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Dune is a cautionary tale about how no matter how based a white boi can look, he can still be the devil
“Ahh yes, a cautionary tale about the dangers of heroic figures. Very deep meaning. Many layers of subtext.”
“When the white man first arrives, open fire.”
He literally says himself, out loud, in the books, that he is orders of magnitude worse than Hitler. Real “subtext is for cowards” moment from Frank Herbert, which apparently was still not enough for these clowns to understand lol.
I will say that there is a point that it doesn’t matter how unsubtle the message is, if no alternative exists. Heroes are bad and messiahs are dangerous, sure, but Frank Herbert still only wrote of messiahs, heroes and conquerers and goes on and on about how amazing they are because of all their super human capacities.
It has a very “Don’t do this very awesome thing” vibe. Like anti smoking ads from tobacco companies.
He writes Paul as a man who has lost control of his kingdom and then follows up with a book where Paul says he’s millions of times worse than Hitler and goes blind in an attack he didn’t see coming, and then follows it up with a book where Paul’s children have to actively fight against their family to not be killed by a zealot grandmother or a possessed aunt (who commits suicide because she can’t bear the possession any longer), and then follows it up with a book where Leto is the Loneliest Man Alive and literally everyone in the universe fucking hates him except his army of lesbian supersoldiers (which he unceremoniously divorces because his enemies devised the ultimate bait: a woman who feels empathy towards him).
Paul isn’t even presented heroically in the first one, he’s manipulating a population that’s been primed by indoctrination generations ago for a messiah and he hates the entire process of doing so. Leto is a pathetic and reviled figure who basically lets himself be killed because he’s addicted to bullying the clones of his dad’s best friend.
That doesn’t change the fact that when anything changes in the dune universe it does so through the agency of singular men. Paul creates a new evil corrupt empire from the ashes of the old, and this is turn is challenged by heroic individuals who gain followers through their singular abilities. There is never a point where the solution is systemic or those challenging the status quo are just regular people.
Not so, the protagonists all spearhead mass movements. Paul without the Fremen dies in the desert. Leto needs to take the throne to do anything and still only rules by hydraulic despotism because the forces arrayed against him are significant and linger for thousands of years.
Paul spearheads a messianic movement built up around him as a savior figure. Which is shown as failed when he no longer controls it. The only people with agency in the Dune universe are the special people and that’s simply fact.
Paul without the Fremen dies in the desert
Are you going to declare that it is materialist because he would die without water next? The Fremen don’t have any agency, don’t make decisions, don’t do anything until Paul grants that to them with his specialness.
in the books
90% sure they haven’t read the books, just watched the movies and read a plot summary of the rest
It’s not even the first book. Neither Villeneuve nor Lynch have gotten that far.
Worse than Hitler and Genghis Khan combined, I should add
Worse than every single mass murderer in history combined. Paul killed literal planets during the Jihad.
I’ll preface this by saying Dune is absolutely one of my favourite series and GOED is one of my favourite books.
It’s really questionable and Messiah’s tales of Paul’s villainy are beyond hamfisted. In the first book, after defeating Jamis but before reaching Sietch Tabr Paul sees his last chance to avoid the jihad: Kill everyone there including himself and his mother. I don’t see anyone with common sense lining up to make a choice between an extremely inhuman action and incomparable atrocity.
I’d say that if Herbert was trying to make a point about JFK/charismatic leaders pushing their people into horrible acts, he didn’t succeed. He thought the same, so in the next book he literally had Paul compare himself to Genghis khan and Hitler and then say he killed way more. Subtle.
Mind you, the dichotomy I mentioned is a key theme in children and god emperor. In contrast to Paul, Leto could take those inhuman actions to avoid a worse outcome. And the point about teaching humanity a lesson they’ll remember in their bones is deeply idealistic, as are most of Leto’s monologues. It doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the character, and it may not be as idiotic and shameless as, say, Heinlein, but the part of my brain responsible for dialectical materialism didn’t stop pinging.
This comment got away from me but I hope the point is clear, a fascist reading of Dune is closer to the actual text than a Marxist reading, so I can’t begrudge Nazis or liberals for appropriating it. To the ghost of Herbert: America learned fuck all from Nixon, pal. They had a corpse drag them into another proxy war with a nuclear power. They lost fewer people in an attack than cigarettes kill every month, and they gave their govt the authority to do Watergate x300 million around the clock. You know what they did learn? Cronkite’s honest face taught them to trust their news. They fell for it when an ambassador’s actor daughter cried about some horseshit, they fell for it when someone shoved aluminium tubes in their face as evidence of something, and they fell for it when some lunatic said their enemies were committing a genocide without showing a single body. What a fucking lesson.
This is all true and a good point, but I think Dune is fundamentally more interesting if you consider that the characters generally take it as a given that their precognition is complete and omniscient without any real evidence that that’s the case. Was everything Leto II did actually necessary to avoid a worse outcome, or was it only one of many possible paths?
Smokes up the worm shit. 
“We have no choice but to commit genocide.”That’s the whole point in the books tho isn’t it? It is about how the future is “a wave of possibilities and probabilities”, and Paul and later Leto the 2nd’s precognition is surfing the cusp of this wave. So they are never saying or believing the future they see is the one the will happen. But their precognition also makes kind of live in this state where they act in ways that bring that future to fruition in a kind of “inevitable” way. They are like a surfer constantly falling in the wave, they are as much guiding things to that future are they are guided by the mass of possibilities that form the wave.
Yes, so fascists interpreting them as “hard men who do what’s needed” are missing the point that they are being driven by history as much as the other way around and “what’s needed” isn’t actually that clear. Readers given supposed precognition, and an outcome driven by the existence of that precognition. They assume that that’s evidence the precognition did show the only possible future, rather than self-fulfilling prophecy.
I mean we are led to believe they think, and “know”, that it’s the only future where humanity actually thrives. That they are forced to enact that future because of that weight, of like an uber trolley problem. Either they commit those atrocities in life, or billions or even trillions die and suffer infinitely more forever.
And I don’t think the book is about making us believe they are right, or anything. But how that would affect someone. Like how it’s almost kind of inevitable because it wasn’t Paul or Leto’s specific moral failing that led them to be “mislead” by their visions or whatever.
It’s just that anyone would have to act as they acted. In some sort of moral automation. Even if we were wrong in our visions, the slight chance we are right makes the atrocities we commit imperatives.
I don’t remember the passages 100% so I’ll say “there’s a reading that” Leto was aware of this limitation of prescience. Something about thinking deeply about the venue of the wedding making him feel like the golden path was slipping away. If this is the case, and not just flowery language about diverging from the golden path while staying in the confines of his prescient vision, the worm may have chosen not to gamble what he saw as the only known chance for the survival of humanity for the benefit of relatively few. I think there was also something in chapterhouse about things being not exactly as Leto saw them.
I’ll add this on as something Herbert absolutely didn’t write and probably didn’t mean: What if these two fuckers only saw extremely inhuman actions as the only way to prevent total calamity just because they’re so far removed from humanity that they can’t imagine a similar outcome without suffering beyond measure?
Editing to add after seeing your other comment: Prescience being fundamentally flawed is at best a minor theme, within the story for all intents and purposes, it’s accurate. Moreover, Herbert may not have said the hard times, strong men drivel, but he absolutely believed that rough conditions made rougher, tougher people. Harkonnen < Atreites < Sardaukar< Fremen for this reason and it’s absolutely not rejected in the rest of the series.
But tougher in the sense of capacity for violence. Both the ability to enact it and the mental capacity to justify truckloads of it. I think that’s (one of) the point(s) of the Sardaukar and Fremen.
I don’t think Herbert is praising the Fremen as ubermensch at all.
Like yeah they are strong, in body and spirit. And their culture has many beautiful aspects. But they are absurdly superstitious and are genocidally murderous.
Also I’m sure Herbert didn’t intend for this at all, but there’s a lot of parallels between the Fremen and (Jewish people that “settled” in) Israel if you think about it.
Both were persecuted and expelled from place to place for a looong time, both suffered genocides. Their settled homes are deserts, but a place that is of interest to all powers around them. Both are ethno-religious groups. Both are capable of incredible violence, probably from carrying that massive generational trauma. Both fight mostly through black-ops like groups instead of large armies. Idk just a random thought I just had.
Was everything Leto II did actually necessary to avoid a worse outcome, or was it only one of many possible paths?
Now if we ignore Omnius and Erasm being hamfisted into it to make good tragedy into ordinary pulp sci fi story about survival, it was entirely unnecessary because everything that could endanger humanity was also the product of Paul/Leto’s rule. I think they both understood it and clearly said they are imprisoned in the prophecy.
The real least bad move would be destroying spice in the end of book one.
The real least bad move would be destroying spice in the end of book one.
They seem to indicate, at least in the first book, that after Paul entered the sietch, the jihad was unavoidable. Even if Paul died, the Fremen would carry it out in his name. Leto II says something about how a prophet is locked into their own prophecy unless they create their death contrary to it. He mentions John the Baptist apparently engineering his own beheading to escape his vision. Supposedly this death need not be real, as Paul allowed himself to be abandoned in the desert to die, allowing Muad’Dib to die, and the Preacher to arise. He was no longer The Messiah, but this fell to Leto II, but even he “died” to the tigers and was reborn as a worm.
Right, but destroying the spice would end all the spice induced prophecies. Jihad would not happen, simply because guild would refuse to transport Fremen. Civil war in the empire would also not happen for the same reason. Trade would stop and humanity would be fragmented again, but, fun fact, most of planets were just subsistence farming feudal shitholes that would not die out, and another fun fact, the one that die would be nobility, from lack of spice. I don’t really see many downsides to this in comparison with Leto II rule and its consequences.
Well what he did eventually did end up like that one way or another. Humanity did scatter and fragment. This kind of reinforces that Dune really is anti-great man propaganda tbh. Like good job wormie, you did in 5k years what could’ve just been done in the first book…
I was actually worse though, because of scale plus the mass genocides in books 5+. Also the core of problem was not even removed, remember that the first real invisible human was Siona, and even if they really had thousands descendants really fast, the scattering started at roughly the same point so almost nobody scattering had it at first and there is just no possiblity for the genes to spread enough in 1500 years.
Imo basically every core problem of humanity in Dune stemmed from bad guys winning the butlerian jihad. That’s what make it a Greek tragedy where every choice is bad as long as you don’t free yourself from that basic iron premise.
But the basic problem of Dune as a book is that is completely idealist (with prominent Great Man theory, even though it criticise it as you said) and there is little historical materialism in it, despite constantly claiming it is a book about societies, ecology etc. After book 4 it stopped even pretending.
Oh yeah, fully agreed. I think Dune as a Greek Tragedy and not a “warning” or moral lesson makes much more sense. It’s not about what not to do, but about the inevitability of tragedy. Even if humanity escape our current cycles, we’ll just enter longer and even more tragic cycles.
Very lib, but yeah 🤷♂️
I wouldn’t say he was the villain, more of a protagonist of Greek tragedy where you’re fucked no matter what you do. Well he did had two opportunities to avoid being galactic hitler but in both he would have to kill himself and in second one seriously gamble with humanity’s survival.
https://xcancel.com/emergentbtc/status/1993007030345347072
It’s amazing that people actually just still take it as a fact that everything Paul and Leto II did was necessary. You are told explicitly in the very first book (before the element of prophecy is even introduced) that the prophecy he is fulfilling is fake and made up as a colonial control mechanism. The characters feel compelled to do terrible things they don’t even really seem to want to do, and the counterfactual of “maybe our precognition isn’t omniscient” isn’t even considered.
“Hey did you know there’s a gene that makes people immune to prescience?”
Damn, that’s crazy. Anyway, about the prophecy
(Dune related 40k rant)
In another case of Warhammer being a pastiche of several classic sci-fi works including Dune, they also managed to recreate this fandom argument but worse.
Textually in Dune, prescient vision is fallible but can pretty reliably indicate trends over long periods of time. Hence Paul and Leto II justifying atrocities to avoid complete human extinction, the ethics and accuracy of which is still questioned constantly.
Whether it is questioned enough to carry the uncertainty out to a satisfying degree in Leto’s case…?
Meanwhile in 40k the God-Emperor is constantly portrayed as self-absorbed, distant, abusive, narcissistic, and blatantly wrong constantly, and he doesn’t even have the excuse of seeing the Golden Path.
It is outright stated as such hundreds of times, and that it was his personal megalomania, xenophobia, and abuse of his children that led to him getting corpse-emperor’d on the throne.
But chuds, especially tourists who will never touch the actual game and spend most of their time reading wikis and watching nazi loretubers, will constantly spout that everything the Emperor and his Imperium did was justified. “It sucks but it’s necessary because the setting is just soooo dark, it’s what Humanity needs to do to survive” - bullshit! How many times does a piece of fiction need to say “this was entirely avoidable and is the worst possible way things could have gone” before willingly media-illiterate redditors accept it?
Is it just another manifestation of liberal order in the face of catastrophe? “Millions have died but it’s how things are done, sadly it’s necessary and nothing could have changed it”.
It’s probably worse that, as the media juggernaut lumbers on, some hack authors want to paint the humans as the unambiguous good guys and the Emperor as ultimately right too.
Even orks are shown to be capable of bargaining. They may be genetically engineered super soldiers leftover from a war between gods, but orks understand mercenary work. You can give orks shiny new weapons and they will fight for you against worthy foes. So even the go-to example of a xenos race “worthy of extermination” falls flat. The Imperium would rather spend the lives and resources of thousands of star systems trying to eradicate the orks as opposed to giving them a titan or two as payment for fighting the Tyranids on humanity’s behalf.
Chaos and Tyranids are the only real existential threat to humanity, with Necrons infected with curses not far behind. Tyranids are wild animals doing animal things. But Chaos? The greatest gift the Ruinous Powers ever received was nine primarchs and nine legions of space marines. The Emperor doomed humanity the moment he created his supersoldiers, intending to conquer the galaxy.
Orks are kind of weird and I’d assume that Humanity before the Dark Age didn’t exactly have good relations with Orks either. Chaos and Tyrannids didn’t exist during the great crusade and the Imperium was the only military power the Orks could fight to the fullest.
The Imperiums current stance is a leftover from the great crusade and even the current primarchs don’t believe in Xenos Extermination. Guilliman has more or less given up about undoing the 10000 years of brainwashing of trillions of souls and focuses entirely on just keeping the Imperium together.
Even during the crusade, Horus quite literally would’ve made peace with Xenos if Erebus didn’t fuck shit up.
Also keep in mind that most of humanity has been brainwashed into accepting their living standards and the unnecessary cruelty is seen as duty that you’re supposed to be proud of. This obviously doesn’t work out that well and leads into rebellions or chaos infestations but the Imperium has enough military power to throw at small problems like this. It’s simply too big to fail.
Orks are kind of weird and I’d assume that Humanity before the Dark Age didn’t exactly have good relations with Orks either.
I assume Eldar empire took care of nasty things like ork Waaghs* or emerging hostile species like Rangda for the 60 million years since obviously galaxy was not destroyed in that time. Humanity pre Age of Strife also just had to be incredibly tolerant compared to Imperium just because it is often mentioned in HH books thast galaxy was full of alien species and Great Crusade genocided untold number of them, and it wouldn’t be so if humans were exterminating them actively before Age of Strife.
*iirc in not even 2 millenia after the warp storms lessened and allowed for travel, there were 2 apocalyptic waaghs that would overrun entire galaxy if not stopped, so if we multiply that by 60 million years, yikes.
The Eldar took care of them for most of the 60 million years but probably not during the last few thousand years of debauchery which led to hostile species running rampant in the galaxy.
Humanity was tolerant and progressive before the Civil War with the men of iron atleast. After that relations probably rapidly deteriorated with Xenos and especially the Eldar because of obvious reasons.
The Eldar took care of them for most of the 60 million years but probably not during the last few thousand years of debauchery which led to hostile species running rampant in the galaxy.
Were there even any in that time? I mean they probably didn’t intervened in the human civil war against Iron Men* and that was the biggest war event before Age of Strife but i would assume orks also tried something. Not to mention that the debauchery of Eldar seems to be very abrupt event and i find it hard to believe that after 60 million years of basically completely static culture they did this without outside intervention. Which btw seems very coincidental in time with certain powerful psyker moving towards his ambitions, to which both Eldar and whatever humanity looked before being thrown on their knees by Iron Men and Age of Strife would probably object, not to mention his strange custom of empowering chaos everywhere he touch (yes i do accuse Emps of definitely sabotaging the Eldar and maybe even Iron Men rebellion to prepare galaxy for his ascent, he’s not above doing such things)
*Fun fact, the Ironkyn of Leagues of Votann are basically Iron Men, just they didn’t rebelled. Question is why, and the most possible answer is that they weren’t enslaved but treated more or less as equals by the Kyn ancestors or that the Kyn ancestors expeditions were cut off from the rest of humanity so their Iron Men just missed it and possibly whatever signal started it (or both)
The Men of Iron Rebellion was squashed by a bunch of galactic species allying against them. The Eldar were probably there as well considering how powerful the tech at that was. It also destroyed Human Technological Prowess because most of it was reliant on the MOI. Combine Human Instability with Eldar Debauchery and other species had the perfect setup to start hostilities.
The Eldar thing as building up for millions of years and considering they are a very psychically active species, it’s incredibly likely that the pattern grew exponentially as numbers grew. That stuff was also empowering a sleeping Slaanesh who I believe further influenced Eldar into being worse.
yes i do accuse Emps of definitely sabotaging the Eldar and maybe even Iron Men rebellion to prepare galaxy for his ascent, he’s not above doing such things
I doubt it. The Emperor was not especially powerful during that time. I doubt he could compare to unrestrained Eldar Psykers who had unlimited access to the warp before the Fall.
As for the Men of Iron Rebellion, I like to believe that it was inevitable as Humanity was too reliant on them yet didn’t see them as equals. Also there could be involvement of the C’tan(probably the Void Dragon) who’re likely the “Real Omnissiah” as mentioned by UR-025.
Re: Orks fighting Tyranids, they tried that already in the Octarius War, though with schemes rather than negotiations.
The real reason orks need to be fought by the Imperium is so that GW can keep selling plastic minis of orks to fight other plastic minis of space marines.
I’m pretty sure that the Emperor has some sort of prescience although it’s fucked up due to warp fuckery so your point still stands. He’s downright one of the worst entities in the setting and basically doomed humanity.
We must change the opening paragraphs of every book to “This a wargame setting where everyone and everything has to constantly be at war with everyone and everything else, that’s why every culture is militaristic and every threat is recalcitrant. If you try to justify things with only in-universe lore ignoring this fact, you are a fool and nobody should take you seriously.”
Libs in the rare case when a piece of media does not want them to understand a protagonist as “chosen specialest good boy” or “psychopathic sexyman tumblrbait”
I don’t know either. What is the irony here?
In the second book he literally compares himself to Hitler and points that he killed several orders of magnitude more people.
