Topic: WorldNetDaily
Did you know that the archfiend best representing the Halloween season – namely, Count Dracula – is fake news?
I don't mean that he's fake in the sense that he's fictional – which, of course, he is – but rather that his entire genesis is grounded in a pattern we now recognize and see on a daily basis: leftist propagandistic forces working to transform heroes into villains.
Count Dracula entered the popular consciousness in 1897, with the publication of Bram Stoker's novel, "Dracula," which surrounds the exploits of an undead bloodsucker from Romania. As many novelists do, Stoker tried to give his story an aura of historic legitimacy by connecting it to real people and events. For his novel's namesake, he found a real Romanian, Vlad III Dracula (c. 1430-1476), also known as Vlad the Impaler.
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Despite all this, it's what is left out – the all-important context, which fake news thrives on omitting – that invalidates the overall depiction of Vlad. Just as Americans today are regularly hammered about their ancestors' role in slavery – without ever being told that everyone engaged in slavery, and often on a much worse scale than Americans – virtually everyone of Dracula's era was by today's standards cruel, and impalement was a standard form of execution.
Also left out is that Vlad was first exposed to savagery in his youth, when he was a prisoner of the Turks, who regularly tortured and impaled their victims (and turned his younger brother and fellow prisoner into a catamite). In his adult years, he learned to fight fire with fire – not least because he was vastly outnumbered and disadvantaged – terrorizing and impaling his Ottoman enemies no less than they had done to his people. Even the contemporary claim that he dined around his impaled victims was a tradition begun by Sultan Murad II, his captor, who ordered tables set and a feast held among the corpses of his Christian enemies following the battle of Varna,1444.
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Count Dracula was actually a committed Christian and saw his Just War against the invading Turks as being first and foremost about defending Christendom from Islam. Far from blaspheming and turning against God following his first wife's death – as dramatically portrayed in the opening scene of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) – Vlad regularly visited, sponsored and spent his free time in Orthodox monasteries, and even sent donations to Mount Athos.
Perhaps the "Chronicle of Efrosin," which appeared less than a decade after Dracula's death, best captures his character. It depicts a man with a severe persona who meted out terrifying punishments for those who dared transgress especially moral laws. According to the chronicle, "He hated stealing so violently in his country that anyone who caused any evil or robbery, or a lie or an injustice, did not live long. Be he an important boyar, priest, or monk, or an ordinary person, be he the richest man, he would not escape death. So feared he was."
Above all, Vlad is remembered as a fierce warrior who terrorized the 150,000 jihadists who invaded his homeland in 1462. Being vastly outnumbered, with some 4,000 horsemen, on a pitch black night he violently blitzed into the Ottoman camp in order to cut the head of this vast Islamic snake by assassinating its sultan, Muhammad II.
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Little wonder that, whereas Dracula is a bloodsucking fiend in the West, in his native Romania he remains a hero. Till now, whenever there is talk of corruption or immorality, it is common for Romanians to resignedly end the conversation by quoting the following lines of an old poem: "Where art thou, old prince, Vlad, on them all to lay thy hands."
And so, on this Halloween, you can remember Count Dracula not as fiendish vampire, but as a fallible man who, like so many Europeans before him, did what he could, fighting fire with fire, to keep his tiny Christian kingdom safe from Muslim invaders.
-- Raymond Ibrahim, Oct. 30 WorldNetDaily column
