“…With Thousands of Fremen Warriors”

Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint. (Proverbs 29:18)

(Spoiler warning: the post contains book and movie spoilers.)

Frank Herbert published the first Dune book in 1965. Considering that, I would say, in jest but not completely so, that some of the prescience of his main character, Muad’Dib, rubbed off onto his creator. The series handles many subjects, but what I find striking is how it deals with the relations between “sophisticates” and “natives”, with the resultant romanticism and with the fact, still widely overlooked today, that religion can assume a life of its own and cause its adherents to shape reality rather than the other way round.

Besides the book, there’s also the movie Dune, by David Lynch, which, when compared to the books, even just the first alone, does them great disservice. Not that I think Lynch is a bad director—the books contain just too much in the way of word-conveyed matter to be expressed adequately in any movie of reasonable length. The movie, because it needs to focus on actions like most movies do, is simplistic, and on the other hand it adds things not found in the original. Still, it is useful for demonstrating some points—some ideas appear the same in the movie and the first book. What I now engage in is interpretation within the framework of my blog, which means ideological defense of the West in general; creative interpretation, yes, but not that far from the intentions of the author. If anything, his extensive use of Arabic words makes this very relevant to our time.

The setting of the books is essentially the Middle Ages copied and pasted onto a far-future Space Age. Where the Middle Ages had barons, dukes and earls with plots of land as their fiefs, in Dune their fiefs consist of planets. At the center of all this is the desert planet Arrakis, also called Dune, the only source of production for the spice, to which so many in the Imperium are addicted. Through antiquity and medieval times up to the Age of Discovery, Europeans were addicted to the use of spices coming by way of Arabian merchants; and today the modern world is addicted to the oil of Arabia, paying through the nose for it if need be, with the petrodollars providing the lifeblood for Islamic terrorism.

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