Boy escapes communist tyranny with Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris in "Lone Wolf McQuade"

The year was 1985. In Bucharest, Romania, boys kicked broken bottles and chased after stray dogs between drab, gray, concrete projects and past food-ration lines seeking scraps from nearly empty groceries, always on the lookout for Nicolae Ceausescu's dreaded secret police.

Twenty years of communist rule and Ceausecsu's systematization scheme of socialist urban planning had turned Bucharest into an ugly, concrete crypt.

Even more tightly sealed than a crypt was the people's access to information, as Ceausecsu completely cut off Romania from Western media. Subjected to the communist dictator's highly censored propaganda, broadcast on only two hours of television a day, Romanians knew nothing of the world's technology, news, art, music or abundance.

For a boy identified only by the first name of Bogdan in the spellbinding new film, "Chuck Norris vs. Communism," which debuted recently at the Sundance Film Festival, the only life he had ever known in Bucharest was one of hopelessness.

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But then he saw Chuck Norris.

Bogdan, now a grown man, describes with child-like joy the day he rustled together just a few Romanian lei as his entrance fee to a home where daring citizens were showing an American film, smuggled into Bucharest on VHS.

"The first film I saw was in a small apartment. It smelled of damp, but it didn't matter," Bogdan relates in "Chuck Norris vs. Communism."

For those few dozen Romanians, cramped in a smelly apartment but transfixed by the images before them, it was their first glimpse of the West's technological advances, its landscaped cities, beautiful cars and full grocery stores, where meat and sweets could be had in plenty.

"That's when I realized how far behind the West we were," notes another woman interviewed in the film.

Bogdan describes watching Norris' movie, "Lone Wolf McQuade," amazed at the action hero's calm in the face of danger and resolve in the face of adversity. He was engrossed in the story.

"No panic. No anger. He was in control. I thought it was real," Bodgan marvels. "I can see myself, mouth wide open, eyes peeled. It's OK, we'll make it. Of course I can do it. You can do it!"

As "Chuck Norris vs. Communism" details with spy-novel-like intensity, those first few VHS tapes – smuggled over the border in a trunk of a car and dubbed for Romanians by a woman inside Ceausecsu's own administration – soon grew to thousands of Hollywood movies seen across the country in underground viewings, basements and homes with curtains drawn tight.

The fleeting images of freedom stirred a hunger in the people, seeds of a movement that would one day lead to revolution and the overthrow of Ceausecsu and his communist cronies.

In a column exclusively appearing in WND, Chuck Norris explains he was "humbled and honored" to see reported that his action movies inspired Romanians like Bogdan.

Read Chuck Norris' column, "Operation Digital Delta Force," by clicking here.

"However," Norris writes, "the total truth is that without the common people rising up, rebelling, and supporting freedom, change and democracy, the motivation from my movies would have been short lived and even missing in action. They may have stoked some democratic fires or blew on the flames of freedom, but the people's passions enflamed liberty into an inferno that led to a communist overthrow."

Norris continues, "Even though I haven't had an opportunity to see the movie, 'Chuck Norris vs. Communism,' I'm truly gratified to learn that some of my action movies of the 1980s played a role in the undermining of the vicious and brutal Ceausescu regime in Romania. It illustrates, once again, the importance of cracking closed societies and giving people in horribly oppressed nations something positive and uplifting to think about, especially with regard to man's eternal quest for liberty."

In fact, Norris notes, "That might also explain why I heard about my films' positive influences among Iraqis while visiting U.S. troops during Operation Freedom in 2006 and 2007. I'll never forget meeting Iraqi officers who were overly complimentary about my movies. The whole time I thought, "I didn't even know Saddam Hussein's regime allowed my films into his country!" Now, I understand they were likely smuggled in. I can only hope they might have offered similar encouragement to the oppressed people under Saddam's brutal dictatorship, too."

As for Bogdan, the influence of martial arts star, action hero and today, WND columnist Chuck Norris was a lot more personal than simply inspiring his nation.

"After the film ended, a street was not just a street," Bodgan recalls. "A rock not just a rock. They were challenges. We started to play in a disciplined manner. We started to want to be … heroes."

A trailer for the film, "Chuck Norris vs. Communism," can  be seen below:

You still have a chance to see, meet and greet Chuck Norris in person – and get your picture taken with him and signed – by attending WND's exclusive pre-75th birthday party bash for him in Nashville Tennessee next month.

Read Chuck Norris' column, "Operation Digital Delta Force," by clicking here.