Chuck Norris Versus Communism
5th January 2017
Economist Alex Tabarrok takes a look.
Chuck Norris Versus Communism is a great documentary about art, the power of heroes and the end of communism in Romania. After the communist regime was established in 1948, travel was restricted, the media were censored and the secret police watched everyone. Romania was cut off from the rest of the world. In the mid-1980s, however, smuggled VHS tapes of American movies began to circulate. Underground groups would gather together to watch samizdat movies like Rocky and Lone Wolf McQuade.
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The action was exciting but perhaps even more revealing were the ordinary scenes of supermarkets stocked with food, at a time when Romania was racked with severe rationing. City lights, beautiful cars, and the ordinary freedoms of worship and belief casually portrayed all impressed on the Romanian viewers the starkness of their own situation.
I am reminded of the scene from Moscow on the Hudson where a Russian defector, played by Robin Williams, goes into a grocery store and asks where is the line for bread? The clerk says, ‘There is no line for bread. Bread is on aisle 4.’ Williams hyperventilates and passes out at the sight of forty feet of shelves with nothing but bread on them — and no line.
Makes you wonder how all the people who prefer socialism to a free market can be so stupid.