Ep 36 | Andy Ionescu | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Let me quote a not often watched movie from 1983, Twilight Zone.

It was a very young Dan Aykroyd, and he said, Do you want to see something really scary?

That is what he said just before he transformed into a supernatural monster.

Well, my guest today, not Dan Aykroyd or a monster, is probably a man you've never heard of.

But the story of his life played out like a real-life Twilight Zone.

We watched his country transform not to anything supernatural, but an equally terrifying totalitarian socialist monster.

We watched it on this side, but he lived it.

51% of millennials today say they would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist country, but they confuse Sweden with a socialist country.

That is a capitalist country, that from their own prime minister.

Now, that number rapidly declines with the older generation.

Only 30% of anybody 50 to 60-year-olds have a positive view of socialism.

That number falls to 28% if you're 65 and older.

Why is that?

Because the younger generation has never had the experience of seeing what socialism really is firsthand.

They miss the twilight zone of Eastern Europe from the 1940s, 50s, 60s into the late 1980s.

That is not the case of the man you're about to hear from.

It is a story of terror, fear, hunger, survival.

It's bizarre.

In short, it is the story of socialism.

So, here we go.

You want to hear something really scary?

Next, surviving socialism.

Andy, I have...

We have so much to cover and you...

Reading your blog is just so eye-opening.

But I want to do this in chunks.

I want to try to take it chronologically a little bit.

Tell me about Romania before the communists come, because it wasn't a violent takeover.

Yes and no.

So

Romania

was

probably

one of the most promising countries

before the war, before World War II.

And unfortunately, it got caught into the

Axis alliance with the Nazis

simply because of the Molotov-Ribentrov pact,

which was between Hitler and Stalin.

And

that's when following that they invaded Poland.

But everybody knows that they invaded Poland, but almost nobody in the United States knows that actually Romania, following this pact, was broken.

Hungary got Transylvania and the Soviet Union got half of Moldova, which both are historical Romanian provinces.

So

basically the Romanian government didn't have much to say.

They followed the Axis because Hitler promised them restitution, promised them

he would get them rid of

the Soviets and

the Moldova territory would be brought back to Romania.

Kind of like what happened in Finland, where they joined the Nazis because the Russians were always

invading them.

Yeah.

So

when the war was over and the Nazis fell,

there was a pact, though, with

Russians that

they couldn't overthrow any government through military means.

They had to...

Did you ever see communists keeping their promises?

No, no, no.

So

what happened,

in August 23rd, the young king Michael of Romania, he was the youngest monarch.

He was only like 17 or 18 years old.

He ordered the Romanian army to turn arms against the Nazis and join the Allies.

So he arrested the

prime minister,

General Antonescu, and he declared that Romania from that day on is on the Allies' side.

So they fought, actually Romanian soldiers fought all the way to Berlin

from august twenty-third, nineteen forty-four, until the end of the war.

But that didn't stop the Russians from occupying the country.

And

they

brought their own

consultants.

They organized so-called free elections in which

everybody voted for

historical parties like the liberals, not liberals in the American sense, but the true sense liberals, and the national peasant country.

But somehow the Communist Party, which was only about 1,000 members strong, they won the elections by 95%.

Why?

Because they counted the votes.

Right.

And they were the ones that you, the reason why Romania joined Hitler was because you didn't want to be communist with the Russians.

Exactly.

And Romanians have...

Interesting.

Romanians are very, very strongly, they feel very, very strongly about communists.

In 1947, when the Communists came to power, as I was telling you,

the Communist Party of Romania was only about 1,000 people strong.

That in a country was about 20 million at the time.

So they were...

somehow they won.

So you were born in 66?

63.

1663.

Okay.

Boy, we've had wildly different lives.

I was born in 64 and born in America.

And your life and my life are completely different.

Yes.

I grew up in America that we were afraid of the Soviets, but not like you.

We were afraid of being vaporized.

But we, you know, thought we could vaporize you guys right back.

And I remember thinking that growing up, that the entire bloc

was just this monolithic

communist, we want to take over the world.

And it wasn't until the revolutions happened, until the wall came down, that the people in the West started to see, wait a minute, you guys are just like us.

We're so much alike, not our governments,

but the people wanted the same thing.

We never understood that when the wall was up.

We thought everybody was in lockstep.

Well, yes, you're right.

But in the same time, what is funny is that we didn't understood you

either.

Yeah, I mean, we knew about the West, freedom, and the land of plenty, and you know, you can speak up your mind.

But the funny thing is, I'm in the generation, I was pretty young when it was the

hippie power flower

generations here, and we were so

taking.

We tried to

to imitate really

long hair and let me tell you something

that was a big no-no because if they were

catching that you could actually be arrested for long hair for long hair

yes

absolutely

and for wearing those pants with the how do you call them bell bottoms bell button yeah exactly you would go to jail for bell bottoms well not i mean i might actually agree with that.

Not go to jail, but

picked up from the street, thrown in a van,

put in a

in the in a basement, in a cell at the police, and they were sending one guy and beating you good.

What was the crime?

Because he was

subversive.

He was subversive.

He was too Western.

Okay, you were trying to be like the enemy.

And you, I mean, it's so strange because now that things have opened up and you have Netflix, et cetera,

I've watched some of the old Soviet TV and it's crazy how upside down things were.

And yet there was this underground.

I don't know if you've ever seen

Chuck Norris versus Communism.

As a matter of fact, yes, I did, and I recommend it to Nick.

And we're working on a project together.

Really?

I'm good friends with Chuck Norris.

And he had never heard of it.

I'm actually going to his house this weekend, and I might bring it to make sure that he watches it.

But he had never heard of it.

And I said, no, no, no, Chuck, you don't understand.

It's not about you.

It's about the underground.

It's about the underground

movement of dubbing movies,

Western movies, Hollywood movies,

because everything was censored by the government, by the party.

And

yeah, it's a great movie.

When the wall fell and you finally saw the West, maybe maybe let's go 10 years past that, 20 years past that.

There had to be some trepidation, but also excitement about what the West might offer, an end to what you knew, an excitement for something that maybe lay ahead.

I've been

I think we all have in the West, been beaten into this

feeling that

we've been a great disappointment to

the world and those who lived behind the Soviet curtain, that we're no different than that, that freedom is,

there's no real freedom here, and it's just all this ugly, croniest capitalism.

And is there any feeling like that?

No, why do the people, they they they

try to get here so hard, Glenn?

I know if it's like on the other side.

Yeah, you tell me that

because it's different

because America is still America, it's land of the free because no matter how

and let me tell you the detractors Okay, are here in the United States.

Okay, people

on the other other side, people in Romania, people in the eastern countries, they love America.

There's no question about that.

It's a symbol.

It's a symbol, and they love it and they appreciate it.

You know, the Reagan has statues all over the place,

in Estonia,

in Poland, I believe, in Hungary.

I think I was reading in a newspaper they want to erect a statue of Reagan in Bucharest in Romania.

So if America is no different than the rest of the world,

why is is that?

So

let's take a look at what life is like under socialism.

First of all,

what is the difference between socialism and communism?

Okay.

Socialism

is

a stepping stone.

I don't say that, but

Marx himself, the creator of socialism, said it.

Socialism is just a stepping stone on the way towards communism.

So basically

in socialism you

everything is owned by the state,

the means of production,

everything, the economy is planned, but

people they are still having salaries,

they work as employees for a salary and so on.

There is still allowed a certain amount differing from country to country a certain amount of private property.

For example, you are allowed to own a home

or you are allowed to own a little piece of land to supplement your

food.

In communism,

all this disappears.

There is no private property whatsoever.

There is no salary.

There is nothing like that.

Everybody works to the best of his ability, and he is rewarded according to what

his needs are.

Okay?

So what's the difference?

The reason why,

let's be clear, communism was not achieved by no country in the world, not the Soviet Union, not even the North Korean regime.

So they're all socialists.

The reason why

they called,

they say they are communist countries is because the government is communist, the party, the leaders are communists.

Why?

Because they represent themselves as the trailblazers

of the people in their march towards communism.

So it's normal, they being the ones that trailblaze, they call themselves communist, but the society is socialism up to the point where all private property is eliminated.

So what is Venezuela?

How close is Venezuela to what you grew up in?

Venezuela is

a socialist country, obviously.

They still have private property to a certain degree, but it has a planned economy.

How close it is to socialist Romania, that would be kind of hard to tell because I wasn't there, but from what I heard, what I read from the internet,

they're about there.

They're about

how it was during the Ceaușescu years, in the mid-80s, when was the blackest times in Romania.

Although I believe in Venezuela,

Maduro, is,

I would say, is more violent than Chavusescu was.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

We'll get back to him in a little while, because that's quite a statement.

Let me ask you one more question on the differences between these systems.

Everybody says, we're not going to have communism.

We don't want communism.

We don't want all of that.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All we want is Sweden.

All we want is Denmark.

Are those socialist countries?

No, they're capitalist countries which have social programs, social safety nets.

So what is the difference between a socialist country, one run by democratic socialists, and one that

is like Sweden?

What's the difference?

Sweden is a capitalist economy, period.

They don't have a planned economy.

That's number one.

The state doesn't own the means of production.

It doesn't own

most of the land in Sweden.

They have high taxes, indeed,

to provide for a widespread social net,

but they are capitalist and even I would say probably more capitalist than

the United States.

They are more free than the United States.

The regulations are, yes.

The business regulations there are, you know, more relaxed than in the United States.

So

Sweden, the Nordic countries in Europe are not socialist.

By not democratic socialists, not socialists, period.

They are capitalist countries which have a wide social safety net.

Okay.

Tell me about your parents.

What did your parents do?

What was your life like, your earliest memory?

Let's start in the 1970s.

What was it like being a kid?

So my parents

unfortunately divorced.

My mother was an attorney.

and

my father was the son of a capitalist pig

or a kiabur.

It's the name you probably heard about the name Kulak in Ukraine.

Okay, in Romania is the same thing, but it's called Kyabur.

So my grandfather, from my father's side,

he owned about 10 acres of land, of land.

He was a farmer.

He owned 10 acres of land and a convenience store, like a 7-Eleven.

And because of that, he was declared an enemy of the people.

He was arrested.

He was put in

prison and released only when he was too sick.

He got TB.

And they let him

out when he was too sick to work in the gulag.

They wouldn't want to care for him, you know, pay for his medication.

So I remember him dying in, I think I was like

maybe five years old when he died at home of TB.

And your dad

took on that shame?

My dad, he was very young when they arrested my grandfather and fortunately he was out of town.

He was out of the village.

He was

with the produce at the market in the capital in Bucharest.

And

he caught wind that his father got arrested and he lived on the run under an assumed name for the next 15, 16 years.

Because they would have arrested him?

Yes.

Just because of who his father was.

Exactly.

And they finally caught up with him.

He went to college

to become an engineer.

He changed his name to Jonescu, which is my name, which is not actually my name, but it was his assumed name.

And when he was in the senior year,

they caught up with him.

They didn't put him in jail because by that time, they kind of like

trying to

let people, you know, to relax a little bit.

They were the years in which Ceausescu tried to appear more,

you know, westernized, being the rebel kid of the communist bloc.

But nevertheless, they kicked him him out from college.

So he took a job as a machinist in a factory.

Any doubt with the technology that we have now that your dad would have lived?

Excuse me?

With the technology that we have now, being able to find anybody anywhere?

Oh, no, absolutely.

Absolutely not.

With the face recognition and stuff like that?

No, absolutely not.

So

what's school like for you

when you're a kid?

What's school like?

Is it full of indoctrination, anti-West?

Is it good?

Is it the perfect school?

What is school like?

Okay, school was not bad, leaving aside the indoctrination part, because

every

classroom had the portrait of the dear leader

over the blackboard.

And

we had, but later in high school, we had classes teaching Marxist

Leninism, dialectic materialism, and all that stuff.

But leaving that aside,

I can compare with the school that my son went through here.

And I would say, like in general education,

it was really good.

It was really good over there.

Of course, a lot of discipline.

You couldn't

engage in any kind of political discussion other than

saying,

you know,

what beautiful life you have.

Were there spies, like the Nazis?

By the way, there is a, I read an article recently that the Nazis were not, the National Socialists were not socialists.

Is there a difference between the Nazis and the socialists?

No, there is.

Okay.

The Nazis are national socialists.

The communists are international socialists.

So they're cousins.

Yeah, okay.

And there is no wonder why Hitler and Stalin

were best buddies before

Hitler attacking.

That's why the Nazi flag is red, according to Hitler.

Exactly.

To show you, we're on the same team here.

We know in the West about Hitler, we know less about Stalin,

but he just seemed to do more of what Hitler was doing.

We know Hitler was, he

bred fear neighbor against neighbor.

You never knew who anybody was.

They were informants.

He was using kids to inform on their parents in school.

Was that a part?

Yes.

It was.

It was the same thing.

The same methods.

Informants everywhere.

You could have

your best friend or your neighbor or even a member of the family informing on you.

I remember when I was

20 something, I was working on an offshore drilling rig

as a radio man.

And I was dating my colleague that I was sharing the same cabin on the rig.

I was dating his daughter.

And after the revolution, I found out that actually he was an informant.

Really?

Wow.

So

you could never trust anybody.

And you could never trust anybody.

And if you were listening to Voice of America or Radio for Europe, which were illegal to listen to on the radio, you did it with the volume turned like way down.

Way down.

So because they put us in these apartment flats with thin walls, and you could hear from one apartment to another,

and

you were staying in line for bread or for meat, and you had to keep your mouth shut.

You couldn't express your

disgust with how long the line is.

No, because you never knew.

The guy behind you could be one of them, and you know,

all of a sudden, a black van pulls over, and you're gone.

gone.

So, how much, like we're experiencing a little bit of this the first time.

Americans have always been really open.

We trust each other.

We trust neighbors.

We trust everybody.

Not us, Glenn.

Yeah, I know, because of that history.

But we've never had that here until recently.

And

people here are not reacting to it, I think, the same way that they would where you're from

when they see things where you can just accuse somebody and their life is over.

We've always had an innocent until proven guilty.

Exactly.

And

we're seeing this now in this democratic socialist movement, this social justice movement in America, that is,

there is no real justice.

If the accusation is out there, you'll be destroyed.

Exactly.

And that's how much of

how much of the

security apparatus and the informants, how much of of that stuff were you worried that if I get on the wrong side of somebody, even if I don't know that they're an informant, if I just get on the wrong side of somebody, they could turn me in because they want something of mine or I've wronged them somehow.

Was that prevalent at all?

Very, very Glenn.

I mean, you couldn't,

you always had to be on guard.

You always had to, and you always had to

think about the double meaning of everything, of everything that was said.

I was struck when I came to the United States of the innocence of the American people, which pretty much when I came here 20 years ago, they take everything at face value, which was shocking for me.

That didn't happen anywhere in the communist bloc.

Everything can have double meaning.

Everybody can be the guy who is gonna rat on you.

So you always had to be on guard.

You always tried not to tell what you're really thinking.

That was life day to day over there.

Even with your children, like in Germany or not?

With the children,

you were trying to, yes, even with the children,

when you had small, the moment they were starting to understand what is,

they have to keep their mouth shut and they don't have to tell their friends what they hear inside the home.

But before that, when they were very young and innocent, parents were trying not to talk about politics or

anything against the regime in the presence of their children.

Because you never know.

You never know.

They could have gone outside the home, tell

their friends, their parents might be informers, they hear, and there you go.

You're gone.

You know, this,

I just saw somebody say,

oh, communism has gotten a bad name because, I love this, because of a few famines.

It's not that there was a drought.

It's not that the farming, the centralized planning doesn't work.

And it's not just a few famines.

Tell me what

the good times were like in a grocery store.

The good times?

Okay.

I mean when under communism.

What was it like just you know this is an everyday kind of I'm going to the grocery store to get stuff

up until probably 1975 it was it was

from

our point of view

it was kind of okay because you could go in a store and find a piece of cheese or

you could It was good because you could go in and find a piece of cheese.

Or you could find bread.

I'm not talking about imports like oranges, olives, and stuff like that, but basic necessity, you know, basic foods you could find up until 1974, 1975.

But after that, everything, every single thing was a struggle.

And everything was on a ration card.

You had a ration for bread, for butter, for everything that you put on the table but don't count like everything that you can buy here from the store.

Okay?

Like

very basic necessities,

food stuff like bread, potatoes, meat, rice, oils,

rice and stuff like that.

Okay,

but

the fact that you had them, you had the right

on your ration card didn't guarantee that you're going to get them every month.

So, you could go to the store and tell the

ration card.

Yeah, I have a ration card.

Give me my

kilo of rice.

I'm sorry, we don't have it.

Come back and might be here like three days from now.

You come here like three in the morning.

Make sure you bring your little chair, stay in line, and if you're lucky, you're going to get it.

So this was

after

the 70s.

It's not like you could call the store and say, hey, is that shipment of rice come in?

Well,

you couldn't call the store because you didn't have a phone.

That was the main reason.

They would tell you, are you crazy?

First of all, but you didn't have a phone because in order to have a phone installed in your home, you would have waited anywhere between eight and twelve years to get a phone.

To get a phone line installed, yes.

And that phone line installed most times was a shared phone line with somebody that you didn't even know.

So you pick up the phone and you hear somebody else that you didn't know who it was.

It was the same line.

I don't know if this was the case ever in America.

Like two families together.

Very early on in my life, I remember some people

would have what was called a party line.

Party line.

Okay, there was another thing that

made you to be very guarded because you never know when you pick up the phone who was the other guy that could have listened on your conversation.

So

you couldn't call the store.

And if you would have called the store, okay, they would say, are you crazy?

Okay, so

no phones.

No phones.

So you get, so all you have to do is just get into your car.

What do you drive down?

What car?

You know, your family car.

Okay.

I think in Romania,

only about probably one in 25 families have a car, had a car at the time.

One car.

For every maybe 20, 25 families.

One car.

Why?

Because

they had these ugly cars of the people.

Okay.

Because the industry of

the socialist industry wasn't geared towards consumer goods.

So automobiles were considered consumer goods and they were not considered really a necessity for the people.

In order to buy a car in Romania,

first of all,

you had to save

your entire salary.

Let's say you're a blue-collar worker in a factory.

You save your whole salary, every penny, and you live out to your wife's income for about seven years.

Wait, wait, wait.

Seven years.

You would have to pay your entire salary

for seven years.

Seven years, put it in a savings account special design for buying a car

with the national bank.

Okay?

You couldn't touch those money.

You didn't have interest earned on those.

So you pay seven years, your entire entire salary, and you leave at the mercy of your wife or relatives because you didn't have any money left.

After seven years, when you finish paying, okay,

then

you finally get in line to get the car, which takes another five to seven years.

Shut up, 14 years?

14 years to get a car.

Okay.

And then after 14 years,

you get a letter and you go to the only one dealer of cars in Romania, which is the factory, Dacha factory in Pitešt.

You can pick anything there.

Anything, any color, as long as it's produced that month.

So, for example, you want to buy a red car, and you get there, and you see all that parking lot full of green cars, and you promise your wife you're going to get a red car at home, right?

Well, you can't because they didn't produce the red cars that month, okay?

So you get your green car or you don't get anything.

They give you the key.

You get out of the factory

parking lot gates and then you have a problem because in the gasoline tank there is only about two liters of gasoline enough to go to the first station, gas station.

And you get into the first gas station.

And you have a ration for gasoline too, which is seven liters a month.

A month.

Seven liters a month.

What's like in gallons, like three gallons?

That's crazy.

So, somebody

most of the times it's not enough for you to get home with your new brand new car.

So, you have to have a friend waiting for you with a jerry can somewhere and you know, put gasoline in your car, and then you finally get home.

This is how it was to be a car owner.

I my family never had a car.

I got my first car when I was

27, 28, a year after the revolution.

That's when I bought my first car.

But other than that,

you were considered lucky to have an automobile and go into a vacation.

And by the way, you couldn't go into a vacation at any time.

You had to calculate.

First of all, you had to save the gasoline

money.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

To

get the gasoline ratio.

And then you had to plan it because

you couldn't drive your car every weekend.

If you had an even

license plate with the ending with an even number,

you could go, you could drive your car

in the first and third weekend of the month.

If it was uneven,

in the second and the fourth.

Why?

To save,

I don't know, to save the planet?

I have no idea.

You were not allowed to drive like that.

Maybe this is how liberals in America they were trying to imitate this model.

We did it in the 70s when we had a gas shortage.

Yeah.

You know, and that's when

we had the wonders of Jimmy Carter, who, who loved a lot of the social media.

So you're telling me he copied the model?

Yeah, he.

Even an odd?

Yeah.

You could only buy...

No, I think it was you could only buy gas

on certain days.

But you could drive every weekend.

You could drive as much as you want, but you're not going to get any gas.

Oh, well.

So as you're going...

As you're going through this, well, first of all, you're 18 years old.

Let me take you to 18 years old.

You're going to college, you're going to work, you.

I was finishing high school,

and then I got drafted in the

armed forces.

I was in the Navy.

Okay.

So it was mandatory to serve your country.

Once you turned 18.

you got your

must have been an exciting time i mean

yes absolutely

i i i have a feeling that's sarcasm.

So they called you,

they called me, they sent me a letter.

I went to the recruitment center.

It was in a high school gym.

They look at me and say, well, you have big ears.

You might be a good radio man in the Navy.

Oh, my God.

So they examined us, and a month later,

I was in the Navy, in the Romanian Navy.

Went right to the ship, you go to boot camp?

We went to the boot camp for two months, in which

besides the

training and marching and all the stuff that

was

leaving us tired as dogs, like pretty much here in the United States, and gas mask on the face and all the things.

But after you finish all that stuff

and you are tired like a dog and you want to hit the sack, okay,

You couldn't because they were starting the political indoctrination lessons for about two or three hours every day,

in which

everybody in that classroom

was like

listening

some instructor droning about the

15th Congress of the Communist Party and what Ceausescu said and how beautiful it's going to be in the future and stuff like that.

So

it was a dark period of my life.

After the boot camp, it was kind of a little bit better because I was assigned to a ship, but only to a certain point because the food was really bad.

Cockroaches everywhere, including in the bread.

We were in the morning for breakfast, we were taking the the the loaves of bread from the galley and we were going outside on the top deck, slicing the bread so the cockroaches could have enough time to

oh my gosh.

This is at the time when we were having Reagan.

Yeah,

probably, yes.

Probably the first.

You were 18.

That would have been 81, 80, somewhere in that area.

That's Ronald Reagan.

You were chasing the...

You were cutting the bread to let the cockroaches out.

Get out, yes.

And we had buttertop bread.

And

we were joking with you know friends that we were trusting

that

as a military force we would surrender immediately if only the American would come and drop loads of Marlboro cigarettes, blue jeans,

bottles of whiskey over us.

You didn't need to drop bombs on us.

You just need a Berlin lift and we will surrender.

The food situation was so bad that when you enlisted, part of boot camp was working on a farm, wasn't it?

We had pig farms.

But where the pig meat, where the pig meat go,

I never found out because we only got like pieces of fat and pig skin in our

plates.

Probably went to, you know, not to the enlisted people, but to, you know, to the people in...

No, but you don't understand.

That's what socialism is all about, giving it to the 99 instead of the 1%.

The 1%,

yeah, the 1% in socialism, Glenn.

Because I hear every,

almost every day, the 99% and 1%, and the rich people are the 1%, and in socialism there's not going to be 1% any longer

it's it's

it exasperates me because in socialism there is a one percent but the one percent are not the people who deserve to be wealthy and to be in position of leadership and they are practically in socialism

The 1%

who have all the

wealth and all the privilege are not the people that work hard for it.

Are the party privileged, the elite of the party.

The game players, the ones who know how to schmooze, how to work people, how to work.

Exactly.

Then

another category of one percenters are the people who enforce the regime.

The securitata, the secret police.

Those guys are going and shopping in special stores where you don't have access.

They never lack anything, they don't lack food,

they don't lack

booze.

Basically, they have their children going to elite schools that your kids, they don't have access to.

And then there is another group of one percenter one percenters, and you're going to laugh at this, but the last group is people that are

selling potatoes in the stores and meat and they the people that the food stuff and the consumer goods

are

are the people who are working in the stores where you go and buy are trying to buy the stuff because they can get the first and the best exactly they can get the first and the best and they can trade what they have right with other people who have other stuff

They might have that rice that you couldn't get.

For example, I had a colleague in high school.

His father was a butcher.

Okay, now what's a butcher in the United States?

Okay, but he was somebody.

He was somebody.

He had Nike's shoes.

He had

Levi's blue jeans.

His father had a vacation home.

and a nice apartment downtown.

They had two cars.

How could he get away with with blue jeans for Levi's in particular when others would be picked up for bell bottoms because they were too Western?

Because

the cops, the police, they have to eat too, right?

Like the lower,

you know,

the cops on the beat, the ones that they arrest you for wearing blue jeans or having a lot long hair.

So where is it?

They know that that kid is this guy who is the butcher where I'm going to buy meat.

So they're not going to touch that.

So where is the Marx social justice?

Where is the

justice for the?

I don't know.

Maybe Ocasio-Cortez can tell me, or maybe Bernie, because I didn't lift it.

There is nowhere.

Socialism is

if we are talking about human

exploitation,

okay, that's socialism.

And

what they are trying to sell the American kids, that democratic socialism is different than real socialism, it's not true.

It's just

lipstick on a pig.

How do you

were you allowed to go hunt for your own food?

Could you have guns and rifles and

no

guns were prohibited?

My uncle had

a shotgun.

Was he on the capitalist?

Double barrel.

He was a doctor.

He was a doctor.

So hunting in Romania was reserved for the elite.

I had an uncle who was a doctor, kind of like a celebrity, a doctor for celebrities, for actors and stuff.

And he was kind of like a uppercrust.

He had a double-barrel shotgun,

and he was going from time to time to hunt bears and deers.

And, you know,

but every time when the dictator was in town, he had to surrender his gun to the police headquarters under lock and key.

He was not allowed to keep it at home.

But other than that, I never touched a gun until I got drafted in the Navy.

And

it was probably...

I don't know if it was a capital offense to have an illegal gun, but probably you were going to jail for life.

Did the communists take the guns, or is that part of the culture of Romania?

The communists took the guns.

My grandfather, from what my dad told me,

he had a shotgun.

And when the Germans, they were retreating from Romania, his house was right next to the railroad, and the German troops were throwing all the stuff that they couldn't carry from him.

So he picked up a Luger pistol from

the railroad tracks.

When the communists came to power, the first

law,

not the first, but one of the first laws they passed was

confiscations, registration and confiscations of all firearms.

So,

you know.

Did he keep it?

Did he hide it?

No, he

surrendered it.

He surrendered it.

And that didn't help him much because they took him and put him in prison anyway, because he was a capitalist pig.

And I remember what my father told me after the revolution.

He told me, if I would have

known

what was going to happen

after they did that, I would never have allowed my father.

I would have taken those guns and hit them.

There's everywhere communists,

socialists, communists,

they came to power or they tried to accede to the power, they have this

policy of restricting gun rights.

And it's absolutely every time it happens.

It happened right now in Venezuela.

When Maduro came to power, he did the same thing.

When you start to lose power, you have to.

You have to stop.

The democratic part of socialism goes away quickly.

Exactly.

And then you have to use force.

Correct.

Tell me how

homosexuals and gays and women and all this.

If you were identified as a gay,

lesbian, transvestite or whatever

you were going to prison, period.

It was a decree

in which homosexuality

was criminalized.

And that was

the law in Romania, believe it or not.

They only got rid of that law way in 2006.

So it was another for another seven years after communists fell.

They still had the law.

From what I heard, they were meeting underground, but it was very, very

risky to be outed as one.

They were going.

And the thing is,

if they were arrested, the survival expectancy in prison as a gay person, it was probably weeks.

They were usually killed by other inmates under the orders of the prison guards.

What would have happened to a guy like Martin Luther King?

In Romania?

Romania.

Guy who stood up and said, this is wrong and this is an injustice and

beaten

within an inch of his life.

If that would have happened

after

1960s,

because if he would have been arrested, let's say he would have been arrested before 1960s, he would have been just disappeared.

Okay?

But when Ceausescu came to power, he didn't actually, he killed people, but he wasn't like

Maduro style, like shooting people on the streets.

He was arresting them, beating them,

keeping them

in home arrest.

If he was something like

Doina corner like a dissident uh doina corner who had

uh her son who lived in france and he was a personality

house arrest 24-hour surveillance and period periodical beatings

this is this is how it was

Ceauusescu wasn't I mean he was a

absolutely a dictator.

I mean, he was a he was charged with crimes against humanity, genocide.

Yeah, he was because he practically starved a lot of people to death.

And he killed people, especially when he was young.

Before becoming president, he was the head of the Communist Party security services.

I know because I had an uncle who actually he was he

uh was one he was in the military and he was one of his bodyguards and my uncle witnessed Ceausescu ordering killing of the people there were a couple of peasants revolts in Romania people they didn't want to give up their lands and Ceausescu led

the repression and he gave the order for

for

the security forces to to machine gun those those peasants when I when I listen to the people in Washington on the left

I think

they have no idea what's going on.

They're clueless.

They're so separated from the people that they don't even realize how out of step they are.

And it brings me to 1989 and the revolution.

The way I remember this, and correct me if I'm wrong.

The way I remember this is

the dictator walks out onto a balcony.

I think it was his wife, and he's giving a speech, and

he's used to everybody praising him, and I think it was one like old woman in the crowd or something that said

liar or freedom or something, and then the whole crowd turned on him for the first time, and he was shocked.

He had no idea, right?

Yeah, he was trying, I mean,

the revolution started about a week before in the city of Timishwara, and he sent there the securitized troop to try to repress the people, shot them in the street.

He shot the wounded in hospitals.

He sent people and shot people wounded in

the hospital beds, yes.

Why is this the only violent revolution?

Everything else, you know, was rocky, but this was awful.

Why?

He tried to hold on to power.

He didn't want to listen to what Gorbachev told him.

It's time to go, probably.

He didn't want to believe that the people had enough of him.

He gathered the people when he started.

He gathered those people

in the government plaza in Bucharest, where the government building was, and you remember that from the TV.

What he actually tried to do that, he was trying to

bribe the population.

He said that he's going to raise the salaries, the minimum salary

on the economy with, I don't know, a couple of dollars a month and stuff like that.

And actually nobody is very clear what happened, but somebody yelled

something

and then

some kind of loud noise happened and then that's when the people they just lost their mind.

And then what happened to him?

He uh they broke uh through the police line uh and I think the police didn't offer much of a resistance because the police was pretty sick and tired.

The the cops were pretty sick and tired of him also.

And people rushed into the government building.

He went out on the top of the building and took off with his wife in a military helicopter.

Which

only the flight only took about half an hour because the pilot was alerted by the

flight control or something that they're going to be downed if they don't land.

So they landed in the middle of

a highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere and they were picked up by a military vehicle, took into a military unit.

And

you probably already see

the two-hour trial.

And where were you?

I was in Constanza.

But the circus in my hometown started actually the moment

he left in the air.

Yes.

That was a power.

Did you see that moment on television?

Yes, I've seen it on television.

Did you see it then, though?

Yes.

And what was that?

Well, immediately after he started saying,

quiet, quiet, quiet, please.

The moment when that happened, they cut the transmission.

But what did you think?

Were you?

Something was

going on, because that never happened.

And then, probably, if I remember correctly, about half half an hour to an hour later, later,

less than an hour,

people took over the television stations and new faces came.

The dictator ran away, and everybody was happy.

Everybody was trying to get in the front of the camera to express their feelings and stuff.

So, that's when we got out.

I tried to go to pick up my wife from work

and

we went to the party

building in downtown of my hometown.

Chaos,

things flying through the broken windows, telex machines and

tables and chairs and stuff like that.

People were like pretty wild, you know, expressing that.

Then we went marching to the secret police headquarters.

We freed a couple of guys that were

in one of their jail cells underground from under the first floor, broke the bars and let them out.

And then I remember

millions of sheets of paper flying from the windows.

Those were the dossiers that they had on each one of us.

And that was the first day.

And the second day, that's when the shooting started in my hometown.

Because they had probably they had

from what I heard, they had

his loyalists which were

we believe at the time they were actually Palestinian

hired by Ceausescu because he was put in such a situation that he wasn't trusted even if his own

people in the secret service he was distrusting them too and from

what

I heard, he actually was,

he had a plan with the Aser Arafat.

In case something happens,

people from the PLO living in Romania as foreign students undercover would fight for him, would try to

help him

escape.

So it was chaos.

We had

people shooting from top of the buildings

we call them terrorists

I don't know how many they were apprehended we heard that a bunch of them they were but we never saw them

I got a call from my company

and I had military experience they call me if I want to go on patrol I went to the company they open up the each company they had a room with the arms and ammo for the what they call the patriotic guards, the militia.

So they open up that room, they open up the cans of ammo, they gave me an IKM-47,

two mags of ammo, and we went on patrol in the harbor because

they were saying he's going to try to escape aboard a ship.

He's going to go to Iraq to his

Saddam Hussein friend or Yasser Arafat, whatever.

That didn't happen.

They already apprehended him

the days before, but that didn't stop the shooting.

And we had a

in

since the revolution started,

up until it started quieting down

early January, around 2,500 people were shot.

Wow.

Killed.

Terrifying?

No,

actually.

Why?

Because we were so happy.

I mean

so we were

you know what did you all know what a monster he was and you just ignored it yes we everybody knew what a monster we we had but you asked me we were terrified we were terrified all of only one thing glenn the only thing we were terrified that he's going to come back

We were not terrified of the bullets.

We were not terrifying that people shooting us.

We were not terrified of anything.

But we were terrified that tomorrow morning morning we're gonna wake up and we're gonna see the guy back on television uh and the the the the cops are gonna

come and get us and one of the reasons

there are not too many pictures of the revolution and not too many uh

videos shot

films shot of that because people were afraid to

when when you were seeing a guy with a camera shooting you automatically thought it's one of the securitate guy and is taking your picture.

And you know, and after the charces will come back, he's gonna get you because he knows it was you on the street.

So as somebody who came here with that understanding and that lifestyle, that life,

what does freedom of speech mean to you here?

Oh, it's everything.

It's, I mean,

it's

without freedom of speech, there is nothing.

I lived 26 years without having it.

The fact that I can can criticize the president, which I don't because I like him.

I didn't like the previous one.

The freedom of speech

is

extremely important.

Without freedom of speech, and I'm looking at

these millennials.

which are trying by all the means to say, oh, this is offensive.

You cannot say this, you cannot say that.

Freedom of speech is made to protect speech that you don't agree with.

Speech that you might consider

offensive.

Why is that important?

If it's not

freedom of speech doesn't protect speech that everyone agrees with, it wouldn't be necessary, agree with me?

Okay?

It's freedom of speech protects people,

protects the speech that

people might not agree with.

They might consider it offensive.

And

Second Amendment

is also very important because the Second Amendment protects the first.

And I know because I live to that, without what the when the Communists came to power, they

got rid of the Second Amendment Second Amendment.

We didn't have the Second Amendment per se, but they got rid of guns.

Why?

So they can shut up us later, after they got the guns.

They were not not afraid of us any any longer so they took the freedom of speech too

so if if romania won

why'd you leave to america ten years later

because

of

disappointment glen glenn

in

in what happened after

and what happened after was

second-line

party activists, Ceausescu's bodies that they were like behind him,

they all of a sudden

dropped the name of Communists and they called themselves

Socialists

and

Democrats.

And all of a sudden, using their connections that they had before from the previous regime, they became capitalists and they started getting not only the political power, but also the economic power.

So practically Romania became

a corruptocrat country.

A republic of

former

Communist Party activists turned socialists who control the economy and control everything, control the system.

The governing the governing party in Romania right now is called

the Social Democrat Party.

And

I would say probably

Bernie would be proud to lead that party.

Wow.

Yeah, Bernie Sanders.

It's

when we realized that actually we

had free speech.

You could, after 1989, you could criticize the government.

We had a free press.

But in fact,

if you you went on the streets and tried to say I disagree with the government and they were gathering too many people like it was in 1990 during the minariyada, I don't know if you remember that, what happened,

they sent the miners and they sent the police and they beat the crap out of everybody just for wearing glasses or having a beard.

You look like an intellectual, therefore you are against the regime.

Students put in the hospital, intellectuals, libraries destroyed.

It was the same thing with second-party activists in charge.

Aaron Powell, how much do you think this stuff is happening here in America now?

I mean, you look at the political landscape.

People who are the most awake, generally speaking, I think are the people from the former Soviet bloc.

I talk to them all the time.

They'll stop me in the street.

Because we recognize the

rhetoric in the science.

side rhetoric because we recognize the rhetoric we lived with it in our youth so we know when when Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or Hillary speaks about it takes a village we heard that before

okay but this time it'll be done right

when did that happen ever happen co

socialism

was tried in 40 countries around the world.

It failed every time.

What does it make you believe that it's going to succeed the 41st time?

Because the right people were in charge this time.

So, are you telling me that the American socialists are somehow smarter than any other socialist on the planet?

That

Bernie Sanders is smarter than every other leader of the party in

other 40 countries that tried and failed.

That's kind of an elitist, don't you believe?

I'm struck by your t-shirt.

I've been looking at it the whole time.

You got one?

I haven't.

You brought me one?

Oh, I'll proudly wear that.

Romania,

that's the home of Lad the Impaler,

who is the inspiration for Dracula.

Yes.

I mean, the Impaler army.

That's pretty dark.

No, it's fun.

Vlad the Impaler.

Yes,

he's a national hero in Romania.

He's an historian.

Wait, wait, wait.

He's a real prince.

He fought against the Ottomans, the Muslim Turks.

And he beat them several times until he died being betrayed by his people in his inner circle.

But he's a national hero.

He's very, very respected.

Unfortunate, well, I wouldn't say unfortunate.

He was transformed in a fictional character

by an English writer in a vampire.

He wasn't a vampire by any means.

He was a prince and he was pretty badass.

He kept the country

free.

He beat what was probably at the time the

greatest armed army in the world, which were the Ottomans.

They were ruling at the time.

They were, I would say, the America, the American power of the day, and he managed to beat them several times.

He was a just ruler.

He was tough.

But hey.

Those were the times.

He learned actually the art of impelling from the Turks when he was imprisoned by them as a child.

So

this is my respect for him and combined with my anti-communist stance.

Raising commies to new heights.

Exactly.

And there is another one, if I may say, I don't know if that's going to pass.

No, that's not.

Nick Cercei has one.

which says we shove communists up your ass

you can can cut it.

Tell me what you really think.

Tell me what you really think.

You don't want to know.

So

why don't you leave us?

Talk directly to somebody.

Look into that camera.

Okay.

And speak directly to somebody who

is 20 and says, look, I appreciate that happening in your country, but it's not going to happen here.

That's not what the Democratic Socialists want to do here.

It's different.

It's not that.

Well,

it's exactly that because

always,

without fail, socialism,

either socialism or democratic socialism, or call it as you may want, it always

ends up like that.

You just cannot share the wealth.

It's end that way in Sweden, in Denmark, in Norway.

Because there's not socialism.

You try to

make Sweden government to abandon free property and try them

to

plan their economy in five years,

like in five years plans.

Try to do that and you're going to see Sweden becoming a third world country in less than a decade.

So you can tell goodbye to your IKEA furniture and your Volvo car, I can guarantee you that.

Socialism fails every time without fail.

That's period.

People stealing other people

wealth

and

redistributing it.

That's just not working.

It's not how it's going to work.

You cannot get rid of the 1%.

you just can replace it in socialism.

You replace the 1%

which is based on merit most of the time and

on people who work their asses out and

who open businesses and who have great ideas.

You replace them as the 1%ers of capitalism.

You replace them with people who don't

deserve to be 1%.

You replace them with people who are high up in the party, people who can do

who have control of the goods on the market, and you replace them with people who will put the boot on your neck and keep you down.

Those are the 1% over there, and this is what you're going to get if you

manage to get socialism in the United States.

Where are you going to go if we become that?

There is nowhere else to go.

This is the last country in the world that is,

you know,

keeping socialism at bay.

There is nowhere else to go.

My wife told me we stop running from socialism too soon.

There is nowhere else to run.

Nowhere else.

Andy, it's great to meet you.

Thank you very much, Glenn.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.