Chuck Norris versus Communism

Dictators of any colors and the enormous system supporting them don´t want their humans happy. They want to keep their people they took captive in ignorance, cut from the rest of the world. They want to enjoy the priviledge of playing with their mind and even stomachs, to portion their food with the same minutiae they are portioning and distorting the everyday truth and reality.

My childhood memories are very fuzzy. I remember vaguely relative saying ´good bye´ late at night, warning to not share anything was talked about in the home with neighbours and practically anyone, my stepfather being red of fury after he caught my brother listening to Radio Free Europe, the radio elegantly set on the heating system - thus, allowing the resonance of the sound down to the upper apartments, it seemed. I was afraid of not being caught in the elevator during the sudden electricity shortages. The visits of the food smugglers, late at night. A horrible doll, looking like a Golem with blue eyes, that I was finally allowed to have, bought from my neighbour, who used to steal it regularly from the toy factory he was working. Sometimes I remember a bit more, what I cannot forget is the feeling of leaving behind everything on the very first days of 1990. Like the magic stick made all those bad people and their bad lives disappear all of a sudden. No regrets, but for our wasted years in a place of no-belonging. Memories are very subjective, also when it comes to enormous historical encounters.

Part of my fuzzy mental album, there were the movies. We had a TV and at a certain point even a video player. Once in a while we were allowed to watch some cartoons, Woody Woodpecker was for sure, also Tom&Jerry. I was an expert in imitating Woody´s hysterical laugh. I was recently remembered about the woodpecker a couple of months ago, when I was walking through the snow-covered forest with my bf and heard it. Tried to share with him my very personal childhood story but I bet he didn´t get it fully but it´s damn hard to explain such intimate stories when political restrictions are meet and seen through the world-ignorant children eyes. There were some ´good night, children´ Bulgarian cartoons with a rabbit able to fly using his long ears as a hellicopter. I´ve learned some words in Bulgarian that helped me when I was flirting with learning the language and/or was trying to impress a guy who was speaking it fluently. And there was another cartoon made in the communist east, with the villain wolf trying to catch the rabbit - Nu zayetz, nu pogodi. We love it, and I remember that once my mom used the word ´perestroika´ while we were watching. Was it because of the jeans the wolf used to wear? Have no idea if it was a very direct connection with the changes that Gorbachev started in the Soviet Union that made the cronies in Bucharest fear for their tug life. 

But, as I was reminded during watching the movie Chuck Norris versus Communism, directed by Ilinca Călugăreanu - this specific Soviet cartoon was on the list of must-watch&must-cut list of movies of the censors. A commission made of people with certain cultural affinities was supposed to vision in advance all the films and productions to be aired during the 4-hour TV program aired daily by the Romanian TV. Given that the discourses of the president and his wife - both illiterate in the alphabet and Marxism, it´s good to remind for the background story - were very long, the so-called entertainment should to be short. The censors were busy identifying a lot of images and dialogues that were considered dangerous: no swearing, no religious mentions, no Gd, no luxury, no decadent capitalism, not too much food on the table. As they were trying to create an experiment erasing from the human Romanian brain of some the references to things that they, Communist People´s Party were enjoying regularly. 

They were not able to do it, for a very simple reason. As usually in communist/closed societies, there is a parallel society which is created, where people are getting in touch, illicitly mostly, sometimes through the help of some people part of the system - doing it for money or just because they realize the absurdity of their everyday life. In the case of Romania, there were the power of images from the American movies that succeeded to help people survive. It´s not a cultural survival, as many of those movies were hardly identified as a high-cultural concept, but it was a survival through images. Rambo, Pretty Woman, Top Gun, Doctor Zhivago...they were brought to 20 million Romanians through a network that, surprise, was tolerated and even encouraged by people with connection in the upper echelons of the Party and ´Intelligence´ (the so-called Securitate). A total of around 3,000 movies, as Irina Margareta Nistor, the voice behind those movies confesses in the movie.

Irina Margareta Nistor was working by day as part of the state TV censorship commission. After work, she was ´recruited´ by a certain Mr. Zamfir, who was the manager of the network sharing VHS tapes all over the country. At a certain moment, somebody else, apparently a double agent, joined the team. According to the details shared in the movie - made exclusively from various testimonies of people involved in the network or who enjoyed in different part of the country the experience brought to them - a well-oiled sytem was operating throughout the country, distributing the VHS tapes on the black market, and further displaying for smaller audiences. Irina Margareta Nistor was translating - sometimes betraying the original script a bit - on her own, almost everything. Her voice was associated with those images of freedom and well-being, the Romanians were hoping for eventually while waiting in a long line in front of empty stores. 

During those times, in the 1980s Romania, having a video player and a TV set was the equivalent of using a VPN in countries where Internet is under the strict state control. In some cases, there were group auditions - some with an entrance fee. From my fuzzy yet awake child brain, I remember my mom mentioning watching Dr. Zhivago alongside with some machers from the cultural decision fora of the party, and maybe 1-2 ´intelligence´ guys. In very closed societies, you need a serious protection to play the brave, even the naughty kind of brave, and maintain your freedom.  

Irina Margareta Nistor, who seems to be a recluse person and with a relatively shy presence in the brutal vulgarity of the post-communist Romania, was apparently left alone to do her job. Definitely, not because no one was watching. The extension of the network reached such a degree that it´s impossible to believe that it was not allowed to extent from the upper echelons. The Zamfir guy who managed capitalistically kind of skillfully the entire enterprise mentioned in the movie that once, one of the dictator´s sons requested a special movie and he refused it. Let me have a laugh on that. It´s a task for the historians of Romanian communism - still unknown to me - to document this very interesting cultural development that may serve as a model of understanding how dictatorships of all kinds can be actually shaken. 

Chuck Norris was not able to replace communism and those wo did it were not heroes, but the power of images and the resilience of people who were just having enough, so enough, of the miserable life, can prepare people for a life after. A life when at least people do have the freedom to take that airplane to a better, drama-free life.

 

For the historians of communist Central and Eastern Europe, as well as for those curious to understand the everyday life suvival in dictatorships, the movie Chuck Norris versus Communism is an useful source of information, although not complete, comprehensive or clear enough for having an analytical macro-society picture. 

´The Education of Kim Jong-Un´

The current North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Un is often read in an ironic, comic-book like key. Or he is considered a cruel tyrant killing not only his people, but also his own family members - which probably is. But what´s the intelligent approach to his rule?

Jung H. Pak worked for the CIA as intelligence community analyst on Korean issues and is a Brookings Institute Senior Fellow, as well as on author on topics related to Korea, particularly the North. The Education of Kim Jong-Un is a very short - under 50 pages book - yet insightful approach to the man who´s both despised and admired but for sure has a mind of his own, which is mostly unpredictable if following the wrong analysis matrix. 

Compared to other books I´ve read this year about Kim Jong-Un this short introduction is very useful if one wants to get familiar with ´the hardest of the hard targets´. A spoiled boy who lived his own life under the sign of priviledge, that was on a boarding school in Switzerland while his people was starving, Kim wants to raise high. It´s a new type of dictatorship he is practising but placed under times of tremendous change and unpredictibility. Hence, the need of a more elastic, creative approach of his regime and, eventually, post-Kim North Korea.

´Kim has made it clear that he will not tolerate any potential challenges. And his rule through terror and repression - against the backdrop of that pastel wonderland of waterparks - means that the terrorized and the repressed will continue to feed Kim´s illusions and expectations, his grandiose visions of himself and North Korea´s destiny´.

In other words, it´s a smarter game taking place out there than you may read in the media - at the time the book was read, there was not too much a fuss about Kim´s health and the raising of her sister on the top of the party hierarchy. Adding Kim in a box with the stamp of ´Craziness´ on the top of it would have been too easy. The guy who did an over 100 kilotons bomb test in 2017 - for the sake of the comparison, as mentioned in the book, the bomb the Americans threw on Hiroshima had just 15 kilotons - has also the power. Nuclearization is an important asset of this regime and ignoring or deriding it is as dangerous as dancing with the bombs. 

Instead, Jung H.Pak suggests a suple and subtle approach, which involves increasing the regional alliances - particularly between US (that´s from an American perspective that the author considers the facts and further developments), South Korea and Japan, as well as through efforts of cutting the resources that fund the nuclear weapons program, a constant cyber war, raising awareness about human right violations and, one of the most important things, creating an alternative vision for a post-Kim era. What I´ve felt is missing for the analysis is the mention of other - less-democratic - interests in the region, such as China and Russia, which would have create a better picture of the real situation on the ground.

The Education of Kim Jong-Un is a practical and insightful read about North Korea and its leadership, which includes fine observations and useful future political projections. The future only will tell what´s the best and how things will evolve in the next months and years.

Rating: 4 stars