“To live is to suffer, but to survive is to find meaning in the suffering” goes the saying alternately attributed to Nietzsche or DMX. Yet it goes beyond this Instagram ready slogan–to survive requires inflicting suffering. Damaged, short-haired women may break into restaurants to rail about violent speciesism against delicious chickens, but even plants don’t want to be eaten. To live is to kill, whether you like it or not.
Urban Elves in the post-West rarely experience violence in the ways their ancestors would have taken for granted. I’ve met soldiers in the Army who have been to “war” (in the rear with the gear) who admit to not only having never fired a weapon in anger, but never having been in a fistfight. Indeed, the middle class and the working class in this country can largely be separated not on the basis of wealth, but on their openness to the use of physical force. If you’re at a party where a thrown punch will lead to police, arrests, and lawsuits, congratulations–you’re middle class, even if you’re carrying $80,000 in student loan debt.
Violence is still golden, and the sheltered lives of so many Americans belies their ultimate dependence on the gun. Nonetheless, it is critically important that someone else wield that weapon. As intellectual mascot Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.”
To kill, as Lawrence Auster pointed out, is an act of discrimination, an acknowledgement that my life and the lives of those I value is more important than the life of another. But there are those to whom death may be preferable to discriminating.
While hypocrisy is certainly part of the makeup of an Urban Elf or an educated Eloi, the fact is many of these people, like Beltway Republicans, really do believe their own propaganda and have the perverted courage to see it through to the end. And just as your typical Conservatism Inc. functionary would rather lose an election than be called a racist, there are those who would rather die–either as an individual or as part of people–than accept the terrible responsibility of acting in defense of survival. To act is immoral–to be slaughtered passively is to prove one’s virtue. Christian martyrdom may be passé outside of Russia, but the cult of St. Amy Biehl of the Church of Holy Equality is still going strong.
The conflict between survival and virtuous sacrifice is at the heart of Dracula Untold, the surprisingly subversive reboot of the classic vampire franchise. Astonishingly, we are taken to Eastern Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, when Europeans knew what it was to be occupied, when Vienna itself was besieged by the armies of the Mohammedans, and when thousands of European children were brutally kidnapped and forced to serve as Janissary slave soldiers against their own blood. There is no pro forma condemnation of the Crusades, the Church, or the inherent hatefulness Europeans possess through their sheer existence–we get a straightforward tale of an occupied population groaning under a foreign tyrant from the East.
Vlad the Impaler, after a terrifying childhood and forced service in the company of the Ottomans, is a weary, peace seeking ruler who dutifully pays his tribute to the Grand Turk. However, when the Turks demand 1,000 children of the kingdom and Vlad’s own son as hostage, Vlad’s inclination to submit to save his people suffering is challenged by his wife, who all but calls him coward. Vlad chooses war, and more than that, accepts the burden of the vampire’s curse in order to gain the power to defeat his enemies and save his family and people. When his people discover this, they are horrified, but they have no choice but to trust in him.
In this telling, vampires don’t just drink blood or possess subtle psychological powers– they can single handedly slaughter 1,000 men, summon deadly armies of bats, and control the weather. Dracula’s wife, though she initially is frightened by his transformation, is ultimately the one who begs him to drink her life’s blood after she is mortally wounded. The act will cost her husband her soul permanently–but allow him to save his people and more importantly, his son. The conclusion features Dracula creating a terrifying vampire army of the wounded survivors of his shattered people, who slaughter hundreds of thousands of Turks.
In the end, Vlad relinquishes his son to the care of priests, as the vampire army he created now threatens the one person he was trying to save. Once his son is spirited away by the holy men, Dracula deliberately destroys himself along with the rest of his demonic force. His son is grief-stricken but parts from his father in love and respect, a departure from most contemporary films where the son disowns his father for being too reactionary or violent. He inherits his kingdom from his father, credits him with saving Europe from Muslim conquest, and honors his memory, though no one else does.
The price Vlad pays for his victory is that there are no statues or portraits dedicated to his glory–he has sacrificed his own reputation and even his own soul to save his people. As Keith Preston noted of the Romanian Iron Guard, “In order to defend the Faith and the Nation, a Legionnaire might at times be called upon to perform deeds that would result in his own damnation. In other words, not only an individual life but an individual soul must at times be sacrificed for the greater good of the struggle.”
The movie has a pathetic, tacked on ending, filmed late so Universal could ape Marvel and try to make Dracula Untold the first film in a never ending series of “Monster” films based around classic characters. Vlad is resurrected for some stupid reason, apparently does nothing for about 600 years, and shows up walking around modern Europe. Naturally, he ends up finding a woman who, it is suggested, is the reincarnation of his dead wife. Plus the Master Vampire (Charles Dance aka Tywin Lannister) who initially turned him is there for some reason. Roll credits, set up crappy sequel.
But ignoring the final three minutes, Dracula Untold is actually the perfect Halloween horror movie for the modern Left. The traditional vampire in Western culture is a figure of the Right–aristocratic, sexy, dangerous, wealthy, and superior. Even the liberal SWPL
vampires of “True Blood” are a way for progressives to glory in their own social superiority over the wrong type of white people, the gross Christians who vote Republican and can remember what “gender” they are without a Ph.D. Vampires can be progressive–but they can’t really be egalitarian.
More importantly, Dracula Untold highlights part of European history when White Christians were being grinded beneath the boot of an imperialist, autocratic Islamic regime. It portrays national resistance as being rooted in the unity of the family–and any real nation is, after, just a community of ethnically related families. And finally, it portrays Vlad the Impaler (still a hero in parts of Romania) as a champion of the West, even excusing his barbarism as a way to prevent further cruelties.
So not surprisingly, it’s being called “racist.” The Gawker media network, currently bleeding advertisers over Gamergate, is always a good source for some effeminate duckspeak every time a white person does something. Editor in Chief of IO9 Annalee Newitz was triggered as surely as if she had just seen a straight White couple taking their legitimately born son to his first Holy Communion. Newitz kvetches:
Probably the most intriguing part of this reboot…is the way this film turns its evil, fanged impostor into a hero. Not to put too fine a point on it, the answer is a racism update. Bram Stoker’s original Victorian novel was a swashbuckling anti-immigrant tale. It was explicitly about how those creepy Eastern Europeans were buying up British real estate and turning all the nice Western women into blood whores. But the hatred of Eastern European immigrants became less relevant as time wore on…We need to bring back the original racist frisson of Stoker’s novel. That’s why Vlad Tepes in Dracula Untold has to be fighting Muslims. Because of course.
“Because of course” is up there with “here’s why that’s a problem” and “it’s not OK” as mottos for Generation Gawker. It reflects a proud ignorance of actual knowledge combined with passive aggressive demands that someone force intellectual opponents to shut up. Stoker’s Dracula may not have been based on Vlad the Impaler at all, but this Dracula is and Vlad the Impaler is linked with the character in the popular imagination. Vlad Tepes was a real person who fought Muslims, not a “sexy outsider with a charmingly dilapidated castle.” In fact, the “Mehmet” of the film is Mehmet the Conqueror, who ended the Byzantine Empire with the subjugation of Constantinople. The Muslims of the film are hardly portrayed as monstrous or fanatical, but simply as an invading army seeking to expand their power.
However, even showing any non-European people in a position of superiority or aggression is now itself a racist act, though commentators can’t decide whether displaying Ottoman aggression is racist or making the Turks too racially white is racist. Though Turks themselves make triumphalist movies about their greatest victory over Europe, Whites prefer their non-Europeans as agency free mascots who serve only to highlight white depravity.
Newitz, whose background is exactly what you would expect, is (like Zoe Quinn) a commissar rather than a critic or creator. Her job is to make Whites quietly accept their dispossession, without getting too worked up about what could go wrong. After all, if Whites act in their own interests, they tend to win, and that leads to inequality, conflict, and the moral responsibility of lordship. Certainly, many Jews don’t want whites starting this process but more importantly many Whites don’t want it. It is easier and more morally comfortable to simply consume and accept a quiet, subordinate status and gradual, peaceful extinction. Maintaining a people, after all, is hard work.
Unfortunately for Whites, even the most degraded SWPL exists because his better sires built, bred, and battled so that the line could continue. Even being a consumer means to be complicit in the victories–or sins–of Europa. To use one of Dracula’s lines, the power of the contemporary West is our ancestors’ way of telling us, “You are alive because of what I did to save you.”
In the eyes of our media culture, Whites are morally obligated to fear embarrassed about this power and work to renounce it. As Newitz’s sarcastic title that Dracula Untold is a remake for the “ISIS age” suggests, Muslims’ imposing slavery, stoning women, murdering entire peoples, and beheading journalists is not a real problem. The real problem is those drawing attention to it because it might lead to Europeans noticing there’s a difference between us and them. Worse, Europeans might start to wonder what the world will look like when we are firmly dispossessed within our own countries.
Such a realization would reopen the door to Europeans acting in defense of their own survival, with the conflict and struggle that would entail. To prevent this, white progressives (and conventional Republicans) simply assume a priori that “we” will always be in charge in some way. As Stuff White People Like’s Christian Lander put it, “It is always OK to make fun of white people, because no unhappy ending is possible.” Therefore, to notice a centuries-long pattern of aggressive behavior by Muslims towards the West, is, as noted Islamic scholar Ben Affleck put it, “gross.” It’s not untrue, per se–it just shouldn’t be said because, you know, ew. We might be expected to do stuff.
If we aren’t supposed to notice this and we certainly aren’t supposed to fight back, what are we supposed to do? The answer is simple–we have a duty to die. If the price of survival is discrimination and violence, it is better to perish. Like Christian martyrs who would rather burn than denounce their God, many Whites would rather die than sin against egalitarianism. Furthermore, they will fight against us–to save our souls for what Paul Gottfried has termed the “Secular Theocracy.”
In Harold Covington’s Freedom’s Sons, Covington posits the creation of an ethnostate in the Northwest that eventually achieves an uneasy peace with those Whites still living within American borders in eastern Montana. Rare for the excitable genre of “white nationalist revolutionary fiction,” Covington actually presents a semi-honorable character on the other side who condemns the violence of the revolution. Killing people, especially non-combatants, “is not morally admissible, for any reason. It can’t be allowed.” When ask
ed if that means White people should have let themselves go extinct, the character says, “Yes. If you truly wish to prove for all time that you are morally superior, you voluntarily surrender your own life rather than take that of someone else… I at least will not die a monster.” (p. 631)
Halloween these days is mostly an excuse for young women to dress like sluts–even in costumes that make no sense. But monsters are still real. Today, a monster is a White person who is willing to act in defense of his own life. Sometimes these monsters might even use force, like the legendary creature Darren Wilson, leading to ghost stories about “black bodies” being taken by Whites in the night. And the worst monsters of all are those who are willing to act in the defense of an entire people. This film’s Dracula haunts the modern Left as surely as Stoker’s creation stalked the nightmares of a Christian people.
There won’t be a day, at least not one anytime soon, when the media will change its mind and celebrate White advocates as heroes. And even if you don’t impale your enemies on stakes or tap the powers of the Infernal Realm, if you fight for your people, you are a monster.
What of it? Leftists may weary of the moral responsibility of living by having to claim the past victories of Europe or accepting the inevitability of combat. But they don’t have the right to drag us down with them. What is happening today is an evolutionary process, a weeding out of those who wish to survive from those who don’t. And to survive means to struggle–and, inevitably, to cause suffering to those who compete with us for survival.
So what if they call us monsters? And so what if the Left Hand Path is what is called for in these days of the Kali Yuga? As Vlad says, “Sometimes you don’t need a hero, sometimes you need a monster.”
Happy Halloween comrades.
