Elitism, Europhilia, and Roman Polanski

The basic theme of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the nightmare of a modern virtuous society invaded and corrupted by decadent “Old Europe” style nobility, who act in ways that defy morality and flaunt the laws of society due to their belief that they themselves are beyond the reach of man’s justice. Stoker wrote Dracula at a time when England was surpassing Europe as the cultural center of the West, and his novel was a reaction to the antinomian and often blasphemously obscene art and literature of men likeHuysmans or Baudelaire. Dracula in Stoker’s work represents not only the dark antiquity of Europe, where men of low character could, by nature of their birth into noble households, literally get away with rape and murder, but the fin de siècle movement’s seeming embrace of that sort of depravity and decadence.

Dracula, the noble who defied even death (and thus God in Stoker’s universe), took what and more importantly who he wanted without regard to common decency. He murdered, raped, and stole his way through the story, acting as the ultimate metaphor for the evil of Old Europe’s degeneracy for decades. Then something peculiar happened. Post-modern society began seeing Dracula not as a metaphor for the sexual predator protected by his wealth and power, but as an anti-hero rebelling against Victorian morality. There is no Humanities or Literature department, book publishing house or film studio where this is not the prevailing interpretation of the Dracula character. Perhaps those that see themselves as the cultural “tastemakers” of our society, the university professors, leftist “artists,” and the business interests that surround the arts, have vested interests in reigniting the noble-worship of Old Europe, in creating a society that believes in the noble’s exception including their privilege to assault and otherwise molest non-nobles. But anyone having been exposed to some published poet or author (and I’ve meet far too many) knows that this reimagining of Dracula, and vampirism in general, is simply another expression of these people’s misanthropic elitism.

A common expression of this elitism is also academic Europhilia, by which I mean the adoption (primarily by the left) of what they assume are prevailing opinions in Europe and the pretense of a disdain for America. Those of us on the right are mistaken to think the modern academic’s tendency to scoff at “dead White males” and their contributions to civilization as in some way Europhobic. To the contrary, academics have merely adopted two of Europe’s most pernicious and degrading philosophies outside of the idea of the hereditary divine right: Marxism and multiculturalism. So entranced by Europe’s ability to project the air of cultural superiority, the self-appointed elites here have entered vassalage with the new “nobility” of Europe.

Which brings us to Roman Polanski, hackneyed artist, peripheral character in the Manson murders, and violent rapist of children. Roman Polanski drugged and violently raped, both vaginally and anally, a 13-year-old girl. He then skipped bail and fled to Europe where the arts community there, with the open approval of the “tastemakers” here, helped the degenerate continue to work and prosper while avoiding justice. His recent arrest exposed how the people who consider themselves part of the most sophisticated sectors of American society are little more than living caricatures of the gypsies who followed Dracula, doing his bidding and aiding him in his most heinous crimes.