This is the second part (I, II) of our somewhat silly look about the plausibility of warfare in Frank Herbert’s Dune. Last week, we looked at the system of warfare that is dominant in the setting when the first book opens: warfare among the Great Houses. While I noted some worldbuilding issues I see – some of the physics doesn’t quite work out, I don’t think lasers are satisfactorily dealt with and the implied social system doesn’t seem even remotely stable– we’re going to accept for this part that the system works more or less as Herbert describes it.
The various Houses (Major and Minor) maintain relatively small militaries of trained close-combat fighters who fight using shields. Because shields reduce the effectiveness of ranged combat nearly to zero, this system of warfare dominates among the Great Houses and because untrained, unshielded fighters are so profoundly vulnerable to trained, shielded ones, outside military challenges to this system are generally unsuccessful, enabling the small, closed and mostly hereditary elite with their retinue-armies of shielded fighters to maintain a stranglehold on political and military power. They use that power to run relatively inefficient patrimonial ‘household’ governments over entire planets, siphoning off what little economic production they can – because their administration is so limited – to fund their small armies.
What keeps the armies small is both that the resources of the Great Houses are limited – again, small administrations – but also that the core components of industrial military power in this setting (trained fighters, shields, ornithopters, frigates) are clearly very expensive, both to build and to maintain. And as an aside, because it will be relevant below, it is clear even in the books that wear and tear on shields is a major cost: “The Harkonnens certainly used plenty of shields here, “Hawat said. “They had repair depots in every garrison village, and their accounts show heavy expenditures for shield replacement parts.” (Dune, 88, emphasis mine). In short, these elements of military power represent ongoing expenditures, requiring maintenance and logistics which is going to matter a bit below.
This week we’re going to look at how the Fremen disrupt this system and ask if the Fremen success in doing so seems plausible. We’ll do so generally accepting Herbert’s clear description of the Fremen as superlative warriors, even though long-time readers will know that I find the idea of the Fremen being such superior warriors broadly unlikely. But as we’ll see, even if the Fremen are remarkably skilled warriors, they are unlikely to succeed in their jihad against the society of the Known Universe.
In particular, the reduction of Stilgar from the clever, charismatic, thoughtful figure of the first film to the blind fanatic of the ending scenes of the second film is astoundingly powerful and well-delivered.
But first, as we’re going to cover below, equipping a fighting force with Dune’s version of modern military power – shields, ornithopters and frigates – is expensive. If you want to help me equip a Great House of trained fighters to challenge the Imperium, you can support this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Wars of the Fremen
We should start just by outlining exactly what the Fremen do, both what we see in Dune and what we are told about in Dune Messiah.
The Fremen are, at the time Dune begins, the native population of Arrakis and we are told there are about 15 million of them. They maintain some small levels of industry – mostly things which can be rapidly moved – back lack large industrial systems and notably lack the ability to produce any of the elements of industrial military power (shields, aircraft, frigates) essential to the warfare of the Great Houses, though they do at time capture and use this equipment.1 The Fremen are already highly capable warriors, but because they lack these elements of industrial military power – especially shields – it is easy for the militaries of the Great House to oppress them. In particular, the Fremen have no defense against laser weaponry, which is devastating against unshielded opponents.
When Paul arrives, he organizes the Fremen for what is initially a classic protracted war campaign against the Harkonnen occupation, which eventually sufficiently disrupts spice production to bring the emperor himself to Arrakis. The result is something of a science-fiction rerun of Dien Bien Phu: the foreign occupier, convinced that his industrial military renders him unbeatable in a conventional engagement intentionally and arrogantly extends his force into enemy territory only to be cut off and defeated.
A few things make this Fremen success work. First, the Fremen operate from a terrestrial base that their enemies cannot attack effectively (the deep desert). The Fremen also operate with tremendous local knowledge: because they are the indigenous population, it is easy for their agents to infiltrate into the settled zone the Harkonnen control, meaning that the Fremen have good visibility into Harkonnen operations even before their leader becomes a prescient demigod. Perhaps most importantly conditions on Arrakis negate most of the advantages of industrial military power. As Hawat notes, ornithopters suffer substantial wear-and-tear on Arrakis, making it expensive (but not impossible) to maintain large fleets of them; shields too apparently are hard to maintain. The large sandstorms that rage basically anywhere except in the small area protected by the ‘Shield Wall’ mountain range (which is where all of the cities are) can disable shields at almost any scale. But most of all, shields attract and drive mad the large local sandworms, making their use on the ground in the open desert essentially suicide.
Consequently the Fremen able to win in part because they occupy the one place in the whole universe where the military ‘package’ of the Great Houses does not work.
And to be honest, I do not find the way the Fremen win on Arrakis to be wholly implausible. Given their mastery of the local terrain and infiltration of the local population, it makes sense that the Fremen would be very hard to uproot and might steadily bleed an occupying force quite badly over time. At the same time, the idea that Shaddam IV and House Corrino might – somewhat arrogantly – assume they that could safely extend themselves down to the surface is the sort of military error regular armies make all the time. Finally, it also makes sense that the Harkonnen and Corrino armies coming to Arrakis might fail to adapt to Fremen warfare – fail to adapt to warfare without shields, for instance – because they do not perceive their primary security threat to be the Fremen (the Harkonnen, we’re told, consistently underestimate how many Fremen there are). So while they should respond to the Fremen with guns and artillery, it makes sense that initially they respond with the sort of armies that work for all of their other problems: trained melee fighters with shields.
And if – again, we’re accepting this for the sake of argument – if the Fremen are the superior close-combat fighters, the result of that effort might well go this way. Especially with a prescient leader pushing them forward to victory. Crucially, the victory at Arrakeen fundamentally depends on these local factors: Fremen knowledge of terrain enables Paul to mass his forces undetected and observe the Corrino disposition safely and to thus to stage a coordinated surprise attack against his opponents. Sandworms enable him to deliver an attack force rapidly through a sandstorm and the storm itself disables the defender’s shields, enabling him to disable their frigates and also neutralizing much of their airpower. Fremen victory is almost entirely reliant on factors unique to Arrakis.
So that is more or less fine. The problem I have is really with everything that happens next.
What Happens Next…
I think we should be clear what Dune and especially Dune Messiah lead us to understand comes next to avoid unnecessary wrangling in the comments. While we do not see it, the Fremen wage an absolutely massive, known-universe spanning war in which they conquer thousands of worlds and kill sixty-one billion people (the statistic given in Dune Messiah).
Equally, we are supposed to understand that this result was inevitable. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of Dune, that by the time Paul’s prescience has developed sufficiently for him to understand the road to his Jihad, it is already too late to stop it. As we are told of Paul’s thoughts, “He had thought to ppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become.” Just after, right before his duel with Feyd, he thinks, “from here, the future will open, the clouds part onto a kind of glory. And if I die here, they’ll say I sacrificed myself that my spirit might lead them. And if I live, they’ll say nothing can oppose Muad’Dib” (Dune 482, emphasis original). The point is the Jihad happens either way.
I want to stress that: even without Paul Atreides’ prescience, the Jihad happens and at the very least burns across the known universe doing massive destruction; in fact, even without Paul the Fremen win.
That position – that the destruction of the Fremen Jihad is not merely possible but inevitable to the point that Paul cannot stop it – puts a very, very high bar on its military plausibility. In particular it rules out any defense that Fremen victory is simply because Paul, as a prescient military leader, can simply pull an endless series of ‘inside straights.’ Remember: the Fremen explicitly still win even in Paul Muad’Dib Atredies is dead at the hands of Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. It is not enough for it to be possible for the Fremen to win, it must be impossible for them to lose.
Now in the thematic world of Dune, that is because military victory is fundamentally a product of the Fremen Mirage: societies have an inherent vitality to them and the Fremen are vital, hardened by the harshness of Arrakis, in a way that the Great Houses are not. In Herbert’s mind, that is enough: the ‘hard men’ created by the ‘hard times’ of Arrakis will inevitably triumph once an event – the emergence of Paul as a heroic figure – spurs them into action. Paul is thus die Weltseele zu Pferde, “the world-spirit on horseback,” the archetypal ‘great man of history’ who embodies supposed historical forces which are larger than him, which act through him and which would act without him.
Except of course the problem is that both the Fremen Mirage and the Great Man Theory of history are, to put it bluntly, rubbish– grand historical narratives which simply do not fit the contours of how history actually works. ‘Hard men’ from ‘hard places’ and ‘hard times’ lose all the time. Societies only seem ‘vital’ or ‘decadent’ when viewed in retrospective through the prism of success or failure that was contingent, not inevitable. History is full of movements and moments which cannot be explained through the agency of ‘great men.’ There is, in fact, no ‘world spirit’ guiding history like an invisible hand, but rather a tremendous number of contingent decisions made by billions of people with agency acting with free will.
So rather than simply assume that because the Fremen are moving with the ‘universe spirit’ of history as it were, that because they are a vital people, because they are ‘hardened’ by Arrakis, that they win by default, we’re going to ask are the Fremen actually likely to win in their Jihad? Remember: the books present this not merely as likely but inevitable. Is it likely?
Oh my, no.
The War With the Great Houses
I think we actually want to think through this conflict in two rough phrases. Initially, the Fremen leaving Arrakis are going to be confronted by the traditional militaries of the Great Houses. We’re never told how many Great Houses there are, but it is clearly quite a lot – the institution still very much exists in God Emperor of Dune despite the fact that we’re told 31 Houses Major (the upper-rank of the Great Houses) had collapsed. The implication is that 31 Houses Major do not represent even a majority. Likewise, the entire political system of the Corrino Imperium only works if the Houses of the Landsraad collectively had more military power than the Corrino Sardaukar, such that the emperor had to keep them divided at all times (and such that, acting collectively, groups of them might force concessions from the emperor). Given that Baron Harkonnen thinks just two legions of Sardaukar could easily overwhelm his entire offensive force of ten legions, the implication has to be that there are quite a few Houses Major with military forces on the scale of House Harkonnen.
In short the Fremen are likely to be faced by many dozens of ‘House armies’ ranging from the high tens of thousands to the low hundreds of thousands, probably collectively representing several million trained fighters with shields (I’d guess a few tens of millions, once Houses Minor are accounted for), ‘thopters,’ frigates and all of the other components of ‘modern’ (for the setting) warfare.
The main advantage the Fremen have – and it is a very significant advantage – is that their control over the Spacing Guild (via control over the spice on Arrakis) means that they can face these forces one-by-one, rather than having to face a large coalition of the Landsraad all collected in a single location. The secondary advantage the Fremen have is that the Great Houses are likely to try to meet them with the same rigid, formulaic armies they have long prepared for use against each other: trained fighters using shields engaging in melee combat. They will probably not be, in the first instance, rapid military innovators – they aren’t set up for that.
But the disadvantages the Fremen face are enormous. First and foremost – and this is going to be central – Fremen manpower is fundamentally brittle. On the one hand, the Fremen do not have a civilian class – all of their people are trained fighters, so basically their entire adult population is available for combat. The problem is that means that there is no underlying ‘peasantry’ as it were to refill the ranks of their losses and the harsh conditions of Arrakis – essential to the entire Fremen thing – are not conducive to a ‘baby boom’ either. Fremen losses will thus be functionally permanent: every Fremen Fedaykin lost is lost forever – a long-term reduction in the total Fremen population and thus available Atreides military force. Meanwhile, Hawat estimates the total Fremen population at roughly 10 million. That represents a fundamentally finite resource which cannot really be replenished: it must provide for offensive forces, for casualties, for garrison forces to hold conquered worlds and with enough left over to maintain both the logistics of the Jihad and the basic rhythms of life in the sietches of Arrakis.
The other major problem the Fremen face is that most of their key advantages evaporate once they are off of Arrakis. Indeed, some invert. The Fremen knowledge of local terrain was crucial to their victory on Arrakis but if anything the Fremen are remarkably badly equipped to understand and fight in other terrains. These are men who cannot conceive of a thing called a ‘sea,’ for instance and one supposes they would not fair well in snow or forest either. Urban terrain is also, crucially, mostly foreign to them. Their mastery of stillsuits, of walking with irregular strides in the desert, of concealment in sand, of the use of sandworms all matter exactly not at all off of Arrakis and in most cases will be active hindrances. At best they will have to face the armies of the Imperium in ‘stand up’ fights, at worst they will be repeatedly ambushed.
What is even worse, the Fremen are stepping into a kind of warfare they are unfamiliar with, for which their society was not designed. Remember: Fremen victory on Arrakis depended on most of the technology of industrial warfare not working there. Sandstorms grounded ornithopters and shields were broadly unusable outside of the towns and villages (and disabled by a sandstorm for the final battle). None of that is true the moment the Fremen step off world.
Worse yet the Fremen supply of industrial ‘firepower’ is fundamentally limited. The Fremen themselves are incapable of manufacturing any of this. One of the sleights of hand here is that while the Fremen disable all of the Harkonnen and Corrino frigates at the opening of their battle at Arrakeen – blasting the noses off – these very ships are handwaved back into functionality for the off-screen Jihad. One wonders how the Fremen – who have never seen this technology before, technology which is built nowhere on Arrakis (we’re told the Harkonnen’s equipment is all off-world import, nothing is manufactured locally) – were able to swiftly repair dozens of high-tech spaceships. Equally, the Fremen lack both the ability to manufacture shields or ornithopters, but also lack the knowledge to maintain shields or ornithopters.
I suspect any Fremen campaign would suffer from limited frigates – both for transport and presumably for fighting – through the entirety of it.
They have exactly what they captured from the Harkonnen and Corrino troops and nothing else, with almost no means to repair anything that breaks – this is where my earlier point that shields evidently require a lot of maintenance and replacement matters. While the idea of running an army entirely off of captured weapons is a thing often thought of, functionally no one ever actually makes it work: open the hood on armies claiming to run primarily off of captured equipment and you almost invariably find foreign sponsors providing the bulk of their weapons. The Fremen have no such foreign sponsors – or at least, won’t have them the moment it becomes clear they intend to burn down most of the known universe – so their access to military material is going to be limited.
As a result, the Fremen are going to be a remarkably two-tier force: a small body of troops equipped with looted shields and supported by what aircraft can be maintained, with a larger body of Fremen fighting ‘light’ as they did on Arrakis, but without storms or worms or mastery of local terrain.
On the one hand, the Fremen would presumably be able to outnumber the first individual Great Houses they targeted. Great House armies are small, as we’ve noted, so while the Fremen would have an overall numerical disadvantage (the Imperium has more trained fighters than there are Fremen) locally they would have the advantage, created by their control of the Spacing Guild. It would be less overwhelming than you might first think though, for a fairly simple reason: though the spacing guild is compliant, the Fremen only have the space transports they can capture. Note that the Spacing Guild supplies heighliners, not frigates and the Fremen do not know how to build frigates. So their ground-to-orbit and orbit-to-ground capacity is going to be limited. High – the Harkonnen and Corrino fleets captured on the ground at Arrakeen were large – but limited. Still probably enough to give the Fremen local numerical superiority everywhere they went.
The problem would be attrition: Fremen manpower is brittle. This is made worse by the fact that achieving numerical superiority on multiple fronts – and we’re told this fight encompasses a great many worlds (and planets are big things – most of them do not have all of their major settlements packed in one small area like Arrakis does), so they fight on multiple fronts – would require deploying large numbers of those ‘second tier’ Fremen forces. Those Fremen are going to be lethal in close combat, but extremely vulnerable to the industrialized firepower of the setting: one thing we’re told very clearly is that lasguns are evidently extremely powerful against unshielded enemies.
Meanwhile, as capable as the Fremen are, we also know they are not trained how to fight in shields (it is an entire plot-point in Paul’s duel with Jamis that they do not understand Paul’s slower movements), so once forced by military conditions outside of Arrakis to fight shield-against-shield, some part of the Fremen qualitative edge will be lost even for the ‘first tier’ troops.
And simply put, a few million Fremen is probably not enough to actually sustain that campaign, though I will admit it could end up being borderline, depending on the size of Great House armies and the loss-ratios the Fremen are able to put up. Once you have siphoned off the tens if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers required to garrison worlds that have been taken and accounted for losses fighting technologically superior opponents in unfamiliar terrain, I would guess that Fremen manpower would end up badly overstretched.
Very roughly, we can start with 15 million total Fremen. While Fremen women are trained to fight and Chani is on the front lines, we do not see any other women do so: the Fremen do not employ their womenfolk offensively as fighters, as a rule.2 So accounting for women and children – in a society that we may assume has almost no elderly – that 15 million total Fremen might give us 5 million military aged males available for offensive deployment. Some portion of those will still be needed on Arrakis for spice production, administration and so on, but perhaps it is a small portion.
So perhaps 3 million Fremen available for offensive action off world, of which perhaps only a few hundred thousand can be moved at a time given the limited supply of frigates, charging out into a universe with perhaps something on the order of 15 to 30 million trained fighters. That offensive force will be depleted not only by casualties, but also by the demands of holding and administering captured territory and also that army needs to still exist when the fighting is done, both to deter what Great Houses remain and also to enable the continued existence of the Fremen as a people. If Paul conquers the universe but gets a majority of all military-aged Fremen men (over a decade, so more than one full generational cohort) killed, Atreides rule isn’t going to last very long.
Worse yet (it gets worse) the manpower pool the Great Houses operate from is absolutely vast – there are evidently tens if not hundreds of billions of people in the Faufreluches – so any Great House not entirely wiped out is going to be able to reconstitute fairly rapidly. If you do wipe out a Great House but leave the planet, there are no shortage of richece willing to take their place and then reconstitute a Great House army fairly rapidly. The Fremen are going to be playing whack-a-mole quite a bit, because their opponents have enormous demographic reserves to draw on, while by contrast the Fremen’s own are very limited. Of course the Fremen could start recruiting people out of the faufreluches, but that seems both unlikely (the Fremen do not bother to conceal their contempt for the people of the villages of Arrakis, whose conditions are already much harsher than the average worker in the faufeluches) and would also dull the all-important qualitative edge the Fremen need. So while the perhaps 5 million or so total Fremen military-aged-males is a exhaustible, set resource the 15-30 million Great House fighters is a resource which can be almost endlessly replenished.
It is easy to see the ways this could go wrong. First, the Fremen lack of industrial military power could cause the casualty ratio to turn the wrong way once they are off world. Sure, they have the superior close-combat fighters – we’ve stipulated that – but if you lose half of every attack group to lasguns, hunter-drones or other ranged weapons on the way in (because you haven’t enough shields), the Fremen are simply going to run out of Fremen before they subdue the Great Houses. The other path is one where the campaign sputters: the Fremen win initial (costly) victories due to numbers and mobility advantage but are then forced to dissipate much of their force in garrisons and administration. That in turn enforces something that happens to many great conquering peoples: they become like the regimes they replaced. Fremen leaders with their small military retinues settle down to control and exploit the worlds they garrison while being vassals of the Atreides – in short, they become Great Houses, likely losing whatever distinctiveness kept them militarily superior in the process. In either cause, because the numbers are so lopsided, the loss of momentum for the Fremen probably spells collapse as the balance tips back the other way and the Great Houses, with superior manpower and economic resources, begin whittling down what is left.
In short, Fremen victory against the Great Houses strikes me as possible but implausible, it is an unlikely outcome – one that probably would require a prescient warlord directing everything to perfection in order to win. Which as we’ve noted already, is a failure point for the narrative of the books, which require this war to be a thing that succeeds regardless of if Paul lives or dies.
Of course this assumes broadly that the ‘military resources’ – trained fighters, shields, supplies, frigates and so on – in the ‘system’ remains fairly static: that the Great Houses mostly fight as they have always done, with the weapons they’ve always had. One result of that is that the Fremen never get access to the quantity of weapons to fully modernize their own forces – the Great House armies are, ironically, too small to furnish them enough systems to capture.
Of course those limits might not hold. War is, after all, the land of in extremis. The Fremen assault might be enough to really break the static nature of the faufreluches and unlock a lot more economic potential, which might increase the military resources the Fremen could unlock from captured worlds.
That scenario, it turns out, is both likely and much worse.
Fremen: Total War
First, let us start with the part that this seems likely.
So far we’ve been discussing this as a war between the Fremen and the Great Houses, with the much larger mass of the population left out of it. We’ve done that because I think it is the only version of this war the Fremen could win. But it is also clearly, explicitly not the version of the war that happens.
Again, we’re told in Dune Messiah that the Jihad ends up killing 61 billion people, wipes out forty religions, and sterilized ninety planets.
In short, under Muad’Dib’s leadership the Fremen are not merely waging a war against the noble families of the Great Houses, but rather a war against the people of the Imperium. There is something of an irony that Frank Herbert seems to be clearly thinking in terms of something like the rapid expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661) here, but the Rashidun caliphs quite deliberately avoided this sort of thing, often offering religious protections to the underlying peoples beneath the empires (Roman and Sassanid) they were attacking to avoid a situation where they faced broad popular resistance. That said, this aspect of Islamic conquest was often not emphasized in the 1960s popular understanding, so Frank Herbert may not have been aware of the degree to which local religions and communities were largely and intentionally left in place during early Islamic expansion.
Either way, it seems almost certain that Paul’s Fremen attempting to extirpate entire religious traditions and sterilize entire worlds, are going to start facing broad popular resistance.
Now obviously the first problem here is that it makes their manpower problem much worse. When the Fremen were just facing the Great Houses, they were outnumbered perhaps 5-to-1, which is quite bad but in the fiction of the setting superior skills can overcome those disadvantages at least some of the time.3 But against a, say, Earth-like planet – of which there must be very many, given that killing 61 billion people did not even cause much of a social collapse in the Imperium – the Fremen might face mass-mobilized armies on just that planet in the high tens of millions. The USSR mobilized an astounding 34.5 million troops during WWII out of a population (pre-war) of about 200 million. Naturally it would be hard to mobilize a whole planet on that basis, but doing so on a modern-Earth-like world would net you around one billion soldiers.
So the idea that the Fremen might find themselves landing forces of, say, 300,000 Fremen warriors (representing basically the maximum carrying capacity of the Corrino and partial-Harkonnen fleets they captured) on a planet only to find themselves facing an opposing force five million or fifty million or five hundred million foes is not out of the question. One of the few ways to force that kind of mobilization from modern societies is to attempt to genocide a population or extirpate their long and sincerely held religion and the Fremen are trying to do both.
Now the Great Houses can control these populations because they maintain local legitimacy, because shield-based fighting gives them a huge advantage against populations that cannot afford shields and because they have demilitarized the lower classes. But the Fremen will have removed all of these factors. The Fremen do not have long-standing local legitimacy – they are a barbarian foreign force trying to take away your religion. They also do not have a shield-based fighting system and lack enough shields to fully equip their force in any case and so take to the field without a technological edge over a mass-mobilizated populace. And worse yet, the very threat they pose is going to push the lower classes to militarize.
Now in pre-industrial societies, this effect was somewhat limited because pre-industrial societies were not capable of fully militarizing their lower classes. But the societies of Dune are post-industrial societies. It may be impossible to provide the high tech instruments of warfare to an entire mass army – not enough shields, ‘thopters and frigates – but it would be trivially easy for these societies to equip the great masses of their population with spears, swords and simple guns.
Ironically, the Fremen would now find themselves immediately caught in the same trap as the Great Houses: trained in a fighting style that emphasizes close combat, they would try to have close-combat mass-battles with huge, unshielded armies of melee combatants, rather than being set up to use their shields to maximum advantage by conducting the fighting at long range.
Facing even relatively modest mass armies would require the Fremen to deploy a lot of their available manpower simply to be able to hold ground on the kind of scale these wars would be fought on, which would make the two-tier structure of their army even more of a liability because it would force them to field those second-tier troops in quantity. And while a Great House might be dumb enough to fight those second-tier unshielded troops in close combat – that being their habit – one imagines a mass army of resistance might approach it differently. After all a mass army is going to look for cheap ways to arm hundreds of thousands or millions of fighters and guns and artillery are relatively cheap compared to shields and ‘thopters. And we know that the basic technology of artillery is not lost, because Vladimir Harkonnen uses it as a surprise tactic against the Atreides.
Heaven help the Fremen if some planet somewhere stumbles on the same idea and expands it out to a fifty-million-soldier army against a largely unshielded, close-combat-based infantry Fremen force. Ask the survivors of the Battle of Omdurman (1898) what happens when the most skilled, motivated, desert-hardened and determined ‘hard men’ attempt to charge machine guns with contact weapons. While the ‘first tier’ Fremen troops with captured shields might still be effective, after their ‘second tier’ supporting units were obliterated they would be horribly outnumbered, easy enough to simply mob down with bayonets.
Even if the Fremen qualitative edge remained intact – perhaps because their opponents continued to operate in the contact-warfare frame rather than rediscovering projectile weapons – the attritional structure of the conflict would become unsustainable pretty quickly. Paul could easily lose half of his entire offensive force fighting a single partially mobilized world of this sort with a 15:1 casualty ratio in his favor.
But there’s an even worse outcome here for the Fremen, especially given the length of the conflict: total economic mobilization. So far we’ve considered worlds with perhaps days or weeks of warning doing panic mobilization while under attack, churning out as many rifles and swords as they can to put together mass armies, relying on the fact that planets are very big and so any conquest would take months if not years.
Paul’s Jihad lasts twelve years, canonically. For a sense of what twelve years is in ‘mobilization time,’ the United States went from producing almost no tanks in 1939, to just 400 in 1940, to 4,052 in 1941 to 24,997 in 1942, to 29,497 in 1943. In 1939, the United States built 5,856 aircraft; by 1944, it was building more than 8,000 aircraft a month.[efn_notes]Statistics via Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995), 331-2.[/efn_note] Again, as we’ve already noted, the only way the small armies of the Imperium make sense with its attested population (which must be more than the 61 billion Paul kills) is if this society is mostly demilitarized. We see plenty of industrial capability – aircraft, space-ships and so on – it is just that these noble houses with their limited administration cannot mobilize that capacity for war.4 The technology and population exists, what is lacking is the administrative capacity and political will to employ it. And while we might imagine that Dune‘s frigates and ornithopters are more complex machines than WWII-era aircraft, tanks and warships, it is equally the case that we’re thinking about the economies of entire planets rather than individual countries.
But for a planet that found itself not immediately under attack but very obviously in the path of Paul’s Jihad – perhaps with a well-entrenched local religion – that calculus is different. Information might spread slowly in the Imperium, but not infinitely slow – at least the elite do seem to have some sense of affairs in distant places. Those richece, perhaps with their nobles or without them, might well opt to do what those noble houses with their tiny, underdeveloped administrations could not: mass mobilize not just people but industry, unlocking the productive capacity of several billion people and turning much of the civilian economy over to a war-footing in a way that the Great Houses, with their small administrations and very limited legitimacy never could. Show the people film-strips of Paul Muad’Dib’s army murdering billions and sterilizing worlds and say, “that is coming here unless you line up to work in the factory churning out ninety thousand ornithopters a year.” Big posters that say, “to keep the Fremen Fedaykin murderers away from Our Holy Sites, we need YOU to hit our target of launching two thousand heavy weapons frigates this year!” Industrial societies engaged in something approach total economic mobilization can produce enormous amounts of destruction very rapidly.
The Fremen Jihad lasts more than long enough for the more populous worlds of the Imperium to adopt this kind of war economy in preparation and the tremendous violence that the Fremen inflict – again, sixty-one billion casualties – are more than enough to motivate a lot of these worlds to do exactly that.
Paul will, in that event, at least be lucky that the Spacing Guild might let him isolate such worlds, although if you are the Spacing Guild (or an anti-Fremen group of smugglers) you might just be willing to roll the dice to see how Paul’s base of power on Arrakis handles the arrival of thousands of frigates with tens of thousands of ‘thopters carrying millions of heavily equipped troops showing up in the skies above Arrakeen.
The Failed Jihad
Now of course the natural response to all of this is that Paul Muad’Dib Atreides can avoid all of these outcomes because he is the Kwisatz Haderach, able to see the present and the future and thus able to anticipate and avoid all of these outcomes, threading the needle of probability perfectly to guide the Jihad to its victorious conclusion.5 And of course we’ve already noted the flaw in this: Dune is explicit that by the time Paul fully grasps his prescience, it is too late to stop the Jihad, which would happen and succeed even if he was dead. Paul is merely the catalyst for what Herbert imagines as historical – nearly ecological – merely the manifestation of the ‘world-spirit’ of the age moving through history. The Jihad would happen without him. Only the catalyst is required; the rest is inevitable.
And it just clearly isn’t. There are, in fact, quite a lot of ways the Jihad could swiftly fail.
And fundamentally that goes to how Frank Herbert’s vision of military power – one shared by quite a lot of people – differs from how military power is actually generated. In Frank Herbert’s vision, military power is a product of the individual capabilities of fighters, which in turn is produced ecologically based on the harshness of the environment they come from. He imagines huge gulfs in capability, where two legions of Sardaukar can easily overpower ten legions of Harkonnen and Fremen in the desert can inflict even more lopsided casualties on Sardaukar.6 There is a direct correlation then between the harshness of a place and the military power it can produce.
And equally, there is a strongly gendered component of this view in Frank Herbert’s writing: militarily effective societies in Dune are masculine in key ways.7 Harsh conditions, for Herbert, produce intensely masculine societies (whereas the decadence of the Imperium is signaled in equally gendered terms: the gay sexual deviant Baron, the genetic eunuch Fenring, the emperor with his household of daughters and his failure of “father-head”-ship), which in turn produce militarily effective ones.
It is not hard to see how intense and pervasive a view of military power that is, how frequently in popular culture ‘manliness’ is presented as the primary source from which military effective flows. This isn’t the place to get into the modern manifestations of this sort of ideological framework, but it is not particularly hard to find recruiting and propaganda videos that attempt to communicate military effectiveness almost purely through gendered visual language of masculine fitness prowess, as if victory belongs to the army that can do the most push-ups. Herbert’s vision is somewhat more sophisticated than this, but only somewhat. It is water drawn from the same well.
And that simply isn’t how military power is actually generated in the real world. Training certainly matters and there are some kinds of fighting – like horseback archery – that almost have to be deeply socially rooted to be effectively trained. Cohesion also certainly matters, but it can be generated quite a few ways and strong cohesion is certainly possible to produce ‘synthetically’ through training and drill. But the strongest armies do not generally come from the harshest places – indeed, the opposite: for most of human history the military advantage has gone to resource-rich places with dense populations. This is obscured somewhat in popular culture because the exceptions to this rule are so striking but they’re striking because they are exceptions.
But especially after the industrial revolution – and Dune is a post-industrial (very post-industrial) universe – military power is largely generated by economies, a brute-force product of the ability of societies to deploy the most men (supported by their agriculture), the most metal, the most explosives and these days the most electronics. Weaker powers can still win by protracting conflicts and focusing on degrading the will of an enemy, but they do this because they are weaker powers who understand that they do not have much of any chance of winning in a direct confrontation. Indeed, the armies that have put the most emphasis on the ‘fighting spirit’ or individual physical superiority of their soldiers have tended to lose modern wars to armies of conscripted farm-boys and shop-keepers backed up by tremendous amounts of modern industrial firepower.
Of course, as Clausewitz reminds us (drink!) war is the realm of the “play of probability and chance” – a contest in which the stronger does not always win. Military strength may be, in modern times, almost entirely the product of industries, economies and demographics (and the first two more than the last one in most cases), but such raw strength is not the only thing that determines the outcome of wars, which equally depend on the strategic importance of the objective, the political will of the two parties and the vagaries of chance that are omnipresent in war (drink again if you got the reference).
None of this makes Dune a bad book or Frank Herbert a bad author – it is a fascinating book that raises these kinds of ideas and questions. But equally precisely because the book’s understanding of where military power comes from derives not from historical facts but from fictional events, it is worth thinking hard about how it imagines this works and if that actually corresponds to historical trends.
In this case, Frank Herbert imagines that ‘historical forces’ have created an effective inevitability that once roused the Fremen, on account of their harsher society, would storm the universe basically regardless of the balance of logistics, military equipment or numbers because the vague ‘hardness’ of their society makes them unbeatable. It makes for a fascinating narrative, but this is not how history works and indeed the wastelands of history are littered with the half-remembered names of a great many peoples who were ‘hard’ and ‘tough’ and ‘aggressive’ and utterly slaughtered or overrun because the ‘wealthy’ ‘decadent’ and ‘unmanly’ societies they fought also had greater numbers and superior weapons.
So to answer the original question: no, one way or another, the Fremen would fail, though they might fail in the most interesting way – failing not by replacing the faufreluches, but by galvanizing them into producing (or reproducing) a different kind of self-governing society that was far better able to mobilize itself and its resources – and capable of far more destructive, horrifying forms of war.
One wonders what the Dune universe’s version – after the collapse of both the faufreluches and the Fremen – of the First World War, a horror-show of industrial warfare on unprecedented scale – would look like.
- It is striking how little a role captured ornithopters seem to play in Fremen warfare, suggesting that while they can capture these things, they probably cannot maintain them, leading them to quickly degrade rapidly in harsh desert conditions.
- Neither do the Great Houses, from what we can tell. Herbert’s fantasy universe is very explicitly a patriarchy, even amongst the Fremen.
- Attempting to win in close-combat against five to one odds in the real world, however, has a far lower success rate in the absence of non-training advantages like better armor or weapons.
- To go a step further, in a society like this I would imagine that part of the reason none of these Great Houses have mobilized their whole societies for war is that it would imperil their own rule – the same reason that the monarchies of Europe tried (unsuccessfully) to put the ‘cat’ of the levée en masse back in the bag after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – mass warfare creates social pressures that tend to push either towards totalitarianism or democracy, both of which are incompatible with the sort of small, personalist, traditionalist regimes the Great Houses are running.
- One interpretation, as an aside, I’ve toyed with of the books is that Paul is in fact not really the Kwisatz Haderach, but that his son Leto II is. I think it is striking that the Bene Gesserit breeding program expected a Kwisatz Haderach not in Paul’s generation, but in the next – in a sense Paul was the ‘early misfire’ of their effort, whereas Leto II arrived right on schedule. It also fits with Frank Herbert’s ‘genetic philsophy’ as it were, that the Bene Gesserit breeding within the noble houses only produces failed almost-Kwisatz-Haderachs like Count Fenring, but it is the blending of an outside people, the novel combination of Paul and Chani with a Fremen element (the very thing the Bene Gesserit regard as a catastrophe) with produces the true completion of the program with Leto II and Ghanima. It’s striking that while Frank Herbert shares some of the Fremen Mirage which is often a staple of racist ideologies, Herbert instead views the mixing of peoples and cultures as good, the novel creations of such as necessary for the vague ‘vitality’ of a people.
- “It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.” There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar.” It is unclear in the passage how many Sardaukar and how many Harkonnen are in those ‘more than a hundred’ described, but it is at least a few (they captured three).
- The retort here is going to be to bring up God Emperor of Dune‘s Fish Speakers, but as noted in the link there, the trope of a ‘Fremen’ society so masculine that even its women behave in unexpectedly masculine ways from the perspective of a patriarchal society is an ancient one too. The Fish Speakers thus fit neatly into a long tradition of ‘barbarian warrior women’ serving as the gender-flipped other, drawn into high relief by how their army was entirely composed of women without exception, with men entirely eschewed from their society save as husbands. In short, the Fish Speakers are not a more gender-egalitarian or gender-neutral society, but a ‘palette swapped‘ version of Dune‘s other patriarchies.
“back lack large industrial systems”
-> but lack
“He had thought to ppose the jihad within himself”
->oppose
“[efn_notes]Statistics via Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995), 331-2.[/efn_note]”
I’m assuming this was meant to be a footnote.
Given that the number of planets that can be sterilized with knives, no matter how expertly employed, is zero, I think it’s fair to say that the Jihad was probably not primarily a bunch of knife fights.
Dune has a bunch of factions with apocalyptic arsenals of planet-destroying weaponry. Paul expects ‘general warfare among the houses’ to blast planets. Stone burners (which can apparently destroy planets through a scientifically laughable mechanism) are both discussed and used ‘on-screen’. Emperor Paul says that “any Family in my Empire could so deploy its atomics as to destroy the planetary bases of fifty or more other Families.” And, of course, anyone that can move kilometres-long ships between stars could presumably do extinction-event kinetic strikes fairly easily, though I don’t think Herbert ever mentions this.
The weird thing is that there doesn’t really seem to be a rung on the escalation ladder between ‘traitors, poison, and knives’ and ‘nuke them from orbit’. The conceit seems to be that this is a result of shield technology, but that can’t be the whole story. At any rate, the Jihad evidently results in escalation to the nuke ’em level.
This is what I would have thought. The Fremen can blow up all the planets they like with no ill effects, the Imperium cannot respond in kind without dooming itself to a slow death-and even if the Emperor or the other members of the government were willing to try such a thing, the Spacing Guild would need to agree to actually bring their doomsday weapons to bear on Arrakis. The Emperor, the Bene Geseritt and the houses could survive in some form without Spice, but the Guild couldn’t. Under those conditions it does make some sense they’d be able to do masses of damage and that the various regional rulers of the Imperium, all of whom owe a fairly loose allegiance to the Emperor in the first place, would bend the knee to avoid more trouble.
The only way I can see the Jihad being inevitably successful is if the Great Houses and the broader Faufreluches have terrible food security.
Let’s say that the overwhelming majority of the inhabited planets are in some way inhospitable to human life, meaning that their populations are largely dependent on the import of food from agricultural worlds (we know the Atreides’ original fief exported pundi rice, so agricultural exports on a planetary scale are a thing). Either that or simply not geared up for agricultural production due to planetary specialisation.
In this case, the deaths caused by the Jihad are primarily from starvation and food riots as Paul and the Fremen leverage their control over the Spacing Guild to cut off supplies to planets that resist. This cuts down the number of ‘healthy’ Houses to tackle significantly, being only those ones that run an agricultural surplus on their worlds. We have no idea how many of these there are, but considering that House Atreides was one and they’re not exactly one of the most powerful houses, perhaps agricultural exports aren’t where the wealth is, so you’d only really be fighting intact Houses Minor (or second tier Houses Major). The rest of the houses, if they don’t capitulate ahead of time, would either be torn apart by internal instability, or fighting the Fremen and major planetary rebellions simultaneously (which the Fremen could then leverage to say ‘if you join us and convert we’ll bring food’).
Of course, none of this is particularly referenced in the book (we don’t know how habitable the other planets are, only that they are moreso than Arrakis…which isn’t saying much), so this is more of a ‘how it could have happened’ idea than anything else.
Personally if they did do it that way I think it makes Paul and the Fremen seem more evil, which fits the major theme of ‘Paul is not a good-guy’.
It sounds like Paul has more control over the Jihad than he thinks.
BTW I don’t understand why people would live in planets that cannot sustain their lives. The Fremen live in Arrakis so it must be sustainable for them. The forces of the Great Houses in it are just some soldiers and workers to harvest spice. The mass majority of Great Houses population should live in planets with sustainable agriculture.
I think it is more the case that some planets have unsustainable populations, not that they are themselves unable to sustain human life. The existence of food exporting planets implies the existence of food importing ones who rely on interstellar resupply to maintain themselves.
Which is also odd. We can ship food around because it’s really cheap, but interstellar travel in Dune is very expensive.
At least, it’s expensive for Great Houses to ship troops and military equipment around. Maybe the Spacing Guild does price discrimination.
Though that brings up how they have the power to do this against the Emperor and all the other Houses. Sure, they have a monopoly on interstellar travel, but they don’t grow food on those ships that I know of.
Paul mentions towards the end of the first book that the Guild has lowered shipping rates that almost every soldier of the Great Houses is in orbit overhead simply for the chance to loot Arrakis. Which, being a mostly barren desert, doesn’t seem to be all that great in the looting department.
I always had the impression that the actual mechanics of interstellar travel are reasonably cheap, and the guild charges high transport fees for (most) conflicts because they want to discourage fighting, not that it’s actually expensive for them.
“Paul mentions towards the end of the first book that the Guild has lowered shipping rates that almost every soldier of the Great Houses is in orbit overhead simply for the chance to loot Arrakis. Which, being a mostly barren desert, doesn’t seem to be all that great in the looting department.”
A barren desert full of the most precious substance in the universe, though.
People live in cities. The cities need to import more food than they can grow in suburban backyards, or office towers converted to hydroponic farms, or whatever. There is nothing wrong with this, the economic surplus generated by people living clustered in a city rather than distributed over the countryside is more than capable of paying for the cost of transporting food to the cities.
People live in countries. Counting food/agricultural imports/exports by calorie or what-have-you, some countries are breadbaskets, while others are net calorie importers. While nowadays we are far from the Malthusian limit (see the peasant life series, or the Bread series), there are some countries so densely populated (or so unsuitable to agriculture) that they couldn’t meet food subsistence demands if cut off from trade. Yet on net, people are migrating to such countries, for much the same reasons as they are moving to cities.
People live on planets. While it takes a staggeringly low transportation cost for it to be worth shipping bulk cereals (e.g. rice) between planets (indeed star systems) — and this bulk shipping is coincidentally also the fastest way to ship anything from high-value-density piece goods (such military equipment) to people and even messages(!), and this should be expected to completely wreak havoc on the economic organization of the setting — as long as transportation planetside is cheaper and faster than interstellar shipping, people will naturally form some “city-planets”.
This.
There’s also the fact that feeding a population requires infrastructure investment and time. Even if a planet does have the required arable land to support its population, that land cannot be made productive instantly. Not only are there investments in land development/machinery/irrigation/fertilisers, but in things like seed stock. At minimum there’s an agricultural cycle to ride through before you can harvest anything. Something like buckwheat is super-quick at 70-85 days, but rice is more like 90-150 and wheat/oats/barley are 120-150.
Let’s say Planet A gets a food embargo with 40% surplus population from what its domestic agriculture can produce (going by the example of, say, the United Kingdom currently producing ~60% of its food domestically). Let’s say that it does have the required arable land, but it’s not currently utilised for food production. Considering the economics of industrialisation, it’s likely that your more powerful Great Houses are likely to be over-represented in this cohort.
The embargo begins and cached food starts being depleted. At this point, the leadership starts a concerted effort to rectify their food security issues (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they react immediately and effectively). Industrial capacity is switched over from non-essential production to the tools of agriculture. Corvee labour is deployed en masse to prepare farmland.
However, there’s a difficult decision to be made in relation to seed stock. On the one hand, eating those seeds now will mean fewer of those 40% of the population will die. On the other hand, if you don’t plant them then come the next harvest more people will die because your yield wasn’t high enough.
The leadership has a different calculus to an individual at this point. The leadership wants the maximum number of total survivors (which probably means planting more seed stock and letting more people die immediately so you can reach food security quicker). An individual wants to not starve now. Hence, high likelihood of food riots and broader instability.
What will likely happen is some form of cyclic recalibration as these pressures work out, meaning the whole place is going to be fairly chaotic for a while. This is the point at which the Fremen Jihad turns up, with a bunch of soldiers and also a bunch of bulk cereals. ‘Rioters join us and we’ll feed you, anyone else prepare to die’.
Also, you raise a good point about the costs of interstellar transport needing to be super-low to justify the transport of bulk-staples. We know, however, that Caladan’s main export is ‘pundi rice’. As far as I can tell, this leaves us with two potential options.
1. ‘Pundi rice’ is not actually a staple but a desirable luxury good that’s worth exporting.
2. Interstellar transport costs actually are that low.
The second one is very interesting indeed, because if true it would mean that the high transport costs as a limiting factor for the transport of armies is entirely fabricated by the Guild, which has all sorts of implications.
So we are actually told in the first Dune book that the costs of transporting troops is set by the Guild. At the end of the book, it is stated (I forget by whom) that the Guild lowered the costs of transporting soldiers, allowing even minor houses to arrive in orbit with many ships and soldiers.
So it is very likely that the Guild, likely in collusion with the Emperor or the Landsraad, keeps the cost of moving *soldiers* artificially high as a way of preventing wars between houses, which neatly explains why the “war of assassins” is utilized instead.
This would enable foodstuffs and general commerce goods to be cheap and efficient to transport, while making moving soldiers expensive and difficult.
It could also be the case that for some reason, moving people or livestock is expensive (perhaps something to do with having to maintain atmosphere, or perhaps as simple as not being space efficient) but inanimate or nonliving goods is super efficient, leading to lower costs
If the cost of shipping military equipment and troops were so drastically inflated by the guild, I imagine there would be incessant and creative attempts to smuggle those things within civilian shipments. I choose to believe this is a conceit of the setting because it is very funny. “Trooper, get in this box and pretend to be rice for a few weeks. Do your best to rendezvous at X once you arrive planetside.”
How carefully does the Guild inspect cargoes so that what’s getting shipped is actually what the customers claim is in the cargo containers? If suspended animation is a thing in the Dune universe then hibernation pods would allow for a significant amount of illicit human trafficking. Maybe Guild prescience comes into play to prevent this?
@Michael Hutson I don’t remember any suspended animation technology in the books, although B.G. training might give the ability to significantly lower metabolic rates.
In practice it wouldn’t really be necessary, because interstellar travel is apparently instantaneous. It’s a jump rather than a journey Star Wars/Star Trek style.
Since heighliners are enormous, I imagine that the Guild does about as much inspection as modern container shipping ports do. Which is AFAIK very little, random sampling of one of many, unless told by the local police / intelligence agency to pay attention to a particular shipment.
Smuggling in the Dune Imperium would have the same problem as today, in that if say you want to smuggle people, you have to mark those “containers” as not to be frozen, not to be stored in vacuum, etc. The Guild might be interested in why you’re taking such precautions for bags of cement.
A problem unique to the Imperium is that if you get caught smuggling, the Guild can blacklist you or triple the cost of every future shipment, and you have no alternative.
Precisely why I specified hibernaculums, if they were self-contained they wouldn’t need controlled environments. Plus a lot easier to spend a couple of days in a coffin-sized box if necessary until you can be unloaded.
@Michael In the Dune Imperium slavery is legal and unremarkable, so a lot of human trafficking doesn’t need to be illicit.
For hiding assassins or soldiers, developing hibernation technology, and containers that can survive harsh conditions, and have their own power supply, … is very likely going to be more expensive than just paying the Guild rates.
“and this bulk shipping is coincidentally also the fastest way to ship anything from high-value-density piece goods (such military equipment) to people and even messages(!),”
Not just “coincidentally”.
The speed of bulk shipping, urgent shipping and messages transoceanic was pretty much the same 16th to 19th century. Sailing ships across the Atlantic, Pacific or around Cape of Good Hope could not be sped up much. When technology of copper bottoms was introduced late in 18th century, it sped up ships – but soon including the bulk freighters.
It is only since introduction of workable transoceanic telegraph cables 1866-1872 that messages have been faster than people.
While messages move faster, note how passengers on subsonic jets travel, since 1960s, at the same speed regardless of price. Concorde has been shut down as unviable, propeller planes are uncompetitive for transoceanic distances and while ships carry a lot of bulk freight, they are not competitive for transoceanic passenger travel.
It is not an awfully huge coincidence to have only one viable Faster Than Light technology, whose speed is inelastic to effort or load – that is FTL is what it is, and there is no Faster Than Faster Than Light.
Yes, in that particular time window (technology level), over oceanic distances, this was almost but not quite the case. However, this is unusual, and a matter of the task being just barely possible technologically, without diversification having had time to set in. (Already during the latter part of this era, the concept of the clipper as a high-speed low-capacity freighter, distinct from ordinary (bulk) merchantmen, forms.)
In a more technologically mature field, e.g. classical-era land transport, you would see a wider variety of options. Low value density goods would, if the option is available at all, be shipped by river barge and/or coastwise, even if this meant a major detour. High-value goods and important people (who wouldn’t just walk) get a cart/wagon/etc. Imperial-priority written messages are passed along the postal system with horse-changing points. For messages of a staggeringly high value for their exceptionally low bandwidth (only slightly more than 1 bit), you get a fire-beacon system.
A peculiarity of FTL (and the common sci-fi attitude toward space) is that as much as they reuse nautical tropes (those single-biome, single-hat planets are port cities, a few days’/weeks’ travel from each other), they don’t seem interested in anything having to do with sailing (trade winds? do starships ever get becalmed and have to engage in kedging? upwind/downwind positioning in battles?). Instead, starships can move freely in whatever direction they please, but can lose propulsion due to engineering mishaps, and occasionally have to consider fuel. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that, and it is intuitively obvious that such a high-tech, high-energy drive system would be, well, powered. However, this means there should be a vast design space as to how fast they would be able to move, relative to each other. In both World Wars, “standard” merchant ships had perhaps 15 knots as their top speed; destroyers could run at 30+ knots.
Thus even if — especially if? — the Sci-Fi Empire is in technological stasis, its social structure largely unchanged for thousands of years (whether or not there are political revolutions/coups/wars/etc. in the meantime), a technology as foundational to it as FTL propulsion should have all corners of its tradeoffspace explored, and correspondingly specialized ship types should exist. Thus even if the writer doesn’t include ansibles (telegraphs/radio), a packet boat with a letter should be able to outrun a frigate, which should in turn have no trouble catching a bulker.
“Imperial-priority written messages are passed along the postal system with horse-changing points.”
The Inca used this method (with runners instead of horses) for both messages and fish for the royal table.
The Greeks used runners as well because the terrain wasn’t good for horsing around in. Something something Pheidippides something something Marathon.
“Now in the thematic world of Dune, that is because military victory is fundamentally a product of the Fremen Mirage: societies have an inherent vitality to them and the Fremen are vital, hardened by the harshness of Arrakis, in a way that the Great Houses are not. In Herbert’s mind, that is enough: the ‘hard men’ created by the ‘hard times’ of Arrakis will inevitably triumph once an event – the emergence of Paul as a heroic figure – spurs them into action. Paul is thus die Weltseele zu Pferde, “the world-spirit on horseback,” the archetypal ‘great man of history’ who embodies supposed historical forces which are larger than him, which act through him and which would act without him.”
I think this is probably true of Herberts world model in Dune, although I also think it is pretty clear that he agrees with Lord Acton: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
So he is taking the ideas of World Spirits and Great Men and the Fremen Mystique and saying, not that they are non-existent, but that they are evil. Paul wanted to be a decent man, and found himself transformed against his will into a Great one.
It’s a tragedy.
“One wonders what the Dune universe’s version – after the collapse of both the faufreluches and the Fremen – of the First World War, a horror-show of industrial warfare on unprecedented scale – would look like.”
I believe the name for that is “Warhammer 40k”
They even call their basic infantry-weapons lasguns.
They also have a caste of mutants with mental powers that allow faster-than-light space travel. And an emperor who rules what might otherwise be a bunch of independent polities through a corps of fanatically loyal super-soldiers, each worth 5-10 normal warriors.
Back when I had read both Dune and first edition 40k (the world-building of which is slightly different in interesting ways from later versions) much more recently that is the case today, I remember spotting a bunch more similarities between the two.
The fiction of Warhammer 40k has lots of (charitably speaking) influences, but Dune was definitely a major one in the early days.
The idea that games shouldn’t just take from published fiction works with no credit given is something that really only exists for the Tolkien Estate.
“The idea that games shouldn’t just take from published fiction works with no credit given is something that really only exists for the Tolkien Estate.”
Man, I want a t-shirt that says this. Maybe a placard outside my house.
It definitely seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon driven mainly by things like intellectual property law influencing personal perceptions of artistic creation. ‘Hat-tip’ references to multiple other sci-fi and fantasy creative works are very common, even if some are more sledgehammers than hat-tips. ‘Easter eggs’ is another common term for them. For instance, there’s also hints of Burroughs’ Barsoom in the background fluff around Mars (e.g. Radium Carbines).
40k is a sandbox for your own creations (conveniently for Games Workshop, expressed through the purchase of little plastic figurines), though some people seem to be intent on treating it like something like Star Wars with a clear delineation between ‘canon’ and ‘fanfiction’ that cuts off where the author’s paycheck stops.
In that context, the idea that Dune or Barsoom could be historical periods in the greater 40k historic narrative serves as useful inspiration.
Consider that, without Cherryh, both WoW and EVE would not have universes to be set in. Popular culture might be very different if she’s died in the early 90s and gotten estate lawyers involved. As it is, she doesn’t even seem to talk about it.
Indeed. The FTL-mutants are even explicitly called ‘navigators’. Oh, and the Emperor is ‘the God-Emperor of Mankind’. Religious taboo against AI. Loads of stuff.
FWIW, I suspect that an early example that may have contributed inspiration to the W40K setting was a limited run comic series by the 2000 AD franchise called “Nemesis the Warlock”. The premise was that humanity had reacted to encountering aliens by developing a fanatical religious orthodoxy (heavily inspired by/ satirical of the Roman Catholic Church of medieval Europe). This taught that aliens were demons or monsters, abominations that it was humanity’s holy crusade to purge from the universe.
I would quite like to see Brett do a similar analysis of the logistical feasibility of the Great Crusade. The raw numbers seem fairly implausible: supposedly 1 million worlds were conquered in 200 years, meaning that each of the 20 space marine legions has roughly 1.5 days to conquer each planet (this is charitably assuming that the Imperial Army can handle all of the garrisoning duties after the initial c.36 hour conquest, that attrition among the barely 2 million space marines isn’t a meaningful factor, and that no additional allowances need to be made for transit times, even though warp travel between worlds regularly takes months or even years). The easiest explanation, of course, is that either the speed or the extent of the conquest has been wildly inflated by ten thousand years of Imperial propaganda and superstitious mythmaking. However, I haven’t read the Horus Heresy series which has brought the 30th millennium (previously only ancient, quasi-legendary prehistory) into much sharper focus, so I don’t know if the numbers are substantiated more firmly there.
“The raw numbers seem fairly implausible: supposedly 1 million worlds were conquered in 200 years, meaning that each of the 20 space marine legions has roughly 1.5 days to conquer each planet”
From the Heresy books, a few things are made clear that might help things along.
First, the legions don’t operate as single units. The first book, Horus Rising, is set among the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet, which has a XVI Legion marine contingent (and the main character, Horus, in command) but not the entire XVI Legion – detachments as small as single squads are with other Fleets. There are a huge number of expeditionary fleets, and the text states clearly that most of them are commanded by human army generals, not by marines, and have no marine contingent at all. The Sixty-Third is very unusual in this respect. Overall, as at “Horus Rising”, we are told there are 4287 fleets active, another 372 in refit and repair, and another 60,000 or so “detached compliance groups” engaged in further pacification.
4600 fleets active to conquer a million worlds gives a much more acceptable figure of around one conquest per fleet per year. 60,000 active detached compliance groups implies that each conquered world takes about 16 years to be brought fully under control.
Second, there are a lot of little empires out there – human civilisations that control more than one planet. Conquer the capital and you get all the others for free.
Third, of course, the general expectation of the characters (presumably based on experience) is that most worlds won’t resist, but will be delighted to regain contact with Earth.
Hmm, this does sound more plausible. The numbers could still be quibbled (the Emperor always had 20 legions – or at least 18, I suppose – but he presumably didn’t have 4600 fleets from the get-go), but assuming exponential growth it can probably be made to work somehow. I was working off what I know about the aftermath of the Heresy, which is that the Imperial Army was reconstructed as the Imperial Guard specifically to take the main burden of front-line fighting away from the Astartes, who became akin to special forces. Prior to this, it had been expected that marines would handle most combat, with normal humans primarily serving in garrison and support roles. However, the figures you cite suggest that the marines were already doing a tiny minority of the heavy lifting by the end of the Crusade (how this fits with the highly marine-focused nature of the subsequent narrative I’m not quite sure).
The Astartes in the Great Crusade did the most serious fighting, when they hit highly advanced planets or multi-planet empires the Imperial Army couldn’t handle. They’d operate in groups of tens of thousands, as opposed to the 40k era where they’re organized into groups of a thousand battleline plus techmarines and such. The Heresy still has the Imperial Army (now split) involved in a lot of combat, but the main focus is on the Astartes.
I’d also note that the numbers can be significantly improved if we assume a lot of planets joined voluntarily, which I consider plausible. Most human planets were in a pretty bad way and would likely be willing to sign up with a new galactic empire that promised them stuff. Then they only need a minor garrison and the iterators, and most onscreen meetings with human colonies have them try the diplomatic approach. It fails in all onscreen cases, but I tend to assume that’s because the writing is biased towards exciting bolter battles.
Also, the Alpha Legion is contributing in their own fashion, according to Alpharius’s Primarch book, which involves splitting into small groups and doing spy shit like sparking coups; the one we see onscreen has Alpharius launch some minor raids to heighten tension, then hack the IFF of half the troops on the planet to “BLOOD AND SKULLS!” on a planet that had recently had a Khornate revolution, then in the confusion they assassinated the planetary ruler. The narration indicates they do this a lot and it really eases the path for the Expedition Fleets.
Oh, and a lot of preliminary scouting and contact is done by the initial Rogue Traders, who wouldn’t be in the fleet count.
” The numbers could still be quibbled (the Emperor always had 20 legions – or at least 18, I suppose – but he presumably didn’t have 4600 fleets from the get-go)”
I think you could even make a case that he previously had *more* than 4600 – by the time the novels start the Great Crusade is almost over, and it would be plausible for some of the fleets to have been demobilised early. Indeed the triggering event for the whole business is the Triumph at Ullanor, which is an enormous military parade intended to mark the effective end of the Crusade and the Emperor’s decision to withdraw from leading it and put Horus in charge instead.
In terms of timeframe, while I haven’t read much of the Horus Heresy novels (good lord there’s 60 books and they are not small books), I do have a vague awareness that the preparations and amassing materials for the Crusade took significantly longer than the crusade itself went on for, so while the size of the Emperor’s human armies undoubtedly swelled massively over that period, the “mission criticial hardware” for the initial expansion (voidships, titans, shock troops like Space Marines),was probbably well in place before he set off. The core of the Imperial Army, the Solar Auxillia, were all regiments raised from the staggeringly populous solar system after all.
(While Terra went through thousands of years of “techno-barbarianism”, it was back to being basically a hive world by the time of the Heresy)
““The raw numbers seem fairly implausible: supposedly 1 million worlds were conquered in 200 years, meaning that each of the 20 space marine legions has roughly 1.5 days to conquer each planet”
From the Heresy books, a few things are made clear that might help things along.
First, the legions don’t operate as single units. The first book, Horus Rising, is set among the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet, which has a XVI Legion marine contingent (and the main character, Horus, in command) but not the entire XVI Legion – detachments as small as single squads are with other Fleets. There are a huge number of expeditionary fleets, and the text states clearly that most of them are commanded by human army generals, not by marines, and have no marine contingent at all. The Sixty-Third is very unusual in this respect. Overall, as at “Horus Rising”, we are told there are 4287 fleets active, another 372 in refit and repair, and another 60,000 or so “detached compliance groups” engaged in further pacification.
4600 fleets active to conquer a million worlds gives a much more acceptable figure of around one conquest per fleet per year. 60,000 active detached compliance groups implies that each conquered world takes about 16 years to be brought fully under control.”
A small calculation error here I think, but not by magnitude.
1 million worlds conquered in 200 years means 5000 worlds conquered per year.
4287 fleets active means that conquering a world ties up a fleet for an average of 0,857 years – slightly over 10 months.
372 fleets in refit and repair means that the fleet needs 0,075 years in refit or repair per each mission – about 4 weeks either after each 10 month mission or a longer period combined after several missions.
60 000 detached compliance groups mean a world needs such for an average of 12 years (not 16).
20 legions means that each legion needs to man 215 “active” fleets, keep 19 fleets in refit and repair (which mean different men, builders not crews), and man 3000 detached compliance groups.
A lot of the expeditionary fleets probably aren’t manned by the Legions, and the ones we see aren’t manned close to evenly. We see four expeditionary fleets in Horus Rising; the 63rd has Horus and a big Luna Wolves contingent, two that went to the planet Murder with small Emperor’s Children and Blood Angels contingents, and then one with Sanguinius and presumably the main force of the Blood Angels shows up to participate in the campaign on Murder. This was a six-month campaign of complete extermination of the mega-arachnid, which is indicated to be an exceptionally long engagement for such a force.
I’d like to see that too, though I doubt Brett would be very kind to it. None of the numbers stack up in the slightest.
I also haven’t read the Horus Heresy novels, though I doubt they would do much to improve the situation. The quasi-legendary nature of events allows for some significant fudging, especially seeing as we are given explicit license to use unreliable narrator in 40k (e.g. the fluff books are explicitly factional propaganda, and the very first line of the Inquisitor books is ‘everything you’ve been told is a lie’).
The way I square it is that either the numbers of Astartes are wildly under-represented, and/or that the ‘Solar Auxilia’ and other more human forces actually did the overwhelming bulk of the Great Crusade, with the Astartes being the equivalent of those Bronze Age god-king charioteers who carved murals of themselves standing 100ft tall defeating an enemy army personally…nevermind all those tiny little figures standing behind them, they were mainly cheerleaders anyway. Either that or someone dropped a zero from the number of years the Great Crusade took. Maybe all of the above.
Personally, if an article is written, I think this should be the angle taken. ‘We know that the Great Crusade as pitched is functionally impossible…so what fudges have been made in the propagandising of historic events’. Though considering that even the denominator is dodgy (1 million worlds is not very many at all considering the Imperium supposedly covers 2/3rd of the Milky Way), we may just end up chasing our collective tails.
One of my headcanon theories about the 41st millennium is that, by this point, the space marines are basically a propaganda corps. There just aren’t enough of them (approximately 1 per planet under the Emperor’s rule) to make a meaningful difference to the gargantuan wars which the Imperium is constantly fighting, especially given that typical special forces missions (blowing up key infrastructure, decapitation strikes, etc) are of limited utility against leaderless tyranid swarms, regenerating necrons and daemons, or orks whose military-industrial complex consists of scrap held together by vibes. However, lots of posters featuring brightly coloured superheroes who are directly descended from the Emperor is very helpful for legitimating his rule to the masses who actually do 99.9% of the legwork!
“There just aren’t enough of them (approximately 1 per planet under the Emperor’s rule) to make a meaningful difference to the gargantuan wars which the Imperium is constantly fighting”
Agreed. But note that this wouldn’t have been the case during the Great Crusade, when the main effort was not massive wars against aliens, but reclaiming lost human colonies – something much more amenable to surgical strikes against the established leadership, and something where brightly coloured superheroes would have been very effective, since, as we all know, humans are very keen on brightly coloured superheroes (hence why GW sells so many marine minis).
Agreed.
Of course, the real reason for a Space Marine chapter being about 1000 men is that that’s a lofty (but still achievable) goal for building and painting a whole chapter (with a neat sub-goal of collecting a 100-man company).
It’s also worth considering that, while a fair few wars are against Xenos and Daemons and the like, it’s implied that quite a lot of the Imperium’s war efforts are against itself. Internal conflicts with seceding or rebelling worlds of regular humans (be they chaotically initiated or otherwise). Against which chapters of Marines might be of a little more utility.
Also, it certainly used to be the conceit that individual battles of 40k on the tabletop were intended to depict a tiny snapshot of a much broader conflict front. Though I don’t know how explicit that’s made in the recent fluff (i.e. it used to be that stuff like Baneblades and other superheavies were scenery you fought in, rather than models you can plonk down on a battle-mat).
“it used to be that stuff like Baneblades and other superheavies were scenery you fought in, rather than models you can plonk down on a battle-mat”
Well, kind of. The original Rogue Trader rulebook did make the suggestion that an *extremely* large vehicle, like a huge Star Wars-type sandcrawler, might be something to have a battle in or on, rather than something to involve in a battle. But the Baneblade was a model for use in battle from the start; first in the 6mm Epic game, and then in 40k proper. (It was actually playable in 40k years before the first model was released; they published templates to allow you to scratch-build your own. I did. I still have it.)
@ajay Fair point. I’ll pin my flag to the pole as someone who thinks Rogue Trader to about 3rd edition is peak 40k, so that fits. Not that there aren’t excellent bits in the later fluff, but the approach was much more ‘have a fund time’ than ‘let’s make tons of money’ in ways that encouraged individual creativity more.
” I’ll pin my flag to the pole as someone who thinks Rogue Trader to about 3rd edition is peak 40k”
(handshake meme) Frankly I think it started to go downhill from the Vehicle Manual…
One thing that’s important to always remember about the Imperium of Man is that it doesn’t work. It’s not supposed to, it’s the rotting corpse of a giant, standing only because gravity hasn’t gotten around to pulling it all the way over yet.
Any time you look at it and think “that shouldn’t/doesn’t work” the answer is “correct, that’s the point”.
Even the Imperium itself was built on the bones of a previous giant that died and collapsed, and it failed basically immediately when the Emperor got promoted to mostly-dead and the bureaucracy of the system immediately turned him into the one thing he started the heresy by trying not to be, a god.
It’s also not one empire. It’s several empires in a trenchcoat, the Administratum, the Ecclesiarchy, the Astartes and the Mechanicus who are all fundamentally inimical to themselves and each other, and the Mechanicus are only pretending to be in the trenchcoat they’re actually off doing something unspeakable to a toaster.
Imperium *covers* most of the galaxy, not *controls* it. It is, in fact, in source material that vast majority of stars is “wild space” between smallish sectors (~100-200 ly sized cubes) where anything can hide, up to regional power xenoempires – see Tau, or those orkish empires you can find on their codex map. But those could grow no larger as at this point Imperium would inevitably detect them and could pool forces from multiple surrounding sectors to destroy them. Imperium is incapable of literally controlling entire galaxy – it seems nobody ever was up to the task, judging by how War in Heavens went and results of previous hegemony, Eldar empire – but it is a galactic hegemon, a net thrown over the galaxy to strangle any potential competitors in the crib – which clearly worked until necrons, tyranids and, later, all that Great Rift stuff. (Also, I wish GW writers emphasized all this big picture stuff more instead of yet another bunch of boring personalistic exploits, but clearly those sell minis better)
This works particularly well considering how FTL travel works in 40k. You’re not physically travelling through the space faster than light, you pop into an alternative dimension to travel around then pop back out again at your destination (hopefully, and hopefully at the right time, and hopefully without being possessed).
This means your territory can be thoroughly discontiguous as you can travel between them without being intercepted.
One of my favourite bits of headcanon is that due to the non-linear nature of the warp, ‘shipping lanes’ and the like do not follow the geometric relations between two points in realspace. So it could take longer to reach a star system that’s right next to yours than it could to get to one triple the distance away. And because the warp is a gestalt reflection of the thoughts of the galactic population, different species might interact with it in different ways, changing the ‘flow’ of the warp and how they move through it. Not to mention that the Tyranids do not use the warp at all, so they present something of an outside context problem for the denizens of the Milky Way (and, conversely, those denizens pose a bit of an outside context problem to the Tyranids).
It’s a really interesting dynamic that’s completely ignored in favour of having post-humans clouting people over the head with chainswords.
Why million worlds? 41th millennium’s Imperium is said to contain one million planets, but explicitly not all of them were conquered in Great Crusade – there obviously were not-so-great crusades later, rogue traders’ work and so on. In fact there was another major expansion wave in M32-M34, between Scouring and Nova Terra Interregnum.
Anyway, as I imagine it, Astartes weren’t conquering each planet one by one. The usual modus operandi would be: an expeditionary fleet arrives in yet another star cluster, identifies local interstellar centers of power or, barring that, whoever would put the most resistance, crushes them (hopefully quickly) and moves on. Then Imperial Army and bureaucracy follow up and, operating out of the newly-conquered base as a new local hegemon, mop up remaining planets or weaker polities (which likely wouldn’t even put a fight now), consolidating them into a new Imperial sector. That way you naturally get the known “islands in the dark” macrostructure of the Imperium, with space marines’ boots never even getting on the ground on most worlds.
(Thinking of it, it actually reminds me of Alexander the Great’s campaign now!)
Is there anywhere that Paul says the Jihad will be successful without him? He says the Jihad will happen but it’s entirely possible that without the prescient superhuman at its head, what the Jihad obtains is transforming the various Great Houses into administrative states and that leads to WW1 across the entire galaxy. Would certainly be enough blood in such a conflict to drown entire planets.
Yeah the specific quote given doesn’t specify the jihad succeeds, just that it happens. I’m also not convinced our host isn’t making several false assumptions around how the Jihad is actually waged. In particular that they don’t have a way to get more equipment than whatever they could capture on Arrakis, that they engage in negligible recruitment of non-fremen, and that they don’t just start nuking from orbit whenever winning a ground war looks implausible. The 100 sterilized worlds make that last bit pretty strongly implied, I’m not sure how you sterilize a planet with out at least nuclear levels of firepower, and if they sterilized 100 worlds who’s to say they didn’t use less excessive levels of firepower to pacify other planets which put up a bit too much of a fight.
With the advanced space-faring capabilities the Dune humanity possess, they would be able inflict terrific destruction on a planet even without using nuclear weapons. Dropping asteroids could cause a world-ending catastrophe – it’s a fairly common trope in science fiction. The Chicxulub bolid that ended the Mesosoic was “only” 10km (6miles) across. Dropping smaller objects could erase cities. Larger would trigger nuclear winters and planet-wide vulcanic activity.
A rock that big might weigh a trillion tons. No way you’re moving it interplanetary distances easily or quickly.
If it wasn’t the case that a man portable technology can teleport objects wherever you want. After all, the risk in folding space without navigators is that you either miss your orbit or hit something
Yeah, it’s trivially easy to kill a planet from space. It’s a mark of true insanity to live at the bottom of a well and it really illustrates how thoroughly immiserated the common people of the universe must be that so many of them are not in orbit.
Except everything people want is at the bottom of a gravity well.
Coal miners don’t build houses in coal mines.
Because a coal mine doesn’t include everything a coal miner wants or needs to live. You can’t grow crops in a coal mine. You can grow crops in the bottom of a gravity well, and in fact to grow crops in space requires a huge amount of infrastructure and technology, and it makes little sense to do it in space when you have a habitable planet nearby.
Furthermore, living in space does not make you safe from rogue or targeted asteroids! In fact you’re a lot more vulnerable to even small pieces of space debris in a way you wouldn’t be under a proper atmosphere, because said atmosphere causes most of the small rocks to burn up. Your hypothetical space station would need to be constantly on the watch for tiny rocks traveling at tremendous speeds that could punch into them and destroy huge chunks of the station.
“Your hypothetical space station would need to be constantly on the watch for tiny rocks traveling at tremendous speeds that could punch into them and destroy huge chunks of the station.”
To be fair, that sounds like precisely the problem a Dune-style shield would have been invented to fix.
Your point still stands though. Having recently done some rough back-of-a-fag-packet calculations for how much agricultural land is required to support a planetary population for a worldbuilding project, it’s insane just how much space you need to feed people.
Effectively, what I was trying to produce is an agricultural world that was capable of feeding multiple other earth-sized populations in the rest of the solar system. To feed one additional earth-sized population you need basically an additional Europe-sized area under the plow with present-day ‘good’ agricultural yield (4 people per acre). Not even ‘Europe minus the mountainous area of Europe’. The entirety of Europe as farmland. That is a lot of area. You can cut that down through using more space-efficient crops (i.e. potatoes) or more space-efficient methods (i.e. vertical farming), but it’s still very difficult to get around the sheer space requirement of agriculture. Especially in a place where vertical space holds similar cost premiums to horizontal space (as it does in orbital habitats).
Of course, the workaround for this is to keep your agricultural production on the planet and ship it up to orbit, but then you’ve created a continuous expense (bulk food transport out of a gravity well) to protect from a potential risk that may never materialise. The risk is a big one, but people are notoriously bad at planning for ‘black swan’ type big-but-rare risks. Not to say that it’s an impossible situation, but it’s typically done after one of those black swan type risks has occurred. For instance, people historically have relocated cities from lowlands right next to their fields to highlands quite some distance from their fields in response to being attacked. There’s also the issue that keeping your agricultural production on the planet below still retains a major proportion of the vulnerability you’re trying to avoid.
All of this might be moot in the Dune universe of course, and climbing out of a gravity well with a bunch of stuff might be fairly trivial for them (indeed, it probably is considering that Caladan exports rice). But they’re also not in a situation where populations are facing threats that would justify that sort of expenditure on defence. If what we’re told is correct and they have had 10,000 years of stability with strong norms against planet-killing weapons, then it makes perfect sense to just keep living planetside. At least, until the black swan event of the Fremen Jihad occurs…
Went to stay away from the bottom of a gravity well? LEO wouldn’t help, you’re basically at the exact same depth, up to a rounding error. You’d have to go into very high orbits, of the order of multiples of the planet’s radius, to get a meaningful difference. Actually forget about plantery orbits, the Earth is deeper in the Sun’s gravity well than someone standing on the surface of the Earth is in Earth’s. Better move to the far reaches of the solar system, well away from any planetary body or anything of similar mass to be safe. Really the best thing would be to be in the interstellar void. Or is the gravity well of the galactic nucleus is a threat to our safety too?
This safety is worth being very far away from any resources, materials, and energy sources; because civilization always prioritises safety above anything that makes life pleasant, productive, or even possible.
Dune was written in the 1960s, well before O’Neil et al started pointing out that you didn’t have to limit yourself in space to mere “space stations”, that in principle you could make them large enough to be habitats; miniature worlds with self-sustaining ecosystems. The old meme of space being merely something you travel through to get to a planet to be settled was still alive and well at the time e.g. Star Trek.
@Michael Hutson because that’s what space is! No matter how much you build there, it’s still a vast expanse _between_ things. Take the most absurd, extreme scenario possible: convert every last atom in the solar system (outside the sun itself) into small space stations. Say those are ~1000T each (only twice the ISS, which is far from self sustaining). The average distance between them will still be over a million km! That’s an awful lot of nothing between tiny spots (far less than a single km across) of things.
Physics probably doesn’t preclude you from building a self sustaining habitat in the intergalactic void if you wanted to. But most Sci-Fi space structures, even the most far fetched ones like Dyson Spheres and Ring Worlds, are deep in gravity wells. Because deep in gravity wells is where the stuff you need to build / expand / power them is. Because that’s how gravity works. Even if you don’t need any “stuff” at all, you don’t actually gain anything by being far away from them, except some paranoiac level of security. And the cost is quite literally _everything_.
An excellent analysis!
Things like the implausibility of the Fremen Jihad and the change in how Paul’s prescience works (he goes from being nigh omniscient in Dune to having all kinds of limits on his foresight in Messiah) always gave me the impression that Dune was a work of pro-Paul propaganda (almost certainly written by Irulan) while Messiah was closer to the reality, with stuff like the empire being 10,000 years old being incorrect in-world information meant to reinforce Corrino power/imperial legitimacy. I was actually under the impression that this was the intended/normal reading of the books until the first Villeneuve movie came out and everyone started talking about Dune online.
Related to #5, I strongly suspect that the Bene Gesserit don’t actually know what they’re doing. Or, to be more specific, that there was an original plan behind the breeding project that they wandered off to thanks to their other organizational goals as a side effect of their indoctrination. My suspicion is that the original goal was to try to figure out a way of creating controllable “abominations” who wouldn’t randomly get possessed by their past lives, but then the project drifted over time, helped along by whatever methods they used to prevent Reverend Mothers from giving birth after the Water of Life changed their biochemistry. Under this reading, Paul is special because he got both mentat training and the physical parts of the Bene Gesserit training, meaning he could survive the spice overdose and had the mental tools to deal with accessing his genetic memories without whatever mental block the Bene Gesserit give themselves. Granted, it’s been years since I’ve read the books, so I might be forgetting key details that make this theory untenable…
(As a side note, Messiah gave me the impression that being able to see the future actually isn’t that uncommon in the Dune universe – sure, most people aren’t anywhere near as good at it as Paul or a Guild navigator, but I do recall an offhand remark that the bulk of fortune-tellers in Arakeen made Paul’s prescience a bit foggy, which implies that it’s backed by some level of precognition.)
The fortune-tellers may just be an Arrakeen thing, though — remember the spice is far more available on Arrakis than elsewhere.
“I was actually under the impression that this was the intended/normal reading of the books until the first Villeneuve movie came out and everyone started talking about Dune online.”
It was mine also, though a discussion in the previous Dune article rather disabused me of that idea!
Re: Paul’s precognition. In Messiah it’s a plot point that several things are making it harder to see the future. One is the increasing popularity of fortunetelling, even to many individuals trying to scry their futures personally with things like the Dune Tarot. Two is other powerful precogs like Guild Navigators becoming more active in politics, because their presence shrouds everyone involved in a conspiracy. Third, Paul explicitly is trying to not use his precognition. He says that to see the future is to lock it into place, and he’s terrified of locking himself into a long life where he already knows what every second will bring before it happens. And to his credit, after he’s blinded by a stone burner that’s exactly what he does; uses his prescience to see the present and near-future so precisely that people forget he’s blind.
>One wonders what the Dune universe’s version – after the collapse of both the faufreluches and the Fremen – of the First World War, a horror-show of industrial warfare on unprecedented scale – would look like.
“Length of war: forty-eight years, one month.
Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%).
Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary)—91,215,660 (± 200);
Orbitals—14,334;
planets and major moons—53;
Rings—1;
Spheres—3;
stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration)—6.“
~ Consider Phlebas, Appendix
“a small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population”
Giving just a link to not spoil the punch.
Its funny to me that, as a person who only really remembers the 1st book, the only way I can make the Fremen Jihad make any sense is if the Jihad was *preceded* by massive waves of spontaneous conversion among the general populace. A fringe religious movement breaks containment and kills 61 billion people? Makes sense if it’s the spark on an unstable situation that causes already existing tensions across dozens of places to flip into open conflict and mass warfare. Doesn’t even need to be that much of a “before,” if the Fremen show up to a planet and a sizable minority of the of the unmobilized people there go “oh we hate our great house, let us join you with *our* shields and ornithopters,” then we can see a cascading snowball effect, a bit like armies defecting to the Mongols and sustaining their conquest machine far further than would be suggested by their available manpower. The types of casualties and effects you describe here also make sense for like, a more successful Protestant Reformation, 30 Years War and all.
But this is absolutely not at all Herbert’s intent, since that would be about the power of an insurgent religion as a cross-cultural binding force, and would cut very counter to his idea of an ethnically superior warrior culture if people could flip in and join it at a moment’s notice.
Reading the discussion of the war against the Great Houses, I thought that the best way it could happen would indeed be if
I’d always assumed that part of the jihad was that the Bene Geserit, who are explicitly involved in manipulating galactic religion (after all, they are a religious order of religious and spiritual advisors with genuine magic powers in a religious galaxy), had been preparing the way for the kwisatch haderach. I’d also imagined it to be more jihad and less crusade – the terms aren’t entirely interchangeable. After all, the mua’dib prophecy was partially their work – ‘this prophecy is how they enslave us’ being shouted in the Villeneuve film might be very on the nose, but it is literally the Bene Gesserit’s actual plan to plant the Kwisatch Haderach on Dune, use the prophecy of Mua’dib to create a religious movement amongst the Fremen, then use this for their aims.
The real problem being that we don’t explicitly know WHY the Bene Gesserit started doing this. Creating the kwisatch haderach as a messianic figure with an army of religious fanatics on Arrakis is explicitly their goal, as is this figure having incredible powers of prophecy. But their reasons are murky – is it pure religious conviction, like a religious movement preparing the way for the second coming, or do they just believe that the kwisatch haderach is necessary in order to see well enough into the future to govern?
Either way, I’d imagine the literal emergence of the messiah on Arrakis, as foretold by prophecy, at the head of a deeply religious power base would cause sweeping revolt throughout known space, a jihad as in ‘struggle’, and the majority of the casualties are due to this strife as Paul’s Fremen are greated by popular uprisings, as well as nuclear exchanges with the great houses, given the one industrialised weapon the Fremen have in equal abundance to the great houses is nuclear weapons (the Attreidies military was mostly destroyed in the harkonnen attack, but their nuclear arsenal remained hidden). Its also worth noting that whilst 40 religions were extinguished, the new-orange-catholics, or whatever you call the non-Fremen believers in Paul’s divinity, just got a prophet who can very much prove he is the real deal, and no-one has any incentive to reveal that this is a result of either a eugenics programme or drugs (outside arakis the spice is used by guild navigators, so people probably associate it more with actual navigation than prediction, even if relativity does make those effectively the same thing).
“but it is literally the Bene Gesserit’s actual plan to plant the Kwisatch Haderach on Dune, use the prophecy of Mua’dib to create a religious movement amongst the Fremen, then use this for their aims.”
This is, in fact, the opposite of the BG’s plan. Or rather, two different plans got tangled up together.
The prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib is one of several religions “seeded” in the setting’s distant past by the Missionaria Protectiva, which engineers religions to protect Bene Gesserit sisters in distress. Jessica even notes that Arrakis was not the only world harsh enough to justify being seeded with that prophecy.
The Bene Gesserit’s plan for the Kwisatz Haderach was Jessica to bear a daughter to Duke Leto, who could then get genetic material from Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and have a son on Chapterhouse who would be the Kwisatz Haderach and be raised Bene Gesserit. After that, the details get hazy. The fact that Shaddam IV’s BG wife had only daughters suggests that they could have wanted Irulan (or her youngest sister — the books aren’t super clear on dates) to marry the eventual KH and take control of the Imperium, but there would be a considerable age gap considering Shaddam’s wife died about the time Paul was born, so their youngest daughter would have to be at least his age. The other possibility is that with no indisputable heir, the Imperium would have fallen into chaos, allowing the BG to present the KH has a messiah for the whole Imperium.
The only reason that would make sense to me is to kill the great houses that are perpetuating the father headship patriarchy and to use another equally patriarchal culture to do it, thus ridding themselves of threats, given that the Fremen clearly can’t hold such an empire. But Herbert obviously doesn’t intend THAT narrative. The Bene Gesserit do these things because they are women and witches and why do women do anything? They are just useful tools, like the witches in Macbeth, or the oracles in half a dozen other tales.
Or, I think of the point made here by our resident pendent/historian, the Valkyrie and Amazons were there to be beaten. That’s what the Bene Gesserit are really there for–to be beaten, foiled by Paul’s existence, foiled by good, hard men of firm conviction.
I always thought that Herbert was obviously riffing on the miraculous speed of the Islamic conquest. You have these “uncouth desert dwellers” create one of the largest empires in history within a couple of decades. How did they do that? Maybe the Great Houses were much more brittle politically and economically due to internecine conflicts. Maybe their oppressed populations were seething with resentment already.
Also, what about control of spice, which in the real world would be some combination of petroleum, caffeine, superfood, microchips, and cocaine (to which all of society was addicted.)
Finally, while the Fremen may not have “modern day” military training they definitely can benefit from the surviving Atreides military braintrust (and maybe their intelligence/propaganda/spy networks survived as well?) I think about how Japan went from medieval warrior elite to diesel-tech military empire in the course of a generation, being open to technological change while still keeping their military mindset.
> Equally, the Fremen lack both the ability to manufacture shields or ornithopters, but also lack the knowledge to maintain shields or ornithopters.
Or operate them. I found the scene of the freemen running to man the imperial frigates especially hilarious, what would they supposedly do when they got in? Do they magically know how to fly them?
Next you’ll be saying the humans in “Battlefield: Earth” couldn’t have repaired and operated the thousand-year-old fighter jets they used to attack the Psyclos.
Note to Brett: Please, please do not attempt to analyze the logistics and tactics of the film, for the sake of your sanity and whatever dwindling faith you have in the intelligence of humans.
I mean, the book is funny enough.
“Oh, they’ve been Black Box/Cargo Cult-ing their FTL for forever, but my ENDLESS HUMAN INGENUITY allows me to reverse engineer its functions with THIS MAGNET* to nuke their homeworld and start a human space empire!”
*I’m 74% sure the MC just uses a magnet on the outside of the Psyclos FTL control box to work the hidden internals, but it has admittedly been a very long time
They may not have known how to operate frigates, but they clearly knew very well how to operate ‘thopters. The ones who give Jessica and Paul the ‘thopter they took to escape gave them specific, quite dangerous, tactics to evade pursuit. The idea that a culture doesn’t know how to operate a thing, yet has specific doctrine for its use based on pushing the operational envelope to the absolute limits, doesn’t make a lot of sense.
As for the frigates, there are a few things to consider. First, Paul could have instructed specific Fremen in the operation of the frigates, so maybe they DID know how to fly them. But more likely they didn’t, which brings me to my second point: You don’t need to know how to operate something to know how to destroy or disable it. Anyone who’s had to do FOD checks/patrols or had to be escorted around large, expensive machinery knows this first-hand. And this is especially true for a spaceship. Target key components and you can render them inoperable or even turn it into scrap metal. Presumably the frigates carried fuel and such internally (so disabling ground-based infrastructure won’t be sufficient), but that alone makes them vulnerable, because anything that can power a ship or be used as a weapon can destroy the ship. Or just plant explosives on the thing and blow up carefully selected bits. Doing so is going to be complicated and dangerous, but the theory is dead simple.
But those frigates are then used as part of their fleet to attack other worlds no? Like, without frigates, the Fremen will have to rely on Heighliners to deploy their troops onto planets, presumably while those planets have a functioning frigate fleet, and thus could intercept the ships trying to drop troops onto their planet. They need frigates to open the way for invasions of other planets, do they not?
Fair, but again, Paul knows how to operate them (either through training or prescience). And they captured a certain number of troops.
It’s also worth noting that Paul was the emperor by the time the Fremen were going offworld. The Fremen didn’t need to fly them; the troops Paul obtained by becoming emperor would handle that. That creates a three-tier military–heighliners to carry the frigates, frigates to carry the troops, and troops to do the fighting.
“His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him.”
Could this be interpreted to mean only that the jihad would inevitably be *attempted*, and not that it would inevitably *succeed*?
A thought occurs about the shield based fighting, it makes no sense any force that has shields can pad their force multiple times with un-shielded troops, even if only 5% of the troops have shields instead of creating an elite force, you distribute it equally in a much larger force, that way the enemy cannot use laser weapons against your entire force, because if they do very quickly they will hit that one man in twenty with the shield.
The correct way to de-fang laser weapons in the setting would be to introduce a one sided counter measure like some kind of armor that reflects or scatters the laser with no harm to the intended target. The armor can be super expensive and hard to produce so that the Freemen have no access to it.
The most trivially easy way to defeat shields is to launch an impact-activated laser against them.
Or the dart thing that got Leto, that stops just before the shield and then slowly works it’s way in, why isn’t there a machine gun that shoots 1000 per minute of these?
Isn’t that an incredibly rare piece of tech manufactured on the planet Ix, borderline AI ?
The dart is an interesting one. The films treat it differently to the books.
In the books, Yueh tranquilises the Duke with a dart before he manages to activate his shield. There is a mention of ‘slow-pellet stunners’ in the books which can penetrate shields, but we do not see them. Presumably the films took inspiration from this. I’m not sure if we do see them in later books, so I’m open to being corrected.
If we’re taking the books as the primary source, then I don’t think we know enough about shield-penetrating darts to know why they’re not mass-produced.
Personally, I had a similar reaction to the shield-penetrating ordinance that destroyed all of the Atreides ships in the films. If those exist, then what exactly is the point of shielding at all? I note that these also do not exist in the book, but presumably were added for increased visual spectacle in the films.
Because Hunter Killers do not work so in the novel, Leto did not use his shield in the book in that scene.
IIRC because hearing and Lasguns
Conventional (i.e. chemical-explosive) artillery. Boom-boom, now all the unshielded soldiers are dead. This technology exists in the setting, the Harkonnens are shown using it in their attack on Arrakis.
However, having artillery and using it are not same thing.
Artillery buried at the furthest corner of some almost forgotten warehouse shoots nothing.
And to know you can use artillery you need to know that you will fight unshielded troops. Which is kind of not a thing in Dune universe. So they assume the horde coming in is shielded.
So while they can have artillery, by time they understand it could work it is likely too late.
Or take the technology to its logical conclusion – hitting a shield with a laser causes a nuclear detonation somewhere along the beam. Provided this doesn’t disable the shield (overwhelming them isn’t depicted as a thing), said nuclear explosion would almost instantly hit said shield with another laser (nukes produce laser levels of light, just in all directions), so any time someone hits a shield with a laser they get a more of less infinitely exponential detonation (as each detonation causes another one, provided it occurs outside the initial shield). And that is bad for the same reason we’ve never used Anthrax bombs – we worked out how, but also worked out that war involves claiming territory, which is not possible if you’ve rendered it uninhabitable.
The way that Freemen win is nukes, Paul and whatever Atreides contingent survived on Arrakis has the technological know how to build nukes, a very simple weapon by the settings standards.
Paul rapidly sets up a nuclear program on Arrakis in a matter of months, a stockpile is built up very quickly within a year the Freemen travel to the first great house world, and issue an ultimatum. It is rejected they use nuclear weapons to wipe the planet clean, this pattern repeats multiple times until the great houses and the people underneath them get the message and start surrendering without a single shot or stab if you will.
The control of the Spacing Guild (the only faster than light medium of travel) affords Paul the asymmetry of being able to nuke anyone he wants without retaliation.
…and then no Fremen ever gets onto any Great House world ever again.
They get *really good* at detecting Fremen (these are people with super-science capabilities in genetics by our standards), and any trying to sneak onto a world (How? Hiding in the landing gear?) get to (briefly) see the stars without a space suit.
The weapon they were attempting to smuggle onto the world is quickly moved into the House’s stockpiles, or dumped into a retrograde orbit over Arakkis, or just blown up using regular explosives down a mine (nuclear weapons are actually pretty hard to make detonate properly, and relatively easy to sabotage), depending on how easy it is to make safe in the judgement of the House’s nuclear technicians. Yes, there are some for every House. The weapons work, so they’ve been maintained.
I also suspect the Fremen, and the Saudakar for that matter, wouldn’t be unstoppable because they’re better fighters, but because they have much better morale/cohesion than paid House troops in a world where the houses have minimal state control. As in, house troops are proffesional mercenaries, great against unshielded rebelions, but not particularly loyal to their house, which, as the Attreidies demonstrate, isn’t ‘their’ government (houses can fully leave the planet, at which point a different house is in charge of said planet instead, and it’s apparently not particularly weird that the Attredies legions are led by a former Harkonen, with the weird bit being that Gurney is very good at it, not that he’s a foreigner). In contrast, the Saudakar are described as incredibly loyal to the Corino empire, and the Fremen are conducting a religious war, and so would be even more personally motivated to keep fighting for their literal Messiah. It might just be that most house troops will switch sides at the first sign of oncoming weather.
The Atreides forces show the exakt Opposite
> but the Rashidun caliphs quite deliberately avoided this sort of thing, often offering religious
> protections to the underlying peoples beneath the empires (Roman and Sassanid) they were
> attacking to avoid a situation where they faced broad popular resistance
Isn’t this the crux though? He repeatedly talks about the Jihad being a mental contagion and “spasm” that all of humanity is pushing for. And he talks a lot about the Qizarate missionaries as well (and they are his spies too). So I suspect that what is happening here is that the Fremen are “enlisting the people” out from under their Great Houses, perhaps? By the end of that 12 years there’s a river of pilgrims coming to Arrakis.
I suspect he’s suggesting precisely this. He’s doing exactly what the Rashidun caliphs were doing — his Jihad is a *popular* Jihad among the Imperium at large.
Yeah, this makes the most sense to me – Paul and the Fremen are definitely adding to their forces along the way (for reasons Brett lays out). The “vitality” of the Fremen culture can still be of critical import, even if the Fremen are only the initiators of the Jihad, not its sole executors.
I would add to the other comments here that the collapse of the empire would let various inter-house conflicts burst into violence.
Also, I always understood that some houses allied themselves to Paul – I mean, his father was so well liked he could have raised the Lansraad against the emperor, a threat that sets the whole series in motion. This then fixes the Fremen lack of frigates and shields at least.
Yeah, I figured Paul has to have had collaborators among the Great Houses, it probably was not “Fremen vs. literally everyone else” during the Jihad. Hell, if their participation was more handling the “back line” stuff of handling frigates and other complicated logistics while the Fremen handled the front line fighting, it’d probably be easier to get Houses to buy-in to the idea of throwing in with Paul (especially since with the Emperor captured and Paul married to Irulan he had the best lock on being the “legitimate” ruler under the system anyway).
I would also say the Fremen probably aren’t wholly ignorant of non-Arakkis fighting either, since the whole reason they supposedly got this deadly was because Paul trained them in the methods the Atreides had developed to make their own forces almost as deadly as Sardaukar. I have to assume that included dealing with things like shielded warriors and the like. They also had significant logistical industrial capability; they were able to mine enough spice to keep the Guild bribed, and stillsuits are specifically called out as factory manufactured as I recall, not crafted by a bunch of artisans or similar. They may not have had the highest industries, but as mentioned you probably had Houses going over to help supply those things.
Not to say I don’t agree about the… implausibility of them winning over the Imperium (honestly, has ANYBODY ever taken on literally the actual entire world and won? Odds kinda argue against that). But I suppose there’s enough room with Paul having basically taken out the entire original power structure that was against him right at the start to maybe argue there wasn’t sufficient organized resistance against him to overthrow his regime. Leto II certainly seems to rule literally everything, but that’s a LONG way down the road and with a lot of deliberate engineering by a god-king to change the actual society.
There are a few things to support this view.
First, what triggers the whole plot is that the Emperor is worried that Leto I was too popular, and thus a threat to his reign. For this to happen Leto I would have to have had a fairly large base of support among the Great Houses. Compounding this, Paul and Jessica have irrefutable proof of the Emperor getting involved in an inter-House dispute, something repeatedly pointed out as a Bad Thing in the book. The original Atreides idea, once the Harkonens attacked, was to prove that the Emperor’s troops were working with the Harkonens, to get the Great Houses to object strongly enough to force the Emperor to withdraw his support of the Barron.
So Atreides had widespread support to begin with, and would have increased that support quite rapidly.
As for Fremen fighting, they weren’t ignorant of it–they’d dealt with the Harkonens and smugglers before. They weren’t used to shields, but they knew they existed and how to deal with them (including “let the worms get them”). The thing to remember is that the Fremen had a plan of their own–to terraform Dune–and while fighting Harkonens may be fun, it couldn’t be allowed to interfere with the terraforming efforts. It wasn’t until Paul that the Fremen stopped actively hiding their numbers and capacity; up until then, they were playing a role.
As for Fremen manufacturing, it’s repeatedly pointed out as being highly mobile. Makes supply lines a lot easier to maintain. We don’t know what raw materials are required for Fremen combat operations, but as Rome demonstrated, a military that’s able to supply more of their own needs within the military can operate more effectively than a military that can’t. A military force that brings the manufacturing of weapons and logistical equipment to every base they establish is going to be a LOT harder to disrupt than one that relies on Guild transport to bring these things.
I think this analysis really fails to appreciate the immense logistical advantage Paul’s forces have. They control ALL interstellar transport and trade. Any House, Minor or Major, that wants to maintain interstellar trade (presumably vital to retaining their status) bends the knee and joins the Crusade’s logistics network if not Paul’s own military.
“Victory” in the Jihad is mostly irrelevant. What Paul can’t stop is the death and suffering.
Jihadists willing to freely use lasguns against shields and the nuclear-equivalent damage implied seems like a quick way to kill billions. Nuclear winter would cause a lot of follow-on suffering. Full control of the spacing guild would stop all communication between star systems, wouldn’t it? How successful have the Bene Gesserit been at planting religious seeds elsewhere?
So, maybe the pattern is something like: cut off all interstellar travel, causing widespread panic, send emissaries out into the galaxy proclaiming the good news that the messiah has arrived, on planets where the population embraces the new religion, take out critical great house assets and get the faithful to rise up and overthrow them. On planets where it doesn’t, suicide lasgunners attacking shielded Great House forces cause terrible destruction. Since interstellar communication is cut off, each system faces this without warning.
I should note that the connection between ‘jihadists’ and ‘suicide bombing’ did not particularly exist in the 60s when Herbert wrote Dune. Various different peoples all over the world engaged in suicide bombings of some sort or other since at least the 1800s, but the concerted campaign of suicide bombings in relation to radical Islam really only started in the 80s. So I don’t think this is the sort of thing that would have been in Herbert’s mind when he used the word ‘jihad’.
Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that Herbert has created a military situation where lasgun-equipped suicide bombers would be exceptionally effective. Just that this is coincidental, rather than implied by the usage of ‘jihad’.
Suicide bombing has always been, and remains, primarily an anti-colonialist/anti-imperial practice more closely related to protest self-immolation than artillery strikes. Religion just serves as a way to get the person sacrificing their life to accept the cost. The largest case of pro-imperial/pro-colonialist suicide bombing is of course Shinto, from WWII; the other pro-imperial instances that have had the most impact on the public’s present understanding of suicide bombing are the September 11th attacks in 2001 and the Uruk-Hai breaking the outer wall of Helm’s Deep in 2002.
While I agree with the overwhelming majority of what you’ve said, I think it’s tenuous at best to describe the 9/11 attacks as ‘pro-Imperialist’. They fit far better with the broader pattern of anti-imperial/anti-colonialist suicide bombings.
The point was more that there’s a widespread popular conception that ‘jihadis’ are more likely to engage in suicide-bombing than non-jihadis due to a number of high-profile instances and trends in the Western world (the aforementioned 9/11, Afghanistan, Palestine, ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria etc.). This trend only really got started in the 80s, so the connection wouldn’t have been present at the time of Herbert’s writing. As you mentioned, the most prevalent suicide bombers before that were the Japanese.
During the conquest by Harkonnens a Fremen Kamikazed a sardaukar transport with his Ornitophter
Bombings, suicidal or otherwise, became adopted by anti-Israeli factions in the Arab/ Islamic world after the 1970s. In the wake of the infamous Ma’alot school massacre, Israel developed effective internal security measures that made the previous preferred tactic– gunman attacks– largely futile.
but the concerted campaign of suicide bombings in relation to radical Islam really only started in the 80s
The Tamil Tigers made even heavier use of suicide bombings than Islamist groups in the 1980s (most famously, taking out a sitting President of Sri Lanka and the frontrunner for Prime Minister of India) and might have pioneered it as a tactic of modern warfare (its a little unclear, since the Palestinian and Lebanese insurgencies and the Tamil insurgency were roughly contemporaneous). It actually makes more sense for them than it does for Islamist groups, since Hinduism doesn’t have the same degree of opposition to suicide that Abrahamic religions do. (The Tamil Tigers themselves were thoroughly secular communists / left-nationalists, but still, drawing from a broadly Hindu population and cultural matrix).
I still make the criticism that I think all of your commentary on the “fremen mirage” is subject to a really imprecise view of what constitutes decadence – it’s not *just* wealth.
I believe ascetic disciplines organically incorporated similar to how people do intermittent fasting nowadays. Enables the addiction to comfort in light of wealth to be countered.
Ironically, one of the counter-examples to the “Fremen Mirage” was the Roman Empire. While it is true that the civilised Romans triumphed over the Gauls, were one to ask the Romans if their victory over the Greeks and Hellenic Asia were due to they moral superiority over the decadent East, they would have emphatically agreed. I think the ultimately thesis of that series was sound and correct, but I think the inhospitable wilderness vs. fertile civilisation axis was given much focus to the neglect of the cultural axis (stoic acestics vs. “degenerate” decadence) which is also a core part of the “Mirage”.
Does there exist a common “view of what constitutes decadence” that isn’t imprecise? Just speaking off the cuff and without thinking too carefully, I’d be inclined to think that a great deal of amorphousness has been baked into many (most?) ideas about societal decadence, going as far back as I can think of.
In fact – revising the above temptation to answer off the cuff and going back and glancing at some of Bret’s older stuff criticizing narratives about Roman decadence – that’s a part of his argument, right? That narratives about Roman decadence are imprecise? Handwavey and vibesy about what decadence is, when it’s supposed to have happened, and such?
A lot of Roman ills is from not only from what is called Luxury among the upper classes as Cato the Elder would rail against. But also from slavery in Roman Latifundia crowding out the Roman Smallholders from their Farms. Undermining the Republican Foundations of a strong Yeomanry. Of property holding Men who are alone qualified to serve in the Republican Roman Army.
Increasing the teeming masses of poor. Known as the “Capite Censi” Poor men without property.
The Gracchi Brothers tried to undo that. And likewise Julius Caesar with Mark Antony tried also.
The “Capite censi” are subsequently recruited into the Roman Army under Gaius Marius once he waived the Property requirement. And through the promise of loot and patronage from their Generals ended up empowering what would later be Men like Julius Caesar and other Generals who would be Emperor.
I hold the view of our pedantic host (as expressed mainly at https://acoup.blog/2023/06/30/collections-the-marian-reforms-werent-a-thing/) that Marius did no such thing and that there seems to be not much difference between the military role of the capite censi before Marius and their role after Marius. I also hold that view about the importance of loot in motivating enrollment (it was important after Marius, but it was also important before Marius; there was no major change).
Separately but similarly, at https://acoup.blog/2025/01/17/collections-on-the-gracchi-part-i-tiberius-gracchus/ our host argues that slavery was not in fact crowding out small farmers in the age of the Gracchi.
Also Slavery is what enables so much of the so called Roman Luxury in the first place. If the Rich Romans had to pay for skilled high quality labor of Freemen. They will get superior quality craftsmanship but they won’t be as wealthy and luxuriated.
Slavery’s purported creation or promotion of decadence is exactly one of those associations that comes with a boatload of amorphousness and contradiction. People will argue that an overabundance of slaves enabled the Roman aristocracy to devote themselves to the pursuits of leisured aristocracy and thereby made them corrupt and decadent (in contrast to the earlier Romans and their hard, austere, manly emphasis on the interests of common free men), and people will also argue (sometimes the same people!) that an overabundance of slaves enabled the Spartan aristocracy to devote themselves to the pursuits of leisured aristocracy and thereby kept them hard, austere, and manly (in contrast to the Athenians and their corrupting, decadent emphasis on the interests of common free men).
In one version slavery creates decadence and free poor virtue, in the other the free poor create decadence and slavery virtue, depending on which one the argument needs it to be.
You could make similar arguments about the image of decadence ascribed to, say, the Persian Empire. The Achaemenids are used as trope codifiers of slavish decadence despite their actual economy seeming to have been significantly less dependent on slavery than any of the Spartans, the Athenians, the virtuous mid-Republican Romans, or the decadent late-Republican Romans. Old Testament patriarchs are presented as virtuous and austere (mostly) or decadent and luxurious (a few of them) with little correspondence to any shifts in the importance of slavery in their society, and in fact slavery among the (mostly categorized austere and virtuous) patriarchs and the (mostly categorized luxurious, slavish, and decadent) Persians, or among the (claimed hard and militaristic) Assyrians and the (claimed decadent and luxurious) Babylonians, or whoever, seems to have been fairly similar species of slavery in terms of the proportions of people enslaved and the roles they played.
I’m not saying that one of these arguments is wrong and the other is right, by the way. I would say that they both are wrong in that they both basically rely on just making an argument about slavery and decadence that sounds plausible, and it can be made to sound plausible in either direction. That’s what makes both arguments amorphous and vibesy.
I’m not saying that one of these arguments is wrong and the other is right, by the way. I would say that they both are wrong in that they both basically rely on just making an argument about slavery and decadence that sounds plausible, and it can be made to sound plausible in either direction.
It depends largely on what you define as “decadence”, surely? Like, if you have a strong attachment to the ideals that work is good and a basic part of human nature, and that living off someone else’s labor is always kind of morally suspect, then any society that depends on large scale slavery as its economic basis is going to seem (morally) decadent by definition.
While of course the counter-argument, at least according to the values of aristocrats in slave societies, is that manual labor is inherently sub-human degradation, and that only those who are above being reduced to work units can be truly human. And as other replies have mentioned, it then becomes a question of what the aristocracy does with their time and privilege: do they sit around drinking, composing sophomoric poetry and playing social status games? Or do they pursue the one vocation that’s honorable for aristocrats, namely conquest? The latter option, when available, is how aristocrats gained their land, slaves and social position in the first place.
@Aithiopika
I believe it is simply that without slavery. The extreme wealth concentration and hence the luxurious status games that the ultrawealthy engaged in wouldn’t be as possible. Ultra-extravagant banquets and parties would be harder to do.
The inequality will be much reduced and more wealth will be more widely distributed among the classes. If Luxury is more widely dispersed, it wouldn’t be as concentrated.
Cato would no doubt wouldn’t be as satisfied with said Roman Society with more widely dispersed luxury. But it already is far closer to his austere ideal in addition to reducing the masses of desperate poor.
A healthier and more vigorous Yeoman Class. Is much more a benefit to the Roman Republic and harder to buy off than the Capite Censi who filled the bulk of the Roman Military recruits later.
Bret did go into how as far back as the accounts we have go, the Spartans insisted that they might be succumbing to decadence now, but things were different in the Old Days. I.E., the Spartans were not as “spartan” as they liked to claim.
Also, don’t ask where the rich and powerful empires get their recruits from
I can think of one example of an army using mostly captured equipment. Finland between 1918 and the mid 50s. This is definitely an outlier since by 1919 Finland was a functional nation state and had a small but capable industrial base. The Finns used Mosin-Nagant rifles until the mid 60s and extensively modified and refurbished them but never manufactured any receivers or bolt assemblies. All were captured or purchased from other nation’s captured stocks. By the Continuation War half of their light machine guns were Russian and most Finnish tanks were captured and repaired T26 tanks.
I can also cite an army that were masters of close combat and lost anyway. The Imperial Japanese Army could fight like demons in close combat but were bad at strategy and terrible at logistics so several major campaigns ended with Japanese armies starving to death.
If you take the idea that the Fremen are super soldiers that can conquered the whole galaxy as true, then the story would not follow Great Men theory anymore. The Jihad would be the results of long oppression by the great houses and brainwashing by the Bene Gesserit toward the Fremen, cumulated by the arrival of Paul Atreides – who would only act as the instigator, not the creator of it. Paul’s inability to stop the Jihad contradicts the idea of “great men” steering the course of history.
Maybe someone made this point in one of the Fremen Mirage threads, but one thing that’s long bugged me about the idea that the Fremen are the toughest fighters because they live in the harshest environment is that that the classical instances of barbarians overcoming civilized empires come from relatively benign places like Central Europe and Mongolia. You don’t get any conquerors from the Arctic wastes, and not many from deep deserts (the Almoravids perhaps come closest).
Essentially what wins is unity: scattered barbarians with a tradition of internecine strife are limited to border raids against civilization unless an overlord tough and shrewd enough to herd cats manages to unify them; and then they usually can only overrun broken disunified empires. On a smaller scale one might look at the history of Scotland v. England.
I’m not sure that I would call Mongolia a “relatively benign” place: it’s the least densely populated fully sovereign country in the world today (i.e. excluding Greenland), and there’s probably reasons for that.
It´s a fully sovereign country BECAUSE it´s relative benign. The less benign and less densely populated countries like Yakutia or Alaska are not sovereign but colonies of more benign and more densely populated countries because they are not as benign as Mongolia.
@ChornedSnorkack,
I mean, fair point, but it’s also fully sovereign at least partly because of geopolitical reasons. They were part of the Chinese empire prior to 1911, and if they hadn’t become a Soviet ally in the early 1920s they might well have gotten reabsorbed into the modern Chinese state: I don’t know if they could have maintained their independence purely through force of arms.
Part of that is simply how much denser agricultural regions can now be populated thanks to the Industrial Revolution. The steppes of central Asia never supported a dense population but they made up for that by sheer size. Cultures adapted to a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle of herding and horseback mobility could survive there, if not as richly, about as easily as people almost anywhere else.
As I said for the last installment. Realistically. Paul would have to really exploit his prescience in order to exploit divisions and turn the strength of the imperium against themselves in endless betrayals and civil wars,break enemy morale to minimise attrition to the Fremen forces. He would also have to somehow have defecting nobles and a critical mass of non-fremen join the Jihad respectively to provide the actual bulk of his forces.
But the vast majority of the killing has to be done by the Imperium against itself. In order for Fremen to conquer them after under the Flag of Paul.
I havent read Dune in decades, and it bored me, so I didn’t read the other books, but I got the impression that the “race consciousness” the book kept blathering on about was some kind of telepathic gestalt/symbiote of humans, and that it was in the habit of engineering these jihads to maintain the gene pool or some such. I didn’t read it as a “universe spirit”, let alone “the forces of history”, but as a sorta-conscious entity with a plan and a purpose and a lot of influence over people’s minds. Maybe it just renders the targets unable to resist effectively by messing with their minds. And do none of them actually join up as the jihad sweeps through? The original Arakeen Fremen have to do the whole thing *all by themselves*?
Herbert is, very much, subscribing to the idea endorsed by the early 19th century idealost Continental philosophers: nations (and “races”, perhaps even the mankind) have an emergent semi-consciousness just like an anthill. Then, quite like social insects, individual persons reflect the will and purposes of this greater being in their actions: common people who maintain their traditions (particularly, folk poems and fairy tales) quite unconsciously, and the artists, scholars, scientists and writers who also reflect the spirit of their time and nation mostly without conscious thought. Even greatest statesmen and generals have only a glimpse of the ideas that are embodied in their time, and the greatest political and military successes happen when they embark on realising the ideas that are already “sleeping” in the spirit of the people. (Similarly, in this philosophy, art is at its greatest when it realises the ideas prevalent in the national soul.)
Naturally, this is just an idealistic version of the Marxist dialectical materialism: you can mostly transform between them by substituting the “national spirit” by “substructure of the society”.
Personally it was a chore to get through Dune (the whole box with Paul’s hand test and drivel about humans and animals forced me to stop a few time and only finished just for minimal sci fi conversation level awareness and really my opinion of the books never improved) so I have little grasp of how the Jihad played out so apologies if I’m missing things. Space travel had to be possible before spice and sure I get it what required thinking machines etc so verboten in the universe. But you would think the guild backing the Freeman would get people to dust off at least a single purpose built heavily controlled computer for one job – space travel and get a religious exception for it (those tend to historically to appear a lot). And than just out maneuver the Jihad as well and or glass where the spacing guild is or Arrakis.
“Space travel had to be possible before spice and sure I get it what required thinking machines etc so verboten in the universe.”
Not really. Space travel was possible before the Thinking Machines, it was just incredibly dangerous. Even with the Thinking Machines it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t until the Spacing Guild was established that you had reliable interstellar travel at reasonable timeframes.
“But you would think the guild backing the Freeman would get people to dust off at least a single purpose built heavily controlled computer for one job – space travel and get a religious exception for it (those tend to historically to appear a lot).”
IX tried. Eventually they succeeded, with the no-ships. But it took a long time, far longer than the 12 years it took the Fremen to break the Imperium. Leto II even pointes out that IX was trying to make thinking machines, and that he didn’t care because they were fundamentally irrelevant–what thinking machines did was increase the amount of things humans can do without thinking, and it’s the choice to not think that’s problematic, regardless of the technology.
Likewise, attempts were made to manufacture the spice for centuries, but didn’t succeed until the Tlieilax turned a Bene Gesserit into an axolotl tank.
These were problems being actively worked on, but they were extremely difficult problems. The former is compounded by the fact that the ENTIRETY OF CIVILIZATION was obliged to destroy anyone who created artificial intelligence–there was no possibility of exemption, only the possibility of people finding excuses to look the other way. Different groups took different stances on where the line was (again, comes up in “God Emperor”).
“The whole box with Paul’s hand test and drivel about humans and animals….”
Part of the larger theme of the story–the theme that stretches across the books–is that the B.G. were wrong in their thinking on this point. That their belief that they could differentiate between humans and animals–and that they were the sole group who could–was a deep flaw in their thinking and world-view.
Even if Paul died, wouldn’t Alia have continued the Jihad? Being prescient herself (IIRC), she could have replaced Paul
If we take the view that the Fremen Jihad, as a story, draws a lot from the real-world history of the First Caliphate then we shouldn’t expect that kind of strict-familial requirement for a new leader. Chani’s father IIRC is dead when Paul has his vision so the direct parallel won’t happen, but Stilgar fits pretty well as an Umar reference, if Paul dies.
“
“That said, this aspect of Islamic conquest was often not emphasized in the 1960s popular understanding”
I don’t know what the popular understanding was back then. But, I was history major undergraduate (B.A. 1970) and an M.A. in 1971 (diverted to law school in 1972). I took World History from William McNeill and Barbarians from E.A. Thompson. I read the Hodgson book “Venture of Islam” I think I had an understanding that has not changed much since than and which focused on how much the conquerors depended on the existing administration and populations.
P.S. I am a patreon but I have never figured out how to sign in here.
I should add that I met Herbert. I had read the first Dune book. The others had not yet been published. He stuck me as being a bit of a loon. I do not know what he understood of Medieval History.
What if…
What if the Fremen did not garrison but abandoned the worlds. (and through prescience selected the worlds where defeat would _cause_ an internal revolution. Those worlds where the richee were unable or unwilling to move up the pyramid to become minor/great houses).
The only way that I can see to win is through the Chinngis Khan model of coopting the conquered – the fundamental racism of the Fremen makes that impossible. But if the forces of the Fremen were focused on removing the empire’s military capability, is it possible that a revolution might arise freeing the economic and military powers of the lower classes and transforming them into – not allies given the racism, but perhaps “fellow travellers” with a similar jihad of destroying the great houses….
The spacer guild then permits trade among these, and the empire’s military forces must be split between the Dune Jihad (small ) and the potentially much larger and much more dangerous class revolution. (the jihad triggers Marxism)
Just a thought experiment
There is actually a way to rescue the Galactic Jihad in all its horror. It’s a matter of Will, something that Devereaux’s seems to have forgotten here. Let’s remember that the Great Houses deciding to face down Paul is Villeneuve’s innovation. We don’t know much about the clear majority of the Houses. We know the Harkonnen have it in for the Atreides, the Atreides have it in for the Harkonnen, and the Emperor is a duplicitous weasel relying on his savage and brutalized Sardaukar. We don’t see any of the other Great Houses. In fact, through _all six books_, I don’t think we see a single fighter who isn’t a) Fremen, b) Atreides, c) Harkonnen, or d) Sardaukar. Odd that.
So what if the other houses are Decadent?
What I mean is: could it be that the rest of the Imperium has been in stasis for so long that basically the rest of the Imperium doesn’t remember what it is like to be willing, much less _eager_, to fight and die for something?
Note that I am not pronouncing moral judgement here. The Imperium could be decadent and a very pleasant place to live, precisely because they have so successfully tamed the violence in their societies. All that matters is that they have lost the memory of violence as a reality and the characteristics that go with that – what you need to inculcate in your society when you are face to face with an Enemy who really, truly means it.
The textual evidence for this is huge. The Orange Catholic Bible is a bloodless document that no one believes in (in contrast to the militant fanaticism of the Zensunni). Even their war has dwindled to a ‘war of assassins’, which reeks of something highly formalized that involves few casualties and a lot of political backroom dealing.
This would explain House Corrino’s dominance. The Sardaukar are different, not necessarily because they are supermen, but because they are savage and brutalized criminals, brainwashed, quite eager to deal out atrocity (that is actually their signature tactic, as occurs at the beginning of the battle of Arakeen). That makes them a very different proposition to the mini-armies of the Great Houses. House Corrino can keep its position very comfortably by allowing a certain low level of violence – enough to ensure everyone else hates each other – while rolling in and stomping everyone flat if things ever look like they are getting out of hand. Well, not ‘everyone’: just show up, crucify the head of the house and his immediate household, do enough atrocity to spread terror, find some minor branch to promote, and return to Salusa.
Plausible?
So what happens when such a decadent society encounters fanatics who actually mean it? Let me state it step by step:
Is it plausible that the other Houses just don’t muster the will to fight the fanatic Jihad, that most of them give in without a fight and let them rampage across the Universe, committing any atrocity they please? That the decadent Imperials would prefer to wring their hands and avert their gaze rather than actually _do_ anything, and fall over themselves to throw other to the Jihad in the futile hope of not being next on the chopping block?
Er… YES, OF COURSE. _Of course_ the Fremen would have the free reign of the Galaxy. Of course the various Houses of the civilised Imperium would fall over themselves to surrender and excuse and suck up to the conquerors.
Ahem: East Timor. The Second Sudanese Civil War. The Masalit Genocide. The Genocide of the Yazidi. The ongoing genocide in Bangladesh. The genocide in Nigeria.
…get the point?
A situation where technologically and militarily backward people who have a fanatical self-belief are given free reign to commit all kinds of atrocities because the more powerful civilised people have lost any and all belief in themselves – that’s not sci-fi, that’s not Dune, that is, in fact, the world that we live in today.
Your notion of a decadence that precludes a drive to fight in defence of their lives in the face of extreme violence is quite ahistoric.
Your apparent attribution of recent and ongoing genocides to powerful and civilized people who remain passive in the face of the attempt to mass murder them is actually kind of odious.
Robert Bosch would have to chime in but based on the examples he cited, perhaps what he was really thinking was that the major power brokers like the USA are not intervening to protect the victims of those massacres? If so, my comment is that that’s not an analogous situation to a people being so wedded to nihilism that they more or less commit suicide by letting themselves be massacred— as you said, something that apparently never happens outside of fiction.
Well here I am.
You are both assuming that the Jihad is targeting Literally Everyone for annihilation. Jihad is likely the bloodiest institution in human history, but that has never been true – it has always spared those that would convert or submit (see Lee Harris “The Suicide of Reason”; Bostom, “The Legacy of Jihad).
Does this follow Paul’s Jihad? Yes: by the time of “Messiah” and “Children” there are pilgrims pouring in from all over the known Universe.
But even more than that, yes it makes sense for the people who are being deliberately targeted to fight back. That is, if you, _you personally_ are going to die if the Jihad comes calling, then it makes sense to fight back. But if the Jihad is targeting your neighbour whom you never really liked or just don’t care about, then it is different. Fuck him – you secure your safety far better by sucking up to the conquerors.
The only practical antidote to this is if people deeply, viscerally believe that “An Attack on One is an Attack on All” – to the extent that you are literally willing to die for your faith, tribe, whatever. And I posit that in an ancient feudal society, they would have lost that.
And by the time that they learned better, it was too late.
Now to the real point: Isator may call my views odious, but how, exactly are they wrong? Why was no action taken over the Darfur genocide, despite neoconservatives like Wolfowitz arguing for it?
Well, because the Big Bad Bush was in power and stopping Bush was the number one thing for all the Good People and 400,000 raped, murdered and enslaved Fur people was a small price to pay for stopping Wicked Wascally Dubya
I was there. Don’t ever try and tell me that was not the motive. this was the time of Michael Moore being a superstar while he was openly, nakedly slobbering over the forces of Jihad that we later would know as ISIS.
Just to be even handed, on the other side, earlier you had Henry Kissinger, one of the worst people in the world, enabling the genocide in East Timor and in Bangladesh (3 million dead, no one cares) because doing anything at all would hurt the polling of Nixon.
So, yes. I say it straight. The decadent Imperium would roll over for Paul’s Jihad in exactly the same way that our world rolls over. Sorry, when I say that fiction asks uncomfortable questions, I mean real questions that are actually uncomfortable.
“Jihad is likely the bloodiest institution in human history”
I don’t think there’s any definition of the word jihad that would make that true.
“But if the Jihad is targeting your neighbour whom you never really liked or just don’t care about, then it is different.”
You are presenting a degree of specification that does not seem apparent in the books.
“Why was no action taken over the Darfur genocide, despite neoconservatives like Wolfowitz arguing for it?”
Through some combination of “powerful states are generally indifferent to such atrocities” and “military interventions on moral grounds are not a straightforward thing”.
“Well, because the Big Bad Bush was in power and stopping Bush was the number one thing for all the Good People and 400,000 raped, murdered and enslaved Fur people was a small price to pay for stopping Wicked Wascally Dubya”
Exactly how did allowing a genocide to happen stop Bush from doing anything? Are you saying that the people who weren’t in government at the time are the ones who would have possess the power to carry out such intervention? This was the first Congress elected after 9/11, there were handy Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
Never mind that even if this assertion had any credibility whatsoever, it would be a far cry from a motive of decadence (barring an unspoken assumption of that being the only reason to be opposed to Bush at the time, as opposed to “hey, maybe people had an accurate idea of how bad the war in Iraq would turn out to be, in addition to objections to the civil rights encroachments of many Republican domestic policies of the time”).
“I was there. Don’t ever try and tell me that was not the motive. this was the time of Michael Moore being a superstar while he was openly, nakedly slobbering over the forces of Jihad that we later would know as ISIS.”
I’m no fan of what Michael Moore is in the current era, and even at that time had numerous faults with factual objectivity, but I suspect your characterisation here is reductive at best. Was he slobbering over “forces of jihad”, or was he objecting to Iraqi people being bombed en masse?
“earlier you had Henry Kissinger, one of the worst people in the world, enabling the genocide in East Timor and in Bangladesh (3 million dead, no one cares) because doing anything at all would hurt the polling of Nixon.”
Ah, now there you’ve got one that crosses from indifference and into “it was government policy at the time to empower anti-communist authoritarians, where the mass murder wasn’t an unfortunately acceptable price so much as a feature of what was considered necessary and justifiable to prevent communism”. That’s not decadence, that’s contemporary politics applied with maximum ruthlessness and amorality.
Sounds like what Emperor Shaddam IV was doing.
@Isator Levi – I apparently have to reply to myself to reply to you.
> I don’t think there’s any definition of the word jihad that would make that true.
There is only one definition of Jihad: The holy war to spread the rule of Islam that is mandated by Koran and Hadith. That is _it_. There is no other definition. And it is the bloodiest horror in history. During Islamic rule of India, Muslim rulers were praised as being “killers of lakhs”, where a lakh is a hundred thousand. Because Hindus aren’t even monotheists, the option of subservience, of dhimmitude, as not there.
Hindu historians estimate that up to eighty million Hindus were murdered during five centuries.
This brutality was – and is – everywhere where Islam conquered. The fate of non-Muslims was Apartheid alternated with genocide. Go read the fate of Christians in the Sudan, or Hindus in Pakistan, if you can stomach it.
The reason this is not taught so much in the West is fairly obvious: ideological capture, fear of retaliation, and all that sweet oil money. But it is a fact.
> Exactly how did allowing a genocide to happen stop Bush from doing anything?
Allowing the genocide to happen _was_ stopping Bush from doing something. Bush and those horrid neocons wanted to take action. But this time the ‘anti-war’ crowd succeeded. No, no, nothing ‘unilateral’, no let’s let the UN do it, sent committees and inspectors…. and nothing was done and 400,000 murdered. And, incidentally, that is also the way Kissinger wanted it
I was there. I was also there for Iraq – and it was not the case that opposition was worried that the war could fail. Not even slightly. They were worried that it would succeed. They were absolutely determined it would fail and – I repeat – made excuses and defended the forces of Jihad that we now know as ISIS and knew then as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Moore’s lying, sub-Riefenstahl “Farenheit 9/11” was attended by the US democratic leadership and I have not heard a peep of denunciation for his mendacity and wickedness. And he was by no means the only one – in the UK, there was George Galloway, a man openly on the take from Saddam, a toady to Assad and a howler for Jihad.
> Was he slobbering over “forces of jihad”, or was he objecting to Iraqi people being bombed en masse?
Here’s your boy Moore: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow – and they will win”
And in what fantasyland did that fat pig ever object to Iraqis being bombed? It was the stated war aim of his glorious “minutemen” to deliberately target civilians and push Iraq into civil war. Neither Moore, nor any of his ilk, ever condemned that.
I repeat: they wanted Iraq to fail and were happy for the forces of Jihad to succeed – because Bush.
As to your final point about Kissinger – you make my point for me. That creature was fine with Jihad as long as it slaughtered… someone else. It has never been satisfactorily explained to me how 3 million dead in Bangladesh and Christ knows how many in East Timor stops Communism, but….
It is apparent to me that the history of religious relations with Islam in India or anywhere are more nuanced than that, as can be inferred from historical records of the likes of the Mughal Empire. The status of being dhimmis has indeed been extended to Hindus, if only for the sake of practical governance of a populace. I wouldn’t wish to downplay the violence of imperialism, but not would I deem such a thing to be unique to Islam (I would compare to the death toll of the Thirty Years War in Europe). If it was uncommonly large across centuries (and frankly, I would question the objectivity of the history you cite given the politics of contemporary India), I would suggest such a thing arises at least partially out of India historically having a very large population more than some distinct motive of large scale violence. It would be much like the history of China in that regard (which indeed also has its own religious motivated extreme violence period in the 19h century, that is pretty high in comparison to your purported number in a span of less than two decades).
I would not be inclined to take a title referring to such large numbers of deaths as literal, and if it’s bad to have such killing as an aspiration, it is a fault shared by other cultures. Look at Roman emperors who adopted titles like “the Bulgar Slayer”.
Certainly there is persecution of Hindus in modern Pakistan. There is about as extreme persecution of Muslims in modern India. These things might be owed more to modern conditions of authoritarian government and violence between states that can be traced to late colonial politics, rather than some unique monstrousness of Islam.
I would personally presume that these things are not widely taught about because they are tangential to the typical content of primary and secondary level history education, namely the country’s own history and things of significance to creating the modern world. I don’t see the positive motive to teach the purported history of distinct Muslim atrocities, outside of a fantasy of Islam as a dire existential threat. Certainly I find the proposition that Islamaphobia is limited by fear of retaliation to be laughable.
All you have for your comment on the Bush administration being prevented from intervening in Darfur is an assertion that does not account for the fact that they had full control of all branches of government at the time.
As for the rest, a lot of your comments beg the question of assuming that all Iraqi insurgency against coalition occupation would be Islamist in nature. Even where extremism did become a significant mobilising element of insurgency, there is a nuanced way to look at such a thing in terms of there being a fault in the aggressor that creates conditions for the targeted people to respond by embracing extremism.
And for your point about East Timor, it becomes apparent that you regard any violence that occurs within a Muslim majority populace as “jihad”, regardless of actual circumstances or motives. Never mind that the governing power of Indonesia that carried out the genocide was a secular, and even specifically anti-Islamist, regime. Never mind that opposition to communism rather than anything religious was their own stated justification for the massacres on the island.
Certainly you’re correct in the idea that widespread indiscriminate violence doesn’t do much to effectively prevent Communism, but that’s really a matter of “genocide is not really an effective way to pursue meaningful policy goals, nor does it often really intend to be” a lot more than it is anything like “they probably had an entirely different goal that validates my prejudices”.
Yes, Isator Levi, thank you for proving my point. I have heard it all before:
Calling genocidal Islamic regimes secular even as they explicitly call for jihad, some David Irving style denying the historical record, dismissing the scriptural basis for jihad, some ‘both sides’ crap about Indian Hindus, some ‘but whattabout Europe?’ and the propaganda term “Islamophobia” thrown in – I have heard it all before.
Let’s cut the crap. The reason behind any of this isn’t facts past or present. It is Orange Man Bad. As back then it was Dubya bad. That’s all this is about. Saying that the genocide in East Timor was jihad is too much like saying Islam commits atrocities which is a bit like saying that [insert six degree of Kevin Bacon stuff] is a bit like being pro-Orange Man, and THAT is unacceptable, so lets roll out the excuses for atrocity.
(I notice that you wonder about the motive to tell the truth about Islamic atrocity – I rest my case. Some might think that the truth is itself motive enough. Some might even think that atrocity deserves to be opposed).
Let’s take just one bit to show how utterly fatuous this is:
> all Iraqi insurgency against coalition occupation would be Islamist in nature. Even where extremism did become a significant mobilising element of insurgency, there is a nuanced way to look at such a thing in terms of there being a fault in the aggressor that creates conditions for the targeted people to respond by embracing extremism.
Yeah, yeah, “because Bush, OF COURSE the Iraqis form the genocidal slaving gang ISIS. Because Bush OF COURSE it’s cool to strap schoolchildren with bombs, OF COURSE it’s fine to start up slave markets”
Except that Iraq had and has a _real_ insurgent militia. They are called the Peshmerga, who fought like lions against first Saddam and then the Jihad scum that became ISIS. And, incidentally, they are members of the secular left, the Socialist International, while the forces of Jihad were actually invited by the Saddam dictatorship.
Wait – invited? Well, contra your line about ‘occupied’, the forces of Jihad were lead by Zarqawi and invited at the behest of Saddam Hussain, to form the Fedayeen Saddam while the regime was active. And the Peshmerga were not ‘occupying’ Iraq. They are natives to Mesopotamia.
So how does any of that fit into your worldview? But to ask that question is a waste of time, isn’t it? The worldview begins and ends with “Orange Man Bad – Elephant People Bad” and that’s really the only thing that is behind any of this.
Thank you for proving my point
I would suggest such a thing arises at least partially out of India historically having a very large population more than some distinct motive of large scale violence
I think that’s exactly right, yes, and as you point out, the same is true of China.
Certainly there is persecution of Hindus in modern Pakistan. There is about as extreme persecution of Muslims in modern India. These things might be owed more to modern conditions of authoritarian government and violence between states that can be traced to late colonial politics, rather than some unique monstrousness of Islam.
Without getting into the subject of whether the situation is equally bad for religious minorities in both countries, I actually think the problem is more than the Indian and Pakistani states are both too weak, not that they’re too strong/authoritarian. Most religiously based persecution (whether of religious minorities, or of women or other groups) in both countries is carried out by mobs rather than by the state- if the state was more effective at maintaining its monopoly of force, the situation would be better for minorities.
It doesn’t even have to be a matter of mob violence; it can be whichever side is the minority getting routinely disrespected, looked down upon, ignored, and subjected to biased law enforcement by the majority which usually controls all possible avenues of redress. Case in point: my brother used to order and send stuff to and from a jewelry crafter in India who is Muslim minority. My brother had to stop because the Hindu-majority local postal authorities simply didn’t give a shit whether packages made it to the Muslim neighborhoods or not. And complaints were useless because their Hindu-majority higher-ups didn’t care either.
Never mind that the governing power of Indonesia that carried out the genocide was a secular, and even specifically anti-Islamist, regime
They were certainly anti-Islamist, and they were not specifically Muslim or Islamically inspired, but I wouldn’t really call them ‘secular’. Indonesia’s constitution officially includes “monotheism” as part of the ruling ideology, and atheism, polytheism, and things like ancestor-worship were highly discouraged. Though I think the situation has liberalized somewhat in recent years and you aren’t required to be a monotheist.
I think this conversation is about drawing to a close. There’s a single, straightforward point that I would want to conclude on.
It always stands out to me how much reactionary conservatives need to assert that contrary viewpoints are disingenuous, and arise from a place that is actually vacuous or self-serving. The lack of self-awareness at how much they expose the fragility of their world view when they depend on the need to see opposition as incapable of coming from a place that is genuine, dedicated, and reasoned.
Nuance cannot be reconciled with the simplistic models with which they engage the world, so nuanced alternative perspectives must be cast as a lie.
Isator Levi,
Actually, I am going to touch on this, because I am really quite angry at this.
> It is apparent to me that the history of religious relations with Islam in India or anywhere are more nuanced than that, as can be inferred from historical records of the likes of the Mughal Empire. The status of being dhimmis has indeed been extended to Hindus, if only for the sake of practical governance of a populace.
I love that term “nuanced”. No one ever says what it means, but it is used as a catch all dismissal.
Let’s start at the beginning. How did Islam get to India? With the invasion of Muhammad bin Qasim. This is recorded in the Chach-Nama; there is a very readable description of it in Naipaul’s “Amongst the Believers”, but you can find the translation online if you look. _This is Islamic history written by Islamic historians_.
Anyway, bin Qasim offers each city the choice of submission or slaughter. The slaughter of Debal lasts 3 days, after which Qasim offers the Hindus the degrading position of **dhimmi**.
But mark the sequel. When bin Qasim writes to his boss, Hajjaj, Hajjaj was furious. He wrote back, reminding Qasim of his Koranic obligations, that the Hindus are not “peoples of the book” and demanding they either convert or be put to the sword. Qasim, duly chastised, returns to the massacre _of populations that have already surrendered_.
This is what I mean when I say that Islamic rule is Apartheid interspersed with genocide. It was an alternation between “tolerant” rulers like Qasim who said “there’s just too many of them for us to kill them all” and the orthodox like Hajjaj who said “Well, we have to at least try”
Or Mahmud of Ghazni, whose own historian gloated that he “utterly ruined the prosperity of India”. That historian was Alberuni – look him up. Or look up the Tarikh-i Yamini, which gloats about the destruction of temples and massacres.
And this is systematic. You can see it in the hideous rule of Aurangzeb. Note that what Islamic sources do not praise is just victory in battle but the massacres of the nonbelieving Infidels – Hindus, Buddhists, Christians.
This is why historians like K.S. Lal estimate the number of Hindus murdered by pogrom and starvation at 80 million – purely by taking the Islamic sources at face value. In the same way that the records of Ausschwitz and Sobibor are taken at face value.
And that is really the parallel. Yes, conquerors have boasted of their violence – but the hatred for those who have already _surrendered_ is unique to Islam. There is nothing like this in ancient history; just reread Devereaux on the assimilation and tolerance of Rome, or Marco Polo’s accounts of life under the Great Khan. This kind of violent, dehumanising hatred of the other has no parallel until you reach the Nazis. And it is no accident that the most senior and believing Nazis – the SS, Hitler and Himmler – were huge admirers of Islam.
The reason I get testy about this is that there is this weird idea that history is “back there” and it is a distinct universe from our modern times. Except that that is not the way many see it. If you listen to the modern invocations of Jihad in Pakistan they explicitly invoke this history, saying that it is ongoing and that is why they are destroying the last remnants of Hinduism in its ancestral lands.
Let me guess: you have never heard of the Chach-Nama, or of Alberuni, or the atrocities of Qasim or Mahmud. Ask yourself why.
Your examples roll back to my point about how I’m not inclined to defend imperialism.
The practice of conquest in general, and particularly in the form of giving cities ultimatums of surrender or destruction, is something that I would regard as bad in general.
I would ask why you incorporate it into a narrative of “Islam is uniquely and universally monstrous” if it should so happen that you do not apply such a reasoning to, say, Greek culture on the basis of the conquests of Alexander the Great.
Or literally any other culture that has engaged in conquest.
That’s not whataboutism, that’s interrogating the selectivity.
I do actually personally have some familiarity with the subject of Islamic expansion into India and Central Asia based on a personal interest, but as far as your general point of conspiratorial ideas of why the subject matter does not get taught below college level… do you not think it would be trivially easy for me to come up with historical subject matter that you were not taught about at that level? Tell me, what did you learn in school about, say, 12th century Norway when you were 14?
Isator,
Here is why I am not buying what you are selling. Let’s look at two quotes from you:
> As for the rest, a lot of your comments beg the question of assuming that all Iraqi insurgency against coalition occupation would be Islamist in nature. Even where extremism did become a significant mobilising element of insurgency, there is a nuanced way to look at such a thing in terms of there being a fault in the aggressor that creates conditions for the targeted people to respond by embracing extremism.
In this one you frame the forces of Fedayeen Saddam -> Al Qaeda in Iraq -> ISIS as a regrettable but understandable reaction. Whole lotta ‘nuance’
>was he objecting to Iraqi people being bombed en masse?
“Bombed en mass”. In this one, the actions of the coalition are framed as just bombing people en mass. Yes, the allies in Iraq were just randomly bombing people, for no reason whatsoever, though I suspect you could probably must up some sentence that involved ‘Halliburton’ somewhere. Not a lotta nuance all of a sudden.
You frame the actions of Zarqawi and his gang as understandable and the actions of the coalition forces as maximally wicked. Never mind that it was the forces of Jihad that were bombing Iraqi civilians en mass and the coalition was trying their damndest to minimise civilian casualties – and that America sponsored a locally written constitution and local elections in which the “insurgency” that you make excuses for could easily have competed (as the political wing of the Peshmerga, the PUK did) rather than, you know, blowing up the polling stations and the people queuing to vote. Never mind any of that
Because your line on Iraq has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts in Iraq, in the same way your line on the historic reality of Jihad has nothing to do with that historic reality. It is all just “Elephant People Bad”. Admitting jihad atrocity is a bit too much like saying that the Elephant People might not be completely wicked, so that cannot be allowed.
This is why I am not buying what you are selling – the way that you try frame the hideous persecution of present day Hindus as a legacy of colonial rule and try to ignore that history.
I am not buying it, and I am not going to, even by inaction, endorse your fantasy that you are being ‘nuanced’. You aren’t. You are being wilfully blind to atrocity.
You keep rotating away from the things that I’m saying and into points where you can keep repeating the same slogans (especially the ones that cast me as mindlessly anti-American Republican).
Like, in a different conversation, I think it would be a relevant and interesting point to describe the history of insurgent groups in Iraq and the trajectory that leads from something like the leadership of Ba’athist militias to become heavily involved in the ISIS. But that point gets obscured in using it for an absolutist narrative of “everybody who ever protested the Iraq War or thought its residents had a right to defend themselves was supporting Islamist militants”.
However, the conversation has caused me to review information concerning the Battle of Baghdad, and I would acknowledge that the stated military objectives of the time were to focus targeting on military and government infrastructure. The extent to which they destroyed civilian infrastructure outside suggests that they weren’t great at it, and I would propose that was the kind of thing people at the time found both objectionable and a thing that would prompt popular Iraqi discontent.
In any case, the core point of what I keep saying is to interrogate the perspective that contextualises atrocities into a unifying narrative that finds Islam consistently atrocious. It is possible for a person to object to genocides and sectarian persecution without forming a through line that extends that through Islam as a whole.
I for one, would not look at my own country’s history of Protestant sectarian persecution and atrocities against Catholics and use that as a basis of condemnation of all Protestantism.
(Christianity didn’t exactly need to spread across its known world through conquest once it got hold of the leading institutions of the Roman state, but Christian Roman emperors weren’t exactly magnanimous towards people who didn’t want to convert. Never mind the conflicts between different denominations of Christianity that had formed almost immediately. The fact that Arianism ceased to exist, and Gnosticism reduced fairly marginal, within only a few centuries was not strictly a thing based on preaching or rational debate.)
Let me guess: you have never heard of the Chach-Nama, or of Alberuni, or the atrocities of Qasim or Mahmud. Ask yourself why.
@Robert Bosch,
Isator points out below that he actually does know about this history, and as someone who’s (by descent) South Asian I can tell you I was raised hearing stories from my grandmother about Mahmud Ghaznavi, the people he killed and the temples he desecreated, and how generally horrible he was (and from what I can tell from the reading I’ve done since then, she was mostly right). To be clear, I should mention that though she was a very religious Hindu, my grandparents were purple-cow Congress voters (so, they would rather vote for a purple cow than anyone but the Congress), most of my relatives who weren’t supporters of the Congress supported or support today parties much further to their left (including me). And that we’re in general from a region and ethnic group where the Islamic conquests were late and fairly marginal, that’s been historically allergic to “Political Hinduism” and the right in general, and where the major political fault lines are about caste and language, not about religion. So, you’re entirely correct both about Mahmud Ghaznavi and people like him, how terrible they were, and also about the fact that this is not a “Political Hindu” narrative, it’s just the way these people are remembered broadly by Hindus today, probably like how (I would imagine) Jews think about the Spanish Reconquista or the Cossacks. (And yes, there are people who admire Ghaznavi just like there are people who admire the Reconquista and the Cossacks, i used those for a reason).
That said, I don’t think any of this shows that Islam is unique in its “hatred” (your word) for unbelievers or anything like that. If you wanted to argue that Abrahamic monotheism in general has a problem here, you’d be on better ground (though certainly, non-Abrahamic cultures have always had problems and sins of their own). You can point to exactly the same thing, and in some cases worse, in the history of Christian civilizations. At least Hindus still exist, and even a thousand years later are still the majority in most of South Asia (let’s not get into the question of whether “Hindu” is a well defined term, it isn’t). How well did the native religions of the Americas do at the hands of early-modern and modern Christian conquerors? For that matter, how well did the native religions of Europe do at the hands of medieval Christian conquerors?
Hector,
Many thanks. Can I say that I am not surprised at this?
> as someone who’s (by descent) South Asian
I am not surprised at this because – frankly – you appear _rational_. That is, you take these ideas seriously and write as though you know there is a world beyond the West and a history that does not involve white people. That this isn’t just a proxy for current culture war nonsense. Where we disagree, I do not have the slightest sense that this is just ‘Orange Man Bad’ or whatnot.
So I can entirely agree with your comments, and your parallel with the Cossacks is very astute.
I am going to deal with the second part of your reply in reverse order:
> For that matter, how well did the native religions of Europe do at the hands of medieval Christian conquerors?
…sorry, what Christian conquerors? Christianity spread mainly by preaching. All that stuff about loving your enemy & the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church? All true. The most famous example was Rome, with its indigenous gods, and the Romans were not exactly averse to militarism and repression. And yet the Christians converted the Empire (a number of reasons, one of which was that the Graeco-Roman pantheon was considered just too cringe by the disaffected educated upper class, but that is a subject for another day). There is another example: the Great Heathen Army of the Scandinavians sweeps into Europe, worshipping gods of strength and war…. and a _lot_ of them rapidly find their way to Christ.
There is a parallel here with Buddhism. One of the truly fascinating pieces of history I have read is how the Greek colonies in Bactria – what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan – began converting to Buddhism. For the same reasons as the Romans did – the Greek gods are just too cringe for words.
Were there rulers who spread both faiths by the sword? Sure. Charlesmagne and his Saxon war is an example. But notice the dates. Charlesmagne lives nearly nine hundred years after Christ. Further, his campaign is limited, as were others (such as the Wendish crusade – and note that name!). Christianity was mostly spread by the word and by example, and that is why we have national saints, such as Saint Partick and Saint Andrew.
The situation in the Americas is a different one. You will find no defence of the horrors inflicted on the natives of North America from me. But it is a little disingenuous to blame this on Christianity. The biggest killer of the North American Indians was diseases that they had no resistance to, and by settlement (they were a low population density group of hunter-gatherers facing a much larger population of agrarian settlers). The direct atrocities, such as the paying of bounties for killed Indians, was driven not so much by Christianity but by the emergence of racial identity (the earliest constitution referred to citizenship being open to “Free white men of good character”)
In South America, the situation is more clear and also more complex. Force and conversion are all tangled up. There was a deliberate drive to forcibly Christianize the native peoples and it was sometimes backed up with some pretty nasty methods, and in other cases it was just the multiplication of Church schools and so on. There was also the fact that many of the local religions were hated – what people forget about Cortes is how many locals were on his side because they understandably hated the Aztecs.
But most crucially – look at the date again. Here we are nearly fifteen centuries since the time of Christ.
Bottom line: there is not in Christianity a central doctrine mandating war and slaughter of the unbeliever. Ultimately it is about the salvation of the individual soul and calling others to repentance. I cannot begin to stress how different that is from Islam. Doctrines for conquest are right at the heart of Islam. It is all over the Koran and the Hadith and has been expounded by legal theorists right from the start – all four of the Sunni schools of jurisprudence place Jihad right at the core of the faith. Abu Hanifa (8th century) stresses the traditional division of the world into the house of submission and the house of war. This emphasis on war and conquest and regarding the unbeliever as subhuman… this is unique. I genuinely can’t think of anything comparable until you get to modern racist imperialism, and there in its most brutal form of the Nazis.
When Hajjaj rebuked bin Qasim, he was, doctrinally, completely right. But there is nothing in Christ’s teaching to justify the Saxon campaign. That is a very important difference.
@Robert Bosch,
You’re exactly right that when I talked about “Europe” I was referring to the conversions of northern and eastern Europe, i.e. the ones that accompanied the wars against the Germanic, Finnic and Baltic peoples during the Middle Ages, and not to the conversion of the Roman empire.
East Timor. The Second Sudanese Civil War. The Masalit Genocide. The Genocide of the Yazidi. The ongoing genocide in Bangladesh. The genocide in Nigeria.
I’m no fan of the current political dispensation in Bangladesh, or of the the mob violence and intimidation of Hindus, Buddhists and liberal/heretical Muslims, but i don’t think any of it adds up to a genocide, let’s be reasonable. Nor is there any ongoing *genocide* in Nigeria. If you’re referring to the things like the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, or the genocide by Indonesia against East Timor, or the violence by the Nigerian state against the Igbo in the 1960s or by Nigerian Muslims against Christians and animists today, I don’t think any of those situations fit the example of “less civilized peoples persecuting their more civilized neighbors”. Even setting aside the moral/normative connotations of ‘civilized’.
Punjabis and Bengalis were both heirs to advanced civilizations, Indonesians from Java were arguably more ‘advanced’ than the East Timorese, and the Hausa/Fulani have a longer tradition of literacy than the Christian/animist peoples of southern Nigeria, dating back about a thousand years, as far as I know (though I guess there are some interesting indications that writing might have developed in southern Nigeria earlier than i thought). The Fulani are historically pastoralists, so I guess that’s the only possible hand-wavy connexion you could make to the “Fremen”, but, again, they also have a long history of interaction with settled agriculturalists and a long tradition of literacy and advanced (Islamic) culture.
I would like to focus on this business of ‘civilised’, which is where I think we are talking past each other. I am not invoking the Fremen Mirage. For this purpose, when I talk about civilised vs uncivilised, I am not talking about levels of civilisation or urbanisation. I am talking about one specific thing: propensity for violence.
This is an objective measure that we can completely disconnect from other value statements (for instance, we can easily concede that Germany under the Nazis was highly developed and highly uncivilised, by this metric).
I am indebted here to Lee Harris’ wonderful book, “Civilisation and its Enemies”. He draws attention to a cyclical process that isn’t the Fremen Mirage (but could be taken for it). The process is that, the more a society becomes civilised, tries to settle disputes in a reasonable way, the more it creates a temptation for those who who defect, who use the uncivilised tools of violence and terror. Note the word “temptation” – I am not saying violence and atrocity are effective, long range (they aren’t), but in the short term… Well, look at the Nazis again. Hitler’s enormous room to manoeuvre was provided by a Europe that was reeling from the catastrophe of the Great War. People were determined to settle all disagreements reasonable way, and this actually incentivised the Nazis to act _unreasonably_ to get what they demanded.
It’s why I say “decadence” does not have a moral connotation here. A society can become decadent _and_ more civilised, more tolerant and so on. “Decadence” here just has one meaning: a loss of the willingness to fight and die for the tribe you are part of, and more, forgetting that that may even be necessary (I use ‘tribe’ loosely – country, nation, civilisation et cetera)
Does this apply to Paul’s Jihad? Well… yes. It tears through the Universe of Dune, but it burns itself out after 12 years, and leaves the basic structure of the society intact. In fact, that structure is so damn resilient that it takes Leto II _three thousand years_ to rip it apart.
I hope that clarifies what I am on about
My interpretation is that rather than the Fremen alone against the entire galaxy, the Jihad inspired peasant rebellions across the planets. A major theme of Dune is that societal forces will slowly build up and explode no matter how hard you try and suppress them. Herbert also takes pains to point out that the Imperium had been stagnating for thousands of years, and that its suppression of humanity’s natural instincts to change and grow had left it a powderkeg, ready for Paul’s crusade to spark it off.
This implies that it was the Imperium’s citizens that were ready to explode against the ruling class, and that Paul’s religion provided a convenient outlet to do so. Whether they were true believers or opportunists, the point was that they were primed to act. Even if it wasn’t the entirety or even the majority of a planet, it caused enough disruption for Paul’s forces to take advantage (especially if their original Fremen forces were bolstered by converts from the planets already conquered).
They don’t outright say that there were rebellions or converts at any point, but they put enough emphasis on the energies building within the Imperium that I believe it must be the case.
Interesting post, I generally agree with it.
But the “Total War” scenario feels a bit unfair. I think Part One made it pretty clear that that industrialized-space-feudalism setup fundamentally doesn’t work: the small personalized forces of the Great Houses wouldn’t be able to stand up to a mass army or mass uprising.
So either you say the whole system isn’t plausible and don’t bother to analyse it seriously. Or you imagine some unknown factor that prevents mass armies, and say that applies to both Great Houses and the Fremen. It seems a bit unfair to allow mass armies against the Fremen when they never appeared against the Great Houses.
“I think Part One made it pretty clear that that industrialized-space-feudalism setup fundamentally doesn’t work: the small personalized forces of the Great Houses wouldn’t be able to stand up to a mass army or mass uprising.
So either you say the whole system isn’t plausible and don’t bother to analyse it seriously. Or you imagine some unknown factor that prevents mass armies, and say that applies to both Great Houses and the Fremen. It seems a bit unfair to allow mass armies against the Fremen when they never appeared against the Great Houses.”
There are reasonably foreseeable factors working against mass armies that did not work for Fremen.
Consider scale. First, of populations.
We have Paul´s report of the casualties of jihad. 61 milliards of people killed – and 90 planets “sterilized”.
I´m making assumption that all or nearly all residents of sterilized people were killed – people who were able or allowed to evacuate the planet before sterilization would have been a small fraction.
That gives less than 680 millions of people per planet. Subtract the people who were killed on planets that were not sterilized.
The sterilized planets might have been less or more populous than average planets, I don´t have a strong reason to favour either option.
Bret´s assumption of “Earth-like planets” may be rare or absent.
Second, of armies.
Discussed in the blog. The Harkonnen invasion force of 300 000 was surprisingly big to the expectations of Atreides defenders, who hoped to repel a smaller invasion force. The Harkonnen total army was certainly bigger than 300 000, on account of men left behind on Giedi Prime, while Atreides total army was certainly smaller, because they left nobody behind on Caladan.
Low hundreds of thousands to hold a planet of a few hundred millions?
Please consider India and China.
Mogul Army was 200 000 horse, with heavily personalized structure, ruling over more than 100 million people.
East India Company had an army a bit over 300 000 by Mutiny, ruling nearly 200 million people. After Mutiny, the Raj did some mutiny-proofing and by 1914 ruled over 300 million people with 150 000 men.
China had population of 400 millions by 1800, ruled by an army of 800 000. But of that, only about 200 000 were Banners.
In 1644, China´s population was not well documented but 200 millions seems a fair guess. China was defended by Ming Army of about a million, and the invading Qing Banners numbered mere 130 000. Yet the Banners won.
There were reasons India and China often did not build mass armies, or having built them did not keep them up. Mass armies were expensive and not a reliable way to win. Ming started with 2 million man army after expulsion of Mongols… shrank it to 1 million by end of Ming. And then Qing received defections of parts of Ming army, but did not feel the need to replace the whole – Green Standard Army was just 600 000.
As for mass uprisings, well, they seem to have been rare in India.
China has had large peasant uprisings. Red Eyebrows, Huang Chao, Li Zicheng, Taipings…
Even so, note how few of them were in total, and how many lost.
Why do faufreluches not mobilize mass armies?
Because:
Mass soldiers would have poor training and arms and be relatively inefficient
But be expensive in terms of direct costs and social concessions they would get in position to demand.
And the alternatives to mass mobilization in faufreluches are usually palatable. The losers usually get tolerable terms, and even at worst, are exiled – or are not in position to mobilize mass armies if they wanted to.
The masses of population don´t have enough at stake to mobilize. They´d still have masters if their old masters lose. At words, new masters are worse, but not drastically so.
And now introduce Fremen.
Fremen, unlike the Great Houses, don´t have the experience how to be a small ruling elite over masses of disarmed people, and how to make compromises with the ruled and their richece to get limited demands met.
We see how the Fremen despise the whole settled population of Arrakis – including the poor who were ruled by the elites.
Does not bode well how the Fremen govern. They expect to make a drastic change – and when the poor find the Fremen worse and more unreasonably demanding than their old master, they can quite well rally to their old masters, or around new leaders if their old masters get captured/killed or are too submissive.
And if the poor refuse to be as grovellingly thankful and fanatically orthodox to the newfangled alien religion as the Fremen wish for, well, unlike the Great Houses who´re stuck with one fief, the Fremen can exterminate the poor who “did not deserve their liberation” and move on to the next planet.
“the rapid expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661)”
Funny that this was mentioned, it was my thought on reading Dune as well. But Herbert didn’t want to mention all the collaborators involved in that, or the overall strategy. He seems to have wanted to do some sort of Lawrence of Arabia thing with Paul.
It’s a long way from the realism of Lord of the Rings. Yes, even in a setting with magic, Tolkien manages more realism in the way troops move than Herbert manages with a super-science setting. Martin is no better than Herbert.
I think most writers just aren’t interested in these aspects of war. They want to have cool battles, and how those battles come about isn’t all that important.
Roleplaying games suffer some of the same problems. The original Traveller game (fairly hard science fiction, with some wibbly bits), IIRC had cutlasses able to do more damage than pistols. The point of this was to make it likely that people would use cutlasses in fights on spaceships.
>> I think most writers just aren’t interested in these aspects of war. They want to have cool battles, and how those battles come about isn’t all that important.
And yet, Dune doesn’t go over the Jihad’s battles. There’s a few anecdotes that characters share set during the Jihad, but the war happens maximally off-screen. This is as far away from “want to have cool battles” as it is possible to be.
There are facts and then there is truth.
What I mean is, sometimes the point of the story isn’t to get the facts right, but to say something about some issue. Herbert never said Dune was a template for interplanetary warfare; in fact, after “Dune” the violence we see is incredibly small-scale, assassinations and stabbings and the like. Even modest dust-ups are viewed after the fact, or from a great distance, or the like. That’s for the same reason Herbert doesn’t have a lot of aliens in his works: The point is the human stories.
You’re absolutely right that Herbert was riffing off Lawrence of Arabia, among other works. The point of Dune was, in large part, to show that charismatic leaders were dangerous if not outright monsters. To do that he used many of the same tropes and ideas, but with a different perspective.
Criticizing “Dune” for using the same tropes as the stories it was examining is rather like criticizing Weird Al for using the same tune as the song he’s parodying. The similarity is the point.
In telling that truth, the facts of the space battles and military tactics are irrelevant. They’re setting, not plot or theme–a vehicle for getting to the full horror a charismatic leader is capable of. To achieve his ends Herbert doesn’t have to have a fully thought-out battle system. He just have to have one he can justify sufficiently to allow readers to go “Okay, they fight like this and Fremen are better at it.”
Don’t get me wrong, I love these deep dives into popular media! Thinking about an artwork is rather the point, and thinking about minor secondary aspects has been a thing since time immemorial. It adds to the story, in my opinion, even if it’s critical of some aspect of the story. I enjoy Herbert’s writing, and it’s fun to play with the ideas. But I’m not fully death-of-the-author. It’s important to remember what the author’s goals were, and to evaluate his works in that context. The combat systems were, for Herbert, largely window dressing, and frankly (sorry, sorry) he gave them more though than they deserved. Not enough to fully flesh them out, but he could have just gone with “They fight with knives because I think knives are cool” and left it at that.
In telling the story, it’s a good idea to have verisimilitude in the situations though.
No, the stories don’t have to comport to all the science we know, or anything with FTL for instance would be completely rejected.
As you get further away from facts though, you get more readers who say “This is silly” and reject what you’re attempting to say.
Herbert is wrong about what would happen, he’s fairly obviously wrong, and the only thing saving him from more people rejecting him is that very few seem to have thought about it. I’m not sure what that says about people, nothing good though.
The whole of Dune tells the story of how a charismatic leader comes to power. But the foundation is shaky, so it loses power – at least some people look at the story and say “Well, that’s unrealistic, so anything he does with it is also unrealistic”
The power is further decreased because the bad things he does are reduced to a couple of paragraphs of narration (it’s been decades since I read it, so there may be more). Which is likely how Lynch was able to tell the story in a manner that makes Paul a heroic character; there’s not much in the story that needed to be cut.
“As you get further away from facts though, you get more readers who say “This is silly” and reject what you’re attempting to say.”
I disagree.
Obviously the type of story is going to be a huge factor here. Hard sci-fi is defined by strict(ish) adherence to established scientific facts, for example, and the bar is obviously very high here. D&D fiction doesn’t really care about verisimilitude at all, the concern there is more whether it follows the published Player’s Handbook, DM guides, Monster Manuals, etc. Then there are fun, goofy stories where verisimilitude is completely abandoned–“Hitchhiker’s Guide” springs to mind. And there’s obviously going to be a spectrum between these (and probably some factors I’m not thinking of).
“I’m not sure what that says about people, nothing good though.”
This is very priggish of you. There are many ways to look at an artwork, including many that don’t look at verisimilitude at all, and those other ways are not invalid. To give an example, I once had a discussion with a literature professor about how the violations of verisimilitude in an artwork provided information about how the artists (it was a TV show) view society and the roles of various groups within it.
I think what you’re saying is an example of Scientism. What I mean is, we as a society tend to treat science as The One True Way (see Netflix’s “Castlevania” to see exactly this language), and evaluate everything on those criteria. Facts, statistics, measurements. Even your vocabulary demonstrates this–“further away from facts” is an attempt to quantify, however broadly, this issue and to establish a clear, ostensibly objective criteria for dismissal. But art doesn’t work that way. Again, it’s often more interesting to ask “What is the author trying to say?” There are tools and techniques to parse this out–it’s not entirely objective, the way measuring the wavelength of light is, but it’s not subjective either.
Will some people dismiss a work because it doesn’t fit their notion of sufficiently scientifically accurate? Sure. And in some cases (again, hard sci-fi, but also biographies and some other works) they’re right to do so. But in this case, they’re being stupid.
Again, I want to emphasize that none of this should be taken as me criticizing this article. I highly enjoy it! It’s perfectly valid to say that a work has flaws, or that something doesn’t make sense, or whatever; art is supposed to make you think! But dismissing a work because it doesn’t meet a criteria the author clearly wasn’t trying to achieve (note that the ENTIRE JIHAD is off-screen, a clear indication that the author didn’t consider the details significant) is stupid, and demanding that we all evaluate artwork based on one’s particular and niche views is arrogant.
” Which is likely how Lynch was able to tell the story in a manner that makes Paul a heroic character; there’s not much in the story that needed to be cut.”
He doesen’t really have to do (much) of that because Paul hasn’t really *done* most of the bad things yet in the first book. (there’s still some softening done, but stopping just at the point when the genocides start sure helps)
I disagree, and the text makes it very clear. Paul knows that his path of revenge will lead to billions of deaths. He knows that he could get the Fremen to smuggle him off world and live out the rest of his days in comfortable exile. His mother tells him that Duke Leto would not have chosen the path of violence. A normal character would have the excuse that they didn’t know what consequences their actions would have, or that alternatives were possible and would succeed; Paul, as soon as his prescience just starts to unlock, knows this with certainty.
He knowingly and deliberately chose revenge, glory, and personal power over the lives of billions. And then he lacked the will to make the personal sacrifices (the life of Chani and his own humanity) to turn this into the Golden Path and the long term good. That absolutely makes him a villain, even if it’s a villain whose motivation we sympathise with.
I think the basic underlying assumption of the Jihad is that those 61 billion will just effectively roll over and allow themselves to be slaughtered without much if any resistance. It sure fits the impression that the non-military population in these books are basically faceless and passive masses at the mercy of their military overlords.
The implication is that, like Earthlings raised in the Cold War expected would happen to them, the victims of the Fremen Jihad would mostly die before they had time to know they were under attack.
Dr. Devereaux,
I am lodging a formal complaint.
I have been a devoted reader of the Frank Herbert-authored Dune books since the mid-1970s, when I first encountered them as a teenager in my high school library. Nearly fifty years I have lived inside that world. I had made my peace with Muad’Dib’s jihad. The Fremen were magnificent. The Great Houses were corrupt and deserving of their fate. The faufreluches were doomed. Everything was as it should be.
And then you showed up with these posts.
The jihad always sat uneasily, I will grant you that. Herbert built the unease in deliberately and I respected it. But I had quietly and conveniently let myself fall under his spell, imagining the whole thing as an inevitable tide of history rather than a military operation that would, when examined by someone with your particular set of skills, either bog down in logistical collapse or provoke the very thing it sought to conquer into a kind of industrial mobilization the Fremen simply could not survive. I did not want to think about Omdurman. You made me think about Omdurman. I want it on record that I resent this.
Worse, you have left me with something I cannot put back down: the idea that Herbert’s vision of military power is deeply ideological, rooted in a romantic masculinism that history keeps declining to validate, and that the jihad’s air of narrative inevitability is the author’s thumb on the scale rather than the world’s own logic. That is a more honest Herbert than the one I had. He was a man genuinely wrestling with the seductions of charismatic power while remaining, apparently, not entirely free of them himself.
This is, against my protests, a better and more interesting Dune than the one I walked in with.
Nearly fifty years I have kept that candle burning. You have given it new wax, and I reserve the right to be annoyed about it.
Under duress,
Darrell
Now I really want to see Dr. Devereaux take a look at Battletech and provide his analysis of that.
Another setting which doesn’t really hold up to analysis.
I admit that my exposure is just to the rulebook back when it was first published in the 1980s, plus a couple of hours playing one or two of the games. So I may be wrong on some things.
But it seems to me to be another one of those “we don’t know how to make this stuff anymore” settings, generally designed to set up the armored knight as the basis of an aristocracy.
So mechs are much better than tracked or wheeled vehicles at combat, but people can’t make more mechs (or only with great difficulty), so you end up with people passing their mechs down to their offspring, and mechs being looted from the losing side in the same sense as knights had to ransom their arms when they surrendered.
Which means that those who have mechs to spare, can then spread them around and get people to swear fealty to them in return for their use.
There’s the “return of the clans” which I think involves *better* mechs being possessed by a relatively small group of wandering people. Who used them to fight each other on their wanderings, yet can keep these better mechs in prime working order.
the setting is designed to allow for making up scenarios involving giant robots fighting each other, but there’s a lot of assumptions that are there to make it work. I think many of those assumptions don’t correspond to what we know about high tech warfare.
> the institution still very much exists in God Emperor of Dune despite the fact that we’re told 31 Houses Major (the upper-rank of the Great Houses) had collapsed. The implication is that 31 Houses Major do not represent even a majority.
how this follows from that info? Why it is impossible to have 40 Major Houses reduced to 9? or 50 to 19?
how this implication works?
The implication being that if 31 Great Houses Major were destroyed, that presumably means that the total number of Great Houses (major and minor) must have been such that the system wasn’t particularly affected by the total annihilation of 31 of its most powerful members. This is combined with the fact that the next statement, pointing out that if just 2 legions of saurdakaur could overwhelm the entire millitary might of one of (if not the) strongest Great Houses Major, yet the emperor was constantly having to pit his vassals against each other and break up power blocks because they didn’t even need to come together as a whole to pose a threat to him, then there necessarily has to be a lot of them.
So if we assumed there were 40 Great Houses Major and they average out to having half the strength of the Harkonnen, then the Emperor would only need forty legions of saurdakar (assuming, unconvincingly, that he must engage in fair fights and has no other forces) to directly contest the entire combined might of the Great Houses Major, which definitely doesn’t seem right given how the political games he has to play work and how much he fears anyone who can build a power bloc in the Landsraad.
Every time you talk about the Fremen, I wonder how the Arabs conquered half the western world in the 7th century. Maybe a series for a later date?
The basic summary I got in my Byzantine history course is that the Byzantines and Persians had just finished a catastrophic war when Muhammad showed up, and neither was really in a position to resist.
Considering that Bret is an expert on Roman Military history, I really hope that some day we get a good in-depth survey (well, as in depth as the format here allows) introduction to the Roman-Persian (and for that matter Byzantine-Sassanid) wars. I would love to learn more about that era.
I think his specialization is in somewhat earlier Roman history, but I suspect he knows a lot about this period too. I would also read that.
While the Arab world does historically consist of nomadic people who would cross the desert such as the Bedouin, I think it also bears keeping in mind that it included large numbers of urbanised people and settled farmers based around oasis cities and river basins that employed irrigation (as well as a central position in sophisticated trade networks). The comparison of the cultures within that ethic group to the Fremen is quite tenuous.
Like, imagine looking at a map of Egypt from afar and seeing it mostly in terms of desert, and then wondering how it could have consistently supported some of the most militarily powerful states of the ancient world with the wealth for pretty enormous monumental architecture. The Nile looks insignificant from afar, but the fertility stretched along such a great length was highly consequential.
I just realised, apart from the obvious advantage of generally not being a foreign religious organisation, but instead being headed by the messiah of the largest current religion who’s political leaders have been prepping the galaxy for it (mua’dib might be the local term for the kwisatch haderach, but they’re definitely the same person), the Jihad has two actual advantages – firstly, it is immune from the specific brand of MAD doctrine used by the great houses. No-one uses nukes in inter house wars because their homeworld would be nuked in turn, even though everyone is known to HAVE nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons do not function via the sort of kinetic force that shields protect against (their strange interaction with concentrated radiation bursts is frankly irrelevant when you’ve already committed to nuking someone). But no-one can really nuke Arrakis due to the spacing guild not wanting anyone to endanger the spice fields (you couldn’t exactly sneak a warship full of nuclear missiles in disguised as supplies). Secondly, they essentially have easy access to Giedi Prime’s significant industrial power at the start of the jihad despite the Fremen themselves lacking industry, given Paul’s the heir to the Barony, and anyone who wanted to argue about the succession is already dead, along with the military they’d have used to argue with.
On the point of ‘well the Jihad would have happened without Paul’ – well, yes, probably, Feyd Rautha was the other candidate for messiah, and he’s talking about a duel. Paul dying in an honour duel against the guy set up to replace him as religious leader is unlikely to prevent there being a religious leader, for obvious reasons.
yeah I think that’s the case. The Jihad wouldn’t use melee soldiers, it uses nukes – which can not be retaliated because its base is Arrakis.
A couple of things that come to mind, although I’ve very much enjoyed this thought experiment:
1.) It was my impression that the Great Houses were able to maintain their small administrative states on top of much larger productive populaces by the threat of their influence with CHOAM, the Spacing Guild, and at root, their Atomics, which both ensure a basic standard of safety in kanly as well as giving them a threat against any popular uprising, although their use is extremely proscribed
2.) The interaction of a lasgun and a shield is random but can be as small as killing both users or as large as a thermonuclear blast, which is indistinguishable from the use of an atomic weapon, which would bring down unlimited kanly on the house seen as using atomics.
3.) The instability that you pointed out is what leads to the success of the Jihad – the houses sign up with Paul under the his new role as Padishah Emperor and the Fremen, as his chosen soldiers like the Sardaukar, ally with local troops to impose their new, much more centralized control – giving them access to the industrial resources that they previous lacked. Religion is after all famously flexible in the face of a chance to exterminate your enemies.
4.) With the total control of the Spacing Guild, which Paul has (except for, as established later, for those houses which saved up enough spice to bribe them into various shenanigans) Paul can just isolate worlds and starve them out, effectively laying siege at will to any without internally self-sufficient industry. Which is a metaphor that works much better for city-states than planets, but that’s just how the Big Herb rolls.
5.) The book itself is based on Sabers of Paradise, a book about Muslim expansion in the Caucasus, where the high proud houses of old lineage are overwhelmed by converting Muslim masses – Paul’s Jihad dangling a better destiny over those planets dominate by the corrupt and imperious Landsraad would be fuel for voluntary conversation and recruitment, which would be up against the various House armies, which, as you noted, are pretty pitiful.
I think there are factors in the book which are intended to reverse the problems you describe here. However, I love this piece of post-historical fiction. Please never stop. Let’s hear about the recruitment complexities of elite conscription vs. special relativity in Forever War next!
Forever War assumes just that. That a world government can last a thousand years making and sending lots of high tech equipment off to mostly be blown up, with no change or coup or revolution.
Venice lasted a long time because it had a small number of elites with well-aligned incentives. The Roman Empire lasted a long time because it was really about five different regimes.
Forever War assumes that there’s only one regime and it was in those elites’ interest to keep the war up for a thousand years. It shows far more of Haldeman’s attitude toward the US (it’s a very American government) than anything historically useful. Perhaps unsurprising considering his life.
I tried to check but saw no other comments on this: consider the Bene Gesserit fixation on genetic engineering in a cosmic scale + the nobility having super-soldiers and a millenia-long monopoly on violence + the small administration almost all centered on resource constrained strategic advantages against other houses in the great game.
these points can easily lead to populations at large “martially neutered”. If your entire culture for 10k years has been stomped out of its rebellious sides through propaganda (think what the bg voice can do to thought leaders and prophets!) and broad spectrum gene editing while the warrior class with its own dynasties of enhanced soldiers and mentats (which we are told are not from the population at large, so crucially as limited a pool as the fremen), and an economy so thoroughly demilitarized that even the technologies for repair and creation of guns etc have become myth, and you can get a 12 years ramp up grace period, especially if messages between planets depend on the guild liners which have been compromised early on.
Add to this the planet killers that the great houses hoard like the bay of pigs on steroids, and you can imagine an early advantage snowballing: you decapitate the arrakis invasion houses, drop on their planets to seize military resources, if they resist vaporize the planet (they can’t tell of forced conversion if they’re dust in the solar wind), move to the next. in a year or so you have converts handling the repairs (converts are never the limiting resource, especially when you’re winning), enough shields and nukes to go around taking your time bullying the remaining planets with your mobility advantage while they regret having no pool of warriors either. A bunch of planets have joined you early on, some try appeasement, some start converting before you even go there, and some show resistance which the fremen just nuke off (we are told their willingness to break the nuke taboo is because they don’t care about MAD)…
What I find is that the Sardaukar are totally paper tigers. They may have been the big bad back in the day, but they’ve been coasting on their reputation for ten thousand years.
I recall something about how the Saudaukar “use cruelty as a weapon” which I assume means they commit lots of atrocities and often win by intimidating the enemy into surrendering, deserting, running away, or cowering in their trenches when they should be attacking. Because the enemy morale sucks because they are facing the infamous ultra-badass *Saudaukar.*
But the Fremen aren’t tied into the general faufreluches culture, they don’t properly appreciate how scared they are supposed to be.
why no fight i see proves anything of that
It’s been a while that I’ve read Dune (and never read Children of Dune) but I always interpreted the death toll of the Fremen Djihad to be the result of civil war, not something deliberately done by the Fremens.
So the Fremen would be the vanguard of the Atreides army, but it’s *because* they’re not that many of them that most of the fight would be done by recruits taken from the many worlds, who, not being elite, could not win quick decisive battles.
Having long protracted battles rather than quick wins by an elite force would be what produces the billions of deaths.
Basically, it’s the reverse of “killing one hundred to cower ten thousand” – if you have such a hard time to kill one hundred that the ten thousand, instead of being cowered, believe they stand a fighting chance, then you have to kill the ten thousand (or at least enough of them to make them give up).
(I’m not condoning murdering thousands nor even trying to cower them through limited murder, but that’s a historical strategy that did exist)
Two thoughts here:
One is the question of the Spice Melange. The Fremen, born and raised on Arrakis, DO have something that is unquestionably NOT seen in any other force in the universe- every one of their warriors has, from birth, been ingesting the drug that lets you see the future. Which means that every single one of their combatants is, in at least a small way, preturnatural and/or superhuman- not due to the ‘harshness of their environment’, but due to a unique chemical-biological interaction of their upbringing. This could explain how they as a mass organism are able to, perhaps, strike in ways that terrify a population into panic and stillness instead of resistance, or maybe manage to go on to capture more of the industrial output of ‘total war’ economies.
The second thought is your idea of the inevitability of the destruction of the universe with or without Paul/Muad’dib. I wonder, here, if his death DOES start the Jihad, but his lack of presence causes, as you say, a rapid loss and destabilization of the Jihad, but one that then causes the Fremen still on Arrakis to use their water reserves (and possibly water brought home from their initial conquests or via captured comets) to ‘drown the planet’ and kill all the sandworms, destroying the source of Spice, and thus eventually completely wiping out interstellar travel and the Empire in the process- which itself would lead to great destabilization and destruction of people and planets and religions, just over a longer period of time.
Good point. I meant to bring that up in my comment about Paul controlling the spice. I wonder how much of the death toll in the book is a direct consequence of the jihad, and how much of it might be counted as a second or third order effect of the jihad. Like if a planet was starved to death because the disruption of spice led to a problem with interstellar trade, would that get counted in the stat?
I will say my recollection is the actual best (at least in individual combat) are the Bene Gesserit they seemed considerably more superhuman fighters to me than the Sarduaker or Fremen.
I think one factor that could be examined more deeply to account for an inevitability of victory in the Jihad is the complicity of the Spacing Guild, not just in regards to transport of troops and materiel, but also in terms of information. It’s been a minute since I’ve read the books, but I don’t recall any mention of explicitly FTL communication. To me, that suggests that the Guild is also crucial in the dissemination of information. I could easily see a scenario in which all communication and transit between unconquered worlds is cut off, leaving each individual world (and their associated Great Houses) completely ignorant of the horrors approaching them until some guild Heighliner drops of orbit and disgorges a pack of killers whose true brutality is not properly anticipated.
(As I type this out, I also start to wonder at the potential knock on effects of what would effectively be a galaxy wide blockade. How economically independent are any of the human worlds? If they’re moving trade goods in the volumes we see mentioned, I could easily see a scenario where worlds are specialized enough that cutting them off from each other for significant enough lengths of time damages them quite badly before the Fremen even show up. How many of those 61 billion died to Fremen knives rather than starvation?)
My thoughts on this is that it’s possible for a Fremen/atreides to win, but not directly kill 65 billion people.
The smugglers and captured frigates are certainly large enough to equip the first Fedaykeen legion out and in the ongoing Jihad, it’s not Atreides Vs the Great Houses, but rather universal warfare as the strictures that bind warfare in Landsraad was torn away.
Minor houses wanting greater spoils or arriving to become major houses , major houses seeking vendetta against others (Atreides and Harkonnen can’t be the only one) and more importantly, the Fremen wanting to “avenge” past humiliation and injuries suffered during their pilgrimage to Arrakis.
So in this case, it would be more House Corrinon has upset us because they once demanded slaves to feed Fremen refugees, there two other minor houses and a great house upset at Corrino and joins in to grab their spoils, house is punished but left standing.
However, it’s weaker now, which attracts more scavengers and there’s other Fremen who upset that Corrino wasn’t punished enough, so another grudge was raised and then settled.
As it falls from great to minor house, others move in to seize the holdings, especially in CHAOM, and bribe Fremen leaders to support them.
Akin to how European forces took on colonial subjects, even when said subjects had guns and cannons like Vietnam and Indonesia.
Ok I speed read it and didn’t see this note. I will acknowledge it has been too many years since I read Dune and this article may be the incentive I need to go back for a reread. I don’t even disagree with many of your points, but love them (and is part of the reason I like coming here). However I do think there is one major consideration left off…
But we are talking space issues – and the Fremen control the major resource needed for space travel. So I see two possible outcomes of this.
1) Orbital bombardment – the Fremen just show up with ships and wipe planets clean without ever needing to land and fight. The Great Houses may have some navies to try and fight against it, but without the Spice, it then becomes a race of attrition – fuel vs maintenance (which is an conflict I find fascinating…)
2) Economic collapses – With the Fremen controlling the resource needed to facilitate interstellar trade… well how many planets might be starved out because they can no longer get food shipments? I may later sit down and work on some math and war gaming. I like your point about economic mobilization – but given that the Fremen control the resource that would greatly facilitate economic mobilization, it would be a real race to see if the houses could unite, mobilize, and take back Arakkis before their Spice stores ran out.
“Herbert instead views the mixing of peoples and cultures as good, the novel creations of such as necessary for the vague ‘vitality’ of a people.”
Perhaps he actually read Darwin. One of the most striking and unexpected aspects of reading “On the Origin of Species” is how Darwin cannot seem to shut up about the “benefits of intercrossing” and the evils of inbreeding. Or, Herbert could simply view aristocratic inbreeding as an element of decadence, with an influx of fresh blood from a vital culture being the appropriate remedy.