Dracula and the Sultan

duAlways comfortable with Hollywood’s distortion of history as long as it suits their propagandistic motives, progressives and their Islamic allies are the first to try to discredit films that don’t fit their narrative. You can be sure that any film they attack on grounds of supposed “historical inaccuracy” must be uncomfortably close to the truth.

Writing in the New Statesman (and reprinted in the New Republic), Turkish writer Elest Ali asks the burning cinematic question, “Is Dracula Untold an Islamophobic movie?” She’s referring to the new Universal picture starring Luke Evans and Dominic Cooper, a fanciful epic about the actual historical source of the outlandish Dracula legend we all know and love: Vlad Tepes III, 15th century Romanian hero and legend who dared resist invasion by the feared Ottoman empire.”

Elest Ali recently saw the film in Turkey with a friend who declared, “That film was very anti-Muslim.” “What else is new?” she replies – because we all know how openly bigoted Hollywood currently is toward Muslims, am I right? Ali decided to write about her issue with the movie’s “historical accuracy, and contemporary significance.” Non-spoiler alert: she denounces it as Islamophobic, the kneejerk, go-to accusation leveled at anything and anyone that doesn’t shine a flattering light on Islam or Muslims (see Affleck, Ben).

“Hollywood is no genius when it comes to accurate representation,” she begins, and I couldn’t agree more. From the “Bush lied, people died” message of Matt Damon’s The Green Zone, to the ahistorical moral equivalency of the Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, to the lies about Ronald Reagan and race in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Hollywood rewrites history to ensure that its dramatic version becomes history in the popular imagination.

But Dracula Untold doesn’t suit Ali’s biases, so she casts the suspicion of bigotry over it. “In the current climate of global political tension and escalating Islamophobia,” she asks, without considering Islam’s responsibility for the former or providing any evidence of the latter, “what political statement does Dracula Untold make in pitting our vampire hero against the armies of Mehmet II?” Probably no political statement at all was intended by the filmmakers, but in any case it wasn’t the statement Ali wanted to see.

She suggests that in Vlad’s time (which she oddly labels “the Age of Enlightenment,” a period that was at least two centuries distant), Islam was an “appealing,” “fast-spreading faith” that was “glamorized” by “wealthy, cultivated Muslim travelers” in Europe, seducing large numbers of European converts. In fact, Islam has always spread not because its appeal is irresistible (except to barbarous killers like today’s ISIS sympathizers), but through the coercive power of the sword. She feels that the movie’s use of the word “Turk” to characterize the glamorous, cultivated, multicultural Ottomans is a subtle historical slur, “an attempt to tribalize the Islamic faith and associate it with foreign, potentially threatening powers, which were the common enemy.” Well, in the time and place in which the movie is set, the Islamic Ottoman empire was a threatening foreign power. For that matter, Turkey today is a threatening foreign power.

“I’ll fill you in on some more history,” Ali continues condescendingly before proceeding to whitewash the imperialist Sultan Mehmet II, while dismissing Vlad as “progenitor of the vampire myth.” She claims that Vlad’s father, the Prince of Wallachia (essentially present-day Romania), “willingly offered” the Sultan his two sons in return for helping him keep the throne against his enemies. This is laughably false. Vlad the elder was seized and his sons Vlad III and Radu the Handsome were taken as hostages to ensure the father’s fealty as a vassal of the Sultan. Young Vlad was a “guest” of the Sultan for six years; meanwhile, according to biographers Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally in Dracula: Prince of Many Faces, the beautiful young Radu initially did his best to resist Mehmet’s sexual advances before eventually succumbing and becoming his lover and a Janissary general. Ali doesn’t mention Mehmet’s bisexuality or Vlad’s fierce refusal to convert to Islam.

Ali continues in her imaginary take on history: When Vlad later “started wreaking carnage across the Balkans, Mehmet II dispatched Radu to quell his brother’s blood-thirst.” Wrong. Vlad was well aware that Mehmet fancied himself a conqueror on the scale of Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal. Mehmet’s ambition was to bring all of Europe into his imperialistic fold, and Vlad was determined to make Wallachia the tip of the spear of Christian European resistance to Islam. He began by sending a very defiant message to the Sultan: he took Mehmet’s emissaries, who came demanding an overdue payment of the jizya, and nailed their turbans to their heads.

“Vlad’s insurrection was not dissimilar to the terror tactics of the so-called Islamic State,” Ali claims in her ongoing attempt to demonize him (as an aside, the Islamic State is not “so-called”; it is the name that those butchers have proudly given themselves). She is not at all incorrect about Vlad’s terror tactics – details of his widespread cruelty make your hair stand on end – but what she does not acknowledge is that Vlad learned such merciless tactics from the Ottomans while he was their hostage as a boy. He learned them well enough that when Mehmet himself marched upon Wallachia to seize it, he was so horrified to be greeted by a forest of 20,000 impaled Ottoman soldiers that he had to be talked out of turning tail back home.

Ali complains that Vlad waged a campaign of guerilla attacks against Mehmet’s larger army, including dressing his men in Ottoman uniforms and using his fluent Turkish to slip into the enemy’s camps. She says this as if unaware that the warlord prophet Muhammad himself taught that “war is deception.” Vlad would have made Muhammad proud.

Ultimately, his hated brother Radu was victorious and Vlad was offered sanctuary by his ally Matthew Corvinus and his clan. “But frankly,” writes Ali, “they’d also had enough of his grizzly antics, so they imprisoned him on charges of treason. True story,” she says, as if we should take her word for it. In fact, Vlad was falsely charged with treason for political reasons; Matthew later allied with Vlad to help him retrieve the Wallachian throne from a Turkish prince. True story.

“Vilification of Islam has reached such heights,” Elest Ali whines, without acknowledging the many obvious reasons why Islam itself might be to blame for that, “that even when the Sultan is cast opposite history’s bloodiest-psycho-tyrant, it’s Dracula who emerges as the tragic hero.” Vlad the Impaler – not the fictional Dracula – certainly earned his nickname, but he is by no means history’s “bloodiest-psycho-tyrant.” That honorific could go to any number of modern monsters such as, say, Ismail Enver Pasha, one of the principal architects of Turkey’s Armenian Genocide. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to dramatize the truth about that.

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  • herb benty

    Oh yes, the Progressives love their adolescent revisionism, ie. lying for gain.

  • AnneM040359

    Well there was a historic person that the Dracula character was based on, if my memory is correct.

    • Pete

      Your memory is correct.

      This is the biography I read. I read a small news articles showing the Saxon woodcuts of his atrocities. But after reading what the other people were like, I liked him a whole lot better.

      Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times

    • UncleVladdi

      Yep! And this movie *almost* properly depicts his life and times (well, except for the vampire nonsense)!

  • AnneM040359

    Just checked the article, yes, it confirms the prior posting!

  • Godagesil Rex

    I saw the movie and actually clapped at the death of the Muslim “Turks”. I am an Native Born American, family here since the 1740′s. I went to college in Munich Germany for a few years in the 1970′s and recall the “turks” then, dirty, ignorant savages. The “N” words of Europe and rightfully so. I had a friend nearly eviscerated at the Octoberfest by one when he defended the honor of his girlfriend who in a low cut dress was accosted by a filthy Muslim who looked her in the eyes and grabbed her breasts. Nothing has changed in Muslim culture since then. The dreaded invasion of Europe by the great unwashed hordes coming across the Dardanelles has alas come to pass. Would there only have been a Vlad the Impaler as depicted in the movie the world would be a better place. Now I ask you, why does history insist on giving credit to Islam for enlightenment, when in actuality, they claim credit for the work and enlightenment of other cultures? Islamification is a long tedious, brutal process. We have no record of what “faith” the luminaries of the so called Muslim world actually were! That the lands they lived in were conquered by hordes of ignorant followers of Mohammed is not in dispute, but why do we think that everyone instantly converted from Christianity (the vast majority of the former Eastern Roman empire was Christian or other faiths. The former Persian empire was predominately Zoroastrian! Why do history hacks believe that just because someone had a Arabic name they were Muslim? Why do people believe it? Why do we believe that the handful of Muslim potentates ruling over a majority of other faiths suddenly became tolerant and understanding? They never were and still are not, the wage a continual war against Khaffirs seeking to rid themselves of them, but exploiting them for financial gain in the meantime. People need to educate themselves in history. We are heading for a bloodbath, if not a war of religion, then certainly one of culture against culture.

    • Del_Varner

      Indeed, many of the writings that have been touted as evidence of a “muslim enlightenment” were actually written by people of other faiths who had adopted arabic names. I cite the works of Rodney Stark on this.

  • Virgil Hilts

    Well…that is a remarkable pile of crap! The expression from the Southern United States sums it up well: “The dog that yelps the loudest is the one that got hit by the rock.”

  • De Doc

    Elrest Ali naturally entertains us with the expurgated and Islam friendly version of the events surrounding the life and times of Vlad Dracula and of course it is a naively, apologetic spin. I’m sure her Turkish origins are as much at play as her faith in how she portrays things. The truth is that Vlad’s barbarity against the Turks was a tit-for-tat display for that era. Of course this does not exonerate fully Dracula, who did commit atrocities against his fellow boyars, as well as other civilians in his realm, but the Ottomans were no better. This was a brutal time in brutal borderlands marked by constant war and ever shifting alliances. Writers like Ali, who are too busy fabricating apologias to actually review the sordid history in toto, miss a chance for judging Dracula in context of time and place.

    • UncleVladdi

      Re: “this does not exonerate fully Dracula, who did commit atrocities against his fellow boyars, as well as other civilians in his realm, but the
      Ottomans were no better.”

      Wrong.

      The Ottomans, being the predatory criminal aggressors, were FAR worse.

      Counter-attacking, in self-defense, is always legal and morally justified.

      Dracula only committed executions of the traitors in his realm, who were perfectly willing to sell out their own countries and peoples for personal gain: trading with the enemy invaders.

      The boyars he executed were the islam-apologist liberals of their time.

      ;-)

  • Race_Dissident

    Good work, Tapson.

  • Bandido

    I am Armenian. My grandmother, at age fourteen, saw her family slaughtered with scimitars before her eyes by Enver Pasha’s savages, THE TURKS. She miraculously escaped by hiding under a trellis. Otherwise, I could not be here. To this day, THE TURKS have refused to admit their guilt for the genocide of two million innocent Armenians, men, women, and children. THE TURKS remain worse than animals.

    • UncleVladdi

      Indeed! Tolkien (a real prophet, unlike Muhammad) called them “Orcs!”

      ;-)

  • http://sunderedsheres.com Renaissance Nerd

    I’m so sick of vampires I had no desire to see this movie…until now.

  • barrycooper

    I may have to go see that now.

    • UncleVladdi

      It was pretty awesome, and the (packed) theatre audience loved it, too!

  • KyraNelson

    I was surprised to learn that Vlad’s impalement technique was not a crosswise through and through, but a vertical impaling, from the bottom of the torso up through the body to the head. Kind of like human shish kebabs. If we could only get the ISIS dunces to hold still long enough………….,

    • UncleVladdi

      Yep – Definitely “lasts longer; more satisfying!”

      ;-)

      • Pete

        Impaling is an art and a science. You have to be really good to miss the arteries and veins. I would much rather farm & build. But if you have to wage war and people around you are brutal … well Vlad was just more capable than they were.

        When Vlad asked the boyars how many leaders there had before him that about says it all.

  • UncleVladdi

    The Turkish “reviewer” made so many historical errors it’s hard to know where to start.

    She says Dracula was of the line of the “Draculesti,” whatever that is. WRONG.

    Dracula’s family ruled BessARABia, and their symbol was BAAL (NOT ALLAH)!

    Their (non-”racist”) progenitor was known as Voda Negru (“The Black Prince”)!

    So, let’s start off with noting how she completely avoids the main contention issue in the movie: the “Devshirme” culling (kidnapping) of indigenous children to satisfy the Sultan’s perverse desires, and to be brainwashed and used later as janissary shock troops against their own brethren.

    Dracula strenuously objected to the practice, which was first introduced around the time of his birth (the Turks had only first invaded Wallachia ten years before that)!

    That’s the main plotline for the movie, and yet she’s avoided it comlpetely, probably because, as a “TRUE STORY,” it makes her own Turkish people look like the evil ISIS-like swine they’ve always been and it increasingly seems still are!

    And the rest of the review is nothing but fact-free, speculative opinion presented as fact – in other words, pathetic lies to deflect from Turkish guilt:

    Re:

    “Vlad Dracul II of the house of Draculesti sought support from the Ottoman Sultan in his claim to the Wallachian throne. To put him on it, the Ottomans waged war with Dracul’s enemies. In return, Dracul willingly offered them not one, but two of his sons: Vlad Tepes Dracula and Radu cel Frumos – aka Radu the handsome. While Vlad Tepes went on to become the progenitor of the vampire myth, his brother would remain loyal to the Sultan, and his childhood friend, Mehmet II.”

    LIES!

    Vlad Dracul didn’t “seek support” from the muslims, he was already on the
    Wallachian throne, and was supported by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Sigismund, and by the king of Hungary, Matthew Corvinus!

    In fact, the situation was the exact opposite: he was extorted into giving up his sons as hostages to the Turks BECAUSE they suspected he would attack them in a Crusade if they didn’t force him to do so!

    Besides, Vlad wasn’t known as “Vlad Tepes” until AFTER he’d learned impaling – FROM THE TURKS!

    In addition, Radu wasn’t Mehmet II’s “childhood friend” because the sultan was a grown man when the Basarab child-hostages were renedered unto him – in stead, Radu was only an innocent 8-year-old child when Mehmet first RAPED him, and gave him syphilis (which they both eventually later died from)!!!!

    The Turkish muslim author of this insipid article then states:

    “The film’s generous use of the word “Turk” was interesting. To call an Ottoman a Turk is like calling a Roman an Italian. True, the Ottoman sultans were of Turkic origin. But the empire was much too big, much too ethnically diverse to be called Turkish.”

    LIAR!!!! Just look at a map!

    Turkey abuts Romania at Bulgaria, and Turkish ships can easily get straight to Romania directly from TURKEY itself, not from some varied and diverse part of the allegedly multi-ethnic-and-cultural empire!

    Anyway, I saw the film a few weeks ago here in Ottawa.

    It was awesome: the theatre was packed, and everyone was cheering for Vlad and hating the Turks (muslims) and there was not a single muslim to be seen in the audience LOL!

    Apart from the vampire stuff, the only real historical inaccuracies were:

    a) that Dracula had no army when the Turks came calling, and
    b) that the Turks shot holes in Dracula’s castle with cannons.

    In reality, it was Dracula who first brought Chinese gunpowder, rifles and cannons to Europe, to blow the crap out of the (very surprised) backwards barbarian Turks LOL!

  • Dan Knight

    Thank you, Mark! —
    So, the upshot here is Universal engaged in Random Act of Film-making rather than creating another tedious, routine propaganda film. Have to admit, I had no interest in Dracula Untold, until Mark’s reverse-review. If a Turk hates the movie: It must have redeeming qualities!

    Drones and sheeple fail to understand how to use a BS Detector: If Anything – anything – even one significant claim – made by the Turkish reviewer were true: Vlad’s Kingdom would have turned Muslim. On the other hand, if Anything – any of the Turk’s assertions are false – We know Vlad impaled 20000, maybe more: He lacked nuclear weapons to stop the Turks: What better weapon than their own ‘Terror’ weapon of impalement.

    Think about it. … If Vlad was on trial, who would you believe? Vlad or ISIS?