Chuck Norris is known as an 80’s martial arts action star, super Christian, passionate Republican and for a while satirical content meme. Remember the jokey-joke what’s under Chuck Norris’s beard?
Another fist!
No?
Ehhh you get the gist though. He embodied the ridiculously indestructible archetype of the Hollywood American hero. Fighting the good fight, always on the right side.
Less well known, though perhaps somewhat unsurprising, also to his credit is helping bring down the walls of Romanian communism without lifting a finger or a bearded fist for that matter!
In December 1989, communism fell in Romania. The regime under President Nicolae Ceausescu had severely restricted civil liberties including the rationing of food and electricity, controlling the reproductive rights of women, along with the usual hum drum of mass surveillance and state controlled media. It also unsurprisingly restricted foreign media content. Films from the most powerful western democracy in the world were very much no buenos. Murica, looking at you!
American action films aren’t super complementary of communism, so it’s best to keep those perceptibly greener pastures firmly on the other side of the iron curtain-no peep holes allowed either!
It wasn’t just Chuck Norris films that were banned but films by his contemporaries as well. A copy of Delta Force, Top Gun, Rocky, Rambo, or any other seductive content that could inspire anything other than committed submissive communist ideals, was strictly prohibited. You couldn’t import it, own it, watch it or share it. That’s how a Romanian VHS cartel was born.
Chuck Norris vs Communism, by Ilinca Calugareanu is the documentary that covers this bizarre true story. It gives a particular shout out to Irina Margareta Nistor, who took by far the biggest risk translating and dubbing the smuggled American content into Romanian for an invisible underground black market of an audience. The films were played under cover of darkness in random apartment block homes, with suspicious bouncers on the door, and played for audiences who by mere attendance were defying the government and risking it all.
Violent demonstrations and eventual military intervention was what ultimately tipped the scales out of Ceausescu’s favor causing communism to dramatically crumble. However the significance of movies like Rambo and Top Gun, which embodied themes of resistance, violence and action surely helped grow the ideological seedlings of an anti-communist movement, mobilizing if not inspiring real actions that contributed to the eventual bloody revolution.
Chuck Norris vs Communism is a great watch, it’s dark and gritty. It’s very easy to forget drugs and guns are not the powerful product illicitly being moved by organised crime, but instead humble cassette tapes and not so silly action movies.