Halloween at Infidel Bloggers Alliance: Vlad The Impaler

Vlad III reigned on and off, as Prince of Wallachia, between 1448-1476. He was born, the son of Vlad II, in Transylvania. Wishing to assert his authority in an untamed world, Vlad II had been an early believer in the rallying power of images, and, had thus, used the Dragon, symbol of Order, as the logo of his reign. The people began calling him Vlad Drakul, meaning Vlad the Devil, a name which he seemed to have liked.

When Vlad III ascended to power, he signed his name to documents, Vlad Drakulea, meaning Son of the Devil.

Yes, this Vlad III, or Vlad Drakulea, is the inspiration behind the book Dracula by Bram Stoker. And with good reason, for he seems to have been a blood-thirsty man, both literally, and figuratively. Legend has it, a favorite delicacy was bread dipped in pig's blood. Whether or not that was true, Vlad Drakulea was an extraordinarily cruel ruler. And, guess where he learned much of his cruelty from?

Yes, that's right; the Muslims.

His father's reign as Prince of Wallachia was troubled by the need to balance the competing

interests of the Hungarians of the realm with that of the invading Ottoman Empire. Vlad II chose appeasement much of the time, and thus, he was assasinated on the order of John Hunyadi, regent of Hungary.

This left Vlad III with no father, and, as those who assassinated his father did not trust his family, no throne.

In the years leading up to the assassination of his father, Vlad III had lived in Turkey and had familiarized himself with the customs, lifestyle, and military structure of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the language. Thus, when he found himself cut off from his royal lineage he turned to the Turks to help him successfully regain what he believed was rightfully his.

His reign was troubled from there on in. All told he gained and lost the throne three times, spending some years in prison during one fall from grace. One constant, though, was his reputation for cruelty. One of his nicknames was Vlad Tepes, which meant Vlad the Impaler.

The process of impaling an enemy is particularly gruesome. This, from Wikipedia is not for the fainter flowers among us:

Impalement was Dracula's preferred method of torture and execution, which he had learned in his youth as a prisoner of the Turks. It was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying ever imagined.

Dracula usually had a horse attached to each of the victim's legs as a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock.

Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the anus and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest.

As expected, death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Dracula often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of a city that constituted his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The corpses were often left decaying for months.


Vlad was known for many of the other cruel punishments he levied on his subjects. He would cut out the genitals of women who committed adultery. He once invited a large group of the sick and the lame to a big banquet, and at the culmination of the banquet, put the question to them, "Would you like to live with no care in the world?" When they answered in the affirmative, he had the doors locked and the building burned to the ground. There were no survivors. He then told his court that he had done what he had done, because he didn't want weak people in his land.

One lesson he seemed to have learned from the Turks was the hudna. For after just a few years of aligning himself with the Turks in order to establish his power, he turned on them.

The most famous scene of Vlad's life came in a battle against the Ottoman forces of one Sultan Mehmed II. Here is a description:


In the beginning of 1462, Vlad launched a campaign against the Turks along the Danube river. It was quite risky, the military force of Sultan Mehmed II being by far more powerful than the Wallachian army. However, during the winter of 1462, Vlad was very successful and managed to gain many victories. 

To punish Dracula, the Sultan decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Wallachia. Of course, his other goal was to transform this land into a Turkish province and he entered Wallachia with an army three times larger than Dracula's. 

Finding himself without allies, Vlad, forced to retreat towards Tirgoviste, burned his own villages and poisoned the wells along the way, so that the Turkish army would find nothing to eat or drink. 

Moreover, when the Sultan, exhausted, finally reached the capital city, he was confronted by a most gruesome sight: thousands of stakes held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives, a horror scene which was ultimately nicknamed the "Forest of the Impaled." 

This terror tactic deliberately stage-managed by Dracula was definitely successful; the scene had a strong effect on Mehmed's most stout-hearted officers, and the Sultan, tired and hungry, admitted defeat.


Now, see, I know you were thinking to yourselves, "Since when does Pastorius do history?" The answer, of course, is rarely. But, this one is rather important, isn't it?

I'm not going to comment further. Talk among yourselves. Can't wait to hear what you have to say.

PART II

I want to be clear that I am not advocating torturing people en masse in the post below. I put myself in a bad position by declining to comment and make clear my thoughts on the antics of Vlad the Impaler.

Here are my unorganized thoughts on the war we find ourselves in.

As is true of human nature, the nature of warfare does not change as the years go by. The weapons change, the tactics change, and the battlefields change, but war stays the same. Why? Because war is a natural outgrowth of human nature.

Therefore, the thing that beat an enemy a thousand years before Christ, is the same thing that will beat an enemy today.

It is not guns, spears, rocks, or knives that beats the enemy, and, believe it or not, it is not killing the enemy that beats the enemy.

You can never kill every last one of those who oppose you. One thing the Lefties get right is War breeds more enemies. You kill one, and more will show up angry at the one you killed.

We are fighting what we think of as a 21st century war against a medieval enemy. We are using surgical strikes, GPS-mapping, and targeted bombing, all to insure that we kill as few civilians as possible. That is admirable. But, we may find that it also works against us.

We must understand that our enemy in this war has the advantage of being baptised in a Warrior Creed. Islam itself, teaches them to strike fear into the hearts of the infidel. To fight without ceasing, and to die the noble death of a martyr. Warrior Creeds teach that one should not fear dying. Instead, one should fear dishonor, humiliation, and bringing shame upon one's people.

Remember that the Japanese warriors of WWII would take a knife and plunge it into their belly, slicing themselves from groin to chest if they felt they had let their people down.

The Jihadis we are fighting against are no different.

They are Warriors because they were raised in a Warrior Culture. We were not.

Sure, we've got better hardware, but that won't win us the war. What will win us the war is to strike fear into their hearts. To shame and humiliate them.

What brings shame and humiliation upon a warrior?

Think about warrior types that you know. Think about athletes. Think about the most macho human beings you have layed eyes on in our culture. What do they fear? What causes them to lose their minds? What causes them to lose control of their emotions?

Having their manhood called into question in graphic terms. Having their woman taken away from them. Being shown to be weak. Being forced to part with their image of themselves as the most macho men you will ever lay eyes on.

A few days back I posted an excerpt from an article by an Australian Police Detective who seemed to have the right idea. He describes patrolling a Muslim neighborhood, and the fear his fellow policemen felt at having a brick hurled at their police car:


As we drove away in our marked police car, a half-brick bounced on the roof of the vehicle. The driver kept going.

I said, “What are you doing, they’ve just hit the car with a house brick!”

The young constable said, “Oh, they always do that when we drive past.”

The police were either too scared or too lazy to do anything about it. The damage bill on police cars became costly and these street terrorists grew stronger and the police became purely defensive. You see, the Police Royal Commission was about to start and the police retreated inside themselves knowing that the judicial system considered them easy targets. The police did not want to get hurt or attract Internal Affairs complaints.

Call me stupid, call me a dinosaur, but I made sure that day that at least one person in the group that threw the brick was arrested. I began by approaching the group just as that magistrate had lectured me and the other police involved in the Croydon search warrant. I simply asked who threw the brick. I was greeted with abuse and threats.

I then reverted to the old ways of policing. I grabbed the nearest male and convinced him that it was he who had thrown the brick. His brave mates did nothing. By the time we arrived at the police station, this young fool had become compliant, apologetic and so afraid that he kept crying.

You may not agree with what I did, but I paraded this goose around the police station for all the young police to see what they had become frightened of. For some months after that, police routinely rounded up the family whenever it was warranted.


That is what needs to be done to the Jihadis we are fighting. Of course, we are not allowed to broadcast the humiliation of our enemy for the world to see. It is against the Geneva Convention. But, they are allowed to broadcast the beheading of our friends and family, and our media will happily sell commercial time for us to have the privilege of watching.

What kind of sense does that make?

If we do not change our way of doing battle, I doubt that we will win. I think we will, instead, find ourselves in a kind of stalemate, until, eventually, one of their "sleeper cells" detonates a nuclear weapon in one of our cities. And then, we will act like beasts. We would probably retaliate with nuclear weapons and millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people will die.

I do not want to see that happen.

And, that is why I brought up the subject of Vlad the Impaler. It seems to me he knew how to strike fear into the heart of his enemy. However, his weakness was that he was truly crazy. He did not go about war with the calm head of a rational being, but instead, like the Jihadis, would turn on anyone who wandered into his path at the wrong time.

We have the advantage of being rational. Now, if we would only also use our advantage in knowing how to thoroughly humiliate an enemy, as we have done time and again throughout Western history.

I am not advocating that we impale tens of thousands of Muslims. But, I am advocating that we do what we need to do to scare them out of their minds. They don't mind dying. It is humiliation that they fear.

If we need to display their gruesome dead bodies for their friends to see, then that might be a better deal than eventually resorting to WMD's, don't you think?

And, if we have to humiliate some top level Al Qaeda terrorists on international television, I don't think that would strip us of every last vestige of our humanity.

We need to get serious, or I fear we will end up being forced to become truly monstrous.

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“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche