11 million+ murdered. Jews, Roma, Sinti, the disabled, queer folks (mostly homosexual men), Soviet POWs, Slavs, political prisoners…
It seems so long ago. It wasn’t. My great aunts were there, my grandmother (z”l) was there. This happened in the modern world, in living memory.
Stand up. Fight back. Never forget. Never again.
Why should I care about you? You don’t care about how atheists are mistreated and instead just lump us in with Christians.
Why should I fight for you when you wouldn’t do the same for me?
This really is a masterclass in Western Athiest morality. All the righteous fury of an evangelical and the rootless nihilism of Western Capitalism. Maybe you don’t care about the Jews or the other groups the Nazis would kill, but think about this: a Nazi takeover would almost assuredly delay or cancel the next Marvel/Star Wars/Harry Potter movie. That’s enough to get every Western atheist in America forming militias right there
Again why should I care about anyone that doesn’t care about me? Op would gladly watch me die. She already doesn’t care about atheists getting killed all over the world.
Wow, leave the internet for a couple of days to handle things in meat space, and people start saying exactly what they mean. Good to know. I should try that at work.
Dude, I have no problem with atheists. I genuinely do not care if you believe in a deity or not. I never have. And, as I have mentioned, multiple times, atheists also can face persecution in various countries to include my own. To use a phrase common in my day job: what evidence do you have?
However:
1) An atheist raised in a Christian hegemonic country is still inculcated with Christian worldviews and culture whether they themselves are Christian or not.
2) Structures built under Christian hegemony disadvantage, on a systemic level, people with minority religious cultures (including those that are atheist) to a greater degree than others. Including other atheists.
3) To equate the non-systemic oppression of individual atheists in the west to the Holocaust, which resulted in the death of 11 million people regardless of faith (at the hands of an officially secular state no less), shows you for who you really are. It’s amazing how many fascists wear leftist hats these days.
I’ve never wished harm on atheists of any cultural background, I simply point out how much of the culture of the west is steeped in Christianity. Your discomfort with acknowledging that says nothing about me.
I am willing to entertain a fair amount of debate, but debate with those who “don’t care” about the Holocaust (which, again, murdered 11 million people) because they dislike one Jew? No. Get the fuck out. Enjoy the block, it’ll begin in one hour to give you time to read this. And don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, the door doesn’t deserve that.
HEY, “VAMPIRES ARE ANTISEMITIC REPRESENTATIONS” SCHOLARS, I AM CALLING YOU OUT. I AM CALLING YOU THE FUCK OUT.
People keep going “Oh Dracula is an antisemitic caricature” and i keep going WHERE. WHAT IN THE TEXT IS MAKING YOU SAY “THAT MAN IS JEWISH. So i finally break down and go “fuck it, i’m checking google scholar” and wanna ask what’s the evidence that the texts bring up for Dracula being a vampire?
He’s got a big nose, he’s Eastern European, and drinks blood.
MOTHERFUCKER, THAT DOESN’T PROVE THAT DRACULA IS SUPPOSED TO BE A THINLY-VEILED REPRESENTATION OF JEWISH PEOPLE!!!! THAT JUST MEANS THAT YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO HAS A BIG NOSE, AN ACCENT, AND DRINKS BLOOD AND THINK “AH, CLEARLY THAT’S A JEWISH PERSON”!!!!!!!
oh you think i’m paraphrasing? You think i’m making this sound worse than it is?
HEY, YOU STUPID FUCK, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY OFFENSIVE ACTUALLY?!?!?! DO YOU KNOW THAT?!?!?!?!
Okay, folks, let me learn you two things. The first one is a logical fallacy known as circular logic. “X is the best artist because their paintings are the best; their paintings are the best because they’re the best artist” is an example of circular logic. The second thing is a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent”. If I say “The lightbulb is broken, so the kitchen is dark. The living room is dark, therefore the lightbulb in the living room must be broken”, i’m affirming the consequent.
Now, if you want to prove that Dracula is an antisemitic representation, you first have to prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness. If you prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness, then Dracula drinking blood is blood libel.
What these fucking articles keep doing, however, is “Dracula is antisemitic representation because he’s drinking blood, which is an example of blood libel because he’s an antisemitic representation” which nO! NO, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!!
(also the fact that the article I just shared decided that sucking blood wasn’t the most obvious blood libel but a representation of greed for money? Immaculate. Unbelievable. I could fucking die now.)
“But hey, Dracula is a vampire, and vampires are antisem-” NO!!!! FOLKLORE ISN’T JUST ONE THING!!!!!! IT ISN’T JUST ONE THING, YOU FUCK!!!!!
This is for you, Jeffrey Weinstock, you absolute cock– YOU DIDN’T PROVE THAT VAMPIRES WERE CONNECTED TO JEWISH PEOPLE! YOU JUST PROVED THAT JEWISH PEOPLE WERE CONNECTED TO BLOOD AND THEN DECIDED TO GO, LIKE A FUCKING HACK FRAUD, “AND OF COURSE VAMPIRES DRINK BLOOD SO-”
WELL NEWSFLASH, VAMPIRES ARE ANCIENT THINGS THAT DO MANY THINGS!!!!! SOME OF THEM DON’T EVEN DRINK BLOOD!!!!! SOME ARE ACTUALLY BASICALLY WITCHES!!!!!!!!!! SOME OF THEM ARE JUST PEOPLE WHOSE SOUL DIDN’T GO IN THE AFTERLIFE AFTER DEATH AND JUST STAYED IN THE BODY OF THE DEAD!!!!! HOW IS THAT CONNECTED TO JUDAISM?!?! THE MODERN VAMPIRE COMES FROM POLIDORI’S VAMPYRE, AND IT’S VERY LIKELY THAT WAS JUST A GIANT TAKE THAT TO LORD BYRON!!!!!!
FOLKLORISTIC THINGS ARE A GENERAL “OTHER”, NOT A ONE SIZE FITS ALL “OTHER”! AHHHHHHHHHH
Generally I agree with you.
Most of the folkloric roots of Dracula are much more based fear that one’s own dead family members will come back to haunt and kill the living. Historical acts of vampire hunting usually happened during outbreaks of wasting diseases, or in case of especially ominous death, and were usually the actions of the family and community of the suspected vampire.
That being said I want to raise two caveats to your post.
First is that Dracula have themes that are can be described as aisemitism adjacent. Most literary critics of Dracula point towards the main conflict in the book being between the modern enligtend and scientifically minded Victorian culture, and the old fashioned superstitious eastern Europe. Dracula is after all an eastern European immigrant who manes England by being a creature of Eastern European folklore. While the main message of the story of Dracula is more about the need of Scientific thinking to be opened to the unexplained (as expamplfied by Abraham van Hellsing). The story still Cary anti immigration themes.
So how does this all connects to antisemitism? The answer is perceptions of Jews and especially east European Ashkenazi Jews at the time. While the perception of the backwards east European as superstitious, backwards and primitives was in no way restricted to the Jews of east Europe, many of Staker’s contemporaries saw them as especially backwards. The Britush anti Eastern European immigration attitudes that made their way into Dracula stung extra hard for Jewish Immigrants.
Second, the image of the vampire, and Dacula in particular are appropriated with some regularity by antisemites for their rethoric ends. A famous example is the film Nosferatu, wich was an unapproved adaptation of Dracula (The Staker estate even sued the film maker) and contained much more explicit antisemitic coding. It’s also not hard to find Antisemites describing jews as “vampiric”.
Of course the fault here lies in the antisemites and not the book or the folklore, and ceding all depictions of vampires to the antisemites makes it easier for them to use vampires in this manner.
Still, Antisemitic blood label is one of the ways the Vampire myth is used and we do need to be vigilant against such rethoerics. It’s important to ask ourselves “what’s the role of the vampire in this text, and is it symbolic of something? ”
Sometimes the answer will be Landed Nobility, sometimes it will be an epidemic of AIDS or Tuberculosis, and sometimes sexual awakening, but sometimes it will be “The Jews”.
That’s the thing, some vampires are ABSOLUTELY connected to “the Jews”! Nosferatu, as you mentioned, is a clear antisemitic representation, and Jeffrey Weinstoke mentioned him as an example and i was like “yup, you are correct, great start”
And then he went on and said that therefore vampires are intrinsically connected to Jewish people, which– no???? Like, sometimes, yes, but it’s not their first and foremost purpose! Like the Interview with the Vampire vampires aren’t antisemitic representations because they drink blood and therefore it’s blood libel, for fuck’s sake Jeffrey Weinstoke. That’s a clear disease-AIDS-gay people thing! The Twilight vampires are, like… mormons? Carmilla is the lesbians, Countess Sarah is women who want to have rights or something, and Baron Ruthven is that fucker, Lord Byron.
That’s the thing that drives me wild, vampires contain multitudes! They can be so many things, so when all these researchers get together and go “well, Dracula is an antisemitic representation because he’s a vampire” it’s like– what the fuck are you saying????? Vampires are The Other! They can be anything!
I think that a big problem is that people assume that the concept of “using blood in a bad way” comes from blood libel, when the truth is that the accusation of blood libel is founded on our cultural belief that “using blood in a bad way” is perverse. “Group X uses the blood of the innocent for their weird rituals” is the Middle Ages version of the modern day “Groups X is comprised by pedophiles”; it was shorthand for ‘these people are evil monsters’. So yeah, of course there’s loads of monsters who drink blood or steal children, that’s a bad thing that monsters do! These monsters aren’t drinking blood because “we’re actually talking about the Jews, here”, Jewish people were accused of blood libel because people thought they were monsters!
It’s just, HHHHHHHHHHH, you know?
Like, read articles on how Dracula personifies the fear of traditionalism, and they make excellent points; Dracula is, literally, the past that is here to bleed you dry and take over. You can see it from the fact that he is an immortal being from centuries ago, from the fact that he is old fashioned, he is literally old and presents in an old fashioned way, is from “the old continent”, he talks about his history with pride. You also see it because the other characters are about the new. Mina is a smart, capable woman learning a new type of work. Quincey is from the US (a ““““new”“““ country). Seaward uses new methods on his patients. Jonathan is a representation of the new Empire, and stumps Dracula with shorthand, a new type of writing. They absolutely make the point that Dracula is The Old, that is established, let’s move on to see what that means.
Or Dracula personifies the danger of immigrants. How do we establish it? He’s Eastern European. He’s different from the English. He has different manners and fashions. He embraces his tradition, and only learns enough to pass. Cool, we’ve established, on to talk about what that means.
Or Dracula personifies sexual perversion! How do we establish it? *points at the book*
But then you get to “Dracula is an antisemitic representation” and“well he’s got a hooked nose and is Eastern European”. Like, excuseme?!?!?!
I don’t even necessarily disagree! I spent a couple of hours researching the issue and found out that Bram Stoker wrote Some Stuff in his diaries, and also there’s the character of Immanuel Hildesheim in the novel that could be used to draw some parallels. But I had to find those things out MYSELF! Like, actual, tangible evidence of something that could actually prove the point and nobody bothered to use it in the articles where they are trying to prove the point!!
You are putting words into my mouth that I didn’t say, and it’s really funny because my comment is right above yours.
I never said Vampires are inherently antisemitic, I definitely never said that Dracula is Jewish coded because of his appearance.
Let me restate things more simply:
1.The book itself doesn’t single out jews, and is not directly antisemitic for it’s negative portrail of Eastern Europeans, I am even willimg to admit that being a noble, Dracula is explicitly coded as Christian. But the book still traded in stereotypes that indirectly and let me say it again indirectly effected contemporary Jewish people. Even when they were aimed at Christians.
You can see this happening with other negative stereotypes sometimes effect people of other cultures. For example Sikh Janai and Hindu people that were targeted for hate after 9/11.
This is why I used the term antisemitic adjacent. Not because the book is antisemitic, but because sometimes people repropriate it to be antisemitic.
I am not condemibg of the book itself, this is completely the fault of any Antisemites that saw the book as a way to farther their Agenda.
2. I completely agree that vampires can mean many different things, and not every vampire story means all of those things. That’s what I tried to say so above, I listed a lot of different uses for vampires, and I can think of many others. I didn’t mean to say every vampire story represents all those things at the same time, but that vampires can mean one or more of them, and not mean other.
Lol i’m not arguing with you i’m continuing the conversation because we agree! I’m focusing on how the scholars fucked up, I didn’t mean to imply that you thought that, sorry :)
My apologies, I must have read a “he” as a you…
No worries at all!!! We’re all more likely to read things with a negative inflection, I know it happens to me all the time! Plus I have the bad habit of just writing big whole things when talking about topics I’m interested in, so that must be overwhelming too lol. I should have made it more clear that I agree with you before getting into more ranting!
HEY, “VAMPIRES ARE ANTISEMITIC REPRESENTATIONS” SCHOLARS, I AM CALLING YOU OUT. I AM CALLING YOU THE FUCK OUT.
People keep going “Oh Dracula is an antisemitic caricature” and i keep going WHERE. WHAT IN THE TEXT IS MAKING YOU SAY “THAT MAN IS JEWISH. So i finally break down and go “fuck it, i’m checking google scholar” and wanna ask what’s the evidence that the texts bring up for Dracula being a vampire?
He’s got a big nose, he’s Eastern European, and drinks blood.
MOTHERFUCKER, THAT DOESN’T PROVE THAT DRACULA IS SUPPOSED TO BE A THINLY-VEILED REPRESENTATION OF JEWISH PEOPLE!!!! THAT JUST MEANS THAT YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO HAS A BIG NOSE, AN ACCENT, AND DRINKS BLOOD AND THINK “AH, CLEARLY THAT’S A JEWISH PERSON”!!!!!!!
oh you think i’m paraphrasing? You think i’m making this sound worse than it is?
HEY, YOU STUPID FUCK, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY OFFENSIVE ACTUALLY?!?!?! DO YOU KNOW THAT?!?!?!?!
Okay, folks, let me learn you two things. The first one is a logical fallacy known as circular logic. “X is the best artist because their paintings are the best; their paintings are the best because they’re the best artist” is an example of circular logic. The second thing is a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent”. If I say “The lightbulb is broken, so the kitchen is dark. The living room is dark, therefore the lightbulb in the living room must be broken”, i’m affirming the consequent.
Now, if you want to prove that Dracula is an antisemitic representation, you first have to prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness. If you prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness, then Dracula drinking blood is blood libel.
What these fucking articles keep doing, however, is “Dracula is antisemitic representation because he’s drinking blood, which is an example of blood libel because he’s an antisemitic representation” which nO! NO, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!!
(also the fact that the article I just shared decided that sucking blood wasn’t the most obvious blood libel but a representation of greed for money? Immaculate. Unbelievable. I could fucking die now.)
“But hey, Dracula is a vampire, and vampires are antisem-” NO!!!! FOLKLORE ISN’T JUST ONE THING!!!!!! IT ISN’T JUST ONE THING, YOU FUCK!!!!!
This is for you, Jeffrey Weinstock, you absolute cock– YOU DIDN’T PROVE THAT VAMPIRES WERE CONNECTED TO JEWISH PEOPLE! YOU JUST PROVED THAT JEWISH PEOPLE WERE CONNECTED TO BLOOD AND THEN DECIDED TO GO, LIKE A FUCKING HACK FRAUD, “AND OF COURSE VAMPIRES DRINK BLOOD SO-”
WELL NEWSFLASH, VAMPIRES ARE ANCIENT THINGS THAT DO MANY THINGS!!!!! SOME OF THEM DON’T EVEN DRINK BLOOD!!!!! SOME ARE ACTUALLY BASICALLY WITCHES!!!!!!!!!! SOME OF THEM ARE JUST PEOPLE WHOSE SOUL DIDN’T GO IN THE AFTERLIFE AFTER DEATH AND JUST STAYED IN THE BODY OF THE DEAD!!!!! HOW IS THAT CONNECTED TO JUDAISM?!?! THE MODERN VAMPIRE COMES FROM POLIDORI’S VAMPYRE, AND IT’S VERY LIKELY THAT WAS JUST A GIANT TAKE THAT TO LORD BYRON!!!!!!
FOLKLORISTIC THINGS ARE A GENERAL “OTHER”, NOT A ONE SIZE FITS ALL “OTHER”! AHHHHHHHHHH
Generally I agree with you.
Most of the folkloric roots of Dracula are much more based fear that one’s own dead family members will come back to haunt and kill the living. Historical acts of vampire hunting usually happened during outbreaks of wasting diseases, or in case of especially ominous death, and were usually the actions of the family and community of the suspected vampire.
That being said I want to raise two caveats to your post.
First is that Dracula have themes that are can be described as aisemitism adjacent. Most literary critics of Dracula point towards the main conflict in the book being between the modern enligtend and scientifically minded Victorian culture, and the old fashioned superstitious eastern Europe. Dracula is after all an eastern European immigrant who manes England by being a creature of Eastern European folklore. While the main message of the story of Dracula is more about the need of Scientific thinking to be opened to the unexplained (as expamplfied by Abraham van Hellsing). The story still Cary anti immigration themes.
So how does this all connects to antisemitism? The answer is perceptions of Jews and especially east European Ashkenazi Jews at the time. While the perception of the backwards east European as superstitious, backwards and primitives was in no way restricted to the Jews of east Europe, many of Staker’s contemporaries saw them as especially backwards. The Britush anti Eastern European immigration attitudes that made their way into Dracula stung extra hard for Jewish Immigrants.
Second, the image of the vampire, and Dacula in particular are appropriated with some regularity by antisemites for their rethoric ends. A famous example is the film Nosferatu, wich was an unapproved adaptation of Dracula (The Staker estate even sued the film maker) and contained much more explicit antisemitic coding. It’s also not hard to find Antisemites describing jews as “vampiric”.
Of course the fault here lies in the antisemites and not the book or the folklore, and ceding all depictions of vampires to the antisemites makes it easier for them to use vampires in this manner.
Still, Antisemitic blood label is one of the ways the Vampire myth is used and we do need to be vigilant against such rethoerics. It’s important to ask ourselves “what’s the role of the vampire in this text, and is it symbolic of something? ”
Sometimes the answer will be Landed Nobility, sometimes it will be an epidemic of AIDS or Tuberculosis, and sometimes sexual awakening, but sometimes it will be “The Jews”.
That’s the thing, some vampires are ABSOLUTELY connected to “the Jews”! Nosferatu, as you mentioned, is a clear antisemitic representation, and Jeffrey Weinstoke mentioned him as an example and i was like “yup, you are correct, great start”
And then he went on and said that therefore vampires are intrinsically connected to Jewish people, which– no???? Like, sometimes, yes, but it’s not their first and foremost purpose! Like the Interview with the Vampire vampires aren’t antisemitic representations because they drink blood and therefore it’s blood libel, for fuck’s sake Jeffrey Weinstoke. That’s a clear disease-AIDS-gay people thing! The Twilight vampires are, like… mormons? Carmilla is the lesbians, Countess Sarah is women who want to have rights or something, and Baron Ruthven is that fucker, Lord Byron.
That’s the thing that drives me wild, vampires contain multitudes! They can be so many things, so when all these researchers get together and go “well, Dracula is an antisemitic representation because he’s a vampire” it’s like– what the fuck are you saying????? Vampires are The Other! They can be anything!
I think that a big problem is that people assume that the concept of “using blood in a bad way” comes from blood libel, when the truth is that the accusation of blood libel is founded on our cultural belief that “using blood in a bad way” is perverse. “Group X uses the blood of the innocent for their weird rituals” is the Middle Ages version of the modern day “Groups X is comprised by pedophiles”; it was shorthand for ‘these people are evil monsters’. So yeah, of course there’s loads of monsters who drink blood or steal children, that’s a bad thing that monsters do! These monsters aren’t drinking blood because “we’re actually talking about the Jews, here”, Jewish people were accused of blood libel because people thought they were monsters!
It’s just, HHHHHHHHHHH, you know?
Like, read articles on how Dracula personifies the fear of traditionalism, and they make excellent points; Dracula is, literally, the past that is here to bleed you dry and take over. You can see it from the fact that he is an immortal being from centuries ago, from the fact that he is old fashioned, he is literally old and presents in an old fashioned way, is from “the old continent”, he talks about his history with pride. You also see it because the other characters are about the new. Mina is a smart, capable woman learning a new type of work. Quincey is from the US (a ““““new”“““ country). Seaward uses new methods on his patients. Jonathan is a representation of the new Empire, and stumps Dracula with shorthand, a new type of writing. They absolutely make the point that Dracula is The Old, that is established, let’s move on to see what that means.
Or Dracula personifies the danger of immigrants. How do we establish it? He’s Eastern European. He’s different from the English. He has different manners and fashions. He embraces his tradition, and only learns enough to pass. Cool, we’ve established, on to talk about what that means.
Or Dracula personifies sexual perversion! How do we establish it? *points at the book*
But then you get to “Dracula is an antisemitic representation” and“well he’s got a hooked nose and is Eastern European”. Like, excuseme?!?!?!
I don’t even necessarily disagree! I spent a couple of hours researching the issue and found out that Bram Stoker wrote Some Stuff in his diaries, and also there’s the character of Immanuel Hildesheim in the novel that could be used to draw some parallels. But I had to find those things out MYSELF! Like, actual, tangible evidence of something that could actually prove the point and nobody bothered to use it in the articles where they are trying to prove the point!!
You are putting words into my mouth that I didn’t say, and it’s really funny because my comment is right above yours.
I never said Vampires are inherently antisemitic, I definitely never said that Dracula is Jewish coded because of his appearance.
Let me restate things more simply:
1.The book itself doesn’t single out jews, and is not directly antisemitic for it’s negative portrail of Eastern Europeans, I am even willimg to admit that being a noble, Dracula is explicitly coded as Christian. But the book still traded in stereotypes that indirectly and let me say it again indirectly effected contemporary Jewish people. Even when they were aimed at Christians.
You can see this happening with other negative stereotypes sometimes effect people of other cultures. For example Sikh Janai and Hindu people that were targeted for hate after 9/11.
This is why I used the term antisemitic adjacent. Not because the book is antisemitic, but because sometimes people repropriate it to be antisemitic.
I am not condemibg of the book itself, this is completely the fault of any Antisemites that saw the book as a way to farther their Agenda.
2. I completely agree that vampires can mean many different things, and not every vampire story means all of those things. That’s what I tried to say so above, I listed a lot of different uses for vampires, and I can think of many others. I didn’t mean to say every vampire story represents all those things at the same time, but that vampires can mean one or more of them, and not mean other.
Lol i’m not arguing with you i’m continuing the conversation because we agree! I’m focusing on how the scholars fucked up, I didn’t mean to imply that you thought that, sorry :)
HEY, “VAMPIRES ARE ANTISEMITIC REPRESENTATIONS” SCHOLARS, I AM CALLING YOU OUT. I AM CALLING YOU THE FUCK OUT.
People keep going “Oh Dracula is an antisemitic caricature” and i keep going WHERE. WHAT IN THE TEXT IS MAKING YOU SAY “THAT MAN IS JEWISH. So i finally break down and go “fuck it, i’m checking google scholar” and wanna ask what’s the evidence that the texts bring up for Dracula being a vampire?
He’s got a big nose, he’s Eastern European, and drinks blood.
MOTHERFUCKER, THAT DOESN’T PROVE THAT DRACULA IS SUPPOSED TO BE A THINLY-VEILED REPRESENTATION OF JEWISH PEOPLE!!!! THAT JUST MEANS THAT YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO HAS A BIG NOSE, AN ACCENT, AND DRINKS BLOOD AND THINK “AH, CLEARLY THAT’S A JEWISH PERSON”!!!!!!!
oh you think i’m paraphrasing? You think i’m making this sound worse than it is?
HEY, YOU STUPID FUCK, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY OFFENSIVE ACTUALLY?!?!?! DO YOU KNOW THAT?!?!?!?!
Okay, folks, let me learn you two things. The first one is a logical fallacy known as circular logic. “X is the best artist because their paintings are the best; their paintings are the best because they’re the best artist” is an example of circular logic. The second thing is a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent”. If I say “The lightbulb is broken, so the kitchen is dark. The living room is dark, therefore the lightbulb in the living room must be broken”, i’m affirming the consequent.
Now, if you want to prove that Dracula is an antisemitic representation, you first have to prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness. If you prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness, then Dracula drinking blood is blood libel.
What these fucking articles keep doing, however, is “Dracula is antisemitic representation because he’s drinking blood, which is an example of blood libel because he’s an antisemitic representation” which nO! NO, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!!
(also the fact that the article I just shared decided that sucking blood wasn’t the most obvious blood libel but a representation of greed for money? Immaculate. Unbelievable. I could fucking die now.)
“But hey, Dracula is a vampire, and vampires are antisem-” NO!!!! FOLKLORE ISN’T JUST ONE THING!!!!!! IT ISN’T JUST ONE THING, YOU FUCK!!!!!
This is for you, Jeffrey Weinstock, you absolute cock– YOU DIDN’T PROVE THAT VAMPIRES WERE CONNECTED TO JEWISH PEOPLE! YOU JUST PROVED THAT JEWISH PEOPLE WERE CONNECTED TO BLOOD AND THEN DECIDED TO GO, LIKE A FUCKING HACK FRAUD, “AND OF COURSE VAMPIRES DRINK BLOOD SO-”
WELL NEWSFLASH, VAMPIRES ARE ANCIENT THINGS THAT DO MANY THINGS!!!!! SOME OF THEM DON’T EVEN DRINK BLOOD!!!!! SOME ARE ACTUALLY BASICALLY WITCHES!!!!!!!!!! SOME OF THEM ARE JUST PEOPLE WHOSE SOUL DIDN’T GO IN THE AFTERLIFE AFTER DEATH AND JUST STAYED IN THE BODY OF THE DEAD!!!!! HOW IS THAT CONNECTED TO JUDAISM?!?! THE MODERN VAMPIRE COMES FROM POLIDORI’S VAMPYRE, AND IT’S VERY LIKELY THAT WAS JUST A GIANT TAKE THAT TO LORD BYRON!!!!!!
FOLKLORISTIC THINGS ARE A GENERAL “OTHER”, NOT A ONE SIZE FITS ALL “OTHER”! AHHHHHHHHHH
Generally I agree with you.
Most of the folkloric roots of Dracula are much more based fear that one’s own dead family members will come back to haunt and kill the living. Historical acts of vampire hunting usually happened during outbreaks of wasting diseases, or in case of especially ominous death, and were usually the actions of the family and community of the suspected vampire.
That being said I want to raise two caveats to your post.
First is that Dracula have themes that are can be described as aisemitism adjacent. Most literary critics of Dracula point towards the main conflict in the book being between the modern enligtend and scientifically minded Victorian culture, and the old fashioned superstitious eastern Europe. Dracula is after all an eastern European immigrant who manes England by being a creature of Eastern European folklore. While the main message of the story of Dracula is more about the need of Scientific thinking to be opened to the unexplained (as expamplfied by Abraham van Hellsing). The story still Cary anti immigration themes.
So how does this all connects to antisemitism? The answer is perceptions of Jews and especially east European Ashkenazi Jews at the time. While the perception of the backwards east European as superstitious, backwards and primitives was in no way restricted to the Jews of east Europe, many of Staker’s contemporaries saw them as especially backwards. The Britush anti Eastern European immigration attitudes that made their way into Dracula stung extra hard for Jewish Immigrants.
Second, the image of the vampire, and Dacula in particular are appropriated with some regularity by antisemites for their rethoric ends. A famous example is the film Nosferatu, wich was an unapproved adaptation of Dracula (The Staker estate even sued the film maker) and contained much more explicit antisemitic coding. It’s also not hard to find Antisemites describing jews as “vampiric”.
Of course the fault here lies in the antisemites and not the book or the folklore, and ceding all depictions of vampires to the antisemites makes it easier for them to use vampires in this manner.
Still, Antisemitic blood label is one of the ways the Vampire myth is used and we do need to be vigilant against such rethoerics. It’s important to ask ourselves “what’s the role of the vampire in this text, and is it symbolic of something? ”
Sometimes the answer will be Landed Nobility, sometimes it will be an epidemic of AIDS or Tuberculosis, and sometimes sexual awakening, but sometimes it will be “The Jews”.
That’s the thing, some vampires are ABSOLUTELY connected to “the Jews”! Nosferatu, as you mentioned, is a clear antisemitic representation, and Jeffrey Weinstoke mentioned him as an example and i was like “yup, you are correct, great start”
And then he went on and said that therefore vampires are intrinsically connected to Jewish people, which– no???? Like, sometimes, yes, but it’s not their first and foremost purpose! Like the Interview with the Vampire vampires aren’t antisemitic representations because they drink blood and therefore it’s blood libel, for fuck’s sake Jeffrey Weinstoke. That’s a clear disease-AIDS-gay people thing! The Twilight vampires are, like… mormons? Carmilla is the lesbians, Countess Sarah is women who want to have rights or something, and Baron Ruthven is that fucker, Lord Byron.
That’s the thing that drives me wild, vampires contain multitudes! They can be so many things, so when all these researchers get together and go “well, Dracula is an antisemitic representation because he’s a vampire” it’s like– what the fuck are you saying????? Vampires are The Other! They can be anything!
I think that a big problem is that people assume that the concept of “using blood in a bad way” comes from blood libel, when the truth is that the accusation of blood libel is founded on our cultural belief that “using blood in a bad way” is perverse. “Group X uses the blood of the innocent for their weird rituals” is the Middle Ages version of the modern day “Groups X is comprised by pedophiles”; it was shorthand for ‘these people are evil monsters’. So yeah, of course there’s loads of monsters who drink blood or steal children, that’s a bad thing that monsters do! These monsters aren’t drinking blood because “we’re actually talking about the Jews, here”, Jewish people were accused of blood libel because people thought they were monsters!
It’s just, HHHHHHHHHHH, you know?
Like, read articles on how Dracula personifies the fear of traditionalism, and they make excellent points; Dracula is, literally, the past that is here to bleed you dry and take over. You can see it from the fact that he is an immortal being from centuries ago, from the fact that he is old fashioned, he is literally old and presents in an old fashioned way, is from “the old continent”, he talks about his history with pride. You also see it because the other characters are about the new. Mina is a smart, capable woman learning a new type of work. Quincey is from the US (a ““““new”“““ country). Seaward uses new methods on his patients. Jonathan is a representation of the new Empire, and stumps Dracula with shorthand, a new type of writing. They absolutely make the point that Dracula is The Old, that is established, let’s move on to see what that means.
Or Dracula personifies the danger of immigrants. How do we establish it? He’s Eastern European. He’s different from the English. He has different manners and fashions. He embraces his tradition, and only learns enough to pass. Cool, we’ve established, on to talk about what that means.
Or Dracula personifies sexual perversion! How do we establish it? *points at the book*
But then you get to “Dracula is an antisemitic representation” and“well he’s got a hooked nose and is Eastern European”. Like, excuseme?!?!?!
I don’t even necessarily disagree! I spent a couple of hours researching the issue and found out that Bram Stoker wrote Some Stuff in his diaries, and also there’s the character of Immanuel Hildesheim in the novel that could be used to draw some parallels. But I had to find those things out MYSELF! Like, actual, tangible evidence of something that could actually prove the point and nobody bothered to use it in the articles where they are trying to prove the point!!
HEY, “VAMPIRES ARE ANTISEMITIC REPRESENTATIONS” SCHOLARS, I AM CALLING YOU OUT. I AM CALLING YOU THE FUCK OUT.
People keep going “Oh Dracula is an antisemitic caricature” and i keep going WHERE. WHAT IN THE TEXT IS MAKING YOU SAY “THAT MAN IS JEWISH. So i finally break down and go “fuck it, i’m checking google scholar” and wanna ask what’s the evidence that the texts bring up for Dracula being a vampire?
He’s got a big nose, he’s Eastern European, and drinks blood.
MOTHERFUCKER, THAT DOESN’T PROVE THAT DRACULA IS SUPPOSED TO BE A THINLY-VEILED REPRESENTATION OF JEWISH PEOPLE!!!! THAT JUST MEANS THAT YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO HAS A BIG NOSE, AN ACCENT, AND DRINKS BLOOD AND THINK “AH, CLEARLY THAT’S A JEWISH PERSON”!!!!!!!
oh you think i’m paraphrasing? You think i’m making this sound worse than it is?
HEY, YOU STUPID FUCK, DO YOU KNOW THAT THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY OFFENSIVE ACTUALLY?!?!?! DO YOU KNOW THAT?!?!?!?!
Okay, folks, let me learn you two things. The first one is a logical fallacy known as circular logic. “X is the best artist because their paintings are the best; their paintings are the best because they’re the best artist” is an example of circular logic. The second thing is a logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent”. If I say “The lightbulb is broken, so the kitchen is dark. The living room is dark, therefore the lightbulb in the living room must be broken”, i’m affirming the consequent.
Now, if you want to prove that Dracula is an antisemitic representation, you first have to prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness. If you prove that Dracula is connected to Jewishness, then Dracula drinking blood is blood libel.
What these fucking articles keep doing, however, is “Dracula is antisemitic representation because he’s drinking blood, which is an example of blood libel because he’s an antisemitic representation” which nO! NO, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!!!!
(also the fact that the article I just shared decided that sucking blood wasn’t the most obvious blood libel but a representation of greed for money? Immaculate. Unbelievable. I could fucking die now.)
“But hey, Dracula is a vampire, and vampires are antisem-” NO!!!! FOLKLORE ISN’T JUST ONE THING!!!!!! IT ISN’T JUST ONE THING, YOU FUCK!!!!!
This is for you, Jeffrey Weinstock, you absolute cock– YOU DIDN’T PROVE THAT VAMPIRES WERE CONNECTED TO JEWISH PEOPLE! YOU JUST PROVED THAT JEWISH PEOPLE WERE CONNECTED TO BLOOD AND THEN DECIDED TO GO, LIKE A FUCKING HACK FRAUD, “AND OF COURSE VAMPIRES DRINK BLOOD SO-”
WELL NEWSFLASH, VAMPIRES ARE ANCIENT THINGS THAT DO MANY THINGS!!!!! SOME OF THEM DON’T EVEN DRINK BLOOD!!!!! SOME ARE ACTUALLY BASICALLY WITCHES!!!!!!!!!! SOME OF THEM ARE JUST PEOPLE WHOSE SOUL DIDN’T GO IN THE AFTERLIFE AFTER DEATH AND JUST STAYED IN THE BODY OF THE DEAD!!!!! HOW IS THAT CONNECTED TO JUDAISM?!?! THE MODERN VAMPIRE COMES FROM POLIDORI’S VAMPYRE, AND IT’S VERY LIKELY THAT WAS JUST A GIANT TAKE THAT TO LORD BYRON!!!!!!
FOLKLORISTIC THINGS ARE A GENERAL “OTHER”, NOT A ONE SIZE FITS ALL “OTHER”! AHHHHHHHHHH
So, now that I’ve processed THAT POST and the insanity behind it that made me spend the last week having panic attacks, followed by flashing back to all the traumatic shit I dealt with in the last 10 or so years thanks to people with similar mentalities to the puritanical, power-hungry demons on this site. Except that was in real life, and I can’t handle this crap anymore.
This year, I finally reached the breaking point to the extent that my family had to stop pretending I’m not damaged. I still can’t go to therapy, but I am taking anti-anxiety/depressants now. One of the things that elevated my already-high stress level was The Old Guard fandom and the toxic environment that killed the one joy I had last year.
What was that? Seeing a movie with an un-stereotyped, irreligious, artistic queer North African man who looks like a male version of me. Seeing him in a loving relationship with a fellow Mediterranean, like so many of the couples I grew up around, parents of ethnically mixed friends I had. I came into the TOG fandom, excited, immediately making posts of facts, translations, seeking out other MENA/Mediterranean people to connect with, because fuck has it been lonely.
And I did. Very briefly. Before shit went to hell because of Hélène and her circle of tyrannical friends.
I still can’t believe they were allowed to get away with this.
I went out of my way to write ridiculously detailed posts on MENA culture, history, language and religion, answer so many questions, with links and details that could only come from someone who grew up with this stuff and spoke Arabic. And I had people questioning my validity??? Talking shit about me, bullying me, or even trying to discredit me because I *gasp*stated a fact that upset their racist headcanons.
Meanwhile, a very Americanized Rich White French Woman, was allowed to get away with constantly changing her ethnicity, religion, economic status, skin tone, family history, make up insane contradicting stories of suffering, and claiming oppression points from so many unrelated demographics. Not just that, she got to peddle racist bullshit as fact, frame the Amazigh of Morocco as if they’re Native Americans, all the way down to the claims that her grandfather was a ‘shaman’, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. That, and applying Black American stereotypes, experiences, and issues to MENA people, especially to herself.
And use the ‘I’m insert minority’ excuse to get away with being an unrepentant monster.
I smelled a rat ages ago, but any time I expressed it to someone they didn’t believe me, and then when I saw what happened to my friend after he DM’d her as a ‘fellow Moroccan’, the horrific shit that was mobilized against him that chased him off the site, I knew I couldn’t handle what would happen to me if I tried to question her bullshit. The stress this fandom gave me was much more than what I had managed to stomach all these years and I had reached a breaking point.
So, I left. I let them have my only representation in exchange for my sanity. I canceled all my remaining Joe-centric/culture posts and fic ideas for TOG and told myself to never let myself forget that I’m not welcome anywhere.
Oh, and these tweets?
They’re about me and nizarnizarblr, who was run off the site. I’m ‘an anti-arab fanatic’ for saying North Africans aren’t Arabs and that our dialects can be barely intelligible to actual Arabs. And he was a ‘rabid nationalist’ for saying the same things as me. We made large educational posts about OUR part of the world, OUR cultures, OUR experiences and that wasn’t approved by the Western Liberals of Tumblr dot com.
She fucking slandered us on a site known for mass-bullying campaigns and suicide-baiting people, called us these inflammatory terms because we actually knew what we were talking about. She used hot-button political terms to stoke mindless hatred against us, the people she was racefaking as.
This RICH WHITE WESTERN WOMAN hated that there were actual North Africans in the space she wanted to rule over, who could ‘threaten’ her position as the authority and token, and that us contradicting her could get her exposed, so she fucking weaponized her following.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS THIS IS? DO I NEED TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW RACIST THIS IS? SHE COULD HAVE RUINED OUR LIVES!
The thing that had briefly brought me joy, encouraged me to write two enormous fics after a period of writer’s block, now makes me sick. The one space I should have belonged in could have killed me.
I, someone that actually shares Joe’s background and has been told I look like a female version of him, got suspicion, disrespect, hostility and chased out of the fandom along with fuck knows how many other Brown/Muslim people under the command of the embodiment of privilege and her cronies, that loved getting the platform to abuse others because they used her words as gospel.
Where are they now? The Anglo/North Euro women that appointed themselves the authority on how to write a MENA man, who tried to tell actual MENA/Muslim people in the fandom how he should be portrayed to the extent of organizing smear campaigns against us when we defied their authority? Why are they all suddenly so quiet when you couldn’t pay them to shut them up?
There was no way you could be friends with someone like Hélène, in groupchats with her for months, and praising her to high heaven for giving you ‘sources’ and ‘sensitivity reads’ and not know what kind of person she was. Considering they all were just as vicious and racist, xenophobic and antisemitic, they must have agreed. That’s why they defended her, went around DM’ing people to delete their reblogs of the exposé. It’s not that they didn’t believe the overwhelming amount of evidence, it’s that they were panicking about losing the pedestal she afforded them.
I ASK AGAIN: Why were they so horrible to actual MENA/Mediterranean/Muslim people yet had their head completely up her arse when she claimed to be ALL THREE. What made her so special? Why did she get sanctified while everyone actually part of those demographics was demonized?
They knew. The whole time they knew. This was all done to give her and her chosen few complete control of a fanbase, where their word was law and any deviation got you witch-hunted out.
Now that their golden goose of consequence-free tyranny had been scratched, they’ve switched to trying to deflect from the point of that post – that she’s a sickeningly horrible person – and are making it about the dumbest fandom shit imaginable.
This isn’t about that fucking half-baked movie. This about all the shit she’s done over the years and continued doing within the community that was built around it. Helene and her shithead friends, used her race-faking and lying about every part of her identity and background, and a fictional MENA man as their carte blanche to abuse others, when they HAD NO RIGHT OR SAY IN THE MATTER.
This woman didn’t just spend years lying about being poor to con people out of money, spouting tankie shit, being a genocide denier, a 9/11 truther, cycling through ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, pretending to be like 2 different types of Jewish while being antisemitic, spreading wrong cultural shit she Googled wrong as fact, a racist and a race-faker, who brown-faced and seemed to be bordering on digital blackface as well, I know I’m forgetting a bunch of other shit because HOLY FUCK!
This woman went about everything with a baffling amount of confidence, while I and so many others never disclosed our backgrounds, until this fanbase demanded it, out of the need to feel safe from racial abuse. Yet, she was basically pretending to be me and got popular off it.
She called Marwan Kenzari a slur that makes me sick, that is not a word that comes up randomly, especially the way she used it. It has to be something you say regularly, without hesitation, for it to be the first thing that comes to mind. Also, that image of him? The one that stirred up that hideous response from her? In it he looks like my dad, moustache, brown jacket, cropped hair and all. So, kosomik ya Helene.
The fact that her URL is ‘lgbtmazight’ when she isn’t anything of the sort is sickening. She couldn’t be arsed to check where Marrakech is or what color it was for her racefaking tall tales, or check that there tens of millions of Amazigh people in Morocco alone, or even understand that there are no literal translations, so NO ONE is using tbarkallah as a fucking mic-drop.
Seriously, she put no effort into this and everyone believed her.
And there are people defending her. How evil do you have to be to think there’s nothing wrong with any of this? Stop fucking making it about two fictional characters and think about the REAL PEOPLE THIS HAS AFFECTED!
I hope everyone that tagged her as or used her as a source deletes her posts of their blog, I hope no one recommends her wrong and racist posts as info, I hope anyone who claims she was their ‘sensitivity reader’ removes her name, I hope no one believes any of the shit she said or has their view of MENA people and culture shaped by her.
The Old Guard fandom has its own HIVliving, MedievalPOC, Rose Christo, white girl who is totally a Cherokee Princess because she did a test and found that she’s 1% Native American, and the charade has been going on for too long.
This post is about Len (better known as LGBTmazight, romiosini, figure8, junmotions). The information compiled here has been found and organized by people of many ethnicities, including those she pretends to be (namely two Moroccans, one of whom is Amazigh, who were raised in Morocco and speak the language), who are now exhausted by her uncontrolled racism. This post is not an invitation to send her hate: it’s a compilation of her unbridled racefaking for internet points, and comes with the invite of blocking her and not using her as a reference when it comes to information regarding MENA countries. 99% of what she says, she copies from Google and often attributes to the wrong country.
As of summer 2021, Len is claiming to be a brown Maghrebi-Greek woman who comes from poverty and whose parents weren’t able to afford to give her an adequate education, works in manual labor, was raised between Greece and Morocco for the first seven years of her life, is dark-skinned enough to get harassed by the police everywhere she goes, and has learned pride in her heritage from her Muslim Moroccan father. She claims to be able to speak, among other languages, Darija, Arabic, and Tmazight.
However, in her internet career Len has also identified as being: white, white-passing, brown, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, animist from a family of shamans and in line to become the next “Darwisa”, French, Spanish, Peloponnesian/Pontic/Anatolian Greek, Sephardic Jewish, Jewish with family “in Europe during WW2", partly Romani, Moroccan, specifically Riffian Moroccan with solely Amazigh descent, and with “close ties to Asia Minor”. Her economic status has shifted from being able to live in the world’s most expensive neighborhoods and attending fancy private schools during the Global Recession to having to ask her followers for change. According to her stories, her family has been at the center of every tragedy that happened in North Africa and Europe since the beginning of the 1900s.
This to say: Len, LGBTmazight, is a racefaker on the same level as HIVliving, a parasite who latches onto racial stereotypes and applies them to her person to give herself, as well as her followers, the right to harass, abuse, and send death threats to people who do not follow or support her narrative. It will be brought up later, but the Moroccan Amazigh person who participated in writing the post, as well as other MENA individuals, were appalled by the blatant racism, Orientalism, antiblackness, fetishization, and White Savior Syndrome displayed by Len, as well as her open disrespect for actual Moroccan traditions, people, and culture. Although this began as a light-hearted research, it soon became clear that Len’s racism, xenophobia especially against Italians and Ukrainians, antisemitism, and downright disgusting behavior are incredibly serious issues, to the point that one of the MENA individuals behind this post became physically ill from seeing what she puts online.
None of the information compiled here is a product of doxxing: it is a collection of what Len herself has put online over the years, and let it be known that we were gracious enough to not post her, her parents’, and her sister’s full and legal names and faces despite the fact that Len has shared them multiple times.
As an appetizer, here’s the face of the “racialized” brown woman who claims to be constantly abused and racially profiled because of her dark skin and North African features:
Although in the past she identified as they/them or he/him, on her current Twitter her pronouns are she/her. This account will do the same.
And here is what she thinks of Black and Jewish people: they are obstacles to the attentions she should, in her opinion, receive for the made-up abuse she rants about online. Her platforms were never about defending, representing, and protecting minorities; it was always a stage for her to grab the attention of well-meaning people. About actual minorities, she couldn’t care less and considers them a nuisance:
(In these tweets she is talking about xenophobia, something she has said is only ever brought up as a way to shift the conversation away from racism. How the tables have turned, Len.)
A summary of the contents of the post: Len is 25% Moroccan at most, was born and raised in Europe, never lived in the Maghreb, doesn’t speak the language, didn’t learn about Islam from her father, never suffered any racially-charged abuse, and never lived in poverty. Her father is a tenured professor and has been one since the 1990s, and her mother is also an extremely well-respected professor; they have dozens of publications between them, and her mother seems to have written the text for her field. Although we have no certainties regarding their monthly income, it is easy to say they are wealthy: both Len and her sister were sent to private schools all their lives, her family could afford to own/rent multiple residencies at the same time, drive around in expensive cars, go on vacation often, and buy Apple products immediately after release. Everything she has said since she started looking for fandom clout is a lie and she has used your desire to be good people to her advantage. Extensive proof is below the cut, and mind that this is only the tip of the iceberg: we have more and it only gets worse.
Hélène, we were initially open to dialogue, but after seeing that you’re a genocide denier who keeps inventing stories of abuse to get pity from people while you spend your time harassing actual PoC and other minorities, as well as being someone who has no problems calling Marwan Kenzari the French version of the insult “sand-ni**er”, we realized you are not redeemable in any way.
We already know she’s going to screenshot this and whine about it on Twitter, because even if she likes to portray herself as a great debater, she has never been able to hold a single online conversation without first victimizing herself and crying about being abused, then screenshotting and asking her followers to harass the people who disagreed with her. We are not doing this for her; she’s neither important nor special enough for that. We are doing this to get rid of the racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and fetishization of MENA people that she has spent a yearaiding.
Omg I just talked about the rest of cadaver used in science by the nazis while the university was under Germany’s control that was still in the University’s buildings a few years back and that it was the rest of a jewish person taken to a concentration camp before being taken to the University to be killed and dissected,,,, AND MY MOTHER ASKED ME IF THEY KEPT IT?????? GIRL??? ARE YOU WELL???
She really asked me if jars filled with the parts of a jewish person who was killed by a nazi, put in jars by a nazi during the nazi occupation have been kept in the university nowadays????? All because “even if they were nazis the science is still useful”?????
Girl,,, like yes, using nazi science is useful, sure, but needs to be taken with a grain of salt, even for disciplines in which they were the best (like archaeology), but keeping the corpse of a person who never wanted that, was taken away from their family, was killed savagely without remorse in order to be used in an antisemitic and racist way is “useful for science”????? And they should’ve considered keeping it to teach?????
