Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
Blurb:
Book Two in the Magnificent Dune Chronicles—the Bestselling Science Fiction Adventure of All Time
Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atreides, better known—and feared—as the man christened Muad’Dib. As Emperor of the known universe, he possesses more power than a single man was ever meant to wield. Worshipped as a religious icon by the fanatical Fremen, Paul faces the enmity of the political houses he displaced when he assumed the throne—and a conspiracy conducted within his own sphere of influence.
And even as House Atreides begins to crumble around him from the machinations of his enemies, the true threat to Paul comes to his lover, Chani, and the unborn heir to his family’s dynasty...
Review:
This post may say “Review” in the title, but now that we’re sixty years on from the publication of the original Dune—throughout which time there have been dozens of sequels and spinoffs, at least three movies, several TV shows, and multiple videogames spawned from it—I think it’s safe to say that you’re either going to read Dune or you aren’t. This review isn’t going to change that. Do I think you should read these books? Yes! Review over. I could do the usual rigamarole and tell you about the prose or about the narrative structure or the characters or the worldbuilding, but I’m not interested in that. And neither are you. Would my describing a Guild Steersman get you to read this book? Or my teasing a returning character from the first Dune? No. My reviews have always tended to skew more towards essay-ish territory anyway, so what I’d really like to do is use this time to do a slightly deeper thematic exploration of Dune Messiah (and, by association, classic Dune). This is our personal book club now, you and me—so let’s talk about Dune.
Dune is about a lot of things. Ecology and colonialism, yes; but also power and the cult of personality. It is, as Judith Merril would put it, a “teaching story”. It has something to say (or many things to say, really). First published in a serialized form in 1963 and ‘64 before its formal “novel” publication in 1965, Dune exists, without a doubt, in the light of the Cold War and the afterimage of World War II. The echoes of Hitler and Mussolini were still being felt throughout Europe, Stalin had barely been dead ten years, and Mao was reshaping China in his image. World War II had brought many things to the forefront of public consciousness, many fears that continued into the Cold War: tyranny, genocide, atomic destruction—but perhaps no other wartime institution had been developed and spread as quickly and as strongly as that of propaganda (as we formally think of it today). Dune, by my interpretation, is about propaganda; and it is on this theme that I would like to dedicate the next few paragraphs.
The whole thrust of the narrative of Dune (and much of Messiah) is carried along by the work of propaganda—mostly Bene Gesserit propaganda, but also the religious propaganda of the Fremen (though it is revealed that these two have been deliberately interwoven by the Bene Gesserit). Paul Atriedes is not so much a “chosen one” in the mystical, heroes-of-old type way as he is simply the right person at the right time to take control of the levers of propaganda to claw his way into power. He is aware of the details of the propaganda that has been disseminated on Arrakis, and is able to use it to his advantage to claim control of a universal Empire.
Arguments have been made that propaganda is a neutral force, and is only made harmful or beneficial by the propagandist responsible for it. But French philosopher Jacques Ellul, in his seminal work Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, bluntly states that: "...propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man—the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.” In Dune, as in the real world, propaganda exists to bring the universe into servitude and submission. The Bene Gesserit created a myth, and Paul stepped into that myth, making it flesh. He became the myth, he continued the myth, and the myth rules the universe. So it is that late in Dune Messiah one character ominously asks “Do we not live in the shadow of the most dangerous creation the world has ever seen?”
Paul is a dangerous creation, and his Empire more dangerous still. Driven by righteousness instilled in them by Atreides propaganda, Paul’s armies purge countless worlds, wiping out entire civilizations. This is the design of tyranny. George Orwell, in a 1945 post-mortem of sorts about the writing of his novel Animal Farm, wrote that “The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.” And in Dune and Dune Messiah, very few people of the common people seem to truly grasp the danger of Paul’s mythos. In Dune this is even more clear. He is an alien amongst the Fremen, feigning innocence despite intimately knowing their prophecies; and so none of them can see him for what he truly is. They can only see what propaganda has told them to see. They can only see their savior. By the time of Messiah, everyone knows that Paul is powerful. They know he is god-like. But raw power is only one kind of danger. Human beings are susceptible to so many others.
Ellul elaborates in Propaganda: “...propaganda will permit what so far was prohibited, such as hatred… Propaganda offers [people] an object of hatred… [and] the hatred it offers him is not shameful, evil hatred he must hide, but a legitimate hatred, which he can justifiably feel. Moreover, propaganda points out enemies which must be slain, transforming crime into a praise-worthy act. …Where transgression becomes virtue, the lifter of the ban becomes a hero, a demi-god, and we consecrate ourselves to serve him because he has liberated our repressed passions. …Through such a process of intense rationalization, propaganda builds monolithic individuals. …[The propagandee] marches forward with full assurance of his righteousness… a limited and rigid personality that mechanically applies divine commandments, is incapable of engaging in human dialogue, and will never question values that it has placed above the individual. …Yet all this is acquired without effort, experience, reflection, or criticism—by the destructive shock effect of well-made propaganda.”
When Paul leads the Fremen to rebel against the Harkonnens at the end of Dune, it is not in the service of some altruistic anti-colonialist effort. He does not mean to truly free them. He means to use them and their struggle to secure power for himself. They believe they are fighting for a free Arrakis, but they’re merely fighting for an exchange of masters. Heroism in the face of oppression then becomes tragedy. We see this most keenly in the ending of Villeneuve’s cinematic adaptation of the latter half of the first novel (2024’s Dune: Part 2), which, though veiled in epic imagery and music, is undeniably sad. We see the Fremen, led by Stilgar, enthusiastically boarding Atreides’ starships to begin Paul’s jihad against the other great Houses. But we know that they are not flying away to their freedom. They’re flying to the deaths, to become cannon fodder for Paul’s new Empire, to become a bloody foundation upon which he will build his kingdom. Because they have bought into the propaganda that was fed to them for centuries, they have become, as Ellul writes, “monolithic individuals… [marching] forward with full assurance of [their] righteousness.” All in service of Paul Atreides, who seeks to keep them loyal merely as an army for this Empire. They are a means to an end.
By the time of Messiah, Paul has made himself a god, and very few are left who will challenge him. But those challengers do exist, and they are growing stronger. Paul’s control over the world is not absolute, despite the efforts of his propaganda.
As far as real-world propagandists are concerned, there are only a few infamous enough to have left a permanent mark on history: chief among them Adolf Hitler. In the introduction to the Mariner Books 1999 edition of Mein Kampf, translator Ralph Manheim describes Hitler as a man who “is fighting his persecutors, magnifying his person, [and] creating a dream-world in which he can be an important figure” (as Ellul writes, “Nothing is worse in times of danger than to live in a dream world”). So too is Paul Atreides in Dune Messiah. And Herbert directly ties the legacy of Adolf Hitler to that of Paul in Messiah. Herbert makes explicit his view toward the actions Paul has undertaken in a scene where Paul suggests that Stilgar study the old histories of Earth. He directs Stilgar to the work of Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler, and to the millions killed under their respective rules, numbers which Stilgar immediately thinks are “not very impressive” compared to the tens of billions Paul’s jihad has claimed. Whatever heroism could be implicitly applied to Paul’s actions in Dune, Herbert is unflinching here. Paul is not a hero. Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Paul Atreides—these men are the greatest evils humanity has to offer.
Paul’s tyrannical nature in Dune Messiah is not contained simply to the killing of billions. His propaganda machine is total, spreading the Empire across Arrakis and across the universe. I do not know how much contemporaneous anti-authoritarian literature Frank Herbert read during the process of writing the Dune series, but over the past year I’ve read something close to 11,000 pages of scholarly work related to dictatorships and tyranny, and perhaps it's simply recency bias but I feel like I can see many of those works between the lines of Dune Messiah. I see Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in lines like “...people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: ‘See, there He is. He makes us one.’” And I would likewise not be surprised to learn that Herbert had read Giovanni Gentile’s (the Italian philosopher and occasional ghostwriter for Mussolini) 1929 treatise The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism; because when Gentile writes things like “[The] people have commenced on the path with a faith, with a passion, that has taken possession of the soul of the crowd, and for which there are no examples in its history. They undertake passage with a discipline never before experienced, without hesitation, without discussion, with eyes only for that person of heroic temper, gifted with those extraordinary and admirable traits of the great leaders of peoples. [Mussolini] advances, secure, surrounded by an aura of myth, almost a person chosen by the Deity, tireless and infallible, an instrument employed by Providence to create a new civilization,” I see the path of Paul Atreides. Herbert had seen the tyrants of Europe. He was seeing the tyrants of Asia. He had seen and was seeing cults of personality sprouting up all over the world—including in the United States—and he was in the thick of the propaganda they were projecting across the globe. Dune and Messiah project the ideas of these personalities into the far future.
In less contemporaneous comparisons, I feel in lines like “Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual,” or “I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality,” the texture of Bellah and Hammond’s Varieties of Civil Religion (and even a little bit of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—“Often that love of native country is further exalted by religious zeal… It is a sort of religion itself; it does not reason, it believes, it feels, it acts”). And in lines like “Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, [Paul] decided, was the inevitable fate of power,” I see Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism”, in which he wrote that, in order for a fascist dictatorship to keep an ideological hold over its people, it must find new battles to fight because the people “must feel that they are under siege.” In this way the dictator secures the loyalty of his people, because he is the only one defending them from enemies (real or imagined).
And I see Herbert’s understanding of history in the description of the world of Dune Messiah. While much of Dune takes place out in the wilds of Arrakis, most of Messiah takes place within the capitol city of Arrakeen; where Herbert invokes the aesthetic sensibilities of fascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini in his descriptions of the massive architecture of Arrakeen. “Buildings took on an aura of monstrous imperial barbarity,” Herbert writes. “They stood enormous and bright beneath the northern sun. Colossi! Every extravagance of architecture a demented history could produce lay within his view: terraces of mesa proportion, squares as large as some cities, parks, premises, bits of cultured wilderness. …All created an effect of unrivaled magnificence.”
Architecture has always been an important part of totalitarian regimes, especially fascists. As Alexandra Currie-Buckner writes for IMPERIAL, “...[fascist] aesthetics are a form of control. They shape how people see the world, how they see each other, and how they see themselves. …A field isn’t just a field. It’s a stage. A government building isn’t just a workplace. It’s a monument to power. A face on a billboard isn’t just a portrait. It’s a god. Fascist aesthetics created a visual reality in which the state was always present, always powerful, always sacred. Art and architecture weren’t just decoration. They were immersive tools of myth-making.” We see these immersive tools at work when one of Paul’s prisoners is being escorted through his keep. Herbert writes: “The size of the citadel began to oppress her. Would the passages never end? The place reeked of terrifying physical power. No planet, no civilization in all of human history had ever before seen such man-made immensity.” Paul has created the monuments of which Currie-Buckner writes, where “If one could stand under a structure like this, perhaps they would get a sense of the size, scale, and power that these leaders wanted to project—not just as leaders of a nation, but as figures that hoped to transcend time.” All this is the totalitarian design. Paul uses history, architecture, poetry, music, and culture—in addition to raw power—to keep his Empire steady. Propaganda given shape and form. As one of the conspirators against Paul remarks: “Culture! [The Atreides] dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote beauty that enslaves. They create a literate ignorance—easiest thing of all. They leave nothing to chance. Chains! Everything they do forges chains.”
In Dune and Dune Messiah, Herbert is warning us against propaganda, against the cult of personality it is used to support and enforce. He is warning us to be on guard against leaders who claim infallibility, who claim they can predict the future, who claim to always be right. He is warning us against leaders who place nation over people, who ask for sacrifice while making none themselves. Do they claim themselves to be chosen by God? Do they claim a special ordination to rule? These men walk amongst us today. They are in power right now.
The solution to all this comes from a passage of Messiah’s Tleilaxu Godbuk: “No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.”
Authoritarian regimes may be forged by masses, but they are undone by individuals.
I worry for the future. I have my doubts that any of this will be here by the time the 10,000-year-away future of Dune rolls around. At the end of the day, I see myself most in Chani when she says, “I don’t want to be part of history… I just want to be loved… and to love.” But whether we like it or not, we are part of history. As trite as the axiom “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it” has become, it still holds incredible weight. But history is dry and dense. And authors like Herbert know it, hence why Dune and Dune Messiah exist. Authors like Orwell, Herbert, Huxley, Bradbury, and countless others have written these works as gateways, as abstractions of the real world, as mirrors; to remind us, to inform us, to teach us what we may otherwise be unwilling to learn. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury reminds us that “Not knowing or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know… [and] We can’t be good unless we know what bad is.” Herbert is showing us “bad” in this book, expanded out to its grandest and most powerful. He is giving us the tools to identify evil. He is removing our excuses not to know.
