Vlad the Impaler: Dracula, Bram Stoker, & the Christian Prince Behind the Myth

For all its twists and turns , the story fundamentally centers around Wallachia , or present-day Romania , and one key historical figure , vlad Tepes , also known as Vlad the Impaler or , as he was known by contemporaries , vlad Dracul . How does it all fit together ?

In the summer of 1890 , 45-year-old Bram Stoker visited the library in Whitby , england , where he requested a very specific title the Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia by William Wilkinson , a rare book unavailable to the public . It was somewhat strange that Stoker had requested it .

In reality , an acquaintance of his recommended he check out the rare manuscript . Patrons who did read the book were kept under the watchful eye of the librarian who , immediately after the patron was done , returned the book to its place on the shelf .

When he viewed the book , stoker turned immediately to a specific passage , left , then visited Whitby Museum , then began investigating a strange shipwreck . In his journal he wrote the following Voivode or Dracula . Dracula in Wallachian means devil .

Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage , cruel actions or cunning . End quote . When he finally wrote his book Dracula , he included a strange preface , one that was removed when the book was officially published in 1897 .

This is what he wrote , and I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight , and I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible" . What is clear from his journal is that Stoker never intended Dracula to be published as a work of fiction at all .

Instead , he believed that the events he wrote about , at least to some extent , had taken place by the time of publishing . Dracula was missing the original first 101 pages , and the publisher insisted that it be produced as a work of fiction or not at all .

The main reason is the publisher feared it would stir panic in England , which was already at a high watermark because of the unsolved serial killings of Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel during the late 1880s . A century later , in the 1980s , a shocking discovery was made . The original Dracula manuscript was discovered in a barn in Pennsylvania .

No one knows how the manuscript exactly made its way across the Atlantic , but it was afterward purchased by Paul Allen , co-founder of Microsoft . But that brings up an interesting question what was in the first 101 pages that publishers found too frightening for public consumption ?

That story has been recently told by Dacre Stoker , great-grandnephew of the author , and JD Barker , in their more recent novel , dracule . The Irish social landscape described in Dracule includes cholera , epidemics , famine and poverty , which create a claustrophobic , dread-infused atmosphere .

The novel tells a fictional story about Bram Stoker's childhood and early life , from the 1850s through 1868 , including the encounters he claims to have had with Dracula . In Stoker's early pages he tells the story of himself as wait for it a vampire slayer .

What were the supposed real-life events upon which Stoker built his story about Dracula , the blood-sucking vampire who never died ? His story most of all seems to be based on the historical person of Vlad the Impaler , or Vlad Dracul , as we will show in this episode .

There is no doubt that Vlad was a brutal military leader and prince in Wallachia who was faced with stopping the spread of an equally brutal Islamic encroachment . His force to the impaled is notorious among Christians and Muslims alike .

His method of executing enemies of the state is indeed shocking he would impale them on large wooden poles , a spectacle that left all in shock and awe . After saving his Wallachian people from the bloody Muslim invasion , vlad was arrested and held in prison by Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus , son of John Hunyadi . The move shocked many within Christendom .

In 1462 , pope Pius II had expected Vlad and Corvinus to partner on a sort of crusade against Islam . As a result of the arrest , pope Pius II demanded answers from Matthias as to why he had not partnered with , but instead arrested the famous defender of Christendom . What resulted was a relentless propaganda campaign against Vlad .

In addition to accusing Vlad of seeking to aid the Muslims a story that , quite frankly , made no sense even to Corvinus' closest aides Matthias detailed fantastical accounts of Vlad's alleged diabolical and sadistic cruelties accounts of Vlad's alleged diabolical and sadistic cruelties .

Thanks to Gutenberg's printing , press stories of Vlad circulated quickly and were accompanied by lurid engravings Appearing under the title the Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked , blood-drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula . These pamphlets spread across Europe and were sensational bestsellers . These pamphlets spread across Europe and were sensational bestsellers .

The story is told of how he boiled people alive , shredded others like cabbage , forced parents to eat their children , impaled and broiled husbands to eat their wives' breasts , forced Tatars to swallow their own semen and built secret trap doors to drop his victims' . Un cunningly located stakes below the obviously fabricated propaganda generated to discredit .

Vlad became part of urban lore , and even his name , dracule , which meant Order of the Dragon and was ascribed to a select set of defenders of Christendom , was changed by the Tracts to mean Son of a Devil , a myth that Stoker obviously repeated . Vlad Dracula was victim to one of the most brutal fake news campaigns of all time .

These false narratives are the ones that Bram Stoker used to construct his Dracula novel .

In reality , vlad was a great , albeit brutal , christian prince , but when weighed against the brutalities he and his people suffered under the Muslims , vlad isn't nearly the monster modern movies and fiction portray him as We'll tell his story in this episode of the King's Hall Podcast .

In his book Monsters from the Id the Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film , e Michael Jones posits the theory that the horror genre took off in the aftermath of the French Revolution , which focused its efforts on the liberation of the libido . Amidst the chaos of the sexual revolution that France unleashed on the world , a new fixation with the horror genre emerged .

As Jones argues , key figures like Mary Wollstonecraft played a pivotal role . Wollstonecraft , who became enamored from afar with the trappings of the revolution , traveled to France , where her life was quickly upended by the lived-out principles of sexuality .

Unchained , regarded as a founding feminist , wollstonecraft had two failed sexual relationships , eventually landing in the arms of William Godwin , a founding father of the anarchist movement . Her life was a disaster brought about by jettisoning the moral compass of the anarchist movement .

Her life was a disaster brought about by jettisoning the moral compass of the Christian faith . She would die just a few short days after the birth of her daughter , mary Shelley . Shelley , of course , would go on to write the novel Frankenstein .

She had begun a sexual relationship with Percy Shelley , who was already married and a friend of William Godwin , pregnant , however , with Percy's child . The couple faced ostracism from the English elite circles . They tried to swim in , so torn was Percy's first wife , harriet , by his infidelity that in 1815 she committed suicide . Percy remained without remorse .

Percy and Mary's relationship was fraught with turmoil , his repeated infidelity and brokenness of degenerate ideals . As E Michael Jones argues , frankenstein is really a monster from the id . That is , the monster that arose from the scarred subconscious of the French Revolution .

Created by a mad scientist , the monster comes to strangle and kill everything its creator held dear . As a metaphor , it stands to warn against the grave dangers of intentionally imposed sexual chaos . The Dracula myth is something similar a metaphor emerging from the deep subconscious of what happens when degeneracy becomes commonplace .

As Stoker tells the story , dracula runs parallel to the homosexual movement . He is unable to reproduce and so flees from Transylvania to the fresh blood of London . There he gains followers and victims , not through reproduction but through blood-satiated recruitment . Not through reproduction , but through blood-satiated recruitment , jones writes .

Like vampirism and homosexuality , revolutions can only be destructive . They can only have a parasitic relationship to the body politic , draining off its vital forces , rendering the soil barren , forcing its proponents to search for new lands to conquer because the lands of its birth have already been depleted .

So Transylvania could stand as a metaphor for revolutionary France , as seen through the eyes of Shelley and Mary Godwin in the days of devastation following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo . Shelley , infected by his sojourn in revolutionary France , returned to England to spread the revolutionary basilisk and its concomitant woes to unsuspecting Englishmen .

Jones posits that Stoker likely had syphilis , and so the connection with Dracula is a deep desire for pure blood . Whatever is true of Stoker , this we know for sure the revolutionary spirit has brought great diseases upon mankind that robbed it of its strength Abortion , infanticide , sexually transmitted diseases , homosexuality and more .

Not surprisingly , it was a society that effortlessly became fixated with the horror genre and , in the case of Vlad , turned a Christian story into something of a nightmare .

He was one of many sons of the previous warlord . He had to fight his way to the throne , since in Wallachia there was no succession of the firstborn , no primogeniture . Every son of a voivode had equal claims to the throne . As such , wallachia was a brutal and unstable country , with as many as 29 different leaders in a 60-year period .

Raymond Ibrahim points out that Wallachia was also treated as a chessboard by Hungary and the Ottoman Empire alike . The Hungarians would promote whatever Voivode would help them the most , and the Ottomans would do the same . The nobles of Wallachia lurked in the background as a third party , constantly attempting to sabotage Voivodes for their own political advantage .

With constant outside influences and danger , vlad became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire in 1437 . The next year , sultan Murad II , the arch enemy of Skanderbeg and John Hunyadi , used Vlad to invade and devastate the Christian country of Transylvania . However , it seemed that Vlad had some regret for taking the Sultan's side .

So when John Hunyadi became active against the Ottoman oppression , vlad switched to the Christian camp . As a result , the sultan called Vlad to Adrianople where he locked him in prison . To buy his freedom , vlad gave his two youngest sons as hostages to the sultan .

The two boys were Vlad , the middle of his father's three sons and named for his father , and Radu , the younger brother , who were both thrown in an Ottoman prison . Just like Skanderbeg before him , vlad was raised as an Ottoman From his approximate birth date in 1430 AD . Vlad III was raised in a tough and brutal environment .

Due to his upbringing , ibrahim refers to Vlad as a top graduate of the school of hard knocks . He writes Ibrahim refers to Vlad as a top graduate of the school of hard knocks . He writes , quote From the tenderest age , a great deal of emphasis was placed on physical fitness .

In Wallachia , even at court , children were exposed to the elements on stormy nights in true Spartan tradition , should they survive the chills and fevers of the accompanying colds . They were considered to have strong physical and moral character , essential traits for good warriors .

For physical exercise , even a five-year-old tot had to be able to ride an unsaddled horse at gallop . End , quote .

His appearance was as follows , quote he was not very tall but very stocky and strong , with a cold and terrible appearance a strong aquiline nose , swollen nostrils , a thin and reddish face in which the very long eyelashes framed large , wide-open green eyes . The bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening . His face and chin were shaven , but for a mustache .

The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head . A bull's neck connected his head , from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered . However , as an Ottoman captive , vlad was rather skinny and pale . For six years , from the age of 12 to about 18 , he lived under the iron rule of the Sultan .

At any moment , vlad's precarious position could change , and he could be killed or blinded If his father's relationship with the Sultan changed , if Vlad himself made a wrong step or if the Sultan simply had a mood swing . Indeed , when Vlad II assisted John Hunyadi at the Battle of Varna , it seemed that Murad would kill the two hostage Wallachians as a repercussion .

Instead , murad kept both boys alive in order to regain Vlad's neutrality , which turned out to be successful . As a result , vlad and his brother , radu , lived in constant fear of being killed at any moment . Radu's story is somewhat more tragic .

Radu is known in history as Radu the Handsome for his incredible good looks , and because of that , sultan Murad's son , muhammad , made Radu into his personal catamite , or lover , as the Muslims call it . Radu had at first resisted Muhammad , but finally gave in to the satanic man's advances .

The historian Shalco Condiles offers these vile details concerning Radu's molestation . Quote it happened that the Sultan was almost killed by the boy Radu when he had wanted to have sex with him . This was when he , muhammad , had first gained the throne in 1451 .

He was in love with the boy , then aged 15 , and invited him for conversation , and then , as a sign of his respect , he invited him for drinks to his bedchamber . The sultan kissed the unwilling boy , who drew a dagger and struck the sultan on his thigh . Shortly afterward , radu was coerced at the port and became the sultan's lover , end quote .

During his imprisonment , radu became a victim of what today would probably be called Stockholm Syndrome . He became fully submissive to the sultan and would remain his devilish servant for the rest of his days .

Because of the different treatment they received as captives and their naturally opposite dispositions , vlad and Radu grew to hate each other over the years , which is one main reason for the conflict they would experience against each other in the years to come . The rule of Vlad Begins In 1447, .

John Hunyadi had had enough of Vlad II's constant betrayals and duplicity . He led the Wallachians to revolt against their leader , and Vlad was beheaded . Vlad's oldest son , Mircea , was tortured and then buried alive . Hunyadi took control of Wallachia .

Aware and afraid of Hunyadi's power , sultan Murad turned to Vlad III , his captive and an heir to the throne of Wallachia . Vlad had a fierce temper and was often whipped as a captive . This , as a result , toughened his character to a diamond-like hardness .

Murad saw these good qualities for a voivode and so sent him to claim his birthright in the form of the throne of Wallachia . In return , vlad owed a yearly tribute to Murad in the form of Wallachian children Once Vlad arrived in Wallachia . The accounts of what happened are confusing . Vlad took the throne of Wallachia at age 18 , but two months later was ousted .

Then he disappears from history completely for the next eight years . Vlad resurfaced in the summer of 1456 , seemingly with help from John Hunyadi , who was then in his final days suffering under the dark cloud of the plague . Vlad retook his throne by single combat , defeating the same man who had killed his father and older brother , vladislav II .

In order to stay in power , vlad would have to make some crucial changes to the structure of the Wallachian government and military . Because treachery from within his own people was the order of the day , he developed a loyal and skilled personal guard to be with him at all times , protecting him from any assassination attempts from his own nobles or the Ottomans .

The next step in cementing his rule was dealing with the ever-present , always malicious Wallachian nobles . Vlad had a plan and , as would soon become his trademark , it was a particularly brutal plan . Vlad invited all the nobles he believed capable of treachery to dinner at his palace . Once they arrived , he asked them how many voivodes had gone before him .

They responded with a laugh and said many , curious . Vlad asked why that was . Without letting them answer , vlad told them that their incessant , scheming and malicious treachery was the cause of this country's turmoil . By now the nobles suspected treachery the cause of this country's turmoil . By now the nobles suspected treachery , but it was too late .

The palace doors were locked from the outside . Vlad and his new guard drew their swords and butchered the nobles . To fill the holes left by the now-diseased nobles , vlad promoted all the worthy men he could find , building a loyal corps around himself as a ruler . Likewise , he rebuilt the Wallachian army from the top down .

After replacing the nobles , he filled the military ranks with trustworthy men who were loyal to him , thus helping to secure his rule and the stability of his country . Now that Vlad's rule was stabilized , a key question remained when did Vlad's loyalties lie ? Would he remain loyal to the Ottomans or return to the Christian side ? Vlad made his position clear .

He allied himself to the Transylvanians and became a vassal of Hungary . He said quote under oath and with faith in God , we have decided and agreed that whenever , over the course of time , because of fear of the Turks or a coup by our enemies , that we will come to the aid of one another . End quote .

He further consolidated his position with a letter to Transylvanian allies in September of 1456 , quote now the time and appointed hour about which we spoke before has arrived . The Turks intend to put great burdens , almost impossible to bear , upon our shoulders , forcing us to bow down before them .

It is not for us or ours that they put such a great burden , but for you and yours . The Turks do this to humiliate us . As far as we ourselves are concerned , we could have made peace , but on account of you and yours , we cannot make peace with the Turks because they wish to pass through our country to attack and plunder you . End quote .

Vlad also asked that the Transylvanians send him 50 men to show his power to the Sultan the next time they met . Not only did Vlad's plea fall on deaf ears , the Hungarians and the Transylvanians conspired to replace Vlad on the Wallachian throne . Learning of the treachery planned against him , vlad went into Transylvania and destroyed several towns .

He had made alliance with impaling thousands . As for Dan , the man the Hungarians had tried to place on the Wallachian throne , vlad had a special punishment for him . Dan was forced to dig his own grave as the funeral service was carried out , and then he was beheaded next to the grave he had dug .

The beheading of Dan and the fierceness with which he defended his throne confirmed Vlad's status as unquestioned warlord of Wallachia . In 1461 , muhammad sent tributes to Vlad , demanding his tribute in the form of 500 Wallachian children to supplement the Janissary course . The men , upon arriving at Vlad's castle , did not remove their turbans .

It was the Christian custom to remove one's hat in the presence of a king , and so Vlad was rightfully upset . He was also well aware of the Muslim practice , but he asked them nonetheless why they refused to remove their turbans . They responded that the Turkish custom was to keep their heads wrapped .

Vlad laughed and said that he would help them keep their custom . As a result , vlad had the men's turbans nailed into their heads , blood flowing freely down their heads and torsos .

Vlad sent the disrespectful men back to the sultan with a message saying don't send his the s Sultan's customs to other lords who don't want them , but let them keep them to himself . In fall of 1461 , sultan Muhammad again sent envoys to Vlad requesting his promised tribute . This time he sent a man named Yunus Bey , who was known for his honeyed tongue .

He convinced Vlad to send tribute to Muhammad , and that winter Vlad arrived at the Ottoman city of Nicopolis with 50 Wallachian children , the first installment of the promised tribute . However , vlad's tribute was all a guise . He hid his personal guard in the mountains and attacked Nicopolis at nightfall and took two Muslim leaders captive Hamzah Bey and Yunus Bey .

The outraged Muslims cried . Quote the Bey of Wallachia , vlad , that damned son of a expletive , attached Hamzah Bey . About midnight he killed many Turks and took Hamzah Bey prisoner . The infidels crossed the Danube at several places and made an incursion into the region's neighboring Wallachia and plundered , causing much damage in that Velyet or Ottoman province .

End quote . Vlad impaled both the captured Muslim men and put them in a place according to their high stature they were impaled on stakes high up by Vlad's castle . Their heads were also cut off and sent to the Sultan as a sign that Vlad did not fear him .

Upon returning to Wallachia , vlad raised an army of 2,000 men and marched back over the Danube to the fortress of Georgia near Nicopolis . Vlad approached the gate speaking fluent Turkish , and convinced the city to open the gate . Vlad and his men massacred those in the fortress and those in the surrounding lands , all told killing about 24,000 Turks .

To prove his victory , vlad cut the nose off of every dead Turk and sent them to Hungary . Next , vlad sent terrified Turkish prisoners to Muhammad with a message quote Such an act drove . Served him as far as I was able and if my service is pleasing to him , I will serve him still as much as is in my power . End quote .

Such an act drove fear into the hearts of the Muslims , who were used to doling out violence and terror , not receiving it Everywhere in the Ottoman Empire , even in the Sultan's court of Constantinople . The infuriated Sultan called for a jihad and declared war on Vlad .

Aware of the Turkish tidal wave that was coming , vlad appealed to the Hungarian king , matthias Corvinus , son of John Humyadi , for troops . Corvinus declined to aid him with troops and Vlad was forced to raise a purely Wallachian army . He managed to muster about 30,000 men , most of whom were peasants . He hoped that it would be enough to stop the Ottomans .

In 1462 , sources describe that Muhammad assembled between 150 and 300,000 men at Constantinople before marching to the Danube . When Muhammad arrived , he was met by the whole of Vlad's army standing on the other side of the riverbank . Muhammad tried to force a crossing , but his Janissaries were repelled by the desperate Christians .

Soon , 250 Janissaries lay dead , his prized soldiers . Fearing the loss of his most fearsome warriors , muhammad withdrew the Janissaries and bombarded Vlad and his men with cannon fire , forcing the Wallachians to retreat . Muhammad and his men then safely crossed the Danube . For the next several days , the Muslim army marched unabated through Wallachian territory .

The Muslims marched directly for the place where the Wallachians had hidden their women and children in the surrounding forests . The secret Wallachian hiding place had been betrayed by none other than Vlad's own brother Radu , who had accompanied the Sultan to Wallachia , their women and children captive .

All the Wallachians , except for those directly in Vlad's service , submitted to Sultan Muhammad . Vlad was left to his own limited resources . Though he could not openly confront the Sultan in battle , vlad did not make it easy for the Ottomans to march through his country .

As he retreated , vlad burned all of the land and poisoned every well , forcing the Ottomans to go without water . Vlad conducted guerrilla raids on the edges of the Sultan's armies as well . Vlad and the Wallachians found themselves in a perilous situation . Surely Vlad would be helped now by his ally , matthias Corvinus .

In a disgrace to his father's name , Matthias failed to appear , leaving Vlad vexed and betrayed by his own Christian kinsmen . On top of that , some of Vlad's holdings were attacked by his own cousin , stephen of Moldavia , whom Vlad himself had placed in power . Christian infighting was again bringing Christendom to new depths and bringing joy to the Muslim hordes .

Aware of his desperate situation , vlad planned a somewhat startling move . At midnight on June 16th and 17th 1462 , in the plains of the Carpathian Mountains , vlad Dracula and several thousand horsemen violently blitzed the sleeping Ottoman encampment with the intention of killing the sultan and his personal guard . The sultan fled by foot with the other scattered Muslims .

By dawn , as Vlad returned to his mountain fortress , the Ottoman camp was in disrepair . The attack became known as Dracula's Night Attack . The move was daring and bold . Muslim contemporaries tried to cover their defeat by saying that they eventually fought off Vlad and caused his retreat , but that simply is not true .

The Muslims had been literally caught sleeping and were scattered . Vlad left before they could recover and mount an attack . But no matter how bold or daring , vlad's plan ultimately failed . The sultan was still alive and his army was still beyond number . On his return to his palace , vlad bestowed glowing praise upon those of his men who were wounded in the chest .

As for those wounded in the back , a sign of their retreat before the enemy , vlad had them impaled , saying you are not a man , but a woman . The Sultan's response to Vlad's attack was to round up as many Wallachian men as possible , beheading them all . Some 3 . As many Wallachian men as possible , beheading them all .

Some 3,700 Wallachian men were killed as a result of the Sultan's fury . Still , though , vlad's plan for killing the Sultan had not prevailed , it had succeeded in planting a seed of fear in the Sultan's mind . What made Muhammad fear Vlad the most was the way in which Vlad's own men feared him .

Following the night attack , a Wallachian soldier was brought before the sultan and questioned . The man answered every question except the question concerning Vlad's whereabouts .

When Muhammad threatened to kill the man if he did not reveal Vlad's location , the man did say that he knew exactly where Vlad was , but since he feared Vlad greatly , he would not reveal his location , even on pain of death .

Raymond Ibrahim said , concerning the Sultan that quote seeing that the Wallachian preferred to be tortured to death by Turks rather than risk the wrath of the Lord Impaler , a thrilling spasm of terror and not a little admiration shook Muhammad as he casually watched and listened to the death throes of the Wallachians' execution .

The sultan was heard to remark that , with such fear surrounding him , dracula could become unstoppable . End quote . Despite his fear , sultan Muhammad slowly pressed on . After the night attack , he made his men dig a very extensive ditch around his encampment each night to protect from future attacks .

The Ottomans pushed to the town of Targovist , the home of Vlad and the Wallachian throne . As the Turks approached Targovist , they saw , glinting in the distance , crooked objects on poles . As they drew closer , the objects grew clear and the Turks grew terrified . Terrified and restless , as a giant gasp emanated from the huge army .

They had discovered the truth of the legend . Vlad's forest of the impaled was no myth . Quote thousands of stakes of various heights held the remaining carcasses of some 20,000 Turkish captives .

Their body were in a state of complete decomposition due to the heat of the summer and the ravages of ravens and other Carpathian birds of prey , many of which had made their nests within the skulls and skeletal remains of the victims .

Barely recognizable because of the higher stakes used in deference to their position , were the remains of the Greek Katabolinos Unispe and Hamz Pasha , who had been impaled months . Before the tattered remains of their gaudy vestments fluttered against the evening sky , the entire area reeked with the stench of death , the smell of rotting flesh .

Dracula had deliberately stage-managed their sinister spectacle as part of his terror tactics to destroy whatever spirit was still left in Muhammad after the unsuccessful assassination attempts a few days before . Indeed , the force of the impaled was horrible enough to discourage the most stout-hearted officers who witnessed the scene . End quote .

Just as Vlad hoped , muhammad's spirit was broken . Contemporary Muslim writers describe the powerful sultan as panic-stricken . Muhammad ordered an especially deep trench dug around him that night , but to no avail . Vlad still conducted another massive night raid , slaughtering thousands more Muslims .

When the dawn came , the frantic sultan packed up his camp and , with much haste , returned across the Danube to his homeland . His efforts having failed and it was with great disgrace that he returned Vlad III Dracula , the dread lord impaler , was heralded throughout Europe as a hero for his efforts .

His tiny force had conquered a massive Ottoman army by turning the Muslims' own terror tactics against them . Unfortunately , vlad's power would not last . Sultan Murad had one last gamble he left his faithful minion , radu , the brother of Vlad , with a small contingent of men and lots of cash and fine things in Wallachia .

Because Radu had just as legitimate a claim to the throne of Wallachia as Vlad remember no primogeniture Muhammad planned on using him to take control of Wallachia . Radu began talks with the Wallachian nobles If they put Radu on the throne , they would have peace with the Muslims , something Vlad could never give .

One by one , the foolish nobles forgot who had delivered them and turned to Radu . Vlad , aware of his brother's scheming , fled to Hungary . Vlad assumed he would be safe in Hungary , but he was wrong .

Instead , the treacherous Matthias Corvinus framed Vlad , forging a letter , purportedly from Vlad to the Sultan , where Vlad proposed to betray Christendom to the Sultan in exchange for the throne of Wallachia . Based on these forged documents , matthias threw Vlad in prison . After the imprisonment of Vlad Dracula , matthias Corvinus had to explain himself to the Pope .

Pope Pius II had given Matthias money to fund a crusade to help Vlad , but Matthias instead spent the money on himself and threw Vlad in prison . Pius was understandably upset . In order to defend himself , matthias invented stories about Vlad that made him out to be a monster , someone who should be kept in prison .

The stories were elaborate and almost clearly fake , as we stated at this episode's onset , matthias accused Vlad of boiling people alive , shredding people like cabbage , forcing parents to eat their children , husbands to eat their wives' breasts , and more . They even twisted the meaning of Vlad's name from son of the dragon to the devil's son .

According to historian Raymond Ibrahim , vlad was not needlessly cruel , for any cruelties that he committed were part of a carefully crafted state policy and committed against the backdrop of a truly brutal age . As a result of Matthias' propaganda , vlad was imprisoned on the Danube in a fortress called Visegrad . He was kept there for 13 years , from 1462 to 1475 .

In 1475 , when Basarab Laiota took the Wallachian throne from Radu , matthias decided Vlad was needed again . He released Vlad from prison and made him captain of his army Right away . Vlad obtained several victories over the Ottomans in Bosnia and Serbia in early 1476 . By August , vlad had completely driven the Muslims out of Moldavia .

Vlad , using the army given him by Matthias Corvinus , retook the throne of Wallachia . On November 26 , 1476 , vlad III Dracula was crowned warlord in Wallachia for the third time . He allied himself with Matthias and Stephen of Moldavia . But Vlad's third reign over Wallachia was short . Though the circumstances are unclear , what is clear is that Vlad was betrayed .

Whether he was betrayed , whether he was betrayed by his own nobles or by Basarab Laiota , the man he had replaced as warlord , is unknown . One story is that Basarab returned to Wallachia with Turkish allies and killed Vlad .

Another is that his nobles surrounded him and stabbed him to death , remembering the way that he had slaughtered all of the noblemen all those years ago . Either way , vlad was beheaded , his head was impaled and flown from the highest tower in Constantinople .

Just like Skanderbeg before him , and unlike his brother Radu , vlad III Dracula , the dreadlord impaler , had risen above his Muslim captivity to defend Christendom with vigor and bravery and shocking brutality . He had held the frontier of the Christian West multiple times against much larger forces , using his own might in terror .

However , just as was the case with John Hunyadi and Skanderbeg , vlad's greatness was undermined by constant Christian backstabbing and betrayal . Vlad's most valiant efforts did not last , mainly because he was undermined by his own , allegedly Christian brothers .

As Mark 3 , 24-25 says , if a kingdom be divided against itself , that kingdom cannot stand , and if a house be divided against itself , that house cannot stand . It is a poignant lesson for our own time . If the kingdom of Christ is divided , it cannot stand .

Because of the terrible division and infighting among Christians in Vlad's own day , the Ottomans made vast inroads into Christian territory , defeating even the best warriors Christendom had to offer . A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand . The King's Hall Podcast exists to make self-ruled men rule well and win the world .

Um , one of the things we don't need to talk about , because we all accept it as fact , is that this level of violence is perfectly acceptable . I knew it , but I knew it many , such , many other questions .

I knew that we were going to get into this episode and the first thing that Eric Vlad Dracula and Joy or Khan was going to say is you know , like when Mona Lisa says I've never done anything wrong , ever , I know this , I know this .

Yeah , like ironically . Ironically , there's been a lot within the Christian reform camp where we're not only , I think , getting pushback James White was one of the key people giving pushback against the Crusades but it's also interesting , dan , because it's the kind of pushback where you say because of your opinion .

James is essentially saying because of your opinion , and how bad it is , we can't even have a discussion about it Like , this is a really crucial issue how you view the Crusades , and I want to ask you at this moment why do you think that is Like ? Why is the Crusades which we've actually been talking about for quite some time ?

How did it get to the point where now we have people in upheaval ? Why is it upsetting to some people within the Christian camp ?

I mean , you have Judas and then it all goes downhill from there right within the Christian kingdom kingdom , and so I think what you're seeing is a spirit of schismatism within Christianity that's existed for a very long time , and the Crusades were just the thing that was latched onto .

What I'm continually frustrated by is actually something that we have as far as rules for engagement right , we have rules for engagement on Twitter .

I mean I'm speaking for more Eric and Brian , because I don't really tweet that often , but you can tell that's where you guys really mount . The attack is . I'm going to poke one of the idols of the age in the eye . That's the goal . But as far as attacking Christians attacking really in our tribe of Christians that's not something that we're going to do .

We're not going to go on the offensive against other Reformed brothers unless we see something that is absolutely egregious , and so we really want to keep our friends close as part of the goal .

So it's really confusing to me when you have someone such as James White and there are others in the reform camp that continue to attack us and our friends , even though they're supposed to be our friends , like these men that are attacking .

They're supposed to be our friends , and so then , when we defend ourselves because we didn't attack , we didn't initiate this , but obviously our reputations and credibility and our arguments , you know they're all under attack we must defend ourselves , Christian circles , and then they accuse you of things like being divisive or not respecting your elders or all of these

crazy things , crazy accusations against us , and that whole dynamic is really irritating to me . I don't know , you guys have experienced this more directly than me .

And on the one side you have James White and pietism , and I think you know where he's calling . Like the early reformers they're sacralists and you know I've heard other people say that . You know most of the early reformers were racists .

Okay , well , if you're pietistic and you're very anti-actual reformer position , very anti-actual reformer position , and you tend to be more of like the non-magisterial Anabaptist type , I think it's just inevitable , brian , it's baked into the foundation .

Well , yeah , if you read chapter 20 of John Calvin and he says that a civil magistrate is to promote the Christian religion and to prevent blasphemies , and on and on , he goes If you're in our camp and you're saying those things , it's naturally going to be offensive to the pietist and particularly , I think , the Crusades , because you're saying , yeah , there were

great Christian men who took up the sword not as a church but as a political entity , a nation , a civil magistrate , in the spirit of Romans 13, . They took the sword and they defended their people as they ought , I think the pietists , it's like they really just don't seem to like that , and understandably so . I want to get your thoughts , though .

Some of this is , I think , the fault of Dr White , who constantly whether I don't know , I'm going to assume not on purpose , but constantly dislocates the disagreement from where I think it truly lies onto other red herrings Like oh , you're seeing these men promoting the Pope sending people with the promise of forgiveness that they'll fight in Christian wars and

absolution from purgatory and all these things . But if you just listen to even what we've said in this show , then obviously show us any Popish errors and we'll damn them along with anybody else . We are , we're Protestants . We're we're not promoting papist errors .

There were huge , huge issues with the papacy , huge , huge issues with the Christian religion of the time , but we're trying to deal with them in a historically realistic way where we're saying this in fact , most of what we've talked about so far was pre-Reformation Christendom , and so there it wasn't as if there was .

There were a lot of Protestants over somewhere else that we , you know , were ignoring . These were all like , when you're talking about God-free , you're talking about an age when the church just was Orthodox and Roman Catholic , and that was just what it was .

And there was all sorts of sinful infighting between Christian princes , there were all sorts of political intrigues going on between popes and kings and that sort of thing . We're not interested in offering theological support for all of those errors .

What we are interested in doing is looking at the history and recognizing that the Christian church in its infancy which I think both Dr White and us would agree that the church is still in its toddler years and certainly in the 1000s was in its infancy that they were fighting an existential enemy for Christianity itself , against civilization , destroying hordes of

Muslims , and that the Muslims we've established this several times in the 300 years or so after Muhammad had proceeded to essentially enslave , murder , rape , destroy , pillage , plunder and conquer Eastern Christendom and then began to encroach even on Western Christendom and so seeing an existential threat , seeing their brethren enslaved , christian kings and princes engaged in

war . Surrounding that there were many , many issues of doctrine and theology that all of us would damn right , along with anybody any other Protestant . That's uncontroversial to us , like we're talking about a historical question . So that's one issue over here . I think that for me , what does frustrate me about this is that , believe it or not .

I mean our enemies slander us in many ways as schismatic ourselves and divisive and whatever . But if you know us , if you've done business with us , you know that we work fairly hard to keep in-house disagreements between what should be allies in-house .

You will rarely see us , for example , blast some ally on Twitter over some in-house disagreement , like when we're talking about other reformed Protestant , especially post-millennial Christians who are like active in the culture war . You know we're not like up out in Twitter often trying to dunk on the abolitionists versus the other folks .

We're not often out in Twitter trying to dunk on the theonomists versus the classical two kingdoms guys . We've tended to try to say .

Even one of the main points of my talk at New Christendom Press Conference last June was that we need to develop a familiarity with saying a sentence that sounds something like I'm very thankful for brother X or so-and-so over in you know such and such a place .

I disagree with him on this point , this point and this point , but I'm thankful for the way the Lord's using him and I I'm good with you . Know we're we're cool , I'm for him and he's for me , and we disagree on some things .

We'll share the stage with you know I'll go speak at a conference with Apologia guys , moscow guys who have like Stephen Wolf , et cetera . We invite because what we're interested in , you know , is Christendom , which requires broad Christian coalition .

So we try to be very hard on our enemies , very hard on feminism , very hard on the demons , and we want to be friendly to brothers , and the result of that is probably 98% of public Christian kind of like guys in our circles we get along with perfectly fine .

There's just a small percentage that it seems like we're constantly butting heads with the G three guys . Owen Strand would be one , james White seems to increasingly be one . He's also G three , though , as well , and he's kind of a .

G three sort of guy and honestly like I don't know James personally , um dog in the fight of like wanting his downfall , like anything like that . We're , we're , we have good relations with the local apology and Salt Lake city and pastor Wade and like text with Zach Connell , a lot of these apology .

You guys have long had good relationships with them and so it is frustrating to me Um , some of the way Dr White's chosen to behave surrounding the issue and talk about good brothers like Stephen Wolf and that sort of thing .

The other one , though , is he's said flatly I refuse to talk to Stephen Wolfe about any of these issues , and of course , you know we won't share the stage at right response because of Stephen Wolfe . Jeff Durbin pulled out of that and they were yeah , I refuse to debate .

My question with this is why is this an issue that is like it seems to be in another category ? Because , right , there's issues among Christians where we go , yeah , we disagree .

You know , james is a credo Baptist and I'm not , and you know , post mill , there's's a certain set of issues where it's like it's okay to debate , but it seems like correct me if I'm wrong there's somehow a set of issues that make you anathema . Yeah , right , now it's .

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Like the next day or that day and you hear I , just while we were recording this , I glanced at Twitter and saw another guy tagging me and , you Like , now they're openly praising this video . It has this scene from a 1936 German propaganda thing or something like that .

I think it was like the Olympics yeah , it was the like 36 Olympics or something like that , and I've always been clear about this issue .

Like I think the concept I want to know the truth about World War II and I don't want to be beholden to the post-war consensus that I think is globalist propaganda run by people who hate Christ and want to destroy the world and enslave everybody to globalists globo-homo , et cetera .

So what I'm interested in with something like World War II and the Crusades , it's the same . I want to know what's true . I want to have the freedom to be able to damn everything that's evil and praise everything that's good and come away with a complicated true story of history which rarely has white hats and black hats unstained and totally blackened .

That's rarely how history goes . So I want to be able to say of German nationalism leading up to World War II , I want to be able to say they were responding to some of the dumbest acts of foreign policy by Europe and England and America . Versailles was garbage . We shouldn't have had either of these World War IIs . These brother wars were garbage .

We shouldn't have had them . Same stuff that happened through the Crusades . We have European Christendom killing each other constantly and the devil cheers and I hate it . And the devil cheers and I hate it .

And I want to be able to say that a lot of the German nationalism included things that condemn genuine evils like homosexuality and pornography and the attack of the family and things like that . And I want to be able to say I don't think Hitler was a Christian prince . I don't think Hitler was a good guy .

I'm not pro-Hitler , like I've always , pretty much from the beginning this has been my position and I'm open to learning all the history and I just want to know what's true . But when you say anything like that , all of a sudden the smear becomes this ultimate , boiling it down to the lowest common denominator .

Oh so you love Hitler and you are pro-Holocaust , or you're pro-this or you're pro-that . Hitler and you are pro Holocaust , or you're pro this or you're pro that .

I'm not persuaded of that . But we get these issues where the to ask the question or to engage in the historical investigation itself is an act of declaration of tribal identity . Well , that's right In a war .

But when you again , when you have these categories of like unpardonable sin , where it's like , oh , these subjects , you just can't even talk about it , yeah , I think it becomes particularly problematic .

One other thing that I noticed , and I tweeted this the other day I said when evangelicals discuss the physical courage required of men , they are quick to point to the martyrs , but they are slow to talk about men like Godfrey Boyan or Richard the Lionheart . Why is that ? Why is getting killed promoted over righteously taking life in defense of life ?

And one of the things I was doing . I was reading a Votibaca book and he's talking about young men and he was like let me tell you what real physical courage is . And then he was like talking about Fox's book , book of Martyrs . The real heroes of Christianity , the really strong men , were the ones who were killed .

Why are we not allowed to celebrate a guy who defended his people ?

All sorts of issues come together into this and it is the failure of distinction between the kingdoms . It's a failure of a distinction between the governance of nations in the political realm and the governance of the church and God's purpose for the church and the heavenly kingdom .

So I think a lot of the issues here come from a fundamental collapse of all those issues into ecclesiocentrism . I think this is one of the errors that theonomic types tend towards , and I again don't mean that disparagingly . I love theonomists .

They have arguments to everything I would say and I recognize that and they're brothers Like this isn't me declaring war and saying we're now like theonomy . A lot of it is actually a good recovery of something much closer to the political theory of the reformers and , I think , classical Christian ideas of these things than what they were arguing against .

So great there .

But there's a tendency to a collapse in ecclesiocentrism and then an attempt to force or to measure leaders according to ecclesiocentric standards , rather than dealing with those leaders within A their historical context and the actual realities of those times , what was going on , the existential threats that they faced , and the realpolitik and political realities of their day

.

He's like he's talking to Christians in the spiritual realm , dealing with the church and personal retaliation . That has nothing to do with how a state ought to operate .

But there's a category distinction we have to make here where we truly deal with nations as nations , with kings as kings .

And one of the other things I think we often fail to deal with is those passages of scripture that give us a full awareness of the absolute brutality of warfare and of the brutality of tactics and warfare as they will really happen in the real world .

Read the Psalms , read the Old Testament , and you will find things just as brutal as what we just read in the stories of Vlad , and some of the time , I think , at the minimum , one thing that we have to recognize is that before we understand the question of whether or not Vlad was right or more probably , it's going to end up being like in which things he

was right about , which things he was wrong about , because it's not always so simple as right and wrong like a hundred percent , a hundred percent .

We have to understand why someone like Vlad was why he was the way he was , that God often raises up and uses men who are actually not , in the final analysis , like guys that you would say that was a hundred percent a good guy . He never did anything wrong .

But God often raises up men like that to destroy and chase in the wicked , including those who claim God's name while acting hypocritically .

They raped and enslaved women . They killed indiscriminately and plundered . And so what happened ? Well , God and his providence here , in this little corner of God's big story , raised up a bloodthirsty dragon of a man to kill their women and children , their men and boys .

Right , you have to look at this and say to me , at the minimum , I read this story similarly to what God does in Esther by raising up his people to destroy wicked Haman with his own . And actually I think in the book of Esther it's an impaling stake as well . It's not a gallows like a noose , it's a . To lift somebody up was actually to impale them .

So Haman ends up in the book of Esther impaled on his own stake . And I see that with the Turks in this story too . You don't have to praise Vlad as , like a saint , in order to recognize God in his providence , raised him up to do to the Turks eye for an eye , what they had been doing .

Here's the theology .

So when you approach history as an apologist and a theologian , you tend to approach it through the lens of historical theology , where you're attempting to justify certain theological positions you hold over against error in history and find people who support or hold your view or proto versions of your view through history so that you can like when a Protestant historian

tells history , it has a Protestant flair . When a Roman Catholic does , it has a Roman Catholic flair . This is just human right .

But what you can tend to do if that's how you engage in history , is that when someone who's operating in a different category , like Stephen Wolfe is , he is going to these questions of historical retrieval , actually asking more of the question what was the political theology of the reformers ? Like , what was it and were they maybe more ?

Did they have it better than us ? Like , were they right ? Were we right ? Where are they wrong ? Where can we disagree ? It really , I think , can break the brain of somebody who has come from history from a theological and apologetical angle . They're not used to going to the history and asking the geopolitical question .

That's correct , and I think one of the places you see this is like there is a great fear in our culture post-World War II consensus that the worst thing you could ever be called , I think , worse than a racist is being called a Nazi or a fascist . So there's an allergy within the Christian camp that we've also been reared on that in public school .

Our political theory has come from that consensus and so I think people are like oh , we don't want to be associated with that in any way . Anything , you know you're I saw things today where it's like you're a brown shirt If you , you know , if you believe that any of the crusades were good or in any sense .

One of the other things I think is really interesting and it's actually just pure hypocrisy in our culture is you'll hear this from the Christian camp . They will say things like there is no place for Christian violence , there is no place for a nation , particularly let's stay in the realm of nations because of Romans 13 .

There's no place for political violence , for political violence . And then immediately if they've got a Ukraine flag in their bio and they're like we need to destroy Russia , or when the attacks in Israel happened . They're like we need Ben Shapiro , we need to annihilate Hezbollah from the face of the earth , and I said hold on .

I thought you said , violence was never the answer yeah , God says violence actually is the answer some of the time . So I love the quote . A lot of people were sharing this because this is really one of the central issues on Vlad is somebody had shared it . They said violence is seldom the answer , but when it is , it is the only answer .

Before we get into Just War Theory a little bit , I want to point out for Vlad , because I am not willing to defend every single thing Vlad did as righteous Name .

He was in a vastly outnumbered , the technologically disadvantaged . He's got peasants and sheepskin as armor a vast majority of them , which , by the way and they're taking your kids to rape them . Yeah , the fact that the peasants showed up a lot of the propaganda . The peasants loved Vlad . He protected them from the Muslims . They loved Vlad .

He even told them if you're scared , them from the Muslims . They loved Vlad . He even told them if you're scared , don't fight . He pulled a Gideon with his 30,000 peasant army . But the reason that he had to resort to those tactics militarily and geopolitically , whether or not he should have was because of Christian disunity .

It was because of the Hungarian betrayal of Christendom for geopolitical interests , which constantly happened in Christendom , where you would have nations and kings who were willing to let their Christian brethren die and their children raped and enslaved rather than go and fight together against the Muslims because they had geopolitical bickering going on .

So that , to me , is one of the greatest sins to be denounced in this . To me , that is a greater sin than any of the papal heresies , and I have to justify that because that's a big statement .

It's because Jesus Christ says over and over , the apostles say over and over and over one of the most repeated commands in the New Testament is that Christians are to particularly love one another , do good unto all , but especially those in the household of faith .

Over and over the Lord , jesus Christ and his apostles make this a test of whether or not you are a Christian . If you will not love the brethren , you are not a Christian , you're a liar .

Okay , so when Christendom 1.0 is marked by constant tribal warfare of Christian land against Christian land , that to me is one of the most shocking and irredeemably wicked acts of Christendom . I would put it in the top three , I mean for sure , lined up with any other thing that you could give me , theologically or actually .

I think that because so much of the bad , so much of the wickedness that happened . It happened because that happened If they had been united , and I even mean East and West , and then within the West . If they had been united , the Muslims never would have taken these lands . In fact Islam probably wouldn't exist today .

Eric shared this video . Eric is a clear Nazi supporter . What are they trying to do ? They're trying to kill your reputation . I mean it's reputation . Assassination .

I mean , and I do think this is part of the fruit of the Reformation as excellent as the work of the Reformers was in recapturing the gospel and in just correcting a lot of the errors of the Catholic Church , like praise God for these men , but one of the byproducts of that was extreme schismatism .

So these are two sins that , when we are yet sanctified , not yet sanctified , will plague us .

Yeah , which is why and to be clear , like I really do want to be clear about this my criticisms of Dr White and anybody else I can't keep track of who we've criticized in the video they're criticisms that I genuinely want to be on the same team , like I want to go to be able to share the conference stage with any , any men in this tribe and promote one

another's good work and disagree charitably and do all these things Like I genuinely want that . My instinct , dispositionally , is that way anyway . So this is kind of like , well , that's how I am , but particularly because of these commands in scripture , it grieves me and I don't mean that in the pietistic , like ohgoing mark of our presence or our culture .

This is one of the top five things people outside of our movement or world would point at inside of it as a critique , and that's one that we have to take very seriously and actually admit . You know what they're right about that .

There's a reason that reformed Christianity is a tiny cultural force today and it's vanquished and swallowed up by normie SBCism , by broadly evangelical megachurchianity . We are vastly less influential and one of the biggest reasons is that because we can't even maintain friends with people who agree with us on 94.7% of stuff .

For 10 minutes before we start anathematizing them and going on screeds against one another , and I think that's a shame , like that's to our shame . That that's true Shouldn't be .

We've tried to do this and I think it would be healthy , where it's like with a Dr White , you know , just reaching out and saying like I'd love to talk , I'd love to hear you out , I'd love it if we didn't have to fight these fights in broad daylight while the enemy wants to castrate our children .

If a lot of this could be solved and again we could treat each other as brothers , I think that would be really helpful . One of the things I want to ask you guys is this is more specific to Vlad .

Now on the issue of violence , brian , you know we've kind of joked about this , but I don't think anybody here is saying , yeah , everything that Vlad did was great . What are some of the things that you would say are like where would you say okay , this is a definite . I think there's some definite problems here , and that's really just to clarify .

So I think that it's probably , at least to me , my instincts on . The best answer to that kind of question is that I don't know exactly where the line is when it comes to war , with terror tactics and guerrilla warfare that inevitably involve the death of civilians . And there's two tensions in my mind that bring us there .

Is that just where you must avoid unintentional at least this is the consensus view of the Christian tradition when it comes to just war , use in , bellow use ad bellum , you have to avoid which ? Those are justice , just war in whether or not to go to war , and then just war in the exercise or the execution of warfare .

Those are the two kind of sides of the question . When can I lawfully go to war and then how do I lawfully conduct war ? So I'm actually talking more of that use ad bellum , like in , or I might be getting that wrong , one of those two , when I'm engaging in just warfare .

I think it was a just war against the Muslims in Vlad's case , in pretty much every case .

So in the conduct of that warfare , how do you deal with the killing of civilians , and particularly in an age when your enemy is definitely going to kill all the civilians they can in the most horrific way and enslave them , and you're vastly outnumbered because of the backstabbing of your Christian brethren , and so your only hope to not have all of the children

of your land enslaved to you seems to be I need to basically adopt the terror tactics of the Turks . So that , I think , is a very difficult question where it's tempting to just say well , obviously you should never do that . You should just entrust yourself to the Lord and let the Muslims win , and maybe the Lord will act on your behalf .

I've heard people genuinely make that argument . It's the same argument I've heard people make against even the use of military deception as a form of sinful lying . So you should never deceive , because , whereas all warfare is deception , it's just deception , it's even commanded in scripture in different , but that's for a different time .

So here's what I want I want righteous , godly Christians who are elites in the conduct of statecraft and war , and I'm not that guy , and so there are limits to my knowledge and my wisdom on the issue .

But I want to defer and say we need godly statesmen who are engaged in godly statecraft , including the exercise of godly war , with extreme violence sometimes , and I want those men to make this their study so that we can have political elites and military elites and that kind of thing that pastors don't need to know or make it their study all the way down .

So I'm , there is when I see like Vlad impaling women and putting their babies on the stake too , I'm like obviously he shouldn't do that . That's my immediate like . That seems sinful , that seems wrong . I get why he did it 100% . I understand the chain of reasoning that led him to go .

They're going to enslave all of our kids unless we fight terror with terror and they completely win .

And I think of passages where in the Psalms , if we sing all the Psalms , one of the things you will sing is Psalm 109 , celebrating or petitioning God that the infant children of our enemies would be dashed upon the rocks , and I think that that's a type of passage that is sometimes left out of our thinking and our calculations in these things .

However , there's biblical theological ways of answering it in Israel , and there's , you know . However .

You say wait a minute , some of this stuff actually looks really unjust . But the same people were like the Crusades are bad , were on Twitter defending to the hilt what Churchill had done , and so we're talking about things like firebombing Dresden , intentionally bombing civilians .

The British after Dunkirk were in a really bad way and so they're really limited in what they could do to fight a war and so , yeah , they're like bombing cities from distance .

It's even harder to say and I'm not a historian my understanding of the issue is that particularly the firebombing of civilians was started by by the british into the germans and that it was something that the germans wanted to avoid , but that once it got to there it was tip for tat .

And I and I would say even to the the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and nuclear bombs dropped on civilian populace that sort of of question you have to when people who would be patently appalled at Vlad in another part of their mind they make a whole argument that that was great , because it was .

We were going to lose a million more servicemen if we had to invade Japan . And so I think , therefore , we had to kill several hundred thousand civilians . I'm saying corporate wants me , wants you to show me the difference between these two pictures vaporizing with atomic weaponry , women and children and impaling women and children .

They're the same picture and you're even using the exact same line of reasoning to get there . Your finger is on the scale ideologically somewhere if you reject Vlad wholeheartedly and embrace the atomic bombing of japan japanese and a war right wasn't that .

Yeah , that's it was a terror tactic we've talked about this with stonewall jackson when , when he is a use ad bellum , use in bellow question again , where he said I don't want the civil war to happen , but if it does , the south needs to um invade the north and wage a black flag campaign against the North , burning and pillaging as we go , because it's the

only way to end this war with as little bloodshed as possible , as quickly as possible .

You have to admit that that line of reasoning is the line of reasoning of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , is the line of reasoning of Vlad the Impaler , is the line of reasoning , and then you either have to reject all of it or you have to get more nuanced than that . That's the point .

I think that is not often reckoned with by modern commentators , who don't realize that in one room of their mind they hold an opinion that contradicts an opinion they hold in a different room of their mind , and that's important to see .

And he says because we had power when we did it , therefore it's right . So that actually makes a lot of sense of how people think today is they're not going to Aquinas or Augustine and thinking through like what is just war theory ?

What they're doing is they're saying well , yeah , like the invasion of Afghanistan , for example , that was justified because we did it Right , because the because we did it Right .

How far would you go ? How far would you go ? And at least going there psychologically helps us to get a little bit . I don't think we can fully get there , but it helps us get a little bit closer to understanding the type of moral calculation that these men and women were facing in their day .

We think about Vlad and like he grew up being raped yeah , I mean , if he wasn't , it was because he was too ugly . But more than likely , more than likely , most people think like Raju obviously was because he was too ugly . But more than likely , more than likely , most people think like Raju obviously was , he was six years in a Muslim prison .

Like they'd be raping everybody .

Often gets translated gentleness , but it's the idea of a war horse under control right , that's power under restraint . Power under restraint . So to be a genuinely good man , you have to have a capacity for violence .

And here's one of the things that I do want to go back to too , just to challenge people who are like , well , there's no place in scripture where we can promote , you know , men as conquerors and warriors as a good thing . But it's really interesting and you know people want to say , like you know , our kingdom isn't of this earth .

But it's really interesting that when we get the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11 , that it's not only , like you know , we have Abraham and Moses and they did all these things , but in the list we get people like Samson , right , we get people verse 32 , chapter 11, . What more shall I say ?

I do not have time to tell about Gideon , barak , samson , jephthah , about David and Samuel and the prophets who , through faith , now hear this , conquered kingdoms , administered justice , gained what was promised and shut the mouths of lions . And then it'll go on to talk about also the martyrs .

But when we sing 666 , the Son of God goes forth to war , and we sing the Psalms that talk about David's hands being trained for war , we cannot , I don't think you can walk away with that and be like . You know , we're like the Mennonites . Christians should just be pacifist at all costs . I don't think that's what scripture is teaching at all .

There is a place for righteous and holy violence and we need to be very careful about that . I think understanding the realms of where that fits in with the state . One of the things Aquinas pointed to was that it needs to be , in order to be , a just war right .

It needs to be properly called upon for war , like in America , congress has to declare , which apparently now they don't have to do anymore , or well-organized militia , which is I mean , I'm , it's not just you going rogue .

Your country , I think one of the places that we've seen it is with the Haitian situation , because you've had a lot of Christians who are like well , you have to love your neighbor , and so we should welcome all these people who are committing crimes and eating cats . And they said , no , that didn't happen .

Is that , fundamentally , though , by loving your Haitian neighbor , you're hating your actual neighbor , your Springfield Ohio next door neighbor , because their children are the ones that are being assaulted , their properties are the ones being damaged , they're the one that are the one stolen from , and so you're actually hating your neighbor .

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Check the link in the show notes or visit premierbodyarmorcom today . So one question I want to ask you guys the Matthias Corvinus and the campaign against , which leads to the Bram Stoker , but the campaign against Vlad .

One of the other elements of warfare here is propaganda , and I can't help but think that guys like Owen Strand , guys like Russell Moore , these guys are basically regime tools issuing propaganda that's basically telling Christians you need to be a doormat , you need to let the immigrants come , they need to flood us , our country , that's good .

They're going to destroy white America , that's a good thing . Whatever , this is a propaganda campaign . So , brian , I guess , as you think about that , it's not just we've talked about the physical . How do we as Christians think through , like , how do we fight that ?

Well , we're kind of doing some of that , I think , but we're sort of in the information operation phase of war , and so it's important to think through , like , how do we actually communicate ? What messaging do we posit ?

Very few of us can say anything other than that . So when you start committing blasphemy against the gods of the age , when you start saying things and this is Owen's fundamental problem is that he's clearly read a couple Stephen Ambrose books .

I like Stephen Ambrose , by the way World War II historian , et cetera , whatever and he based on his interests as I can see them unfold over the years . World War II , history is one of his interests and it's but- .

Churchill was like a total racist , like hated Indians , hated all this stuff , considered blacks like subhuman , like all this different stuff . But Owen has a vision of World War II that is on par with the heavenly pattern for the holy of holies in his mind , and so when you challenge it , you have become not just a liar but you have become an apostate .

So you have to understand that , from a propagandist perspective , the function of people like us is . One of the functions is to commit public blasphemy and take the heat , guys , I'm telling you , against idols not against the holy yeah , against the , against the idols of the day , and , like right now on my twitter , my mentions are full .

This is an average day for all of us . Some another guys call me a nazi now , like just this morning . Another guy's calling me a Nazi now , like just this morning . Eli , whatever his name , is that guy . So this is an everyday occurrence for guys like us that step forward not as Anons . I love my Anon brothers .

I see the need for many of you being Anons . You won't hear me countersignal you on that front at all , but we're not Anons . My Christian name , my family's name is out there , tied to these things , and we're saying them out loud . Okay , so what's going to happen is that a lot of people are going to run propaganda campaigns against all of us .

They're going to say , they're going to try to discredit us in whatever way they possibly can . So discord , so doubt about our character . You know , fill in the blank , blank .

So if you are going to wage ideological war and we must you just have to prepare yourself first for the fact that people will try to kill you , and I mean that like people are trying to assassinate our character daily on the internet . I've also had death threats and like literal death threats too .

I think most you know , at least eric and I have both had literal death threats , and I don't know if Dan Dan maybe has too . He doesn't tweet very much , just to my face . Yeah , that's true , we've had . We've just had death threats . Actually , earlier today didn't Eric threaten to kill you if you you know , like from the story .

And one thing I would say to people too if , if you're a pastor listening to this and you're like you know , some of your messaging , I don't understand , you know , even reaching out , I think , for guys to have the willingness to have the conversation , because it is weird to me that you could see so many people as worthy of a conversation but then , like guys

who are , like you said , 94 point , whatever percent aligned with you , yeah , and you're never going to pick up , you're going to anathematize a guy , you're never going to pick up the phone . I actually feel like that's a disgrace to the pastoral office to do that .

We try to be pretty careful about it , unless somebody has like an you know , let's say they're a Trinitarian heretic , for example , and we know outwardly , we know outwardly , like I know your position . I don't need to like question like , well , what's your character ?

I'm like , no , I'm not federal vision . I understand it , I don't agree with it . Okay , so a lot of this stuff we're pretty standard Orthodox on , and where we're unorthodox- . We're not anti-right justification people no , no , like I don't go there , I'm not , you know fill in the blank with a million things .

So where we are unorthodox is we're culturally unorthodox against the backdrop of popular orthodoxy today , and in there we're like , violently unorthodox . We backdrop of popular orthodoxy today , and in there we're like , violently unorthodox . We're not feminists . We're not . We are patriarchalists . We're not . Even complementarians were patriarchalists .

We're not post-war consensus supporters . We're very much going to tell you that nationalism is not the problem , that national particularity of a people in a place is not the problem , that loving your own kindred and seeking to propagate your own culture and people , that's not a problem . That's not a sin to do that .

It's not a sin contra the post-war consensus and contra race brain of today to say general things about different races and say that , generally speaking , this race has this strength and weakness as a general statement . The scriptures do that .

Well , they're white , like the local pastor that smeared me this week as a racist , nazi , heretic and he said I rebuke you . I mean , it's like his words . So why did he do that ? Because I was willing to say something positive about something that he considered part of the divine holy of holies , the heavenly pattern that must be traced up on earth .

And he's wrong about that historically . And we could run circles around him in an argument on any of these things , which they usually won't , because he's probably completely ignorant on the subject . He's probably never read one book that would challenge his thinking , and you just have to go into this world saying that's the majority of people .

So on this front , backing up something earlier , this is why we have to get comfortable saying I disagree with brother so-and-so on this issue . I love what the Lord is doing in them and I'm not their enemy .

I'm actually their friend and we are allowed to disagree on some of these things , because the moment you elevate any praising of the Crusades makes you a sacralist , roman Catholic , popish , heretic . I'm sorry , you have gone over the little rumble strip on the freeway at 75 miles an hour and you're about to hit a concrete barrier in terms of Christian love .

You're making an elementary failure of Christian love and that's the issue . So when we talk about the propaganda of the day , one of the functions of the propaganda of the day is to divide the enemies of itself against each other .

So you just have to understand this that one of the things the enemy would love and I mean both the human enemy and the spiritual enemy is to divide us all up , all of us Reformed Christians and theonomists and two kingdom guys and paedobaptists and creedobaptists and Presbyterians and Lutherans and all this stuff and people who have this view of the history of the

Civil War , the World War II or the Crusades . And people have this view and they would love nothing more than to get us who agree on 90 plus percent of stuff . All those groups I just agreed , just listed , should be brothers and they just want us to kill each other so that we don't kill them .

So there's the people who militantly oppose us . Right , crusades are evil , wicked . But there's another type of guy that actually kind of drives me nuts and it's the guy who's like always a wet blanket .

You know , it's like , yeah , the crusades this , but you know there was this and well , you know , I don't know , I just don't know if I agree with this and really what they're trying to do is put a wet blanket on any positive movement of rebuilding , right .

So it's like you're allowed to think thoughts , you're allowed to have certain even interesting ideological takes , but it seems like the guy who is really not allowed to exist . Our type of people are the kind of people who build things , who say the crusades , we can learn some things .

And we're going to take that fighting spirit , we're going to take that explorative spirit for the people who sailed seas . We're going to take that . We're going to say let's build , let's go , let's do this thing .

Dan , there seems to be a type of Christian who's like , yeah , read the Crusades book , but as long as you do a fair amount of questioning and then turning it into sort of a gash me a moment of like , yeah , but we can't ever do that today .

And so our goal is to look at it and say what did they do Right , what did they do wrong and what can we learn from that ? Amen , and that's what a builder does right , is you ? You I mean case studies in business . You look at a business and you're like , hey , they did this really , really well . They didn't do this very well .

If I was to apply that to my situation , I would do it this way , learning the lesson that I have . And so then you're like , okay , hey , yeah , like you said , eric , there's a fighting spirit , there is a martial spirit that's really important .

There's a love of people and place , a love of Christian neighbor and those things that you can learn and say , okay , let's particularize that in our time against this globalist sort of Marxist attitude that's predominant in the spirit of our age . Let's love our time and our people and our place and defend Christian brothers and defend the weak .

Let's do that , let's build something , and then you've got the wet blanket guy . You said it's like a sandblot guy .

the . This is what so many of like the boomer evangelicals . It's like their life force is taking the wind out of young men's sails , sucking all the air out of a room . Like you just want to make sure that nobody ever actually does anything .

Have you done this ? Have you done this ? Look at all the stuff I've done , look how experienced I am , look how great I am and to me , the amount that that just made me go ugh , yuck . It was off-putting and it was , I thought , unbecoming of an older man who ought to be , yes , helping and temper the zeal and help young men do a good job .

This is one of the things we try to do at New Christendom Press is we're not going to affirm every single thing that young men do or say in their zeal , but we are going to affirm their zeal and try to direct it in a helpful course . And again , all the brother war things I said .

I want to be at peace with apologia and like when I look at the things that a lot of the abolitionist guys have done , that Jeff Durbin has done pastorally and in his fight against abortion .

When I look at the debates Dr White has engaged in apologetically and a lot of the great things that he's done on that front , and I look at a lot of people great things that he's done on that front , and I look at a lot of people with whom we have disagreements of various types , and I want to say , like those agreements are real .

But also , just let's go , let's all build together , let's go do something meaningful , because when you're actually building things and not just saying words , you realize very quickly that you have to figure out how to work together across minor to medium size disagreements where you'll never build anything other than just yourself .

You'll be by yourself building and you'll build something small and it will be not lasting and people will forget it within 10 minutes of your death .

Honor Thy Fathers , recovering this biblical patriarchal vision of the reformers , and so I would encourage people to check that out Again . That was on Joel Webben's . Right Response Ministries had Zach Gares , pastor Zach Gares , on there . One thing I want to point people to as well . We were talking about righteous deception .

I don't know if you guys had seen this today , but Justin Taylor from Crossway , old John Piper pal him and Danny Burke were going hard at Matt Walsh because they said how dare you , you know , do this film in which you're you know ?

You know there's a lot of people who aren't willing to share a stage with us , but , brian , I'll tell you this right now .

Uh , my , my final charge . You know , happy impaling , whatever , um , and you've got to learn . There's a technique , joel webben . What do you need for ?