Some thoughts on a particularly striking monologue in Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula that I thought chimed with some of my writing of late.
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Some thoughts on a particularly striking monologue in Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula that I thought chimed with some of my writing of late.
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Deeply disturbing Morgoth when I listen to this deep dive and combine it with my own burgeoning fears for our future. It has always struck me when watching films like Gladiator or Braveheart, how every man ran courageously towards an almost certain brutal agonising death. I rationalised it by believing that these men had 100% conviction that they would live on with their loved ones in an afterlife. Compare that today with a typical US military engagement, where a very small percentage will be killed, or lose a limb.
What concerns me, is that in Western Europe, we have two factions heading for medieval war and barbarism. One that contains a large proportion certain of the above mentioned paradise - they display this by suicide bombing. The other, the descendants of those violent men of whom Dracula speaks, who for the most part now have nothing, no belief, no courage, no brotherhood and no real sense of honour, history and pride. It's not their fault, it has been deliberately stripped away from Western man, certainly at increasing pace since WW2 by our masters, leaving us, the white race at the mercy of the imported Barbarians now in the city walls. The spirit of Vlad Tepes needs to emerge again in the white man - and quickly!
I don't find the possibility of a rebarbarization so much frightening as heartening. Extremes, in general, are dangerous things. We've become entirely too civilized, with everything that comes along with that - soft, tractable, lacking in confidence. We've lost even the higher advantages of civilization, for the most part: no longer able to produce or appreciate great art, for example. Our spirits have become jaded and exhausted.
Perhaps the only way out of to embrace the Jungian shadow represented by Vlad Dracul - that savage spirit of a more heroic age that, try as we might to extirpate it, haunts our nightmares. But to whatever degree we are no longer in alignment with whatever this civilization has degenerated into, perhaps its nightmares should be our dreams.
And on that note, is it accidental that a society that has lost the will to live, and indeed pursues death, has for decades now been depicting Dracula's narrative descendents not as figures of horror, but of erotic fascination?