Word: tyrants
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Europe's benchmark bloodsucker is generally considered to be Vlad the Impaler, an inspiration for Dracula. Andrei Codrescu's novel The Blood Countess (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23) offers an equally unattractive alternative: Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Though never tried for mass murder, Bathory is said to have been confined to a room of her castle, where after five years she died...
...Gothic whoopee of his new book (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23), he could become as rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. The story centers on Elizabeth Bathory, a real life 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Codrescu pleats the 16th and 20th centuries together address his real concerns, the recurrent patterns of evil and its handmaiden, absolute authority...
Seen in that light, the Jews who rejected Jesus were instruments of Satan. The Evangelist Mark treats them as chiefly responsible for the Crucifixion, while softening the role of the Roman authorities. In Mark, the Roman governor Pilate, whom other sources of the period describe as a provincial tyrant, becomes a man helpless to oppose the Jewish elders demanding Christ's death. The later Evangelists expanded Mark's themes, paving the way for early Christian fathers who glimpsed the devil in their own adversaries...
...generation's anti-Castro fervor to younger Cuban Americans. He doesn't buy the claims by Menoyo and other dialogistas that they offer a centrist alternative to anti-Castro extremism. "What's a moderate?" asks Gutiarrez. "To say someone's a moderate because he'll talk to a brutal tyrant is a perversion of the label...
Mistrust of government is as American as July 4. Go down the Bill of Rights and you see protections enumerated to prevent the people's republic from degenerating into tyranny. You see a Constitution that divides its powers so that one would-be tyrant faces another in a competition that preserves the power of the electorate...