside of it is that now that we have released this in 25 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 backing me on this one um he's actually back acting you i was that was a solid billy joel joke jeff i hope you're proud of yourself it's a bill Billy joke. It's a Billy joke. Wow. Wow. Well, we're doing good. So you want to talk about a piece of shit a little bit more? I thought we just were.

Wow. No, Billy. Come on. Now he knows we're okay. Yeah. He's a good guy. William Joel. Oh, God.

Why is my phone ringing? Stop it. Because you're popular. Oh, God. Why is my phone ringing? Stop it. 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 fucking Donald Trump decided that

phones should no longer be things that people can use. Isn't that nice? Isn't that a nice change that was made? Classic. It's like it's like when commercials uh were allowed to be cartoons again yeah yeah just one of these decisions that has low-key destroyed civilization and shaped my entire personality oh yeah absolutely you've seen all the he-man and gi joe and stuff that i have behind me here. You and Michael Bay completely changed

as a result of that move. Just like I was completely changed by the fight Beyonce and I had. That's water under the bridge now. Was it in an elevator? Yeah, that would probably be the most cinematic place for us to have had a fight, right?

Yeah, but on a security camera. Did you get did you get the joke or is that over your head no sophie i 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 he's blocked it 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 the episode yeah of course sophie cool i've been up what an episode on lebron james he seems like a good dude yeah i mean he's okay again uh he's done all right for

himself so we're talking about nikolai ceausescu um Now, 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. And as Ceausescu's ambitions for control over the country that he was gradually grinding into the dust grew, he found the need to establish and expand a state security force that could surveil his populace to an unprecedented extent. In Romania, the state's security force, the secret police, whatever you want to call them, they were called the Securitate. 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 shit here. Oh, geez. You got some, some Portland Pinkertons or whatever? Yeah, I mean, 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 talk about the East German Stasi, you know, when they talk about communist secret police forces. Opriciniki? about communist secret police forces. Oprichniki. Yeah, none of these motherfuckers had shit on the Securitat in terms of its actual, like, the extent of the repression that it was capable of carrying out. Hell yeah, man. Goldman.

Oh, yeah. No, this is a good state security force. Not like in a moral sense, but in a... In an efficiency sense. In an efficiency sense. Yeah, in a being perfect villains in a James Bond movie sense. And I'm going to quote from Catalin Gruja here. That's that Romanian journalist.

In 1965, there was a central phone tapping center and 11 regional ones. That's when Ceausescu takes power. 13 years later, there were 248 centers and 1,000 portable stations. By the 1980s, the Securitat had become one of the most feared secret police organizations in the world. In 1989, it had 14,259 employees, of which 8,159 were officers. According to Pesipa, each officer had to have 50 collaborators, members of the Romanian Communist Party, and 50 informants outside of the Romanian Communist Party. The result was the constant surveillance of the population so damn near everybody was either in the employ of the securitat or directly under surveillance of the securitat like it or both yeah or both in many cases both yeah like that's the other part yeah that's i mean

it's they always used to make the the you know the kgb jokes we've all seen that where yeah yeah and stuff like that but this it's seems less funny yeah somehow less funny than the kgb who were who were a bunch of lap hucksters chuckle chuckle buddies yeah i did a research paper on the kgb and uh the title of it was cops and robbers yeah that's not a bad title for that. 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. It's a shame that secret police are absolutely necessary to have in every single country.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here. ACAB includes secret police that are establishing the dominance of the state I'm sorry I know every time I come on I cause chaos and this is it I'm sorry wow that's gonna be

that's gonna be 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. Called get tough. Yeah, except that people disagree with you, secret police officers. That's not what secret police officers do.

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 U.S.-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 fucking times. I think they shot him, and they stabbed him, and he kept, like, not quite dying. You've got to rasputin 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 honestly that's kind of a cool way to kill someone all things oh yeah no no if you're if you're a if you're a a journalist writing against a state and they have to use the radioactive poison against you you know you've uh that's like that's like the pulitzer getting getting radiation getting like radioactive poison uh slipped in your coffee nobel prize of dying yeah of dying as a journalist for sure you know dying like Marie Curie, 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. So this is something that the Romanians were going to have to spend a lot of money on. um so this this is something that the romanians were going to have to spend a lot of money on um and when titan belts put the securitat 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 securitat

during the most repressive years of ceausescu's regime you know what i have a lot of guesses okay uh but i feel like i'm not gonna nail it down because my first answer uh was mcdonald's no not mcdonald's you might call them the mcdonald's of furniture because it was ikea i'm sorry it was ikea i still like them yeah i'm gonna go out on a limb and say i'm still gonna 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 meatballs because i'm gonna eat potential horse meatballs 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 men. 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 Securitas said. So during the 1980s, this was actually a thing across a lot of Eastern Europe.

A number of communist states are having these economic crunches, and so they start opening themselves up to more capitalist businesses and being like, maybe you come in a little bit and help us with things. And IKEA's like, oh yeah, we would like to be coming in. I don't know how to... They're not from Boston. They're not

from Boston. Yeah, sorry. I can't do a good Swedish. What was that? Genuinely. It was not your best yeah i am a sweden man and it's like yeah yeah i was 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 okay so one of the things Ikea did was they realized that it was really cheap to have East German political prisoners build their billy bookshelves and other unpronounceable bed frames. So that was one of the things Ikea got up to in this period.

But they were really interested in Romania because Romania has these huge, again, Ceausescu 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 like there's a lot of wood anyway yeah 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 ikea is like well we need trees we have a lot of low quality uh easily breakable furniture

to produce we'll take all the trees that you could give us um and romania is like well how about you know we you pay our state-run timber company you know know, 10 million pounds-ish a year for wood, 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 yeah everybody knows 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 they're like i sure do like immediate shipping because i'm impatient and i like things being slightly cheaper so i like immediate shipping i'm okay that jeff bezos is buying radioactive poison to use on his enemies yeah um it's it's such a easy way to be like they didn't tell us they were doing that yes 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 uh or any albert chairs or any Abbo tables or Jonas desks from Ikea in the 1980s, there's a very good chance that your purchase directly helped fund the Securitot. So that's neat. Those are specifically the product lines that they – really? No, 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 you're 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 we get money. Just like the Securitat. Yeah. So that's good.'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 in like nato countries um but the west put up with it for quite a while because as horrific as ceausescu was to his own people he never failed to back up u.s interests at critical junctures. And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Wilson Center here. In 1979, Ceausescu attacked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1981, he counseled caution in the Warsaw Pact's response to the crisis in Poland. In the following year, he opposed pact plans to increase defense spending and, in fact,

reduced Romania's defense budget. In 1983, he repeated his call for a halt to the arms race and advocated multilateral nuclear disarmament in Europe. In the following year, he proposed a moratorium on the deployment of new nuclear weapons in Europe and, 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 doing this to stay in the West's good graces. That's not, like, necessarily 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 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 letting it ride. I will say-

Donnie 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 why ever they did it. I actually have no idea why they did it, but because fuck 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 him. Yeah. So Ceausescu, you're uncanceled, buddy. That's

probably not a thing I should. Oh, wait, no, he refused to join it. You're still canceled, motherfucker. So Nixon had been the first U.S. president to visit Romania in a follow-up to his 1967 visit, but Nicolai maintained excellent relations with every U.S. president during his time in office. His success in this was close to perfect, until in 1978 he sent Jan Pasipa to Germany with, apparently, a plan to assassinate a journalist. I say apparently because Pasipa 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 and 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's stories about the Ceausescus, but it's based on the stuff Pasipa claimed almost exclusively and again this guy is not necessarily a credible source on his old boss because he's defected and had a vested interest in ignoring a lot of the fucked 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 Ceausescu wasn't but just like you shouldn't take anything Pasipa says at face value right and making his boss seem more directly responsible for it um which is not to say that chachescu wasn't but just like you shouldn't take anything pasipa says at face value like hans landa 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 bad chachescu is he was his secret police head he's a snitch yeah exactly and snitches get stitches even when they're snitching on uh chow chesky actually in this case snitches get a house paid for by the u.s government for the rest of their lives um i mean yeah i'll snitch on whoever if i that means i could own a house i think a lot of people would so pasipa was the first public figure in the West, because obviously it's big news when he defects, to portray Romania in kind of like a mass sense as a totalitarian hellscape, significantly worse than anywhere else in communist Europe. Kind of before this point, there'd been a lot of, you know, Romania had had a lot of good press in like the U.S. media and stuff. And that starts to turn around after this. And then in 1979, the Iranian revolution,

you know, becomes a thing. And that brings an end to the cheapest oil Romania had been able to buy because Ceausescu had a pretty good relationship with the Shah. Then you would get the Iran-Iraq war, which ratchets up the price of oil more. And that makes stuff more difficult for Ceausescu 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 Ceausescu 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.

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 1980s, 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 1978, and that had risen to 10.4 billion by 1982, equivalent to 28% of its GDP. In 1981, just the interest payments alone accounted for $3 billion. As a result, Romania applied for an IMF loan of some $1.3 billion, only for the IMF board to renege on it. As Misha Gleni has pointed out, clearly the Western economic institutions had little faith in the reliability of Ceausescu's

regime to honor its commitments. As a result, the Romanian economy suddenly found itself in deep trouble. By 1982, Ceausescu was forced to cut spending and redirect foreign currency towards interest repayments. After 1982, Ceausescu threw most of the Romanian budget into paying down the debt. So you got two things going on here. One is that Romania has this crippling debt to pay off, and the other is that Ceausescu gets angry at the IMF 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... That's gonna go great. It's gonna go great for everybody. You know, the IMF is also a bad guy in this, because it was very obvious to anyone paying attention that Romania was not gonna be able to handle the kind of debt that they were taking on, that these were really bad investments.

There's a lot that's fucked up here, but we will, in this case, put most of the blame on Ceausescu. I mean, just the blame kind of goes everywhere in that case, 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, uh, yeah, that is like a rounding error. Now it is funny that like Elon Musk could have paid off Ceausescu's debt with pocket change. Yeah. Still have a quarter of Twitter. Yeah, exactly. So two things. Yeah. In order to do this, in order to pay off Romania's debt and also make it independent from the global economy, Ceausescu had to radically reorganize Romanian society.

He accelerated his plans to force citizens out of rural towns they'd lived in for generations. And one of the ways in which he accelerated it was by dynamiting the villages they'd lived in and pushing everyone to labor in cities to pay down the debt. Classic. By the winter. Yeah, exactly. Classic Nikola. Yeah. It's very fucked up.

Yeah, exactly. Classic Nikolai. Yeah. 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... Dynamining was more of a euphemism because they don't want to spend that much money on dynamite. Because he's not Wile E. Coyote.

Yeah. He will have his Securitat guys show up and be like, everyone has to leave. You have 48 hours. And then when they start, you know, get ready to leave, he'll be'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 homes with like pickaxes and shit um that's something interesting yeah it's gonna create a regular populace that's not gonna want to kill you real bad later yeah no it's it's not gonna make anybody the angriest they've ever been um so by the winter of 1987 things were so bad that gas consumption in 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. Ceausescu declared that the temperature, like if it was warmer outside than 10 degrees Celsius, it was illegal to burn fuel at all or to heat your house at all. And if you disobeyed, you be prosecuted he attempted to reduce he like set up this plan where he was like the average romanian uh only needs 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 yeah 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 15 across the board he like made a a technical plan to reduce the amount of calories that people got to eat um and while all this is happening obviously nikolai and alina are living in palaces they're eating whatever they want they want and this this also makes people angry. Ceausescu, in order to keep things clamped down, had to ramp up domestic repression to fully unhinged levels. Before Pasipa defected, 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 Pasipa betrayed Nicolaeai nicolai 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 1980s 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. Was he Florida? Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, some strong DeSantis energy there. So since 1965, abortion had been banned, again, like Florida. And as conditions eroded through the 1980s, Romania was wracked 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 we said earlier, between 10,000 and 20,000 women in Romania died due to botched abortions during Ceausescu's time in power. But for another thing, 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 they'd left kids without moms and a lot of those moms were single moms. And in addition to that, a huge number of families just had kids that they couldn't afford to feed because Ceausescu 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. So 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 1989, there are 104,000 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 double the population of Romania. They have a third as many orphaned children in institutions. Like, that is an incredibly high rate.

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 sorry i didn't mean to jump ahead with me yeah yeah yeah with my respect the orphans jeff god god i need to get fucked that's right what, well, don't do that in Ceausescu's Romania. Not the proper term, but you know. So throughout Ceausescu's 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 government institutions were run. And I'm going to quote from an article in The Guardian here. Florence Warr, an investigator for the Institute who spent several

years gathering testimony, estimates that between 1966 and 1989, there were between 15,000 and 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children in Romania's grim network of children's homes, with the vast majority taking place in those set aside for disabled children. The most horrific 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 category, some of whom had minor or no disabilities, were subjected to particularly brutal conditions. Across the country, there were 26 institutions catering to the Category 3 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. 70% 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 771 deaths they believed

could have been prevented in three facilities in the late 1980s, suggesting the number across all 26 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 swar so it's not a feel-good story it's not a feel 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 that's like a bad thing i think i think we were able to take that stance sophie is that going to get us in trouble with the advertisers uh i don't really care. Okay, well, hopefully this show is not being advertised by Romanian orphanages in the 1980s. A Romanian rat feed emporium. Yeah, yeah. If so, we're going to be in some trouble. We need those babies.

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SaveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. Ah, what a good time. That money came, baby. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. good time that money came baby yeah yeah it's good stuff i i i i i i i'm happy that we're we're getting paid by the um by this great product and our service exactly exactly good stuff um so yeah we're talking about chao chesku's orphan extermination facilities you know yeah yeah good times and i found a new york times article so chow chesku

yeah very very chowey very chowey 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 uh the consequences of all of his shit 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 90s the children are left as they were, and this is the way the facilities kind of still were in the early 90s. The children are left as they were during the Ceausescu era, prisoners in their cribs. Romanian orphans, it is estimated, receive five to six minutes of attention a

day. Attendants still lull in the corridors, smoking and drinking coffee, leaving the children to rock in their cots. As a result of their troubled early lives, one in ten of the children will finish life in a psychiatric institution, and all will suffer severe trauma. Doctors Without Borders said in its farewell report. That's a pretty blank.

Yeah. And it's farewell report. Yeah. That's the most ominous line there. And it's we got to bounce. We can't fix this. Man, this is fucked up. We'll see you guys in hell, apparently.

Yeah. Yeah. Good luck, Romania. But it gets worse, Jeff, because. Oh, great. man this is fucked up we'll see you guys in hell apparently yeah yeah good luck romania um but it gets worse jeff because oh great and 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 1980s and it's the hiv virus what you don't have you don't have a quip 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 reasonable i don't feel like having my good joke be destroyed by commenters uh yeah well we're also going to talk about racism

so i'll do that yeah yeah okay good so we're going to talk about the treatment of the Ceausescu regime of the Roma and how it relates to all this. So in Romania, the Roma people are the largest single minority group in the country. They're about 10 to 12% of the population. So question. Now, when you say Roma, is that Romani? Yes. Yes.

The Romani. Yes. Okay. So that's the same thing. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We'll use Romani because that might make. So that's the same thing. Okay. Yes. Yes. Um,

uh, we'll, yeah, we'll use Romani cause 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, uh, cumbersome no matter how we, we write it. So it's, um, 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 1850s, is it's super common for Roma people to just be enslaved by the state. Like there's a nasty, obviously it's Roma in Eastern Europe. The history is going to be unpleasant and oppressive. It's not going to be good.

They're treated the way Europe also treated Jews. Yeah, yeah. But if they were kind of hippies. Yeah. That's the way they were treated. And they're not going to have a good history in Europe. 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 pogroms and they are victims of the Holocaust as well. This is all across Europe, but it's particularly true in Romania because there's a lot more Roma in Romania. So, you know, when they were not being enslaved or massacred, the Roma for most of the 1800s and early 1900s, lived the way that they kind of traditionally did, which is on the move, you know, as these kind of traveling groups of people. And this continued up until communism took hold in Romania.

And they kind of, over time, 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. 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 don't know, probably broadly good that they have the option more often for quality homes

during this period. It's one of the achievements of the early communist state, as we'll talk about there's some problematic aspects to that too. But things do get a lot better for them in the early years of communism. One of the reasons why is that most Roma people in Romania in this period are poor. They don't have any property, and they often do not have access, did not have access to education. And in Giorgio Dei'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 read. No. Oh, hell yeah. Come on in. And a number of towns in this period, they get that is literally how George Uday handles a lot of stuff. And a number of towns in this period uh they get that is literally how george uday handles a lot of stuff um and a number of towns in this period they get roma mayors um which had been basically unheard of before this time um and roma people become uncommonly well represented as like local communist party cadre leaders and as low-level functionaries like there's actually a really positive early period for the roma in communism It's like a forced recruitment, yeah. Yeah, they're integrated into the power structure a little bit. Never at the high levels, but at kind of the lower levels of it. But even during this kind of positive period, there are some early troubling signs. One of them is that the Communist Party pretty much immediately stops counting or listing the Roma as a separate population 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 it's on that clipboard real quick yeah don't do it yeah it would be reasonable to feel good about this but what it kind of meant in this case is that the communist party they 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 it happens in a lot of places it happens in many places but we're talking about romania so under ceausescu'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. And the people, obviously, they're not just like making them homeless. Nobody is homeless in Ceausescu's Romania.

They are 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 were 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 like traveled and lived together for generations together and that's kind of a soft ethnic cleansing is that Is that purposeful?

There's debate about this. Or is it carelessness? 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 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 going to be able to give you like, again, a lot of stuff is debated about this. So 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 also you are. This is one of the things that's occurring here is kind of the destruction of the community that had existed previously. Still, given how things had gone prior to the 80s, 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 in Romania collapses

and Ceaușescu forces his vaunted austerity measures on the populace. Now, the Roma had always had larger families than most other people in Romania, but prior to Ceaușescu, Roma women had utilized pretty frequently legal and safe abortions to aid in family planning. With abortion now illegal,

families had more children than they could afford to feed or take care of under Ceausescu'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 going to quote from an article in the Open Society Foundation here. The results were a high level of poverty and an increase in unwanted children. Romanian families, which were already traditionally large, 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 in orphanages to swell to an unmanageable number. State institutions were forced to deal with slashed 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 wrong? Vampires would. Yeah. Yeah. It is a little. Okay. It's a little vampire-y what yeah yeah well it is a little okay it's a little vampirey 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 orphaned children blood

transfusions in the 1980s could be a serious problem they should have gotten like power lifter blood yeah they probably shouldn't have gotten much blood in the 80s because again the aids crisis is hitting um so there's a horrible health crisis as a result of this in 1988 why only yeah um so only about 20 of the blood being donated in romania is tested for disease in 1988 because again budget cuts and the person who's in charge of all of the chemistry related things is alina and she doesn't really think you need to test all that much of the blood um well of course not she's got her her advanced degree and yeah she she understands blood and being like yeah it's don't tell me my job yeah yeah blood is what you drink yes yes blood is how do you say oil through body it's fine so in in 1988 the government reported just

three cases of hiv infection to the world health organization um but in 1989 the next year the number swelled to 1200 and nearly 96 of those were in children under four years of age 65 of them were kids in orphanages and all of them had had a history of multiple transfusions this is the start of a children's epidemic that's like a 40 000 percent increase yeah it is pretty rough and in all of these orphanages, like 80% of the children are Roma. So it is primarily an AIDS crisis among forcibly orphaned Roma children. So that's bad. They need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, that is hard to do when you are wasting away from a variety of AIDS-related illnesses.

That is fair, yeah. When you were wasting away before the AIDS. And also, you have no access to bootstraps because yeah your government were sold to ikea yeah yeah ikea is using them to make those horse meatballs yeah um horse is horse meat and boot rubber it's very good somewhere around 11 000 roma children are believed to have been infected with aids as a result of all this compared with around 3 000 other romanian orphans which gives you an idea of just how significant the scale of this was okay and i i just yeah so it's because they made the plan to just instead of like feeding these kids properly

to just give them bonus blood yeah give them bonus blood and then aids gets into the blood supply weird way that a large group of people is getting hiv yeah uh or or full-blown aids in the case um because it's just like they're like let's do 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 human 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 That would still be one of the worst things I've ever read. It would be fucking weird as well. Like, yeah, like this fucking weird.

That's not what you do. You have a whole country. You don't need to do this. Yeah. Why are you giving? Why are you feeding their baby bodies blood? You freaks. You monsters.

And I said, they're like, yeah, but it was also AIDS blood. Yeah. Okay. That goes. That went from weird to like fully sinister well and here's here's maybe the one of the bleakest obviously a huge number of these children who get infected in the late 80s 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-90s, 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 Ceausescu falls, some of the luckiest orphans are the AIDS orphans, which is... There's an asterisk, citation needed real quick. 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, in Romanian 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 prize is all, all of the leftover asbestos cigarettes. Yeah.

God, I could go for an asbestos cigarette. It's just the normal ones hurt my throat so much. You need a better filter. Yeah, exactly. And there's no better filter than asbestos. No, that's what everyone says about asbestos. I really, 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 mesotheliota at this point in time

oh that's that's 80 of a t-shirt idea jeff mesotheliota yeah there is that that you know what that's fine send me money everybody print it print it yeah so as the 80s dragged to a close the whole warsaw pact is enduring shortages of basic goods and political interests i'm sure you all remember from like middle school or high school you know glasnost and perestroika and the ussr and gerbachev which are these these policies meant to kind of open up the soviet union and relax it from some hardline positions. This is obviously praised in the West. People are like, yay, Glasnost and Perestroika. We're not quite as close to nuking each other as we used to be.

But Ceausescu hates, again, Ceausescu never stops being kind of a hardline Stalinist. And he publicly mocks Glasnost and Perestroika. It's 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 shit. Oh my God.

I would never not be talking shit. The only time I wouldn't be talking shit 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 going to keep me in the palace.

I'm going to vote for them. Yeah, exactly. That is how people with palaces tend to vote yeah hence most of the history of europe um so the ussr is doing this stuff and and chauchescu publicly mocks these new policies and and gorbachev he announced that similar reforms would only come to romania when pears 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 pears as they could. And again, they're all hungry, so the fact that they're using pears for a protest is meaningful. And they hang pears from just trees in the capital in mass as a sign of protest to be like okay you said you said we'd get changed when there's pears growing from the trees so we'll just make that happen um this does not go well with Ceausescu he he takes this he takes offense at this and I'm going to quote from a write an article in the Los Angeles Times the taunt so infuriated Ceausescu that he ordered his secure tot secret police to identify the perpetrators and attack the students in their dormitories killing many of them other students took to the university square where 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 you know yeah yeah not by much not not by much it's uh 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 close my eyes at night when I when I put on my noise canceling here for the 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. All of a sudden, he says, Linda, I see a skull.

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SaveGeorgeBailey.com. Subscribe now. Ah! Oh my god. That's a Tetris 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 it honestly that's just called living in america baby living in america um that was pretty good rocky four 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.

Sophie, can we play that again? Getting a no from Sophie. Getting a no from Sophie. It's going to be a no for me, dog. Wow. Well, I guess that's Sophie's choice. Wow. We did it again.

We did it again. Good times. So, speaking of good times, Ceausescu's good times are nearing an end by 1989. The process by which Ceausescu 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 a thing that a lot of folks don't know about people. This is a thing that a lot of folks don't know about people. In 1987, he announced that half of Romania's remaining 13,000 villages were going to be bulldozed,

and people were given 48 hours to move. So half of the people who live in the country, you all have to leave your homes right the fuck now. Now, this is very unpopular, and it contributes to the protest movement against him. And while this is also happening, happening internationally his luck is running out because i don't know if you know but this because gorbachev became a pizza hut spokesman and then kind of a laughingstock and then shit with russia didn't go so great uh in the post-soviet union period either but back in during this period in the late 80s when he's he's doing this glass-nosed in perestroika he is the dandy of western media people cannot get enough of how much stuff do you remember watching where they were like gorby gorby like that like the simpsons episode where dude was in yeah dude was in mad magazine every month yeah people fucking loved this guy um because he had that that the

the birthmark which was very distinguishable and he was just he was open for all forms of what 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 u.s in the 1960s 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 no you know what everything's gonna be cool like yeah you feel good about him you know you feel like access 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 Ceausescu, 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 bloc that's kind of opposing 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 to countries that we no longer have a use to. We continue to support them. Yeah, we 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.

Ask, I don't know, roughly half of the countries 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 nicolai'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 politburo of her own to review all proposals before they're brought to her husband, and she starts spending huge amounts of state resources expanding the personality cult around both of them.

From an article by the Romanian Cultural Institute, quote, The birthdays of the Ceausescus represented occasions for pompous ceremonies, when the two geniuses were showered with innumerable 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 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, Ceausescu 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 Ceausescu 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 artisan. The request could be for a painting in which Ceausescu is pictured as a defender of the peace, 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 and do 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 no like imagine if you show up and you're just like i worked really hard on this and i did not like the way my eyes yeah well it's very funny too because if you look at these i'm actually gonna share screen so you can see one of these fucking portraits. Ceausescu is usually portrayed kind of close to how he looks like it's slightly idealized, obviously, as as they always are.

It's slightly idealized, 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 20s smoke show baby yeah like uh here check 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 yeah it is it is unsettling when like yeah chochescu can be a man in his 60s but we got to make his wife look 25 um but yeah that's uh that's the kind of you

know art that that they would that apparently made them happy um it did not actually make the people who lived in romania happy and they protested uh 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 anything aren't they i know i know it's it's unreasonable um snowflakes sophie and i have the same problem with our employees at cool zone they hate it when we force them to leave their homes and destroy them with pickaxes in order to move to insular apartment blocks in the cities so they can work in our factories making low quality

televisions we just don't understand why they're complaining so much garrison just does not stop with it anyway whatever endless so one of the people who protests in romania is a traveling itinerant preacher named laszlo toks uh laszlo refused to leave his home when he was evicted you know basically ceausescu this village he's in timisoara uh ceausescu's like you gotta get the fuck out i'm gonna destroy it everybody's moving to the city and toks is like the fuck also it is spelled laszlo tokes as in if he was like a pot icon hell yeah yeah it's pretty cool it's a pretty cool name actually it today he would have a podcast called laszlo tokes where he where he reviews different romanian weed strains um he

would be super big on the joe rogan hour four hours um So he actually is a very cool guy. So he's like, fuck you. I'm not leaving my home. And soldiers and police bear down on the town of Timasora 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 going to 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 fire water cannons into the crowd um that disperses most of the people and they're able to rush in and grab laszlo and they beat him half to death and they drag him out of his home now this, this is the kind of thing, we talked about that peasant's uprising, where that dude got hit in the face with a fucking rock. This short sort of shit, again, had happened all over Romania to a bunch of people for years.

But this time, in the way that these things happened, it ignited something uncontrollable. Protests erupt in response to the beating of Laszlo, and they erupt in Timișoara, and then they spread to the beating of laszlo and they erupt in temesora and then they spread to the surrounding areas and in very short order it becomes clear the secure tot does not have the manpower to repress this and you know initially don't they yeah boy they they sure don't boy does every secret police not have that ability yeah they that is the case always with the secret police republican guard do in iraq yeah uh great uh that's why saddam hussein is enjoying his like 98th birthday uh this week by the way shout out to friend of the pod saddam um any i don't know where to take that but yeah yeah so the secure tot gets overwhelmed very quickly ceausescu and alina at first they

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 sekiratat is like we have been doing that the entire time and it is not working yeah yeah that's like people that's like trying to take a bucket at the beach to try to just throw the water back in uh boss we have problem we have we are shooting into crowds but people have no fear of death because you have mismanaged country so grievously Throw the water back in. Boss, we have problem. We are shooting at the crowds, but people have no fear of death because you have mismanaged country so grievously.

Are you aware of events 1912 Titanic? Yeah. It turns out thousands of orphans with AIDS is more frightening than our bullets. They are no longer scared. They are iceberg. We are sheep. Yeah.

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 where 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 these sakira tot 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 going to wait this one out that, um,

the, 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 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 decide they have principled objections

to the Ceausescu regime, much like the principled resistors in the Wehrmacht. So Nikolai organizes a speech to be delivered from the same balcony that he'd spoken from in 1968. You know, that was his big moment. It was a good time for him. This time, trying to reprise his big moment does not go well,

as Paul Kenyon describes in Children of the Night. Ceausescu was one minute and 17 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.

Ceausescu 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. Ceausescu 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, yeah,

he doesn't even have a tight five ready to kind of get the crowd back. Yeah. Take a class dude. Christ. I can't imagine Ceuchescu like doing the bill hicks where he just starts rolling around on his back shouting about how everyone needs to be killed um it's one way to deal with hecklers yeah that's certainly yeah chauchescu's way of dealing with hecklers 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 theater students who had had a bunch of their friends massacred for the pear thing they're led by this they took improv classes they took improv and they knew how to heckle yeah yeah theater kids know how to handle a stage experience like that and they they do it very very well um that is 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. Ceausescu 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 on to 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 it's like platoon yeah they they have to abandon the capital and they like the pilot they're with as soon as because the pilot's 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 me for 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's like i don't want to be doing this yeah 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 yeah very very bad for me so he basically does the oh 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 uh we'll take care of you don't worry guys this dude rocks yeah it's it's a very funny story. He absolutely makes the right calculation in the moment. It's also very funny to notice that this is in late December in Romania.

Yeah, they are. He just leaves two old people by the side of the road. And it's like, bye! Best of luck! I'm going to get the fuck 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 no 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. And the Ceausescu see that 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 both are going to be on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide. Surprise.

Yeah. I mean, at that point in time he probably was like hey guys i got good news and bad news yeah the good news is i'm here i got everyone to back off yeah the bad news is we're gonna we're gonna shoot you we're gonna shoot you 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 ceausescu giving that speech and 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 it is how could you 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 i 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. Yeah. Right.

That's 100%. You delivered that almost sheepishly. You're like, I need you to know these people weren't revolutionaries that were behind this guy two days ago. No, they're trying not to get killed. Yeah.

And like, they are scared as shit. That has to be like that conversation absolutely happened the guy's probably he's like why are you doing this he's like dude they're gonna fucking kill me do you do you know how angry they are like you're clearly getting killed i don't know how you don't understand that yeah i might not get killed and all i have to do is do the thing that is definitely gonna happen to you anyway yeah and it's and on christmas no less and it yeah it happens christmas day 1989 they get gunned down by uh

by their own soldiers yeah and they were caught by like on the 22nd right like yeah it's very quick like they do not spend a lot of time in lockup this is a a what we refer to in america as a uh quick and speedy trial is that what you say yeah this is this is they do uh romaine the new regime institutes itself by ensuring the right to a speedy trial for nikolai ceausescu hey more like habeas corpse oh you know what i'm saying that is how this all ends and that is the life of ceausescu and Nikolai and Elena. It's a holly jolly corpse mess. 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, isn't that always the case? Yep. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Some would say. Broadly speaking, this is about as well as a story of a

dictator ever ends and romania you know obviously they are 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 shitload better it is much better to be in romania now than it was in under ceausescu in the 80s i don't think anyone would disagree with that i would like to add too that like when you think about like christmas 1989 it's just like oh i got a game boy and they're like oh we got uh we we got a dead ruler yeah we did have a game but uh not with boy. Yeah. So yeah, that's good.

Things do get a lot better. And it's like, again, we don't have the time to talk about the last 30 years or so of Romanian history since all this. 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 the Securitat, 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, 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 laszlo toks like he was active in politics. Yeah. Yeah. For a while. Like that dude was working before he got into podcasting. Yeah. He's got, we got to get that podcast. Oh yeah. Sophie, uh,

let's reach out to Laszlo Toks and see if we can get him, get him to review marijuana for us. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you could be like, Hey, do you want to come on the show?

He's 70. he's got plenty of podcasting years left i honestly think you should reach out i'm looking at his wikipedia now in 2010 his wife filed for uh divorce and accused him of numerous affairs and absurd habits and i kind of want to know what the habits are he's talking baby he's token yeah he's toking absurdly he smokes uh every day yeah that's why they call him laszlo tokes uh so yeah cool cool guy um ish probably i gotta tell you i expected him to look a lot more wily than he shows up in photos yeah he just looks like a dude yep um so i don't know um i actually think he's pretty far right but whatever 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 collapsed and you're like christmas of 1989 that fits the timeline but you look at like what the finish was and you're like oh this is a lot different than than how it happened in other places that's the thing 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 shit that

ceausescu was okay well let's not go too far yeah you're right you're right i don't need to be rude about it offend the chow chesku stands in the audience who are somehow i'm sorry he didn't live up to your standards yeah nobody's perfect robert chow chesku did his best he did his chow best coup yeah that's probably good that's probably yeah yeah no no he wouldn't you know yeah i'm 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 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 80s cast the first stone i can't believe all of these woke scolds coming out and saying they never gave 11 000 children aids because they starved them and were using blood transfusions to try and provide them with nutrients who 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. A Christian palace. A Christian palace. Anyway, Laszlo Toks, you actually sound like you're kind of a weird right winger. But if you want to do a marijuana focused podcast hit us up uh that seems like a thing our audience would like

yeah i don't know yeah he seems like he'd get milkshake ducked real fast as we yeah it does seem like we in live for milkshake ducked him a little bit we're like oh this is a real enemy of my enemy situation and then you see and you're like this is more like the taliban and rambo 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 because he wasn't in predator oh you're right well like sorry dude that's a pre-rec that's like the 15th amendment i'm gonna guess yeah is that yeah governors have to have been this post episode banter has gone on far wow sophie oh i'm well i'm sorry we're adding color yeah

why don't you why don't you why don't you plug your pluggables jeffro i don't even know if i want to anymore it's not fun no um it is fun to talk about myself no um so uh hey my name is jeff may you can find me uh across social media at hey there jeffro uh if you want to see me perform live if you are in california uh 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 are in new England, I will be there.

The 22nd of February. That's coming up real soon. Folks at the redemption rock brewery in Worcester, Massachusetts. That is a Wednesday, the 22nd. 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.com slash Jeff May. That's seven letters. And you can get early access to uncensored episodes with bonus content as well as monthly shows like Ugg Fine. You can also hear Nerd with Dre 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 a gamefully 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 it is. Do you see how I just click into that plug thing?

No, you did. You were incredible. Uh, you were like a Romanian mob taking over the palace um i did throw a rock while i said that yeah yeah you you do that a lot during podcasting and i salute you for it well there's nothing left for me to do but um play us out sophie why don't we uh why don't we queue up my uh my track again all right one more One more time, just

to make you happy. One more time for the road, everybody. Just one more time so that Robert's happy, because Robert's happiness matters. Pretty good musicians at Destiny's Child. At Destiny's Child. I'm from Boston. I'm from

Boston. I'm from Boston. Okay, that ought to do there you know we did that all in one take i like daniel's creativeness by keeping the all right that'll do there in there for you that's my favorite part you are from boston i will be home there and i will tell everybody thank you thank you jeff you all sound like my friend robert yeah thank you for getting the word out all right talk to all right bye this is done that's the chow chow podcast behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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