Eastern Bloc

The United States government feared communism and was prepared to turn a blind eye to Nazi crimes in exchange for assistance.

The CIA had turned to a lot of former SS men to create a spy network to gather intelligence on East Germany, on goings-on across the Eastern Bloc.

In East Germany, the authorities did talk about the Holocaust.

But in West Germany, where many former Nazis remained in positions of power, this focus on the past was taken to be opportunistic.

The reason they hate Donald Trump so much is he's bringing back private production to this country, which gets in the way of what they thought was an inevitable historical move toward the nirvana of communism.

Just ask anybody in Eastern Bloc how that worked out.

Anybody that's here from Cuba says why they fled.

It says, you know, please don't do this.

Well...

You know, weight training in the sprint world really didn't come about until the 70s and 80s with the Eastern Bloc countries.

And we know why they were weight training, because they were using vitamins to assist the process a little bit.

But if you study North America or Caribbean sprinting, you know, weight training in the 60s and 70s was not a thing.

Well, it's probably not going to happen in the US where you train three times a day and you have the financial luxury to just eat and sleep.

So again, a sociocultural driver is the reason why a lot of these things don't work.

Let's go to the Eastern Bloc in the 70s and 80s.

I mean, it was their only way out.

And then that's gone away now because communism has fell.

The Eastern Bloc decides it wants to be friends with us.

And At that point, yeah, the peace dividend, I think, was that the phrase you were sort of prodding me towards? Yeah, the peace dividend.

And we cashed it in.

For citizens in communist nations, that speech was like seeing someone articulate everything they'd been feeling for decades.

Thatcher became an overnight celebrity in the Eastern Bloc.

Even today, countries like the Czech Republic consider her a British hero, on par with Churchill.

But there were missteps, too.

Now, they live different than we do differently.

They live different or differently than we do typically inside of Eastern Bloc and Russian and especially Soviet Union countries.

They would build these large apartment complexes with multi-stories.

You know, the typical one is... 12, 15, 20 stories, right? And so there's boilers in the basement for pumping gas heat, usually.

And, you know, there's nobody to inherit that legacy and we have to kind of keep our distance from it.

So the only way we can make some kind of impact into the public sphere is by saying, oh, but look at Western Europe, you know, these are new concepts and this has nothing to do with this perversion that the Soviet Union was or the Eastern Bloc was.

Right.

So For me, going back to this period in the sphere of energy gave me the resource to reclaim a little bit and to inherit this legacy and to feel proud about something that we achieved back in the day without borrowing from the West.

This is probably because I was aware of your name as far back as Grendel, which I followed religiously.

And I got to be honest with you, when I first saw your Grendel issues, I think you came after Djordjevic, no? Like you came after a run of a guy from that era who had passed away because he was in the he was in the middle of the Eastern Bloc and he was pumping out those amazing pages.

And it took me a minute to get used to your style because that's what I had gotten used to.

And when you came in, Eric, you're talking about Edwin Bwekovich.