Eastern Bloc

Another source here for money blocks is culture.

I've had clients who grew up in the Eastern Bloc countries where the messages were at school, they were at home, they were in, I think one of them told me there would be posters on the walls as you walked down the street with messages like, profits are evil.

Something like, don't be a capitalist pig dog.

Okay, that was my words, but the basic idea was don't stand out, don't have more than your neighbors.

I'm not supposed to have a lot of money.

I'm supposed to just be right there with my neighbors.

Now, I'm gonna say, you don't have to have grown up in an Eastern Bloc country to have a cultural influence on your subconscious around money.

You can get similar reaction from parts of the US and other Western countries, Portland, I'm looking at you.

It's not the race.

It's the amount of people that are coming in from one particular in Victoria who that you sometimes, and a lot of times, feel like you're in another country, not in the Eastern Bloc, are shopping centres, small business.

As soon as a small business folds in Victoria, Asians buy it.

I don't know where they're getting the money from.

I forget.

But you'll actually find that they're all over the Eastern Bloc as well.

Yeah.

A lot of them in the former Yugoslavia.

Officially named the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan offered direct American aid to any European nation willing to participate, including the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

Moscow denounced the offer as capitalist imperialism and forced its Eastern Bloc allies to reject it, effectively dividing the continent into two economic systems.

Back in Washington, isolationist congressmen balked at the massive price tag.

But when a Soviet-backed coup seized control of Czechoslovakia in early 1948, Congress quickly realized what was truly on the line.

And it was great.

And it's interesting to see the difference between Western Europe and the old Eastern Bloc, as we call it, into Hungary.

That was different.

Driving to Budapest, that was cool.

and perestroika which is restructuring and the idea was to introduce limited market reforms based on this belief that actually a free economy a decentralized economy will be more innovative than a centrally planned one which is very much against the kind of orthodoxy of of soviet thinking and it doesn't really work because he only goes a very short way in that direction actually tries to maintain a lot of control so they sort of half reform So one thing that's really driving that is a kind of an attempt to sort of move away from the old system at the highest levels that produces not a great deal of success, but also a lot of frustration from hardliners who feel that Gorbachev is sort of like leading them down the wrong path.

And my understanding is that Gorbachev was himself very aware of the burden that came from maintaining Soviet preeminence in the Eastern Bloc.

And one of the things he was sort of interested in a lot was kind of the process of decolonization that other countries had done.

And is there a way in which you can sort of maintain your influence in places like Poland and Georgia and Ukraine without having to send the Red Army in constantly if there's an opposition to it? And he makes the decision basically to stop doing what was done in Prague and elsewhere previously, which is to basically use force to defend your allies.

It's like I find it hard.

And that's the cool thing about especially a lot of the Eastern Bloc countries like in Europe and stuff, they do what the fuck they want.

Yeah.

Like we were riding down, you know, you ride down the beach and stuff.

But I think it was about the dynamics of what that does to a child feel that they shouldn't be here.

Survivor syndrome, I think, was studied the best by Dr. Philip Ney because he did research all over the world and in particular, Eastern Bloc countries.

But I Survivor syndrome is something like the Nazi Holocaust survivors.

Why am I alive and all my family dead? How did how how is it that I came to be? This is a similar thing that we see among families where there's been abortion losses and the children know about it.