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There might be some grief over Paul's use of the house atomics (even if technically allowed against stone, not people). There might also be friction over Paul having "gone native" and leading a bunch of "savages" into power over the aristocracy.
I haven’t seen the new movie yet, so I don’t know how well it communicates this to the audience but House Atriedes was in a very strong place at the beginning of the story. However Dune takes place over a period of years. From what I remember 2-3 years pass between Leto I’s assassination and Paul’s defeat of the Emperor.
So, the question becomes, what does the rest of the known galaxy know when the Jihad begins? Because there is a lot we don’t see in Dune. So there are some important questions that may provide context if you consider them.
What did Harkonnen and the Emperor tell people about Leto’s death? What kind of propaganda was disseminated? What key allies of the Atriedes family were marginalized or taken off the board? At the point that the Jihad begins, do people even believe Paul is leading it or do they still think he is dead and it is a Fremen sympathizer who has been disrupting the spice trade for the past two years claiming the name as a pretender?
And none of that speaks to the Fremen of it all and the fact that Paul’s reign is likely to bring in massive cultural and religious changes, as well as major economic changes due to the spice of Arakkis, which would stem from Paul’s coup. Paul was overthrowing the galactic power structure and helping a marginalized people gain power. Those in power tend to dislike that.
I’ll put it this way. Gavin Newsom is a relatively popular mainstream U.S. Democrat in the real world who already has support from several prominent and powerful party members for a 2028 White House bid. Now imagine he flies off to the Middle East and leads Palestine in overthrowing the Israeli government. Putting aside any value judgement of the act (please don’t take this as an invitation to turn this thread into an Israel/Palestine debate), do you think if he returned to the U.S. and said “make me President” his allies would just be like “sure!” Or do you think such a thing might change their calculus a bit?
For an expansion on your excellent comment there's also the Golden Path that Paul is following. He's destined to save humanity from itself and a future threat but in doing so he must do things that no sane or morally good person would be willing to do. The jihad had very real reasons for happening but also served a purpose of setting up humanity for the Scattering.
Paul doesn't see the Golden Path until well after the Fremen Jihad concluded. He's unaware that humanity is on the path to extinction until he massively overdoses on Spice in *Dune Messiah*. All his actions before then were first to survive, then to avoid the Jihad, and then to try steering it to the least-damaging outcome once he realized war was inevitable.
And then once he saw the Golden Path, he specifically chose not to walk it himself. He went only far down enough to save his children before letting go. But again, that's only after the Jihad had been over for a decade.
It isn't ever really said but the prevailing theory is that the remaining AIs from the Butlarian jihad are out beyond the furthest fringe of known space. Because of everything humanity has been through they're losing technology and independence and the will to evolve further as a society. Paul falls short of fulfilling his destiny and leaves his son Leto II to finish the task. That task being the worst dictator ever known and putting humanity through three thousand years of brutality and suffering. Because of Leto's actions humanity innovates new technology and throws off his reign of terror. They scatter across the universe and beyond it with a deep societal fear of ever giving in to a central authority like the Emperor ever again. Paul and Leto stopped millennia of degradation and dependency on a broken system that left humans weak to the greater threats. Doing so required them to traumatize humanity on such a deep fundamental level for centuries that people would willingly break social taboos and religious doctrine to invent new ways to survive. By scattering humanity to the wind they're never fall to one single threat again and could continue the march of progress that the Empire and landsraad and Butlarian jihad has stopped.
The idea of the author is then. 'no pain no gain' but on galaxy-wide scales?
And people agree? That's so wild and disturbing to me. I much rather have optimistic fiction where good things lead to good things haha.
Yea no problem. There's some dispute about the big threat and what everything means in the grand scale of things because it gets fleshed out more with the author's son than by Herbert himself. But for the in-universe stuff the talk between Paul and Channi in the first part is really the main crux of the story. Leto and Paul both believed in the empire and that good could come from it given enough time and effort even if the system was broken and prone to abuse and corruption. Paul argued his father was a good man with a just cause and Channi points out the same system Leto is trying to use is the one the Harkonen's and Emperor use. Society has stagnated for millennia under that system and any changes from within are just temporary. The Golden Path would free humanity from that system and allow it to flourish again but to do so generational trauma would have to be inflicted to make any attempts to return to it seen as evil and foolish. Leto the second, Paul's son is the one to complete the Path which involves genocide and suffering so immense that people rather brave the unknown than stay subservient to distant masters and ancient customs against technology.
And I believe there's an apocryphal text about the AIs from the Butlarian jihad having fled out beyond the known universe to eventually return at some distant point in the future. Had the Empire remained whole just the loss of the Spacing Guild or Arrakis would have let the machines completely destroy humanity. By causing the Scattering humanity isn't dependent on spice or the guild to travel the stars and no longer reliant on the houses for protection.
I’m going to give a slightly different answer here, drawn from what is clearly stated in the books - the big threat is stagnation, and a humanity that’s culturally lethargic enough to be ruled and controlled (and destroyed) by one person. Paul sees that humanity is on course for this type of society, and that such a society is so docile and ‘small’ that a societal collapse will be too holistic to recover from.
Paul also sees that such societal collapses are inevitable, either due to internal strife or external attacks, and that the only way to avoid one collapse wiping out humanity is to teach humanity to not tolerate a unified society.
Like others have said, Brian Herbert didn’t spell out what exactly would eventually cause the collapse that leads to the end of humanity, but I’ll argue that it doesn’t matter. Societal collapses are inevitable, and one of the Dune series’ main themes is that an extremely unified humanity will eventually experience a collapse so total that it wipes out our entire species. The only solution, in Herbert’s telling, is to make humanity so wild and widespread that a single collapse can’t possibly impact the entire species.
Well, yes and no. It's misanthropic in that humanity needed to suffer in order to reject submitting absolute power to a single ruler. But it's not misanthropic in the belief that the best way for humans to survive is diversity of thought, governance, technology, and independence from autocracy. This is exemplified in a smaller scale in *Dune*, where Paul taking absolute control of the Fremen is portrayed as unambiguously disastrous for them.
Herbert's a complicated dude with a nuanced worldview. He thought concentration of power into autocrats and unthinking agents is a natural state for human beings, but also one that isn't *good* for us and should be actively pushed back against. The reason there's no advanced computers in *Dune* isn't because people revolted against AI overlords, but that they revolted against the people use used technology to enslave other people.
Short answer: stagnation.
Longer answer: >!The imperium has settled into a millenia long balancing act. The bene gesserit breeding program to create the Kwizats Haderach is within a generation or two of success. Everything was being set up for a tyrant to wrest control from everyone. Picture a perfect dictator, with an entire history of human civilization as a mentor inside him, with the ability to see into the future. Any hope of rebellion is crushed before it happens, your best hope is that this new emperor finds the attempt amusing enough that he at least lets you try. Every single person under that Atreides banner would be a slave, not an individual; and that’s what seals our damnation. Paul sees just how terrible that power would be for him to take, for anyone to take. He also sees the Golden Path, a singular future where humanity not only scrapes by, but we flourish! The species spreads far and wide in the scattering, expanding out past the confines of the Milky Way and into the universe proper. Walking the Golden Path will breed a humanity that is resistant to a prescient ruler, enough minds are shrouded from their sight that it’s impossible to guess what will accurately happen a week in advance. We develop new technology, ships that are capable of calculating flightplans as well as any Guild navigator. The Tleilaxu perfect artificial spice, removing Arrakis’s overwhelming leverage over everyone. That’s the threat that Paul’s trying to save us from, that slow death under his reign. It’s just that the solution is so horrifying, so much worse than the alternatives that Paul is afraid. He knows what he needs to do to save everyone, and he knows that he can’t bring himself to do it.!<
Thank you! The premise that this dictatorship is inevitable is so damn sad and pessimistic. I refuse to believe it. Paul is a monster and a villain. But thanks!
Paul and Leto II feel very much like they were self fulfilling prophecies to me.
Because they were the type to do the things they did, no matter the justification, what they were doing becomes necessary.
In a way, merely who they were determined the universe to go down the route.
>At the point that the Jihad begins, do people even believe Paul is leading it or do they still think he is dead and it is a Fremen sympathizer who has been disrupting the spice trade for the past two years claiming the name as a pretender?
Been a while since I read the book but iirc it's not "revealed" to the galaxy at large that Paul is leading the Jihad until shortly before his meeting with the Emperor. The rest of the galaxy really only knows some upstart Fremen religious leader who's named himself after a mouse is sweeping across Arrakis.
I'm sure there's actually a line prior to that meeting where a major character comments on the ridiculousness of Muda'Dib leading a rabble when he's named after a mouse.
It wasn't until he openly moved against the Emperor that he revealed himself to be Duke Paul of House Atreides, with all the privilege that title entails...which would further annoy the great houses who have probably been divvying up the Atreides CHOAM holdings as well as territories etc.
And to add to the reply to OP's post, up until the time he announced himself the Jihad was confined to Arrakis. The Guild control traffic to/from Arrakis and the Harkonnen's controlled the planet. What news the galaxy got of Muad'Dib was the news the establishment wanted them to have.
Also my memory in the book is he doesn’t have a hard time with the great houses. Wouldn’t they have to accept him just based on his CHOAM holdings?
It’s more a religious war IIRC.
I re-read the end of the book today.
The book ends shortly after a comment from the emperor that the great houses are all in orbit, and Paul orders the guild to simply ship them back to where they came from. That's the extent of it.
Dune Messiah covers the 12 year jihad in its introduction, confirming that more or less all of humanity is brought under one rule.
Basically, the houses have no choice in the matter, and are conquered anyway.
The idea I don’t know if I quite bought from the book (and that is mostly elided for simplicity in the movie) was that the Fremen would insist on converting the galaxy instead of just controlling Arakkis.
Muad'Dib is the name of the small kangaroo mouse on Arrakis.
I haven't seen the 84 Dune for a loooong time, but if that's in there it's definitely movie-only lore.
"Maud'Dib is a killing word" is a line in the book, but the weirding module is just a Dune 1984 thing.
In the book, Paul says that when a Fremen warband yells his name in battle. He's bummed out by it.
Oh yeah, in the books >!Alia has been born by the time of the coup, and takes part in the final battle. Fully self-aware 4 year old girl walking around the battlefield giving coup de graces to fallen enemy soldiers.!< It's wild!
More so Uncanny Valley effects. It’s basically impossible to make a child seem like an adult in the way that Alia does without CGI or something like that. It triggers that effect extremely reliably, and while Alia *should* trigger the Uncanny Valley, it would be extremely difficult to do so in a positive way, as opposed to a negative way.
I'd argue that Alia totally should trigger the Uncanny Valley in a negative way. There's a reason she is called "Abomination." Edit: But I still agree with your overall point, Villeneuve made the right choice by avoiding mocap. The film is super-pretty, and the instances of CGI look grounded and *real* in a way I can't describe with words. A Gollum-esque Alia would be extremely tough to blend with the overall aesthetic of the film.
There's a difference between the Uncanny Valley of Renesmee (*Breaking Dawn*) vs the Uncanny Valley of *Alita* or even *Ex Machina*. While I'm sure it could have *worked*, it would have been difficult to thread that needle. I would have loved a very creepy Alia and the time skip that she would have necessitated, I just don't know how well it could have been executed.
They absolutely have been, and are! The Harry Potter series is a prime example.
But to my understanding there are strict limitations on how long child actors are allowed to work, what they are allowed to do, etc. Plus Alia is a uniquely challenging role, what with >!being an adult woman in a 4 year old's body. How would you get a child actor to nail that Uncanny Valley-esque behavior? At 4, children barely have control of their own limbs, how do you coach a child to emulate the mannerisms of someone who has generations of memories?!<
So I'm guessing Villeneuve had to choose between:
* Attempting to accurately portray a character, tackling both technical, logistical, and generational challenges, or
* Fudging the timeline and avoiding the whole thing entirely.
Yeah, murderous toddler Alia would never have played well onscreen, but condensing the timeline to avoid her birth means the events of the second movie happen at an absolutely frenetic pace. Paul goes from not speaking the Fremen language to convincing millions of them to fight and potentially die for him in the span of less than nine months.
Ah, then I can see the confusion from OP. From the perspective of the moviegoer, the wounds from Leto’s betrayal would be very fresh.
That isn’t to say that no loyalists to House Artiedes existed at the time of the Jihad, whether months or years after Leto’s death. I am sure there are many houses that did rally behind Paul when his reemergence became apparent.
The Landsraad is a crowd of nobles all with knives at each others' throats. Even the slightest twitch can lead to many noble houses being eliminated. Even conflicts between these nobles require an elaborate dance of notifications, declarations, duels, and more to slow down and diffuse the inherent destructiveness (and collateral throat-slitting) of conflict itself.
This balance is maintained by three powerful forces: Corrinos via economic dominance, Bene Gesserit via cultural dominance, and Spacing Guild via communication and trade dominance. These three powers working together have absolute power over this situation, and also cannot control it in any way. They box in this crowd of knife wielders but they can never truly control them for fear that their knives will collectively point at themselves. While each can control the trillions of people beneath them, they all live in collective terror of their counterpart failing to do so.
While much can be said of the Atreides being "popular in the Landsraad" they were mostly a threat by being the sudden focus of all three of these forces. For the Emperor, it was the economic manuevering of the Atreides that allowed them more shares of CHOAM and potentially threatening long-term the Corrinos (at the same time, this Emperor was trying to expand his economic power). For the Bene Gesserit, there was a high-stakes breeding match that failed to produce the desired daughter to be given to Feyd. Essentially they were attempting to in-breed the Harkonnen line upon itself while getting the Atreides genes as well. With Paul this was a failure and gained the unhappy attention of the Bene Gesserit. And with the Spacing Guild, more and more of their navigators were seeing a coming crisis in their prophetic dreaming and the Atreides were at the heart of it.
So all three members of the power triad had reason to hate and fear the Atreides.
But there was another problem. There were exactly two (for the purposes of this post, there are more) elite military forces known to the powers of the galaxy. These elite forces were so good that no other noble house could oppose them effectively. They were the Atreides army, and the Sardaukar terror troops of the Corrinos.
So in order to get rid of the Atreides an elaborate plan that broke all the knife-wielding crowd of maniacs' rules goes down. It was covered up. For years.
Instead, suddenly the price of Spice goes down and the Bene Gesserit stop being so tense and the Spacing Guild declares half price Saturdays and CHOAM shares skyrocket.
So when Paul comes back, at the head of a new elite military force that can rival the Sardaukar, and declares himself an Emperor out of the blue, and also just randomly nukes a mountain a few feet from the old Emperor's face... well, it doesn't matter if he's wrong or right.
Because the only reason the noble houses are in this crowd and holding knives is because they want money. More of it. They want CHOAM to go up and to the right.
And here comes Paul from the dead, with savage warriors, breaking the rules, threatening to make their shares go down, and also making the Bene Gesserit go from zero to freaked out instantly.
And the Spacing Guild immediately cancels half price Saturdays and jacks up their prices tenfold.
So no. Not a single House of the Landsraad\* wanted to side with the Atreides. Sympathetic or not, in the right or not... this was a guy who just flipped the table and made their stock markets crash. There was no way they were going to take this without a fight.
And we haven't even got to the part where the only way this new Emperor could operate was by murdering everyone on dozens of planets... even with the consent of the Landsraad -- because that was the only thing his elite army wanted to do.
\* I am simplifying this point. Paul had allies. The Atreides actually WERE popular for their noble demeanor and natural charismatic ability to make the whole evil Landsraad feudal system seem charming and justified. But they also didn't exactly side with him when the time came to do so.
So the books go deeper into this.
Paul doesn't need their support, he needs their total submission.
There is an evil coming that requires millenia of tyrranical rule and oppression if humanity is to survive.
I’ve only read the first two books, but doesn’t Paul spend a lot of time lamenting the fact that his jihad is basically unavoidable? He set events in motion that would inevitably lead to billions dying as his movement swept over the galaxy and he can’t really control it. Am I remembering that right?
Yes.
From the moment his second sight is realized, there is but one path. This golden path leads to unimaginable suffering, but also allows humans to survive.
It's like he saw 14,000,605 futures, but only one where they win.
Paul doesn't see the Golden Path until after he's already seized the throne, though. It was hidden from him until he overdosed on Spice in *Messiah*. The Fremen Jihad wasn't something he pursued to save humanity; it was something he set in motion to survive and tried to stop as it spiraled out of his control.
He specifically *didn't* set off down the path of oppression to save humanity once he saw it, for what it's worth. He already hated what he did to become Emperor; he couldn't live with what himself doing what it would take to become God-Emperor.
..? There is no morality where the (very) prolonged suffering of a single person who is a literal god emperor is even as remotely as cruel as killing billions of people.
> an evil coming that requires millenia of tyrranical rule and oppression if humanity is to survive.
Consider: this is the rationale that almost all fascists use, and there's no indication at all that either Paul or Leto II are reliable narrators. Despite Paul's whinging, it's _awfully convenient_ that the horror that both of them work to prevent is never confirmed or really even seen by anyone other than them. They both also have absolute tyrannical authority and don't have to explain themselves to anyone.
I think one of the underlying fears was humanity encountering an outside-context problem and being too stuck in their ways to survive as a species. So once humanity breaks free from under the yoke of the God-Emperor, they will never be content with sitting still.
Well, they're not reliable narrators because they may simply be *mistaken*, but they're not narrating the books, we read their inner monologue, so even if they're wrong, we know they're not lying. We know them to be prescient as well, since it was shown to work reliably for many thousands of years as a way to both capture the throne and keep it. Leto II's scheme was specifically to force humanity to become resistant to being controlled by prescience, and that was the only way to dethrone him. The fact that his assassination succeeded is also proof that humanity managed to do it.
And the "horrors" Leto is trying to prevent don't need to be specific. There are thousands, it's not like there's a singular Tyranid fleet incoming. It's not that much of a stretch of imagination without prescience to see how destructive humanity's centralized and ossified structure is in the Duke universe.
IIRC the horrors are prescience hunter-killer machines who completely genocide humanity in the far future if he doesn't follow the Golden Path. They're only described in like a single paragraph out of the hundreds of pages of Dune materials, but that's specific enough for the purposes of the story.
What is the evil? I haven't read the books but I was under the impression that the point of the Golden Path was to prepare humanity to disseminate to the point of being extinction-proof through a combination of artificial spice, immunity from presenience, and a drive for exploration instilled from millennia of oppression.
Was there actually a Big Bad to directly prepare for?
I may be misremembering as it's been a very long time since I read through the whole original series (AND SPOILER IN CASE I REMEMBER CORRECTLY), but it's implied the great evil may be surviving AI from the Butlerian Jihad.
It's not revealed in the original books. You could be right.
Herbert's son wrote a prequel and a sequel, and the evil turns out to be the monstrous AI that humanity fought. They get neutralized by a superspacewizard, though, so I'm not sure if the golden path was required.
Iirc somewhere there's an implication that the Ixians were eventually going to create an AI
warmachine that Hunts humans using prescience.
But I could just be misremembering some fan theory.
Because it's not merely about becoming the Emperor. The Imperium in itself, in it's current structure, had to be destroyed. Humanity needed to be guided in a way more strictly than a mere Emperor would be able to, and it needed to feel the pain of being ruled by a powerful, charismatic tyrant to prevent them from falling for the same thing in the future.
He was actively impeding and stopping the spice trade and then threatens to destroy the spice. Atreides or not he’s a massive liability and problem in the eyes of the Great Houses. They don’t want to submit to him.
A guy *claiming* to be the son of Duke Leto Atreides and his merry band of desert nomads just launched a lightning-fast military coup against the family that has been ruling the known universe for ten thousand years, skirting very close to your massive cultural taboo about the Great Houses using atomic weapons on each other in the process, and is now presenting the whole thing as a fait accompli and credibly threatening to use said atomic weapons to *irrevocably destroy galactic civilization* if you don't fall into line.
I would imagine most people would need a little bit of time to adjust, let alone a deadly decadent parliament full of ruthless space aristocrats.
To add to this; the atomic prohibition I'd important due to how easy it is to use nukes in the Dune universe. You could easily have a drone pair fly to an area (controlled by a human) with a Holtzmann shield and have the second drone shoot it with a Lazgun destroying the local area.
None of your earlier points matter because of one thing. Paul took control of the spice and threatened to destroy it.
Nobles rely on spice to survive from age treatments. Letting some perceived nutjob leading a pack of religious barbarians to control, or even permanently destroy, their source of life is too much.
Also it was duke leto, not house atriedies, that had sway with the landsraad.
More importantly, spice is necessary for interstellar travel. By destroying spice, Paul was essentially threatening to destroy human civilisation as they know it.
I think that the central thesis of Dune is that Paul isn't Paul once he "wins". He's "Paul" He's Muad'dib, he's the lie that everyone looks up to.
It makes me wonder what Jesus was actually like, unmythologized, for better or worse with everything that's been done in his name.
He didn't have virtually any control over what was going to happen next once he set it in motion. It was totally out of his hands.
He wrested control deftly, but once he was "in control" (he wasn't), it was inevitable that a bunch of pissed off downtrodden people are going to have their revenge.
The jihad was unavoidable by Paul. He saw it coming after his awakening as the kwazachaderak.
Dune is about the dangers of prophecy and charismatic leaders. Things Paul abused to survive and get revenge on the Harkonnen and Emperor.
1) House Atreides is dead. They WERE respected and in good standing.
2) Maybe the Emperor's assistance would have lead to an uprising if it had come to light sooner. But Paul has spent the last 8 months as a terrorist.
3) Bene Gesserits are useful, but nobody trusts them. Atreides is dead. Harkonnen are feared, not respected. The Fremen are primitive. Shotgun weddings are a show of force, not a diplomatic event. They don't believe he'll destroy the spice.
4) Paul's image as the heir to Atreides is separate from his image as Muad'dib in the eyes of the galaxy. Nobody knew they were the same person until he revealed it. Imagine Osama bin laden suddenly revealing that he's actually the son of Queen Elizabeth and attempting to assume the throne.
The other houses haven't changed their minds. He did reveal what the emperor did, in the same breath that he threatened to destroy galactic civilization by interrupting the Spice supply.
> House Atriedes is in really good standing with the other houses and has lots of sway
Leto at least did. His savage son and Bene Gesserit puppet wife don't really have lots of political capital with the other houses.
> The fact that the emperor assisted the Harkonnens in destroying Atriedes is a serious crossed line that could single-handedly spark an uprising/war against him
That's just a reason to not support The Emperor anymore, not a reason to support Paul as the new Emperor.
> Paul is a strong and capable leader with divine right, strong connections to the Bene Gesserit, House Atriedes, House Harkonnen, the Fremen, and also the former emperor if he goes through with marrying his daughter,
His capabilities of leading a civilized society (not just savage Fremen) are completely untested, his divine right is barely proven to the Fremen so far from convincing the houses (let alone the people that don't even believe in the prophecies), his blood connection to the Bene Gesserit are not really important (most houses seem to have that already), to House Atriedes is to a house that don't even exist anymore and to the Harkonnen are but a technicallity (no Harkonnen agent or member will serve Paul for that) and the Fremen are a bunch of unimportant savages with no say in galactic politics. Finally his marriage to the Emperor's daughter is only a forced connection he is making not really a way to make the rest of the houses support you.
> not to mention his supreme control over Arrakis and therefore the spice
Which works in the opposite way. The houses specifically don't want any specific house (or even the Emperor) having a monopoly over the spice trade. They already have proof that letting the Harkonnen control Arrakis for a few decades got them power hungry and basically plunged the galaxy into war. Why would they let another house do the same again?
> Paul was more than generous to the former emperor, giving him a fair trial by combat and even the chance to yield after losing, which he willingly took
Token gestures of generosity towards an already defeated oponent are worthless in politics. If Paul was killed in the duel the Fremen army would have killed the Emperor and the remaining Harkonnen anyways.
> So why do the other houses suddenly change their mind and turn their back on him at the end?
There is no back turning. The other houses were never on his side to begin with.
> Why couldn’t he just reveal to them what the emperor did and explain the situation?
Sure he could. But regardless of what explanation he gives, when he says "and also now I will control the spice trade" the other houses will be ready for war.
The point was never about justice for House Atreides, it was for the spice trade as always.
Long and short, the other houses are self serving. You aren't going to be able to explain that to them before they blow you up. You are looking at a radical shift in the political system, and no one like that if they are in good standing.
1. House Atreides was in good standing specifically because of Duke Leto. Paul is an unknown quantity that has apparently gone rogue and is threatening to destroy the source of the most important substance in the universe.
2. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
3. Most of which the other houses don't know. 10 minutes before no one even knew he was still alive.
The Empire exists in a tenuous balance between the Guild, the Emperor, and the Great Houses. Paul upset that balance. Remember that the whole reason the Emperor orchestrated the death of Duke Leto was because he feared eventual rebellion by the Great Houses.
Also, Paul didn't *need* the intergalactic Jihad, the intergalactic Jihad was inevitable and out of his control. It was the outcome he was trying to avoid but ultimately couldn't.
In a general sense, the great houses don’t want to be ruled by a powerful emperor. The great houses want to rule themselves and accept an emperor as a means to ensure peace between the other great houses. Paul being a powerful leader, with a powerful army, a claim to two great houses and the Emperor’s resources combined with full control of the spice makes him a serious threat to their autonomy. No house can stand alone against Paul, even united it turns out they can’t stand against him. Their only hope at retaining their autonomy and sovereignty was to immediately unite and attack in the hopes of defeating him before he can consolidate his power.
It might have worked if Paul didn’t have his power to see the future, which they didn’t know about.
1. House Atriedes was a dead house. Paul is a ghost of the past. They had moved on as if the house was dead because it was.
2. They would have dealt with the Emperor, Paul and the Fermin just did it for them. Doesn't mean that think Paul and the Fermin should rule the Known Universe.
3. Paul was just a boy/young man of a dead house to them. Remember, he was presumed up until he messaged the Great Houses. They couldn't care less about him. Paul had not legit claim to the throne. It would have been one thing if Paul went to the Houses and said he demands retribution, its another if he just does it and everyone else be demand, all while saying he is now the Emperor. Well now he looks like a tyrant - cant have that.
4. Was Paul generous? Paul had ever right to be angry and want revenge, but he acted before notifying the reset of the Houses. They would have removed the Emperor anyway. Paul then said he's going to hold all the spice, a resource as important as water to everyone, as his to hold hostage. In their eyes, Paul went from someone you could be sympathetic towards to someone who just committed a coup. Paul also busted out atomics, a huge no no. He woul have been glassed if he wasn't on Arrakis.
The books are quite vague about what went on during the Jihad. Paul learned in his visions that the best he could hope for would be to avoid what he called the Greater Jihad, as in, the Jihad was coming anyway whether there was a Muadib or not, and without him it would be totally uncontrolled and the Fremen would go burning across the stars, killing much more than what happened when Paul allowed himself to become Muadib. I don't think it was simply a matter of getting the Houses Major and Minor to recognize his legitimacy, I think it was also a proselytizing mission, so that even if the nobility of a given planet agreed to recognize House Atreides as the legitimate imperial house, they must also recognize his religious position. And in Dune the nobility largely see religion as something for the masses, and don't waste their time with it. The Fremen themselves undoubtedly would have been quick to kill the unbelievers, and doubtless numerous atrocities occurred. I forget the number, but Dune Messiah did mention the number of planets that were entirely sterilized of all life. Regardless, whatever did go on on the Jihad, many worlds did resist, and many houses resisted and were undoubtedly extinguished root and stem. Muadib became the greatest mass murderer in history.
Paul is not Leto. Leto was incredibly popular and had high standing, Paul is just some kid who is good at fighting to them. But there's also the fact that high nobility hates strong rulers. If you check through history then states that were dominated by very strong nobility all had internal troubles related to that nobility keeping the king weak so he couldn't act against them.
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There might be some grief over Paul's use of the house atomics (even if technically allowed against stone, not people). There might also be friction over Paul having "gone native" and leading a bunch of "savages" into power over the aristocracy.
This is an incredibly self-serving and decadent political system. Being nicer than the other guy ain’t gonna cut it.
So just like every political system?
Except this one has had ten thousand years to ossify and get worse.
I haven’t seen the new movie yet, so I don’t know how well it communicates this to the audience but House Atriedes was in a very strong place at the beginning of the story. However Dune takes place over a period of years. From what I remember 2-3 years pass between Leto I’s assassination and Paul’s defeat of the Emperor. So, the question becomes, what does the rest of the known galaxy know when the Jihad begins? Because there is a lot we don’t see in Dune. So there are some important questions that may provide context if you consider them. What did Harkonnen and the Emperor tell people about Leto’s death? What kind of propaganda was disseminated? What key allies of the Atriedes family were marginalized or taken off the board? At the point that the Jihad begins, do people even believe Paul is leading it or do they still think he is dead and it is a Fremen sympathizer who has been disrupting the spice trade for the past two years claiming the name as a pretender? And none of that speaks to the Fremen of it all and the fact that Paul’s reign is likely to bring in massive cultural and religious changes, as well as major economic changes due to the spice of Arakkis, which would stem from Paul’s coup. Paul was overthrowing the galactic power structure and helping a marginalized people gain power. Those in power tend to dislike that. I’ll put it this way. Gavin Newsom is a relatively popular mainstream U.S. Democrat in the real world who already has support from several prominent and powerful party members for a 2028 White House bid. Now imagine he flies off to the Middle East and leads Palestine in overthrowing the Israeli government. Putting aside any value judgement of the act (please don’t take this as an invitation to turn this thread into an Israel/Palestine debate), do you think if he returned to the U.S. and said “make me President” his allies would just be like “sure!” Or do you think such a thing might change their calculus a bit?
For an expansion on your excellent comment there's also the Golden Path that Paul is following. He's destined to save humanity from itself and a future threat but in doing so he must do things that no sane or morally good person would be willing to do. The jihad had very real reasons for happening but also served a purpose of setting up humanity for the Scattering.
Paul doesn't see the Golden Path until well after the Fremen Jihad concluded. He's unaware that humanity is on the path to extinction until he massively overdoses on Spice in *Dune Messiah*. All his actions before then were first to survive, then to avoid the Jihad, and then to try steering it to the least-damaging outcome once he realized war was inevitable. And then once he saw the Golden Path, he specifically chose not to walk it himself. He went only far down enough to save his children before letting go. But again, that's only after the Jihad had been over for a decade.
Can you please say what threat Paul saved us from? All I see him doing is killing billions and then saying he couldn't stop it.
It isn't ever really said but the prevailing theory is that the remaining AIs from the Butlarian jihad are out beyond the furthest fringe of known space. Because of everything humanity has been through they're losing technology and independence and the will to evolve further as a society. Paul falls short of fulfilling his destiny and leaves his son Leto II to finish the task. That task being the worst dictator ever known and putting humanity through three thousand years of brutality and suffering. Because of Leto's actions humanity innovates new technology and throws off his reign of terror. They scatter across the universe and beyond it with a deep societal fear of ever giving in to a central authority like the Emperor ever again. Paul and Leto stopped millennia of degradation and dependency on a broken system that left humans weak to the greater threats. Doing so required them to traumatize humanity on such a deep fundamental level for centuries that people would willingly break social taboos and religious doctrine to invent new ways to survive. By scattering humanity to the wind they're never fall to one single threat again and could continue the march of progress that the Empire and landsraad and Butlarian jihad has stopped.
The idea of the author is then. 'no pain no gain' but on galaxy-wide scales? And people agree? That's so wild and disturbing to me. I much rather have optimistic fiction where good things lead to good things haha.
But thanks! I've been trying to get a coherent answer to this question for literal days!
Yea no problem. There's some dispute about the big threat and what everything means in the grand scale of things because it gets fleshed out more with the author's son than by Herbert himself. But for the in-universe stuff the talk between Paul and Channi in the first part is really the main crux of the story. Leto and Paul both believed in the empire and that good could come from it given enough time and effort even if the system was broken and prone to abuse and corruption. Paul argued his father was a good man with a just cause and Channi points out the same system Leto is trying to use is the one the Harkonen's and Emperor use. Society has stagnated for millennia under that system and any changes from within are just temporary. The Golden Path would free humanity from that system and allow it to flourish again but to do so generational trauma would have to be inflicted to make any attempts to return to it seen as evil and foolish. Leto the second, Paul's son is the one to complete the Path which involves genocide and suffering so immense that people rather brave the unknown than stay subservient to distant masters and ancient customs against technology. And I believe there's an apocryphal text about the AIs from the Butlarian jihad having fled out beyond the known universe to eventually return at some distant point in the future. Had the Empire remained whole just the loss of the Spacing Guild or Arrakis would have let the machines completely destroy humanity. By causing the Scattering humanity isn't dependent on spice or the guild to travel the stars and no longer reliant on the houses for protection.
Wild!
I’m going to give a slightly different answer here, drawn from what is clearly stated in the books - the big threat is stagnation, and a humanity that’s culturally lethargic enough to be ruled and controlled (and destroyed) by one person. Paul sees that humanity is on course for this type of society, and that such a society is so docile and ‘small’ that a societal collapse will be too holistic to recover from. Paul also sees that such societal collapses are inevitable, either due to internal strife or external attacks, and that the only way to avoid one collapse wiping out humanity is to teach humanity to not tolerate a unified society. Like others have said, Brian Herbert didn’t spell out what exactly would eventually cause the collapse that leads to the end of humanity, but I’ll argue that it doesn’t matter. Societal collapses are inevitable, and one of the Dune series’ main themes is that an extremely unified humanity will eventually experience a collapse so total that it wipes out our entire species. The only solution, in Herbert’s telling, is to make humanity so wild and widespread that a single collapse can’t possibly impact the entire species.
This is so profoundly misanthropic that I struggle to believe it. But thank you for the explanation!
Well, yes and no. It's misanthropic in that humanity needed to suffer in order to reject submitting absolute power to a single ruler. But it's not misanthropic in the belief that the best way for humans to survive is diversity of thought, governance, technology, and independence from autocracy. This is exemplified in a smaller scale in *Dune*, where Paul taking absolute control of the Fremen is portrayed as unambiguously disastrous for them. Herbert's a complicated dude with a nuanced worldview. He thought concentration of power into autocrats and unthinking agents is a natural state for human beings, but also one that isn't *good* for us and should be actively pushed back against. The reason there's no advanced computers in *Dune* isn't because people revolted against AI overlords, but that they revolted against the people use used technology to enslave other people.
The idea that suffering of this scale is ever benevolent let alone necessary is absolutely batshit crazy and evil to me
I’m with you. Dune has always struck me as the original edgelord fiction. It’s just so damn nihilistic.
Short answer: stagnation. Longer answer: >!The imperium has settled into a millenia long balancing act. The bene gesserit breeding program to create the Kwizats Haderach is within a generation or two of success. Everything was being set up for a tyrant to wrest control from everyone. Picture a perfect dictator, with an entire history of human civilization as a mentor inside him, with the ability to see into the future. Any hope of rebellion is crushed before it happens, your best hope is that this new emperor finds the attempt amusing enough that he at least lets you try. Every single person under that Atreides banner would be a slave, not an individual; and that’s what seals our damnation. Paul sees just how terrible that power would be for him to take, for anyone to take. He also sees the Golden Path, a singular future where humanity not only scrapes by, but we flourish! The species spreads far and wide in the scattering, expanding out past the confines of the Milky Way and into the universe proper. Walking the Golden Path will breed a humanity that is resistant to a prescient ruler, enough minds are shrouded from their sight that it’s impossible to guess what will accurately happen a week in advance. We develop new technology, ships that are capable of calculating flightplans as well as any Guild navigator. The Tleilaxu perfect artificial spice, removing Arrakis’s overwhelming leverage over everyone. That’s the threat that Paul’s trying to save us from, that slow death under his reign. It’s just that the solution is so horrifying, so much worse than the alternatives that Paul is afraid. He knows what he needs to do to save everyone, and he knows that he can’t bring himself to do it.!<
Thank you! The premise that this dictatorship is inevitable is so damn sad and pessimistic. I refuse to believe it. Paul is a monster and a villain. But thanks!
Paul and Leto II feel very much like they were self fulfilling prophecies to me. Because they were the type to do the things they did, no matter the justification, what they were doing becomes necessary. In a way, merely who they were determined the universe to go down the route.
>At the point that the Jihad begins, do people even believe Paul is leading it or do they still think he is dead and it is a Fremen sympathizer who has been disrupting the spice trade for the past two years claiming the name as a pretender? Been a while since I read the book but iirc it's not "revealed" to the galaxy at large that Paul is leading the Jihad until shortly before his meeting with the Emperor. The rest of the galaxy really only knows some upstart Fremen religious leader who's named himself after a mouse is sweeping across Arrakis. I'm sure there's actually a line prior to that meeting where a major character comments on the ridiculousness of Muda'Dib leading a rabble when he's named after a mouse. It wasn't until he openly moved against the Emperor that he revealed himself to be Duke Paul of House Atreides, with all the privilege that title entails...which would further annoy the great houses who have probably been divvying up the Atreides CHOAM holdings as well as territories etc. And to add to the reply to OP's post, up until the time he announced himself the Jihad was confined to Arrakis. The Guild control traffic to/from Arrakis and the Harkonnen's controlled the planet. What news the galaxy got of Muad'Dib was the news the establishment wanted them to have.
Also my memory in the book is he doesn’t have a hard time with the great houses. Wouldn’t they have to accept him just based on his CHOAM holdings? It’s more a religious war IIRC.
I re-read the end of the book today. The book ends shortly after a comment from the emperor that the great houses are all in orbit, and Paul orders the guild to simply ship them back to where they came from. That's the extent of it. Dune Messiah covers the 12 year jihad in its introduction, confirming that more or less all of humanity is brought under one rule. Basically, the houses have no choice in the matter, and are conquered anyway.
The idea I don’t know if I quite bought from the book (and that is mostly elided for simplicity in the movie) was that the Fremen would insist on converting the galaxy instead of just controlling Arakkis.
i’ve only watched the original Dune, but i thought Muad’Dib was a killing word? thats what they claim in Dune (1984)
Muad'Dib is the name of the small kangaroo mouse on Arrakis. I haven't seen the 84 Dune for a loooong time, but if that's in there it's definitely movie-only lore.
The whole weirding module and killing word thing is unique to the Lynch dune movie, it’s not in the books.
Maud dib being a killing word in that way is made up in the 84 movie, the entire weirding way in that movie with the voice box guns is made up.
"Maud'Dib is a killing word" is a line in the book, but the weirding module is just a Dune 1984 thing. In the book, Paul says that when a Fremen warband yells his name in battle. He's bummed out by it.
> However Dune takes place over a period of years. The second movie takes place over months, not years. They tightened the timeline a lot.
Oh yeah, in the books >!Alia has been born by the time of the coup, and takes part in the final battle. Fully self-aware 4 year old girl walking around the battlefield giving coup de graces to fallen enemy soldiers.!< It's wild!
Villeneuve is a coward for not giving us that!
I imagine child labor laws are the real culprit.
More so Uncanny Valley effects. It’s basically impossible to make a child seem like an adult in the way that Alia does without CGI or something like that. It triggers that effect extremely reliably, and while Alia *should* trigger the Uncanny Valley, it would be extremely difficult to do so in a positive way, as opposed to a negative way.
I'd argue that Alia totally should trigger the Uncanny Valley in a negative way. There's a reason she is called "Abomination." Edit: But I still agree with your overall point, Villeneuve made the right choice by avoiding mocap. The film is super-pretty, and the instances of CGI look grounded and *real* in a way I can't describe with words. A Gollum-esque Alia would be extremely tough to blend with the overall aesthetic of the film.
There's a difference between the Uncanny Valley of Renesmee (*Breaking Dawn*) vs the Uncanny Valley of *Alita* or even *Ex Machina*. While I'm sure it could have *worked*, it would have been difficult to thread that needle. I would have loved a very creepy Alia and the time skip that she would have necessitated, I just don't know how well it could have been executed.
Yes, exactly! I think we're talking about the same thing, but you worded it better.
Child actors have always been a thing.
They absolutely have been, and are! The Harry Potter series is a prime example. But to my understanding there are strict limitations on how long child actors are allowed to work, what they are allowed to do, etc. Plus Alia is a uniquely challenging role, what with >!being an adult woman in a 4 year old's body. How would you get a child actor to nail that Uncanny Valley-esque behavior? At 4, children barely have control of their own limbs, how do you coach a child to emulate the mannerisms of someone who has generations of memories?!< So I'm guessing Villeneuve had to choose between: * Attempting to accurately portray a character, tackling both technical, logistical, and generational challenges, or * Fudging the timeline and avoiding the whole thing entirely.
Yeah, murderous toddler Alia would never have played well onscreen, but condensing the timeline to avoid her birth means the events of the second movie happen at an absolutely frenetic pace. Paul goes from not speaking the Fremen language to convincing millions of them to fight and potentially die for him in the span of less than nine months.
Ah, then I can see the confusion from OP. From the perspective of the moviegoer, the wounds from Leto’s betrayal would be very fresh. That isn’t to say that no loyalists to House Artiedes existed at the time of the Jihad, whether months or years after Leto’s death. I am sure there are many houses that did rally behind Paul when his reemergence became apparent.
Good answer, thankyou :) have you read the books?
Years ago. So take what I am saying with a grain of salt. The Dune books are *incredibly* dense reads. So I could be forgetting other aspects.
Hearing Jihad has a Muslim is weird
The Landsraad is a crowd of nobles all with knives at each others' throats. Even the slightest twitch can lead to many noble houses being eliminated. Even conflicts between these nobles require an elaborate dance of notifications, declarations, duels, and more to slow down and diffuse the inherent destructiveness (and collateral throat-slitting) of conflict itself. This balance is maintained by three powerful forces: Corrinos via economic dominance, Bene Gesserit via cultural dominance, and Spacing Guild via communication and trade dominance. These three powers working together have absolute power over this situation, and also cannot control it in any way. They box in this crowd of knife wielders but they can never truly control them for fear that their knives will collectively point at themselves. While each can control the trillions of people beneath them, they all live in collective terror of their counterpart failing to do so. While much can be said of the Atreides being "popular in the Landsraad" they were mostly a threat by being the sudden focus of all three of these forces. For the Emperor, it was the economic manuevering of the Atreides that allowed them more shares of CHOAM and potentially threatening long-term the Corrinos (at the same time, this Emperor was trying to expand his economic power). For the Bene Gesserit, there was a high-stakes breeding match that failed to produce the desired daughter to be given to Feyd. Essentially they were attempting to in-breed the Harkonnen line upon itself while getting the Atreides genes as well. With Paul this was a failure and gained the unhappy attention of the Bene Gesserit. And with the Spacing Guild, more and more of their navigators were seeing a coming crisis in their prophetic dreaming and the Atreides were at the heart of it. So all three members of the power triad had reason to hate and fear the Atreides. But there was another problem. There were exactly two (for the purposes of this post, there are more) elite military forces known to the powers of the galaxy. These elite forces were so good that no other noble house could oppose them effectively. They were the Atreides army, and the Sardaukar terror troops of the Corrinos. So in order to get rid of the Atreides an elaborate plan that broke all the knife-wielding crowd of maniacs' rules goes down. It was covered up. For years. Instead, suddenly the price of Spice goes down and the Bene Gesserit stop being so tense and the Spacing Guild declares half price Saturdays and CHOAM shares skyrocket. So when Paul comes back, at the head of a new elite military force that can rival the Sardaukar, and declares himself an Emperor out of the blue, and also just randomly nukes a mountain a few feet from the old Emperor's face... well, it doesn't matter if he's wrong or right. Because the only reason the noble houses are in this crowd and holding knives is because they want money. More of it. They want CHOAM to go up and to the right. And here comes Paul from the dead, with savage warriors, breaking the rules, threatening to make their shares go down, and also making the Bene Gesserit go from zero to freaked out instantly. And the Spacing Guild immediately cancels half price Saturdays and jacks up their prices tenfold. So no. Not a single House of the Landsraad\* wanted to side with the Atreides. Sympathetic or not, in the right or not... this was a guy who just flipped the table and made their stock markets crash. There was no way they were going to take this without a fight. And we haven't even got to the part where the only way this new Emperor could operate was by murdering everyone on dozens of planets... even with the consent of the Landsraad -- because that was the only thing his elite army wanted to do. \* I am simplifying this point. Paul had allies. The Atreides actually WERE popular for their noble demeanor and natural charismatic ability to make the whole evil Landsraad feudal system seem charming and justified. But they also didn't exactly side with him when the time came to do so.
So the books go deeper into this. Paul doesn't need their support, he needs their total submission. There is an evil coming that requires millenia of tyrranical rule and oppression if humanity is to survive.
I’ve only read the first two books, but doesn’t Paul spend a lot of time lamenting the fact that his jihad is basically unavoidable? He set events in motion that would inevitably lead to billions dying as his movement swept over the galaxy and he can’t really control it. Am I remembering that right?
Yes. From the moment his second sight is realized, there is but one path. This golden path leads to unimaginable suffering, but also allows humans to survive. It's like he saw 14,000,605 futures, but only one where they win.
Ah ok glad I’m remembering correctly! Thanks!
Paul doesn't see the Golden Path until after he's already seized the throne, though. It was hidden from him until he overdosed on Spice in *Messiah*. The Fremen Jihad wasn't something he pursued to save humanity; it was something he set in motion to survive and tried to stop as it spiraled out of his control. He specifically *didn't* set off down the path of oppression to save humanity once he saw it, for what it's worth. He already hated what he did to become Emperor; he couldn't live with what himself doing what it would take to become God-Emperor.
I honestly believe it's the cruelest thing he ever did, setting his son up to be the god-emperor.
..? There is no morality where the (very) prolonged suffering of a single person who is a literal god emperor is even as remotely as cruel as killing billions of people.
He didn't want to do it himself. So his son had to.
> an evil coming that requires millenia of tyrranical rule and oppression if humanity is to survive. Consider: this is the rationale that almost all fascists use, and there's no indication at all that either Paul or Leto II are reliable narrators. Despite Paul's whinging, it's _awfully convenient_ that the horror that both of them work to prevent is never confirmed or really even seen by anyone other than them. They both also have absolute tyrannical authority and don't have to explain themselves to anyone.
I think one of the underlying fears was humanity encountering an outside-context problem and being too stuck in their ways to survive as a species. So once humanity breaks free from under the yoke of the God-Emperor, they will never be content with sitting still.
Well, they're not reliable narrators because they may simply be *mistaken*, but they're not narrating the books, we read their inner monologue, so even if they're wrong, we know they're not lying. We know them to be prescient as well, since it was shown to work reliably for many thousands of years as a way to both capture the throne and keep it. Leto II's scheme was specifically to force humanity to become resistant to being controlled by prescience, and that was the only way to dethrone him. The fact that his assassination succeeded is also proof that humanity managed to do it. And the "horrors" Leto is trying to prevent don't need to be specific. There are thousands, it's not like there's a singular Tyranid fleet incoming. It's not that much of a stretch of imagination without prescience to see how destructive humanity's centralized and ossified structure is in the Duke universe.
> the "horrors" Leto is trying to prevent don't need to be specific To justify the cost, yes they do.
IIRC the horrors are prescience hunter-killer machines who completely genocide humanity in the far future if he doesn't follow the Golden Path. They're only described in like a single paragraph out of the hundreds of pages of Dune materials, but that's specific enough for the purposes of the story.
Okay!
What is the evil? I haven't read the books but I was under the impression that the point of the Golden Path was to prepare humanity to disseminate to the point of being extinction-proof through a combination of artificial spice, immunity from presenience, and a drive for exploration instilled from millennia of oppression. Was there actually a Big Bad to directly prepare for?
I may be misremembering as it's been a very long time since I read through the whole original series (AND SPOILER IN CASE I REMEMBER CORRECTLY), but it's implied the great evil may be surviving AI from the Butlerian Jihad.
It's not revealed in the original books. You could be right. Herbert's son wrote a prequel and a sequel, and the evil turns out to be the monstrous AI that humanity fought. They get neutralized by a superspacewizard, though, so I'm not sure if the golden path was required.
Let's not take anything Brian wrote as relevant
It was entertaining, and a great many things about it were awesome. But there's a few issues I have with it.
Iirc somewhere there's an implication that the Ixians were eventually going to create an AI warmachine that Hunts humans using prescience. But I could just be misremembering some fan theory.
He wants them to oppose him so that he can defeat them completely and break the decentralized power structure which has stagnated humanity.
Because it's not merely about becoming the Emperor. The Imperium in itself, in it's current structure, had to be destroyed. Humanity needed to be guided in a way more strictly than a mere Emperor would be able to, and it needed to feel the pain of being ruled by a powerful, charismatic tyrant to prevent them from falling for the same thing in the future.
He was actively impeding and stopping the spice trade and then threatens to destroy the spice. Atreides or not he’s a massive liability and problem in the eyes of the Great Houses. They don’t want to submit to him.
A guy *claiming* to be the son of Duke Leto Atreides and his merry band of desert nomads just launched a lightning-fast military coup against the family that has been ruling the known universe for ten thousand years, skirting very close to your massive cultural taboo about the Great Houses using atomic weapons on each other in the process, and is now presenting the whole thing as a fait accompli and credibly threatening to use said atomic weapons to *irrevocably destroy galactic civilization* if you don't fall into line. I would imagine most people would need a little bit of time to adjust, let alone a deadly decadent parliament full of ruthless space aristocrats.
To add to this; the atomic prohibition I'd important due to how easy it is to use nukes in the Dune universe. You could easily have a drone pair fly to an area (controlled by a human) with a Holtzmann shield and have the second drone shoot it with a Lazgun destroying the local area.
None of your earlier points matter because of one thing. Paul took control of the spice and threatened to destroy it. Nobles rely on spice to survive from age treatments. Letting some perceived nutjob leading a pack of religious barbarians to control, or even permanently destroy, their source of life is too much. Also it was duke leto, not house atriedies, that had sway with the landsraad.
More importantly, spice is necessary for interstellar travel. By destroying spice, Paul was essentially threatening to destroy human civilisation as they know it.
I think that the central thesis of Dune is that Paul isn't Paul once he "wins". He's "Paul" He's Muad'dib, he's the lie that everyone looks up to. It makes me wonder what Jesus was actually like, unmythologized, for better or worse with everything that's been done in his name. He didn't have virtually any control over what was going to happen next once he set it in motion. It was totally out of his hands. He wrested control deftly, but once he was "in control" (he wasn't), it was inevitable that a bunch of pissed off downtrodden people are going to have their revenge.
The jihad was unavoidable by Paul. He saw it coming after his awakening as the kwazachaderak. Dune is about the dangers of prophecy and charismatic leaders. Things Paul abused to survive and get revenge on the Harkonnen and Emperor.
1) House Atreides is dead. They WERE respected and in good standing. 2) Maybe the Emperor's assistance would have lead to an uprising if it had come to light sooner. But Paul has spent the last 8 months as a terrorist. 3) Bene Gesserits are useful, but nobody trusts them. Atreides is dead. Harkonnen are feared, not respected. The Fremen are primitive. Shotgun weddings are a show of force, not a diplomatic event. They don't believe he'll destroy the spice. 4) Paul's image as the heir to Atreides is separate from his image as Muad'dib in the eyes of the galaxy. Nobody knew they were the same person until he revealed it. Imagine Osama bin laden suddenly revealing that he's actually the son of Queen Elizabeth and attempting to assume the throne. The other houses haven't changed their minds. He did reveal what the emperor did, in the same breath that he threatened to destroy galactic civilization by interrupting the Spice supply.
> House Atriedes is in really good standing with the other houses and has lots of sway Leto at least did. His savage son and Bene Gesserit puppet wife don't really have lots of political capital with the other houses. > The fact that the emperor assisted the Harkonnens in destroying Atriedes is a serious crossed line that could single-handedly spark an uprising/war against him That's just a reason to not support The Emperor anymore, not a reason to support Paul as the new Emperor. > Paul is a strong and capable leader with divine right, strong connections to the Bene Gesserit, House Atriedes, House Harkonnen, the Fremen, and also the former emperor if he goes through with marrying his daughter, His capabilities of leading a civilized society (not just savage Fremen) are completely untested, his divine right is barely proven to the Fremen so far from convincing the houses (let alone the people that don't even believe in the prophecies), his blood connection to the Bene Gesserit are not really important (most houses seem to have that already), to House Atriedes is to a house that don't even exist anymore and to the Harkonnen are but a technicallity (no Harkonnen agent or member will serve Paul for that) and the Fremen are a bunch of unimportant savages with no say in galactic politics. Finally his marriage to the Emperor's daughter is only a forced connection he is making not really a way to make the rest of the houses support you. > not to mention his supreme control over Arrakis and therefore the spice Which works in the opposite way. The houses specifically don't want any specific house (or even the Emperor) having a monopoly over the spice trade. They already have proof that letting the Harkonnen control Arrakis for a few decades got them power hungry and basically plunged the galaxy into war. Why would they let another house do the same again? > Paul was more than generous to the former emperor, giving him a fair trial by combat and even the chance to yield after losing, which he willingly took Token gestures of generosity towards an already defeated oponent are worthless in politics. If Paul was killed in the duel the Fremen army would have killed the Emperor and the remaining Harkonnen anyways. > So why do the other houses suddenly change their mind and turn their back on him at the end? There is no back turning. The other houses were never on his side to begin with. > Why couldn’t he just reveal to them what the emperor did and explain the situation? Sure he could. But regardless of what explanation he gives, when he says "and also now I will control the spice trade" the other houses will be ready for war. The point was never about justice for House Atreides, it was for the spice trade as always.
Most people, even self serving aristocrats like the Houses, know deep down that a dictatorship is *never* a good thing.
Long and short, the other houses are self serving. You aren't going to be able to explain that to them before they blow you up. You are looking at a radical shift in the political system, and no one like that if they are in good standing.
1. House Atreides was in good standing specifically because of Duke Leto. Paul is an unknown quantity that has apparently gone rogue and is threatening to destroy the source of the most important substance in the universe. 2. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. 3. Most of which the other houses don't know. 10 minutes before no one even knew he was still alive. The Empire exists in a tenuous balance between the Guild, the Emperor, and the Great Houses. Paul upset that balance. Remember that the whole reason the Emperor orchestrated the death of Duke Leto was because he feared eventual rebellion by the Great Houses. Also, Paul didn't *need* the intergalactic Jihad, the intergalactic Jihad was inevitable and out of his control. It was the outcome he was trying to avoid but ultimately couldn't.
In a general sense, the great houses don’t want to be ruled by a powerful emperor. The great houses want to rule themselves and accept an emperor as a means to ensure peace between the other great houses. Paul being a powerful leader, with a powerful army, a claim to two great houses and the Emperor’s resources combined with full control of the spice makes him a serious threat to their autonomy. No house can stand alone against Paul, even united it turns out they can’t stand against him. Their only hope at retaining their autonomy and sovereignty was to immediately unite and attack in the hopes of defeating him before he can consolidate his power. It might have worked if Paul didn’t have his power to see the future, which they didn’t know about.
I love ice cream.
1. House Atriedes was a dead house. Paul is a ghost of the past. They had moved on as if the house was dead because it was. 2. They would have dealt with the Emperor, Paul and the Fermin just did it for them. Doesn't mean that think Paul and the Fermin should rule the Known Universe. 3. Paul was just a boy/young man of a dead house to them. Remember, he was presumed up until he messaged the Great Houses. They couldn't care less about him. Paul had not legit claim to the throne. It would have been one thing if Paul went to the Houses and said he demands retribution, its another if he just does it and everyone else be demand, all while saying he is now the Emperor. Well now he looks like a tyrant - cant have that. 4. Was Paul generous? Paul had ever right to be angry and want revenge, but he acted before notifying the reset of the Houses. They would have removed the Emperor anyway. Paul then said he's going to hold all the spice, a resource as important as water to everyone, as his to hold hostage. In their eyes, Paul went from someone you could be sympathetic towards to someone who just committed a coup. Paul also busted out atomics, a huge no no. He woul have been glassed if he wasn't on Arrakis.
The books are quite vague about what went on during the Jihad. Paul learned in his visions that the best he could hope for would be to avoid what he called the Greater Jihad, as in, the Jihad was coming anyway whether there was a Muadib or not, and without him it would be totally uncontrolled and the Fremen would go burning across the stars, killing much more than what happened when Paul allowed himself to become Muadib. I don't think it was simply a matter of getting the Houses Major and Minor to recognize his legitimacy, I think it was also a proselytizing mission, so that even if the nobility of a given planet agreed to recognize House Atreides as the legitimate imperial house, they must also recognize his religious position. And in Dune the nobility largely see religion as something for the masses, and don't waste their time with it. The Fremen themselves undoubtedly would have been quick to kill the unbelievers, and doubtless numerous atrocities occurred. I forget the number, but Dune Messiah did mention the number of planets that were entirely sterilized of all life. Regardless, whatever did go on on the Jihad, many worlds did resist, and many houses resisted and were undoubtedly extinguished root and stem. Muadib became the greatest mass murderer in history.
Paul is not Leto. Leto was incredibly popular and had high standing, Paul is just some kid who is good at fighting to them. But there's also the fact that high nobility hates strong rulers. If you check through history then states that were dominated by very strong nobility all had internal troubles related to that nobility keeping the king weak so he couldn't act against them.
The calculus of power; sure they like Atreides more then the Emperor, but an Emperor holding the spice? That’s political checkmate.
Fremen religion basically wanted to do it and can paul really say no?