A Man Once Lived Who Confronted Islamic Fanatics-Count Dracula

There once lived a man who understood how to successfully confront radical Islamic fanatics.

He lived a long time ago, but his exploits remain vivid in the minds of his countrymen today.

That man who learned how to deal with Muslim fundamentalists who insisted on imposing their false religion on his territory was known to his countrymen, and to the stunned world at large, as Count Vlad the Impaler. You many know him as Count Dracula, a real historical figure, not the movie demon.

Westerners and Easterners in the 21st century – Christian, Orthodox Jewish, Hindu, animist Africans and secular Russia and China – are trying to figure out ways to contain suicidal, aggressive Islam, with radical Muslims now openly proclaiming their plans to take over first Western Europe and then the rest of the world.

Non-Muslims mostly either wring their hands nervously or concede ever more power to advancing Islam. No one has any idea how to confront their murderous rage, their lack of desire to compromise, their feverish desires to literally and figuratively slit the throat of the West.

“And the intimidation [of Muslim extremists] succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour,” wrote nationally syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer in late September about the latest Islamic outrages. President Bush this year at least made the face of the enemy explicit, identifying our danger as “Islamic fascism,” rather than the unfocused “war on terrorism” he had been proclaiming during the first four years after 9/11.

Muslims openly gloat that their eagerness to slaughter non-Muslims, even at the cost of their own lives, provides their expansionist movement with an unrelenting force that the “decadent” West will fail to resist, sooner or later.

As Henry Kissinger wrote in an important September article: “"We are witnessing a carefully conceived assault, not isolated terrorist attacks, on the international system of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. The creation of organizations such as Hezbollah and al-Qaeda symbolizes the fact that transnational loyalties are replacing national ones. The driving force behind this challenge is the jihadist conviction that it is the existing order that is illegitimate."

Well, a man once lived who discovered a way to send aggressive Muslims scurrying back in fright to their own regions -- Count Vlad the Impaler of Romania, better known today as Count Dracula, who ruled in the mid-15th century.

He confronted the last great surge of Islamic expansion that lasted from the 15th to 17th century, as the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey continually attacked the West, often succeeding in conquest. They then forced people to convert to Islam and pay tribute to the Sultan of Istanbul, which is why so many blue-eyed Muslims live today in Slavic regions.

Hundreds of thousands of Christians were killed, tens of thousands of women and children were raped and sold into slavery during these invasions, until a united Christian army defeated the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1688. If not, Vienna might have been re-named “Austrostan,” just as the 1,000-year-old city of Constantinople, built explicitly to become the center of Eastern Christianity, was conquered by Muslims who renamed it Istanbul, and converted its stunning churches into mosques. The Turks would had believed their armies would sweep pass Vienna all the way to the Atlantic, pillaging, slaughtering and making forced conversions all the way to the sea.”

Well, ‘ole Vlad was fighting the Muslims constantly, who periodically invaded his lands and forced him from his castle. That is, until he discovered that Istanbul was sending a huge army to finally defeat and kill him, burn his home and enslave his subjects. He had captured 20,000 Muslim soldiers in a previous battle and was probably holding them for ransom. Instead, as the sultan’s army approached his castle, he ordered his men to impale every single prisoner, male warriors all, on 10-15 feet tall wooden stakes that were then driven into the ground in ragged concentric circles around his castle. “In 1462 Dracula attacked the Turks to drive them out of the Danube River valley. Sultan Mehmed II retaliated by invading Walachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. Dracula was forced to retreat to his capital, Tirgoviste. He burned his own villages and poisoned wells on the way so that the Turkish army wouldn't have any food or water,” says the website: http://www.royalty.nu/Europe/Balkan/Dracula.html.

“When the sultan reached Tirgoviste, he saw a terrifying scene, remembered in history as ‘the Forest of the Impaled,’” the website continues, in an account backed up by many respected historians. Mehmed took one look at the vast panorama of his fellow impaled Muslims, yanked the reins of his horse around, and galloped back to the thick walls of Istanbul as fast as he could, admitting that one sight of the forest of dangling Muslims impaled on poles had completely unnerved him.

The Turks thereafter called Vlad “Kaziglu Bey,” or "the Impaler Prince." Today’s Muslim fanatics have forgotten about Count Vlad. Osama bin Laden attacked the United States on 9/11 confident that Americans were too soft and decadent to retaliate with any real force, after he had run Bill Clinton out of Somalia so easily in 1993.

Must we impale 20,000 Muslim fanatics in the 21st century to bring them to their senses? Ricky has joined with noted idea man Count John the Spiker, whose traces his noble blood back to an 11th century Norman England volleyball enthusiast, in this article to answer that question,

“No, more modern and less barbaric means exist today, but we have to show the stomach for firm action, or they will keep attacking,” Count John says. Count John says that Western government ought to use Muslim and Arabic TV and radio networks and websites, hacking into them when necessary, to remind Muslims that Islamic scholars five centuries ago discovered signs in the Koran that a fiercely powerful Western leader ‘would arise out of a burning bush just as God did to Moses’ to take on the Muslim world. Well, we ought to remind the radicals what the name of the global leader against their fanaticism is – BUSH. A coincidence? I don’t think so.” “That’s enough to stop radical Muslims in their tracks?” Ricky asked.

“No, of course not,” the Count shot back. “The Burning Bush must rush development of the neutron bomb, which far left Democrats sidetracked in the post-Vietnam orgy of American self-flagellation that also saw the gutting of the CIA and the Armed Forces.”

The U.S. military was developing the neutron bomb as an alternative to the horrendous physical destruction caused by both nuclear and increasingly powerful conventional weapons. Neutron bombs unleash short but intensely powerful streams of radiation that kill humans and animals but leave buildings, highways and other infrastructure intact. The radiation also rapidly dissipates, unlike the radiation that could linger for centuries after the explosion of a hydrogen bomb.

“The neutron bomb would have solved the problem of how to hit back at the overwhelming military strength of the Soviet bloc in any attack on Germany, without leaving then Western Germany more devastated, if that is possible, than Nazi Germany was left after its surrender in May, 1945.

“The Soviets planned to send ten times the number of tanks, planes, artillery and soldiers across the border in deep thrusts into Free Europe,” the Count said. “Millions and millions of well-trained soldiers, heavy tanks and advanced warplanes. For decades, American soldiers in Europe knew they would be expected to sacrifice their lives and attempt to hold back the Soviet offensive until reinforcements could be rushed across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the cities, highways, factories and citizens of West Germany would be ground to a pulp by the Soviet sledgehammer. The neutron bomb would have prevented this, killing the infantry and tank men inside their armored vehicles, after the West Germans had fled, but letting them have cities to come home to. Idiot Democrats prevented this by derailing the bomb’s further development.”

“No, it wouldn’t be necessary if we had the bomb ready,” the Count spiked back. “Muslims are busily building nuclear weapons and fanatical terrorist groups, believing they can operate safely within their own borders, that the West would never unleash a preemptive attack in fear of the Muslims destroying the oil fields, or by fear of Muslim casualties. With the neutron bomb, President Bush could simply threaten to drop it on North Korean nuclear facilities as well as the massed North Korean armies lined up on the border within 20 miles of South Korea’s capital of Seoul. We could offer the same to Iran, neutron bombing their nuclear facilities and oil fields and their main military bases, leaving their civilians alone. The U.S. military could then coast in to destroy atomic bomb plants and keep the oil fields running until a free Iran wanted them back.”

“If we have the fortitude of the Count Spiker, who would slam balls hard directly at opponents head if necessary to win the game,” John said. * * * CALL, WRITE, EMAIL AND LOBBY YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR WOMAN IN PERSON TO BRING BACK THE NEUTRON BOMB. BETTER THAN SEEING MORE AND MORE OF OUR BRAVE AMERICAN MEN AND WOMEN SOLDIERS BLOWN UP BY ROADSIDE BOMBS.

Here is another article on PRINCE Vlad ; it's interesting an dhopefully you'll enjoy it too :

From Moralist to Seducer: How Fiction Inverted The Meaning of The Real Dracula’s Bloodlust

Dracula lives — forever undead — in the common imagination.

As Clare Haworth-Maden notes in her book, Dracula, his name instantly brings to mind a vampire in tux and cape, fangs bared, leaning over a prone woman. His intended or actual victim is usually a woman.

Although possessed of supernatural powers and strength, Dracula has significant points of vulnerability. His powers do not survive daylight. Garlic keeps him away. He can be repelled by the sign of the cross. Perhaps most tellingly, as Haworth-Maden also writes, “he may not enter a dwelling unless invited.”

Most people know that there was a real Dracula. He was a 15-Century Prince named Vlad Tepes III. He was nicknamed Vlad the Impaler or — the name he often used for himself — Dracula. He ruled Wallachia, a country that is part of what is now Romania. He possessed no supernatural powers but, as an absolute monarch, he exercised his earthly powers in extraordinarily cruel ways. He may have been responsible for the deaths of as many as 100, 000 people and his favorite means of execution was impalement by which means a person was shoved atop a sharpened pole. The pole slowly tore through flesh until it penetrated a vital organ.

It is also common knowledge today that Transylvania is a real place, a region within Romania.

However, little known or at least remarked upon is the way in which the motivation and meaning of the violence perpetrated by the real Dracula have been curiously inverted in his fictional incarnations. Vlad the Impaler was a stern moralist who terrorized vice out of his country. According to Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, during Vlad the Impaler’s reign, a cup made of gold was “purposely left by Dracula near a certain fountain located near the source of a river. Travelers from many lands came to drink at this fountain, because the water was cool and sweet. Dracula had intentionally put this fountain in a deserted place to test dishonest wayfarers. So great was the fear of impalement, however, that so long as he lived no one dared to steal the cup, and it was left at its place.”

Vlad the Impaler’s fiercest wrath fell on “immoral” women. Florescu and McNally wrte that adulteresses, unmarried females who had lost their virginity, and “unchaste” widows were all punished in the following grisly manner: “Dracula would order her sexual organs cut. She was then skinned alive and exposed in her skinless flesh in a public square, her skin hanging separately from a pole or placed on a table in the middle of the marketplace.”

Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula represents sexual temptation. When he greets Jonathan Harker, he tells him “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” Stoker’s Dracula speaks as the voice of sin, which each person must freely allow into his — or her — heart. By contrast, Dracula’s subjects, and victims, were born into his realm and automatically under his thumb.

The Count of Stoker’s classic novel lives with a harem of three young, pretty women. When they approach Jonathan Harker, he is overcome with fear and sexual longing: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.” The Count discovers the women hovering over Harker and responds with words of transparent homosexual jealously and possessiveness, shouting, “How dare you touch him, any of you? . . . This man belongs to me!”

The Count in Stoker’s novel is quite ugly as he is in the classic Nosferatu, one of the first Dracula films (although one in which the name “Dracula” is not used). He is described as an old, cadaverous man with pointed ears, hairy palms, thick eyebrows that meet over his nose, and having bad breath. Maden Haworth has observed that Stoker’s villain has “a physiogomy . . . consistent with the Victorian age’s concept of the ‘criminal type.’”

Dracula has, with occasional exceptions, gotten even sexier since Stoker’s time. While the repulsive Nosferatu might have to force his lust on his victims, film Draculas like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Frank Langella, are suave, handsome sorts who can easily seduce.

Equally inverted in the fictional Dracula is the real Dracula’s relationship to religion. The fictional vampire is instantly stricken into helplessness when confronted by the side of the cross. Roman Polanski did a witty comic send-up of this in The Fearless Vampire Killers when a Jewish vampire laughs at an outstretched crucifix.

Vlad the Impaler was ostensibly a Christian. According to Dracula Prince of Many Faces, Wallachia’s brutal “was often seen in the company of Romanian Orthodox monks” and “when he imposed the death sentence, he insisted upon proper ceremony for his victims and a Christian burial.” He founded many monasteries and churches.

When Dracula showed two monks the usual scene of impaled cadavers in his courtyard, one said, “You are appointed by God to punish the evildoers.” The other monk remonstrated and was immediately impaled. Vlad reigned before the enunciation of the Divine Right of Kings but the concept of submission to earthly authority, often advocated by religious authorities, was quite congenial to the tyrant.

Moreover, Dracula believed himself to be — and was seen by others as — a Christian patriot, protecting his country and religion from Muslim invaders. The evolution of the name “Dracula” is instructive on this point.

Along with several other distinguished European royal figures, Dracula’s father, Vlad II, had been inducted into an organization entitled the Order of the Dragon. Florescu and McNally write that among its stated purposes were “the defense and propagation of Catholicism against . . . heretics, and . . . crusading against the infidel Turks.”

As member of the Order, Florescu and McNally continue, Vlad II took on the constant wearing of a medallion inscribed with mottoes that “symbolized the victory of Christ over the forces of darkness” and a black cape which would later be the trademark of the fictional, cross-fearing Dracula. Florescue and McNally write that Vlad II, and others of the Order of the Dragon, wore it “only on Fridays or during the Commemoration of Christ’s Passion.”

Vlad II was called “Dracul” because he was a member of the Order of the Dragon; his son, Vlad III became “Dracula” meaning “son of the dragon.” Far from being an epithet, the title was a term of pride, bestowed on courageous men who had fought valiantly against the Turks and for the Christian faith. In short, the real Dracula got along with the cross quite nicely; it was his symbol.

Why was the meaning of Dracula’s violent life been so utterly inverted in fiction? The answer to that lies, at least partially, with the Victorian society in which Bram Stoker. In many ways, the Victorians were a progressive people who believed, as Florescu and McNally wrote, that they could restrain “an untamed nature through the application of science.” Although they were guilty of fostering horrors like clitoridectomy as well as the imprisonment of men like Oscar Wilde for consensual homosexual acts, their primary method for ensuring chastity was social opprobrium. As much as they shared the real Dracula’s disdain for “immoral” women, the Victorians would have been genuinely appalled by his bloodthirsty methods.

Victorianism was not distinctive for the restrictions it put on sexual activity (many of which are fairly cross-cultural) but, as David J. Skal writes in Hollywood Gothic, the separation between “the public face and the private behavior.”

Bram Stoker, unlike his contemporary Wilde, was a good Victorian. As such, he wished to warn against the consequences of sexual immorality — and to sexually titillate without ever being explicit. Finally, it suited his purposes to link savage cruelty with the sexual indulgence both he and his society scorned rather than the sexual restraint they championed.

Hollywood has no moral agenda and is free to titillate unabashedly — thus, the alluring, handsome seducer is generally preferred to Stoker’s ugly rapist.

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