Nicolae Ceaușescu's brutal regime utilized the Securitate to enforce extreme austerity, including dynamiting villages and banning abortion, which devastated Romania's Roma minority. Severe budget cuts led to untested blood transfusions in orphanages, infecting an estimated 11,000 children with HIV/AIDS. Widespread protests against these policies and a personality cult escalated into revolution after security forces beat preacher Laszlo Tox, causing the military to turn against the dictator. Ceaușescu fled in a helicopter on December 22, 1989, only to be captured and executed by his own troops on Christmas Day, marking a rare post-revolution massacre that nonetheless initiated significant accountability for Securitate crimes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Leaving Teaching For Performance00:05:38
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Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, part four of our epic series on Nikolai Ceaușescu 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 is very live performer-esque, just with health insurance.
Not anymore with Zoom.
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 writer and a journalist, but to give up my ambitions of being a musician and really participating, which 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 like, I was about to break through.
And, you know, 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 in their 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.
Okay, that ought to do there.
That was beautiful, Rob.
Wow.
Wow.
Honestly, 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, and you decided to give up your career.
And I'm glad that you guys, you and Destiny's Child, that you're still, you still, it's all amicable.
I know 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 got to be honest.
She's done okay, right?
She's done okay for herself.
She did 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 you had 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 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 and Billy Joel both backing me on this one.
He's actually back, act, act, act, acting you.
That was a solid Billy Joel joke, Jeff.
I hope you're proud of yourself.
It's a Billy joke.
It's a Billy Joel.
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 he's he's he's a good guy, William, William Joel.
Oh, God.
Why is my phone ringing?
Stop this.
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.
Yeah.
It's like when commercials 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.
Radioactive Poison And The KGB00:16:42
I don't know if you've seen all the He-Man and G.I. Joe and stuff that I have behind me here.
Yeah, 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.
But, you know, 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?
I mean, but on a security camera.
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, but blocked it out.
Exactly, exactly.
When you're too close to somebody, it's like how I'm too good at basketball to compete on camera against LeBron James.
Can you just do the episode?
Yeah, of course, Sophie.
Cool.
I've been up with an episode on LeBron James.
He seems like a good dude.
Yeah, I mean, he's okay.
Again, he's done all right for himself.
So we're talking about Nikolai Ceaușescu.
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 Securitat.
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 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.
Open Schniki.
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.
Oh, yeah, man.
Oh, oh, yeah.
No, this is a good state security force, not like in a moral sense, but in a being perfect villains in a James Bond movie sense.
And I'm going to quote from Catalin Gruya 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 Pasipa, 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.
Or both.
Yeah, or both.
In many cases, both.
Yeah, that's the other part.
Yeah, that's, I mean, it's, they always used to make the, you know, the KGB jokes.
We've all seen that where, you know, and stuff like that.
But this seems less funny.
Yeah, somehow less funny than the KGB, who were a bunch of lap hucksters, chuckle, chuckle buddies.
Yeah.
I did a research paper on the KGB, and the title of it was Cops and Robbers.
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.
Yeah.
I'm just going to line on a limb here.
ACAB includes secret police that are establishing the dominance of the state.
Whoa.
I'm sorry.
I know every time I come on, I cause chaos.
And this is it.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's going to be that's going to be really, really controversial among our listeners, fully half of whom work in secret police forces.
But, you know, everybody needs to hear stuff that's difficult to listen to sometimes.
So this 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 respond, 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.
That's the thing they did a couple of times, I think.
Honestly, that's kind of a cool way to kill someone, all things considered.
No, no, if you're a journalist writing against a state and they have to use the radioactive poison against you, you know, you've, that's like, that's like the Pulitzer, getting like radioactive poison slipped in your coffee.
Nobel Prize of dying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of dying as a journalist for sure.
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 are going to have to spend a lot of money on.
And when Titaned 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 going to, you want to guess what foreign company secretly funded the Securitat during the most repressive years of Ceaușescu's 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 IKEA.
I'm sorry?
It was IKEA.
I still like them.
Yeah.
I'm going to go out on a limb 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 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 going to eat potential horse meatballs.
Yeah.
Where are you going to get horse meat if you're not getting it somewhere sketchy, right?
That's that's how I feel about that.
Man, 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 1980s, this was actually a thing across a lot of Eastern Europe.
A number of communist states are having these like economic crunches.
And so they start opening themselves up to more capitalist businesses and being like, maybe you come in a little bit 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?
Genuine.
It was not your best.
Yeah.
I am a Svenenman.
It's like, I went Muppet.
I went Muppet 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 IKEA did was they realized that it was really cheap to have East German political prisoners build their Billy bookshelves and other pronouns bedframes.
So that was one of the things IKEA got up to in this period.
They were really interested in Romania because Romania has these huge, again, Ceaușescu 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 Siberia when you see what's, and most of the 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 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, easily breakable furniture to produce.
We'll take all the trees that you could give us.
And Romania is like, well, how about, you know, you pay our state-run timber company, you 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 going to pay for the secret police.
Everybody knows this.
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 that.
I like immediate shipping.
I'm okay that Jeff Bezos is buying radioactive poison to use on his enemies.
It's such an easy way to be like, they didn't tell us they were doing that.
Yeah, you guys knew.
There's some other evidence to believe that they actually had a decent amount of knowledge about how this was working.
But yeah, if you bought any products in the Billy range 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 Securitat.
So that's neat.
Those are specifically the product lines that they really.
Oh, I had two and both of them broke within a year.
I love IKEA.
This thing right here from Ikea is great.
That's good.
Well, listeners, if 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.
That's cool stuff.
And obviously, while all this is happening, this is pretty fucked up, especially the assassinations they carry out in foreign countries and like NATO countries.
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.
Feel Donny 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 Nikolai 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.
Which is not to say that Ceausescu wasn't, but just like you shouldn't take anything Pasipa says at face value.
Right, Hans Landa.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
That's literally what he's doing.
Like, he's not a hero because he came out with the story of how bad Ceaușescu is.
He was his secret police head.
He's a snitch.
Yeah, exactly.
And snitches get stitches even when they're snitching on Ceausescu.
Actually, in this case, snitches get a house paid for by the U.S. government for the rest of their lives.
I mean, I'll snitch on whoever 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 Ceaușescu wants to create.
And as you get this kind of, we all heard the term stagflation, you know, right?
As that starts to really hit, Romania's creditors start calling in their debts.
And I'm going to quote from a book by the Charles River editors here.
As Western banks increased their own interest rates in turn, the debt repayments became ever harder to service for many governments.
At the start of the 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 Glennie has pointed out, clearly the Western economic institutions had little faith in the reliability of Ceaușescu'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.
Starving Families And Disabled Kids00:08:51
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, it's going to 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 going to be able to handle the kind of debt that they were taking on, that these were really bad investments.
But yeah, so there's a lot that's fucked up here, but we will, in this case, put most of the blame on Ceaușescu.
I mean, just the blame kind of goes everywhere in that case, though, right?
Like, it's, yeah.
It's like, yeah, it's, I mean, debt happens.
When I heard the number, I was like, oh, that is cute.
Yeah.
It is.
I mean, it's a lot more money for them.
But 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.
He still has a lot of people.
That's 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.
By the winter, 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 dynamiting was more of a euphemism because they don't want to spend that much money on dynamite.
Because he's not Wily Coyote.
Yeah.
They will, 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 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.
That's something interesting.
Yeah.
It's not going to create a regular populace that's not going to want to kill you real bad later.
Yeah.
No, it's not going to make anybody the angriest they've ever been.
So by the winter of 1987, things were so bad that gas consumption in Bucharest was locked in at about two hours a day.
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 would be prosecuted.
He attempted to reduce, he like set up this plan where he was like, the average Romanian 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.
But if 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 technical plan to reduce the amount of calories that people got to eat.
And while all this is happening, obviously, Nikolai and Alina are living in palaces.
They're eating whatever they want.
And 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 had 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 Paceepa betrayed Nikolai, Nikolai makes overseas travel effectively illegal.
Like it basically becomes a crime as a Romanian to have contact with people outside the country.
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.
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.
Is he Florida?
Yeah, yeah.
So he has some strong DeSantis energy there.
So since 1965, abortion had been banned.
Again, like Florida.
And as conditions eroded through the 1980s, 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 we said earlier, between 10 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 my friends.
Respect the orphans, Jeff.
God.
God, I need to get fucked.
That's right.
That's what, well, don't do that in the next term, but, you know.
So throughout Ceaușescu'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.
Florin Suar, 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 three disabled children.
Investigators from the institute picked three of them to investigate and found shocking mortality levels among the children.
They didn't die from the disabilities they had.
70% of the registered deaths were for pneumonia.
They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable, said Suare.
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?
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.
Eating While Broke Conversations00:03:37
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
If so, we're going to be in some trouble.
But you need those babies.
Yeah, keep the babies coming.
Um, and why don't you keep the money coming to our sponsors?
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm gonna have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
Yeah.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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Ah, what a good time.
That money came, baby.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
I'm happy that we're getting paid by the great product and our service.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Good stuff.
Asbestos, Blood, And HIV Risks00:15:34
So yeah, we're talking about Ceausescu's orphan extermination facilities.
Yeah, yeah, good times.
And I found a New York Times article.
So Ceaușescu.
Yeah, very, very chowy.
Very chowy.
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 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 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 10 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 pretty blank.
Yeah.
In its farewell report.
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, you know, how could you make this worse?
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 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.
Oh, yeah.
Well, we're also going to talk about racism.
So I'll do that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
So we're going to talk about the treatment of the Ceaușescu 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 it.
Well, I don't know if that's Romani, Roma, Romania.
All of the, it's going to be a little bit cumbersome no matter how we write it.
So 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, there's a nasty, obviously, it's Roma in Eastern Europe.
The history is going to be unpleasant and oppressive.
It's not, it's not going to be good.
They're treated the way Europe also treated like Jews.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And right up 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 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 George Uday'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, you are exactly the kind of people that we want to see.
Can you 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, they get Roma mayors, which had been basically unheard of before this time.
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 where they're forced recruitment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're integrated into the power structure a little bit, not 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 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 worry.
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 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, which is a thing they do not just do to the Roma.
That does not just occur in communist Romania, but it's a thing.
It happens in a lot of places.
It happens in many places, but we're talking about Romania.
So under Ceaușescu's systematization is the process by which they are bulldozing 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 Ceaușescu'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 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 it worth purposeful?
There's debate about this.
Yeah, I think the balance of what I'm reading suggests it's more accidental or just a byproduct of the way the communists felt about every group in the country.
But there are allegations, and there's reason to believe them that 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 still.
You are right that there are benefits to having like a wall.
Yes, yes, yes.
This is not all negative.
It's like, but it 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 slash budgets.
Hospitals resorted to reusing needles and other materials that could be rinsed or quickly sterilized.
Blood, however, was in large supply because donors were paid a small fee.
So when the orphanage pantries were down to just powdered milk, it seemed like a good idea to give the smallest and weakest children whole blood transfusions under the theory that new blood would have more nutrients for their bodies to use.
Now, can you see how this could be?
Like vampires would 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 1980s could be a serious problem?
They should have gotten like powerlifter blood.
Yeah, they probably shouldn't have gotten much blood in the 80s because again, the AIDS crisis is hitting.
So there's a horrible health crisis as a result of this.
In 1988, 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.
Well, of course not.
She's got her advanced degree and she understands blood.
Yeah, it's don't tell me my job.
Yeah.
Blood is what you drink, yes?
Yes.
Blood is, how do you say, oil through body?
It's fine.
So in 1988, the government reported just three cases of HIV infection to the World Health Organization.
But in 1989, the next year, the number swelled to 1,200.
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% 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.
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 the government was sold to IKEA.
Yeah.
Yeah.
IKEA is using them to make those horse meat balls.
Yeah.
It's 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 just.
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 the AIDS gets into the blood.
It's such a weird way that a large group of people is getting HIV.
Yeah.
Or fullbone AIDS in the case, um, because it's just like they're like, There's not much to 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 would still be one of the worst things I've ever read.
It would be fucking weird, is what like you'd be like, This is 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.
Um, but instead, they're like, Yeah, but it was also AIDS blood, yeah, the fuck that cause 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 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 Romanian orphanages.
Like, that is how bad the situation was.
That's like that's like winning the lottery at the asbestos factory.
Yeah, and the lottery prize is all of the leftover asbestos cigarettes.
Yeah, 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, yeah, no better filter than asbestos.
No, that's what everyone says about asbestos.
I really, if we, if we had the asbestos crisis today, I think with the way culture wars go in this country, we would get rid of a lot of problem voters very quickly.
Yeah, it would be called mesotheliorida at this point in time.
Oh, that's that's 80% of a t-shirt idea, Jeff.
Mesotheliorida, yeah, there is that.
That you know what?
That's fine.
Send me money, everybody.
Print it, print it.
Yeah, so as the 80s drag to a close, the whole Warsaw Pact is enduring shortages of basic goods and political unrest.
I'm sure you all remember from like middle school or high school, you know, Glasnost and Perestroika and the USSR under Gorbachev, which are these policies meant to kind of open up the Soviet Union and relax it from some hardline positions.
Um, this is obviously praised in the West.
People are like, 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, warning that'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.
Night Songs And Political Unrest00:16:43
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 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, Jeff.
I know, yeah.
Hence, most of the history of Europe.
Um, so the USSR is doing this stuff, and Ceausescu publicly mocks these new policies 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 Capitol en masse as a sign of protest to be like, okay, you said we'd get changed when there's pears growing from the trees.
So we'll just make that happen.
This does not go well with Ceaușescu.
He takes this, he takes offense at this.
And I'm going to quote from an article in the Los Angeles Times.
The taunt so infuriated Ceaușescu that he ordered his Securitat 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 100 were slaughtered that night.
So that's a lot for a college prank.
Yeah.
I mean, I've seen worse, but not by much.
Not by much.
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 put on my noise-canceling 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.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fellows, they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Kubler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it goes the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
La Vlog proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying, by the way, it is an actual Polish song.
A better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Ah!
Oh, my God.
That's the 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.
That was pretty good song.
Rocky Four, baby.
Pretty good song.
Yeah.
Not great.
Pretty good.
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.
It's going to be a no for me, dog.
Wow.
Well, I guess that's Sophie's choice.
Wow.
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.
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, 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 shit with Russia didn't go so great in the post-Soviet Union period either.
But back during this period in the late 80s, when he's doing this glass-nosed and purstroika, he is the dandy of Western media.
People cannot get enough of that.
How much stuff do you remember watching where they were like, Gorby?
Gorby!
Like that, like the Simpsons episode where dude was in Mad Magazine every month.
Yeah, people fucking loved this guy.
Because he had that, that the birthmark was very distinguishable.
He was just open for all forms 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 is 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 you feel good about him.
You know you feel like access to your television program Punky 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 U.S.
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, 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.
Nikolai's health begins to decline during this period, too.
He's not doing very well.
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 Ceaușescu's 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, 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, Ceaușescu 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 Ceaușescu 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 Ceaușescu 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 into it.
It's very funny.
You don't want to be the one that hands in a subpart painting.
No, no.
But 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 worked.
Well, it's very funny, too, because if you look at these, I'm actually going to 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 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 here, check this one out.
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
It's sort of like it looks like his child bride.
She looks so young in the whole thing.
Yeah, it is unsettling when like, yeah, Ceaușescu can be a man in his 60s, but we got to make his wife look 25.
But yeah, that's the kind of, you know, art that they would, that apparently made them happy.
It did not actually make the people who lived in Romania happy, and they protested against the cult of personality, against the constant austerity, and against most like kind of the last big thing people protest is this forced push to destroy half the villages in the country and make people move to the cities.
And one of the people who protests.
People are just going to complain about anything, aren't they?
I know, I know.
It's unreasonable.
But we have snowflakes.
Sophie and I have the same problem with our employees at CoolZone.
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 Tox.
Laszlo refused to leave his home when he was evicted.
You know, basically, Ceaușescu, this village he's in, Timișoara.
Ceausescu's like, you got to get the fuck out.
I'm going to destroy it.
Everybody's moving to the city.
And Toakes is like, the fuck.
Also, it is spelled Laszlo Tox, 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 Laszlo Tox, where he reviews different Romanian weed strains.
He would be super big on the Joe Rogan hour, four hours.
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 Timișoara 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.
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 is the kind of thing we talked about that peasants' 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 happen, it ignited something uncontrollable.
Protests erupt in response to the beating of Laszlo and they erupt in Timișoara and then they spread to the surrounding areas.
And in very short order, it becomes clear the Securitat does not have the manpower to repress this.
And, you know, initially.
Boy, don't they?
Yeah, boy, they sure don't.
Boy, does every secret police not have that ability?
Yeah, that is the case always with the secret police.
What the Republican Guard do in Iraq?
Yeah, great.
That's why Saddam Hussein is enjoying his 98th birthday this week.
By the way, shout out to Friend of the Pod, Saddam.
Any, I don't know where to take that.
But yeah, so the Securitat gets overwhelmed very quickly.
Ceausescu and Alina, at first, they don't kind of recognize how serious the situation is.
And then they're like, well, why don't you just start killing people?
Just start firing into crowds.
And the Securitat is like, we have been doing that the entire time and it is not working.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's like trying to take a bucket at the beach to try to just throw the water back in.
We have a problem.
We are shooting into 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.
We are shit.
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.
And I don't know if we want to like back up the Securitat 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 the movement is able to really gain steam.
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 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 Ceaușescu regime, much like the principled resistors in the Wehrmacht.
Military Complicity In The Trial00:11:56
So, Nikolai organizes a speech to be delivered from the same balcony that he'd spoken from in 1968.
You know, that big, 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.
Ceaușescu 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 improv.
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 Ceaușescu like doing the Bill Hicks where he just starts rolling around on his back, shouting about how everyone needs to be killed.
It's one way to deal with hecklers.
Certainly.
Yeah, Ceaușescu'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.
This does not work out well.
And I should note the architects of 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 pair 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 do it very, very well.
Imagine the last good thing theater kids ever did.
This is also the case.
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.
Platoon.
Yeah.
They have to abandon the Capitol.
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 Capitol.
So this guy's like, I don't want to be doing this.
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 or very, very bad for me.
So he basically does the, oh, trouble with the helicopter.
I got to 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 got to, I'm going to go get another helicopter.
And I'll be right back.
And we'll take care of you.
Don't worry, guys.
This dude rocks.
Yeah, 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.
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 retake the country with these forces.
And the military's like, we might have a note or two on that one.
But why don't we lock you in an armored vehicle for a little while and you can sleep there.
And then they wake them up kind of after a little while in here.
And the Ceausescus 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're all going to be, 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.
Got everyone to back off.
Yeah.
But this news is we're going to shoot you.
We're going to shoot you pretty bad.
We're going to have us a show trial.
And it is, it's one of those things.
You can watch this.
I recommend watching the footage of Ceaușescu 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.
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.
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 adults, like 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.
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 going to fucking kill me.
Do you know how angry they are?
You're clearly getting killed.
I don't know how you don't understand that.
I might not get killed.
And all I have to do is do the thing that is definitely going to happen to you anyway.
Yeah.
And on Christmas, Nola.
And yeah, it happens Christmas Day in 1989.
They get gunned down by their own soldiers.
Yeah.
And they were caught by like on the 22nd, right?
Yeah, it's very quick.
Like they did not spend a lot of time in lockup.
This is what we refer to in America as a quick and speedy trial.
Is that yeah?
This is this is they do Romane, the new regime institutes itself by ensuring the right to a speedy trial for Nikolai Ceausescu.
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 jolly, jolly corpse miss.
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 under Ceaușescu in the 80s.
I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
I would like to add, too, that when you think about Christmas 1989, it's just like, oh, I got a Game Boy.
And they're like, oh, we got Got a dead ruler.
Yeah, we did have a game, but the not with boy.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's that's that's good.
Things do get a lot better.
And it's like, again, it is.
We are, I'm not going to, we don't have the time to talk about the last 30 years or so of Romanian history since all this.
But one of the things that has increasingly happened, you know, especially after the kind of immediate chaos of the fall of the regime, is there have been an ongoing series of prosecutions against people who committed crimes, people who worked with the Securitat, people who were responsible for the repression apparatus.
And I don't know, again, there's actually a good, obviously plenty of criticisms of how that process has gone down.
But if you're kind of looking at the broad history of revolutions that replace dictatorships, one of the better jobs of holding people to account, which again doesn't mean perfect, but things are better, a lot better in Romania.
This is a revolution that things get a lot better after.
I would like to add too that you mentioned Laszlo Toax.
Like he was active in politics for a while.
Like that dude was working before he got into podcasting.
Yeah.
We got to get that podcast, man.
Oh, yeah.
Sophie, let's reach out to Laszlo Toakes 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 go?
He's 70.
He's got plenty of podcasting years left.
I honestly think he should just reach out.
I'm looking at his Wikipedia now.
In 2010, his wife filed for divorce and accused him of numerous affairs and absurd habits.
And I kind of want to know what the habits are.
He's token, baby.
He's token.
Yeah, he's toking absurdly.
He smokes every day.
Yeah.
That's why they call him Laszlo Tox.
So yeah.
Cool guy.
Ish, probably.
I got to 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.
So I don't know.
I actually think he's pretty far right, but whatever.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
It's funny because when you look at it and you look at how the Soviet bloc collapsed and you're like, Christmas of 1989, that fits the timeline.
But you look at what the finish was and you're like, oh, this is a lot different than how it happened in us.
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?
That's just like not a thing that occurs like in the USSR and any of the other places.
It only happens in Romania, and that's because of the kind of piece of shit that Ceaușescu 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 Ceaușescu stands in the audience who are stealing some standards.
Yeah.
Nobody's perfect, Robert.
Ceausescu did his best.
He did his best coup.
Yeah, that's probably good.
That's probably good.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
He went, you know.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry, he wasn't woke enough for you.
Yeah.
Because he massacred all those people.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Cancel culture comes for the man who created history's greatest orphan 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.
Accusing Leaders Of Spreading AIDS00:04:04
Yes.
A Christian palace.
A Christian palace.
Anyway, Laszlo Tox, 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.
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 added into his.
It does seem like we in live form milkshake ducked him a little bit.
We're like, oh, this is a real enemy of my enemy situation.
And then you see it and you're like, ah, this is more like the Taliban and Rambo.
Yeah.
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 going to guess.
Yeah, governors have to have been this post-episode banter has gone on far too.
Well, Sophie.
Oh, 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 just not fun.
No, it is fun to talk about myself.
So, hey, my name is Jeff May.
You can find me across social media at Hey There, Jeffro.
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 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 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 Trey Alvarez, which is a deep dive into nerd stuff, but you can also get that one for free as well.
You can also hear Tom and Jeff watch Batman with Tom Ryman on the Gamefully Unemployed Network.
And you can also hear me on You Don't Even Like Sports and Unpopular Opinion, both on the Unpops Network with Adam Todd Brown.
Wow.
There it is.
Do you see how I just click into that plug thing?
No, you were incredible.
You were like a Romanian mob taking over the palace.
I did throw a rock while I said that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You do 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 queue up my track again?
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.
Okay, that ought to do there.
You know, we did that all in one take.
I like Danal'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.
Exhausted.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff.
You all sound like my friend Robert.
Yeah.
Thank you for getting the word out.
All right.
Bye.
This is done.
That's the Chap Chess Good podcast.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
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Behind The Bastards Outro00:01:55
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