Sean Williams
speaker
3,152 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Sean Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Hodger dies in 1985.
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But so hermetic is his Albanian North Korea that it survives the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the Soviet Union and limps on until nineteen ninety-two.
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Incredible.
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I think I mentioned this in the previous show, but like there is a great New York Times article where the guy goes to Albania in ninety-two and he meets people that don't know.
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that the Berlin Wall has fallen.
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That's how like closed off they are.
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Anyway, but if Albanians thought they'd have it easy after that, they are wrong.
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For one, the country's economy is a total basket case and presided over by oligarchs and idiots.
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See also literally any other Eastern Bloc nation during the time.
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But in nineteen ninety seven, a series of nationwide saving plans turns out to be gigantic pyramid schemes.
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Most of the country loses its money and all hell breaks loose.
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You have protesters ransacking and blowing up anything to do with the
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state in what really becomes a collective form of cathartic anger against the previous communist regime.
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Then President Sally Berisha, who, in a sign of how stagnant Albanian politics has become, is still Eddie Rama's main opposition, opens up weapons cachets to pro government civilians, which means I mean.
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Who told him that was a good idea?
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And this means that o there are over half a million firearms, grenades, rocket launchers, the lot, all in public hands.
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Some of these gentlemen then loot police stations, grabbing uniforms and pistols and bulletproof vests.
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A friend of mine in Tirana described militiamen parking an actual tank on their front lawn.
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Thanks to Berisha's brilliant brainwave, Albania, which has a population barely above three million, is now home to thousands of angry young men, most of whom are stonebroke, packing the kind of weaponry usually reserved for national armies, with police disguises in a country with a barely functioning government that is just off the coast of Mafia dominated Italy and right on human smuggling and trafficking routes that bring people from the Middle East and Africa.
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through the Balkans and into Western Europe.
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Showing 281–300 of 3,152 · page 15 of 158
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