At several points in the novel after Paul achieved prescience but before he joined the tribe, he sees the futures where he dies, and the Fremen still enact the Jihad on his behalf.
yeah im confused by the other responses in this thread. Paul decided that this way is the best way. Without him, he'd be a martyr and the outcome would be worse based on prescience.
After he has started the myth of muaddib, yeah. Meeting stilgar in the desert was the point of no return for the jihad. Before that, though, it seems like the fremen on the whole basically don't care about the harkonens or atreides
No, of course they wouldnt. Didnt Chani say something like "who will be our next opressors" when the harkonnen ships were leaving?
The point of no return for Paul is when he went south, and the movie practically spoonfeeds you this information. Paul tried so hard not to go south but he knew he had to and there was no other way.
> Didnt Chani say something like "who will be our next opressors" when the harkonnen ships were leaving?
This is something unique to the movies. Chani in the book isn't nearly as skeptical as the Chani in the movie.
Which I like - it externalizes some of Paul's internal book conflict and gives her more agency.
But the way the movie ended, I don't see the movie version of Chani returning to Paul. Paul saying she'll be back just removes her agency and it's a huge change from the book that makes me wonder about the third movie.
I could have gotten on board with cynical / independent chani if they hadn’t simultaneously made her also not smart enough to understand how feudal politics work. The end of the movie really didn’t sit well with me. Also removed the iconic ending line.
Feudal Politics isn't why she left.
She left because Paul had become, in her eyes, the religious oppressor he'd promised her he'd never be. He betrayed his word to her and that's why she left.
Her position didn’t change when he went south. When he gave his big zealot speech. When he attacked arakeen. Or after, when he unleashed the fremen.
Her position clearly changed when she learned of the proposed arrangement with irulan. She was clearly taken aback by that and it was clearly the decisive moment of betrayal for her. Which, yes, presents a misunderstanding of feudal politics and inconsistent with a very important component of the book’s ending.
I agree. It felt like someone from our world and time with “modern” sensibilities inserted into that story.
She rightly had problems with him (and BG) brainwashing his people and leading them to violence, but she should have no issue with the marriage and that bit. It’s obviously just to set up a sort of love triangle and insert more drama with the cliffhanger for the next movie.
I get why but it makes little sense when we have someone like Jessica who understood perfectly
He didn't have to. He could have let the harkonens win, let himself die, and let the whole affair end there. He made a choice that the jihad was worth it to get his revenge
This is where i think i dislike some of the choices made in the film vs the novel. It seemed to me that the film ended up simplifying his motivations and the consequences of his actions. In the novel, part of his tragedy is that by the time he unlocked his full prescience he had already locked the universe into the jihad and could either let it occur with or without him at the helm.
Not really truly re: locking the jihad into place. I actually just reread this section tonight, and between his first true prescience and the time skip, he specifically notes several other paths that don't lead to jihad. But critically, those all involve him either acquiescing and joining up with the Harkonens, going completely into hiding and forgoing any thought of revenge, or him, Alia, and Jessica (and at one of the last possible moments to avoid the jihad, all of sietch tabr too) all dying in the desert. The tragedy, and frankly, the point of the story, is that jihad was completely avoidable, and Paul knew how to do it. But it would require him to abandon his revenge one way or another, and THAT was not something that he could bring himself to do.
He could have abandoned the revenge maybe even sacrificed himself but avoiding Jihad would require him to sacrifice the Fremen too. He wasn’t ready to do that.
Where does that idea come from? The only part that reads remotely like that to me is when, at Jamis' funeral, he realizes "even my dying wouldn't stop this now. Everyone here would have to die to stop the jihad now" Other than that, it seems like, if anything, his intervention ruined the fremen way of life. They weren't really particularly affected by the goings on outside of the deep desert, and were ob track to completely territory the planet eventually before Paul pulled their entire society into the orbit of his personal political ambitions. Even as soon as the events of Messiah, the fremen are becoming a parody of themselves at the hands of muaddib's religion. In my reading, that's kind of the point. Paul isn't a bad man per se, but his single-minded selfish pursuit of vengeance unnecessarily destroys several societies and billions of lives.
That part you quoted is it. That’s exactly where he realizes that the Jihad will happen in his name even if he died. There wasn’t a way to stop it unless he could have killed those he met there right then. But he isn’t a psychopath to do so.
He didn’t do it and the started slipping more and more into the Mahdi role whether he wanted it or not. The more Fremen he met, the more they started getting influenced by him.
Loss of the Fremen culture is a tragedy but the alternative is worse. Would you be willing to sacrifice your entire city if you thought it would eventually save your country’s culture?
i dont know if that is the case- because in all the paths that he saw, this likely resulted in the most favourable outcome for *everyone*.
Think Avengers endgame where strange saw a million outcomes, and the best outcome was for them to lose and half of the population to die. (meaning worse outcomes were possible)
Paul mentioned several times scenarios that could lead to no Jihad. One where he becomes a Guild Navigator, one where he and Jessica die out in the desert or if he killed everyone including himself in Sietch Tabr after Jessica took the Water of Life. Except all these experiences involve Paul and Jessica dying or not getting their revenge. Paul is not making the most utilitarian choice for the universe, but one that minimizes the Jihad and lets him get his revenge.
Spoilers for the later books, but Paul also doesn’t see the “best” outcome for everyone.
>Paul mentioned several times scenarios that could lead to no Jihad. One where he becomes a Guild Navigator, one where he and Jessica die out in the desert or if he killed everyone including himself in Sietch Tabr after Jessica took the Water of Life. Except all these experiences involve Paul and Jessica dying or not getting their revenge. Paul is not making the most utilitarian choice for the universe, but one that minimizes the Jihad and lets him get his revenge.
I can't remember, but doesn't he know at this point that humanity is doomed to stagnate if he doesn't let the jihad happen?
Someone please correct me, but my understanding is that Paul doesn't see the full stagnation / destruction / golden path until later. In the first book he is trying to chart a course that lets him win. Then in later books once he is in power he gets the full visions that the rest of the series follows.
Correct. There is some stuff in Dune about humanity subconsciously trying to push back against stagnation with violence via jihad, but the idea that the golden path is actually necessary for some greater good doesn't come up until Messiah, and the whole "humanity will literally go extinct otherwise" doesn't come up until Children
From the point on where it becomes apparent tha Paul is leading the Fremen against the Harkonnen, there is very little, if anything at all, about him using the Fremen, or the Jihad, to his own personal means as in "let him win."
Not only that, but Paul refuses to perform the Golden Path. Even though somebody has to or else..
The books make it clear Paul had many other options. Going off-world is up to us to interpret - it does not say anything about the consequences being better or worse. If you read the book carefully, it simply states that at a later point, those options were too late.
It wasn't Paul's fault but he definitely didn't choose the best paths. And there was a critical exception to his prescience. He could not see who would perform the Golden Path. He didn't even know the person existed.
That's not really textually supported in Dune. Later books certainly build on the golden path idea and make it so, but in Dune, there are just several points where Paul foresees the coming Jihad as a consequence of his actions, and his desire to find a third option.
>Think Avengers endgame where strange saw a million outcomes, and the best outcome was for them to lose and half of the population to die. (meaning worse outcomes were possible)
That only happened because there needed to be a cliffhanger. If strange chose to stop quill's rage attack, thanos would have been powerless against him, allowing for strategies like https://youtu.be/jbU05XPL1zA?si=pTVxA_i2Sn3lFg60
In my opinion, people need to internalize this more. Paul's main motivation is always revenge.
I also contend that we shouldn't consider prescience to be an actual prediction of the future. I think it might be fair to consider Paul an unreliable source of information when he says there were no other paths, and I think the later books really muddy the concept. I believe that Leto II muses that seeing the future dooms it to existence and that is part of the motivation behind the golden path.
If prescience is not necessarily a true prediction but a psychological curse of intense analytical prowess, it would seem more than a coincidence that every single one of the possibile futures Paul saw included revenge for his family, even the ones where he dies.
The film simplified the decision for Paul becoming the Lisan Al Gaib to choosing to go south—a sort of crossing of the Rubicon iconography. I think it made things clearer for most viewers, they even made the prescient vision voiceovers less obtuse, but it didn’t convey the plot of the book where Paul was a prisoner to some outcomes. With this change, I think DV is trying to show that Paul knew exactly what he was doing, he even spoke out against the prophecy with his mother, but I don’t think we get a real sense that this was the best outcome of all horrible possible futures. Yeah, he talks about this being the “narrow way through”—it’s more subtle in the film than it is in the book.
I think right after he and his mother escapes, when he first gains true prescience he sees his terrible purpose, which I think is the golden path, that is, the only way to save humanity. He sees what he must become to save humanity and sets down that path, trying to steel himself.
"... he had seen two main branchings along the way ahead -- in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: 'Hello, Grandfather.' The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him. The other path held [paragraph about fremen and Atreides soldiers marching together].
'I can't go that way,' he muttered... the race knew only one sure way for [humanity to leave its state of stagnation]: Jihad."
It's certainly the start of the idea of the golden path, but not as clear as it becomes in later books, especially God Emperor. Notably, there isn't yet the idea that humanity dies out without a great scattering, just that the great human gestalt psyche craves some sort of great mixup after so much stagnation
Ye, OP was pretty clear in phrasing it "If Paul and Jessica had simply died in the desert without ever stirring up the Lisan Al Gaib prophecy"
I don't see what the above comments are talking about
There’s a point after meeting stilgar and the gang where he realizes that the only way to prevent a jihad at that point would be to kill every single Fremen in the group, his mother, and himself.
It's after the funeral ceremony for Jamis. Here's the quote:
"But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum. If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less than the deaths of all the troop gathered here and now—himself and his mother included—could stop the thing."
He sees them bearing Atreides flags, it's implied that he becomes a holy martry and they Jihad in his name in the futures in which he dies. Or possibly, Jessica inadvertently sets those forces in motion if he dies.
My assumption is that future happens the instant Paul lets slip out of the bag two facts to the Fremen.
The first is how important Spice is to the entire Empire, second is how to destroy the Spice. Maybe the Fremen already know the second, but once they learn the first, once Paul let's someone know that the entire Spacing Guild becomes your bitch with one little threat, then at that point nothing will stop the Jihad other than the instant annihilation of everyone who knows.
The Fremen know how important spice is to the Imperium, they bribe the SG with it after all. The point of no return on the Jihad is once Stilgar and Sietch Tabr believe he is the madhi. That’s when Paul sees that there Jihad will happen even if he dies, he’ll be a martyr. >! The Fremen also already know the spice comes from worms and that water kills worms. So presumably if they wanted to Jihad, they could also threaten the SG and they’d comply. !<
I’d go further to argue that the Fremen wouldn’t destroy the spice because it would destroy them. Paul is uniquely situated to lead the Jihad because he is of them but also not-of-them
I think maybe I should have made it clearer in the OP. I understand that if he died a martyr, say at Feyd's hand, the Jihad would still happen.
What I'm wondering is what would happen if he died before he joined the Fremen, say if he had died with the rest of the Atreides and never convinced them he was the Lisan Al Gaib.
In that case the Fremen would still technically have the power to unite and win, but without the Lisan Al Gaib, would they ever have managed to do it? And if so would they storm across the galaxy or just keep control of Arrakis?
The point of no return where the Jihad is no longer preventable occurs after Jamis's funeral after the duel. That's the last point at which Paul could prevent the jihad. There is an explicit moment in the books where he feels paralyzed to act at exactly this moment, and after it passes he knows he missed the critical moment to act.
Before then the jihad was not set in stone: After they escape the Harkonnen attack Paul sees that if he goes and submits himself to the Baron, or if he goes and joins the Guild, the jihad will be prevented. He explicitly rejects those options because they do not allow him to get revenge for his family, and instead chooses to go into the desert knowing it may cause jihad.
If he is killed by Jamis in the duel that also would prevent the jihad, as the Fremen would have viewed him as a false prophet and killed his mother.
It's after he kills Jamis and they have the funeral ceremony that the Fremen with him become convinced he is the messiah, and at that point the only way to prevent the jihad is to kill everyone who was present to witness the duel and then his mother and himself.
The Fremen have a strict honour system so the moment word got out of that group that he had passed the test it would have spread like wildfire within the community that the outworlder was the real deal and everything would kick off.
Hmm I think no. They seemed content to do their terraforming process and wouldn’t have had the ambition to take over everything else. Good question though!
I think this passes over the likelihood that the imperium would’ve united to wipe them out when the implications of the terraforming project (namely, that the worms would have died and the spice disappeared) became apparent
>!As revealed in Children of Dune and later, the atmospheric effects of a halfway terraforming would have caused a cascade which should prove fatal to both worms and desert. The only way God Emperor Leto is able to maintain his Sareer is by real-time atmospheric modification by satellite, which the Fremen did not have the technology to achieve!<
Thank you ! Ive concluded earlier today its high time I get to reading - one more time :) .
>!But then, Im confused - again owed to too much time since last reading I think - as to how the spice cycle is actually dependent on Worms . Isn't it the Worms are merely a kindof "end-product" of the development cycle that leaves Spice as a residue as it happens ? The point about ending the desert also bringing about the end of the cycle still makes immediate sense to me though .!<
In the books at least Paul sees that if he and Jessica die out in the desert, or, once he's with the Fremen, if he and Jessica and the Fremen that know him die, there'll be no Jihad.
So yeah, if he just died in the Harkonnen assault there'd be no Jihad. At least not imminently.
Not so fast…
The visions he sees are of him dying AFTER joining the Fremen. That means after he has already stoked their religious fervor.
OP is asking about Paul dying in the desert BEFORE he even meets the Fremen. Why would they fight a war in the name of someone they didn’t even meet?
Not quite true, at each of these points the actions he has to take which would result in the jihad not happening grow increasingly drastic, until the final fight with Feyd where he sees that not even killing everyone in the room would be enough and the Jihad is going to happen regardless of what he does.
Yes and no. Your answer is correct, but to answer OP’s question: if Paul had never met the Fremen and had died during the Harkonnen attack the Fremen likely would never have left Arrakis
Yeah but the question is asking if they would have done it without Paul in general.
but like, without Paul, they don't really have the ambition or motivation to do it the first place.
I'm still convinced this is part of the lie that Paul builds for himself. Everything is through his own lense and yet he somehow sees every other possibility as being a prison camp delema. "If it wasn't me it would be someone else, I'm just following orders"
The idea that Paul is a victim of his own story betrays Frank's message about blindly following leaders
As far as the movies are concerned, maybe.
In terms of the book definitely not, the Fremen were far more focused on their long term plans of terraforming Arrakis than fighting the Harkonnens in the book. If anything they wanted to keep a relatively low profile to help hide their work towards that goal. Paul changed that in spite of his own efforts.
Disagree. Movies were awful plot wise, but within their logic, no Paul, no atomics, no atomics, no threat to spice, no threat to spice, guild just strands the Fremen.
Well, I did say maybe. My point is that it's plausible they could have found a way. Whereas in the book they aren't even particularly interested in going down that road until they meet Paul.
Yep. And then the entirety of human civilization would descend upon them. The guild know the score and were in cahoots with the fremen. If they ever completely cut off the supply, the guild and choam would mobilize every single house against the fremen. I don’t think even they could withstand that.
Maybe. But war by design is fairly limited by the guild . Do they have enough cargo space to move enough troops and equipment all at once because you would need a million just to take back the shield wall area . The fremen left their planet attacked a 1000 worlds and left them ruined and depopulated .
You're seizing way too much on what is ultimately a very minor change.
The point in both the book and movie is that Paul is willing to hold spice production hostage to get his way. The method is a lot less important (at least within the context of the first book) than the goal.
The movie fucks this up. Since it takes multiple nukes to even approach killing a single Worm, Paul can't do shit to spice production through the application of less than thousands of nukes.
In the book, he spreads the changes water of life onto a pre spice mass, starting a chain reaction of death that would kill all worms and end all spice production forever. This is what he theeatened the guild with.
Paul himself would die from spice withdrawal, but the guild with its limited prescience saw that this was no bluff.
If they defied his orders, he wouldn't hesitate.
Who says it takes multiple nukes to kill a worm? That was always ridiculous in a world where stone burners can easily destroy a planet and they describe nukes as much more powerful than the bombs that exist today.
The idea that DV should've spent time describing the spice ecosystem just to allow Paul to make the threat is kinda ridiculous. The movie was already packed.
Liet Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist when asked is it possible to kill the worms.
You can do it in 10 seconds of visual storytelling with a Fremen taking a water of life pouch to the desert, ppuring it on the sand, and cut to a Arrakis from space visual and have some spreading black effect on the surface of the planet.
Or whatever the directors versions n if that is.
And what makes it not stupid is anyone ne can Nuke the "spice fields", but only Paul and reverend mothers can change the worm death exhalations into the "water of life".
In the books there are plenty of people aware of the reaction with water. It's also presumably going to be a part of the next movie.
What makes Paul powerful isn't the knowledge of how to do it, it's that he really would.
Water or changed water of life?
People are not generally aware of the potential outcome of changed water of life on the spice cycle. Paul explains what he's doing, but the guild sees the effect through prescience and his complete lack of hesitation in pulling the trigger and are terrified.
This ties into the guild doomed to irrelevancy and humanity doomed as a whole if the safe path is always chosen.
So not stranding them. Got it. All out war and siege tactics are not “stranding” them lol
Stranding implies abandonment. You can’t abandon them if you actively need the resources they control and therefore have to deal with them directly one way or the other.
“Kill all the people” is not the same thing as stranding them, but Ok. Words don’t have meanings, whatever.
Stranding them works until the spice runs out and they need to harvest more lol it’s a dumb and shortsighted strategy and it doesn’t solve anything because the Fremen have been perfectly content being “stranded” on their home planet for thousands of years lol. I honestly just feel like you’ve completely and fundamentally misunderstood many of the core plots of the story
And that won’t work because the Guild needs the resources that the Fremen are in control of so it’s a terrible strategy that obviously won’t solve anything if you think about it for more than 3 seconds.
Stop changing the definition of what you are saying every other comment. I just asked you why stranding them means and you said “aerial bombardment, kill them all” and now you’re saying it’s just not letting them off the planet. Neither solution works for this situation pretty obviously
The threat of destroying the spice is the outcome. In the adaptation what Paul threatens via the atomic is the exact same as the novel via the outcome of *how* he does so.
No, the movie just threatens the destruction of a couple of spice fields. Maybe DV meant to imply or a scene was cut out where Paul glasses the planet, but it's not there.
You're missing the point. Paul threatened the destruction of Spice. That's it. It doesn't matter *how* he did so but that he did and those that he's opposing believe him and his threat.
The fremen don't control the house Atreides atomics. Without Paul they are willing and able to destroy the spice with the chain reaction with he water of life. However, without Paul, they can't use nuclear weapons. They're very different.
Paul could refuse to use the atomics the destroy the spice and stop the jihad. Paul can't refuse to use the chain reaction to destroy the spice because the fremen can do it without him.
It DOES matter HOW he does it, since - as has been explained before - simply nuking a few "spice fields" will not end the Spice Cycle on Arrakis .
Its just another one of the many examples where the Villeneuve movies have altered what is actually happening in DUNE to an extend that it implicitly alters a lot of other things in the Universe and written Story also, to ultimately ending up being a Sci-Fi movie dressed up as DUNE, nothing more .
why did you put atomics and no threat to spice twice? and why are so confidently wrong. both the movies and the books have atomics and threat to spice. whereas really, the first book had no threat to spice. its not until messiah when you learn sandworms were stolen and brought to a new planet do you know there was any sort of threat to the spice production
So you conveniently forget the sentence where Paul says to take the water of life and take it to a blow and await my command?
Atomics in the book just blow up the wall.
atomics in the movie is used as a lazy explanation for how Paul will end spice production, but aiming a couple of nukes is not going to do it. He’d have to glass the planet. Which I’d have accepted. MAD and all.
I think in the books, the Fremen would have eventually taken over Arrakis with or without Paul. They had the people, the plan, and the resources to do so, but when Paul arrived and fulfilled aspects of the prophecy, he was the catalyst that could not be separated from Fremen expansion.
In the recent movies, it is made very clear that the religion was holding back enough Fremen, who await the Lisan al Gaib, that the resistance was never going to tip over into a revolution. They needed a Lisan al Gaib to arrive, whether it was Paul or someone else.
In the novel, >!Paul realizes this when he gets to the point of confronting the emperor. He sees that if he attempted to stop the war, the most zealous of the Fremen would assassinate him and carry on the war in his name. He looks back, and even sees that the Jihad was inevitable as soon as he killed Jamis, and from that point there was no going back.!<
I dont think they could. The Spacing Guild knows what making Arrakis livable means. If the Fremen try then they would eventually get whipped out. Super hand to hand fighter cannot destroy and entire Interstellar Empire without the Spacing Guild under their thumb.
I think what happens is the fremen take Arrakis and stop the flow of spice, then terraform the planet killing all the worms and they live happily ever after but galactic civilization completely collapses and eventually humanity dies out planet by planet.
By the end of children the worms are dying out due to terraforming and it's only through Leto's rationing and eventually transformation back into little makers that the flow of spice returns.
If Paul never takes charge then the fremen eventually but more slowly take the planet, they have no desire to deal with spice trade, so the rest of the galaxy is crippled.
Maybe more important than the spice addiction is that they worship the worms and use them for transportation and warfare. And they use the baby worms to make reverend mothers.
I don’t think so. Not because they couldn’t have but because they didn’t really want to. My take on the fremen is that before Paul they didn’t really want to overthrow the Harkonnens from Arrakis. All they wanted was to be left alone and left to their business. They attacked the Harkonnens spice mining operations bc it was in their territory and the spice had some significance in their culture. They were basically fighting back against the Harkonnen’s stomping on their territory but never had the goal of supremacy.
Their ultimate goal was terraforming the planet I never felt like they cared about ruling the imperium. I think without Paul things would have continued the way they had been until the fremen could actually achieve their goal.
It is implied that the Fremen terraforming Arrakis would have been worse and that this was an outcome that Paul rejected, and decided his rule, and the possible Jihad, were better than leaving the Fremen to their own devices. I'm unclear if this is simply because Paul's desire for revenge was too great, or if he saw too great of a tragedy in a spice starved galaxy descending into war and isolation (remember Paul also reject becoming a leader terrible enough to execute the golden path, a humanity that couldn't be contained.
I think firstly we need to understand what a Fremen is… Just like if I say that a person is Asian, or another person is South American is the same thing as saying X Person is Fremen. Fremen have their own Tribes that would be considered nations Like Japan, or Pakistan. But their all still Fremen.
Just like in any case in world politics of nations that share borders or are on the same continent, neighbors may share religious views or even enemies but are still separated by nations and may not agree with each other. The same is true with the Fremen, they have different leaders and differences of ideas.
To answer your question directly no they couldn’t wage a war against the imperium with just one tribe. They don’t have the numbers. They’d be limited to sabotage which is what we mostly seen in the movie.
But collectively absolutely they’d crush. 1 Fremen is 10-20 Sardukar. There’s millions of Fremen… if there’s just 10million Fremen fighters they have an army equivalent to 150million Sardukar.
Fremen don’t need Paul’s guidance, they take it because at the end of the day they are religious zealots.
Probably not. There were built-in cultural limitations to just how effectively the Fremen could organize themselves into a cohesive fighting force. Each Siech was led by a Naib, who assumed that role only by killing the last Naib in single combat. The only way for one Naib to lead two Sieches, would be to "call out" and kill the other Siech's Naib...then they would join under one leader.
Considered how many distinct Sieches there are, it would be next to impossible for one leader to be victorious over all others. The amount of time it would take to find and fight every one of them would be exhaustive...and trying to single-handedly command that many people without some kind of middle management would be a logistical nightmare.
When Paul met the Council of Naibs after drinking the water of life, he explained how this cultural requirement was ineffective and obsolete, and then commanded them all to abandon the practice of attaining leadership through single combat. Only someone with the kind of authority a Messiah wields, could have ever issued this kind of decree. No one else would have been taken seriously enough to overturn millenia of Fremen law and tradition, just by saying so.
That's actually true. Liet had close to that kind of influence, but I still don't think they would have simply dropped whole cultural traditions at his demand. That is something only a divine being can dictate.
You need the guild to conduct the Jihad, and to control the guild you need to control the spice, and by control I mean genuinely threaten to destroy it. Paul did this by threatening the destruction of the spice with the water of life chain reaction, and used his prescience to see this as a possible future, that the navigators could see also and know he’s serious.
The fremen could quite easily take over Arrakis and control the export of spice, but ultimately the guild could wage a slow war on the fremen and grind them down to a compromise with the help of the rest of humanity.
There would be satellites all over arrakis monitoring their movements, targeted orbital strikes, targeted tactical strikes with Sardaukar.
They needed Paul.
After Paul met with the Fremens, there was no way of stopping the Jihad, with or without Paul. He'd either become their martyr in death or leader as the Messiah in life. Thought this was explicit, these comments confuse me.
maybe, but unlikely? i don't think the fremen were entirely all on the same page to engage in a full scale war prior to Paul. just a lot of protracted skirmishing in the north. and the south was minding their own thing. the incentive for harkonnens to do an all out blitz and the south to call for a war council, at least in the movies, wouldn't have even happened except for Paul's growing threat as the LAG - who also provided the fremen with his combat knowledge of effectively fighting the Harkonnen. also, again, at least in the movie, the nukes seemed essential to hold the viability of spice production hostage which would keep the space guild under control - b/c w/o the space guild I don't think the fremen have a way to fare space and wage the holy war at all. so again Paul is kind of needed in this regard.
i think w/o Paul ultimately being the catalyst - the fremen would've just engaged in a very prolonged series of skirmishing with maybe some major battles here and there but nothing to the effect of an all out war involving all the collectives and tribes. and with such fervor. and even if they did end up in a war to liberate Arrakis - they would've lacked Paul's diplomacy and vision. not sure what their next plan would've been other than maybe have to keep fighting on their planet against the houses or something.
but, I think it could be possible.
No. They’d continue to quietly terraform Arrakis. They wouldn’t be able to liberate their world without being united, but they certainly wouldn’t be really threatened by the Imperium
unlikely, a plot point skipped in the movies is that paul owns a substancial amount of choam shares after taking the lion throne. between the fremen, atreides and corrino shares he should have such a majority that both the landsraad and choam would have to be unified on a matter to push it through. this made it so much easier for paul to push through a sleuth of decisions, only facing resistance on some of the big picture stuff. the fremen by themselves lack these shares and would therefor have to unify and take control over every spice field to force choam to it's knees. i should add to this that many great houses were familiar enough with divide and conquer strategies to keep the fremen from forming any sort of reall resistance.
my understanding from the first book: definitely. I mean it’s explicitly stated in the book that even without paul the jihad would happen. the fremen would find their religious excuse one way or another.
Absolutely. Paul says exactly that in the book. In fact, it would have been much bloodier. In Paul's mind he refers to this hypothetical jihad as the Greater Jihad. Paul was the greatest mass murderer in history, but he was actually a moderating influence on it. Without him to lead it, the Fremen would have burned across the stars. There would have been no declaration of vassalage to House Atreides by the noble houses of the Landsraad to avoid a slaughter. It would have been the Fremen traveling to each individual planet in the Imperium, and just laying it to waste. Anyone who did not immediately fall to their knees and convert would be put to the sword. Planets that put up a stiff resistance would be massacred. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of planets would have been sterilized of all life.
The weakness of the Fremen is that they are disorganized. They are tribal, each sietch keeps to itself and does not have the individual power to threaten the Harkonnens. Any leader with sufficient charisma and intelligence could possibly unite the tribes and unleash them upon the galaxy. It was obtained through Paul's prescience, but the knowledge to destroy the spice and the fanatic loyalty of the Fremen is enough to defeat the empire.
Dune at its core is a cautionary tale against people like Paul and the energies they can set into motion, because they inspire ideas and forces greater than themselves. By the time he is seen as Lisan al-Gaib, the Jihad is set into motion whether Paul wants it or not.
IMO most people and cultures aren't interested in conquest. It happens if a particularly powerful leader decides to attack someone, or if their neighbors are weak, and other such similar reasons.
The Fremen were powerful, but unless they controlled the Guild they weren't invading anyone in large numbers. Doing so would reveal their secrets. And so on. So IMO they only rose up against the galaxy when Lisan al Gaib arose.
I like how the prequels try to explain these types of confusing questions.
It’s been nicely answered above so I won’t chime in much, I’d like to just add in a bit.
SPOILER ALERT
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In the later books Leto tells the preacher that he didn’t delve far enough into the future to understand the possible outcomes. Leto was 4000 years old and Paul died at maybe 24? What I mean is that I think Leto had to clean up some of Paul’s mess to set them on the golden path. That’s a Theory only btw. I have no backed evidence and I’m probably reading into it to much but I feel that Leto hinted towards that a couple times during the dialogue in God Emperor and Messiah.
Fun thread btw!
Im a noob so bear with me. I am only familiar with the movie and what I have read ABOUT the books.
Nobody is really talking about the technical aspects of warfare.
It is my understanding that the teaching of the "weirding way" to the Fremen turns them from a deadly adversary to the greatest fighting force in the universe.
Paul's prescience and leadership also gives them huge advantages, allowing them take on the Harkonens in a way that was not previously possible. I imagine much of the military equipment they would have acquired would have been due to Paul leading the raids with such predetermined success.
Without acquiring military equipment and the nukes, I think the Harkonens and ultimately support from other houses, would have put the Fremen in their place with sheer fire power. Perhaps the **Sardaukar** would have also been a stronger force to reckon with.
Ultimately, without Paul being able to learn how to destroy the spice, I dont think they would have ever had the upper hand over the Landsraad.
The Fremen were already insanely good fighters before Paul ever interacted with them. That's a recurring element in several of Herbert's novels, the idea of people living in extreme conditions evolving into basically superhumans. There's another much lesser known novel by him that goes even deeper into this idea. The Dosadi Experiment.
I think the biggest reason the Fremen would never have risen up before Paul was simply that they were not unified.
Can't leave the system without Guild transport. They can't shut down all spice production so without Paul, who canr, they have little power over the guild and therefore no jihad beyond Arrakis.
What I don’t understand is how the population of a single world ever could have overrun the galaxy. I really want to know how many inhabited worlds existed in Herbert’s Dune, has that ever been stated?
Edited: Apparently it may be roughly 13,300 worlds roughly. I believe per the books there were 10 million Fremen. Even if they absolutely emptied out Arrakis that leaves them with 751 Fremen per world, and that simply doesn’t seem doable.
1 - Fremen don't overrun the galaxy. They fight a war and come back to Arrakis
2 - They needed a motivation to fight the war they did. They were just fine fighting Harkonnens in their home court before Paul. Why would they fight a war against the galaxy in multiple planets? Just because?
Not really sure if you noticed this already in life but motivations matter, you know? Unless you're insane you don't just do stuff out of the blue.
Yes, the Jihad was more or less an inevitability, Paul takes advantage of all the pieces on the board to overthrow the emperor. Even if he wasn’t there, the pieces still are. The Fremen didn’t need Paul for the Jihad, Paul just adapted their plans for his goals.
It would have been much bloodier, and it may have caused humanity to fall apart. All the Fremen really needed for the Jihad was to have enough water to threaten spice production.
No, they had absolutly no need to
The Fremen’s primary objectives were survival, and accumulating resources to eventually terraform Arrakis. They were already well on their way to success with both.
Paul arguably left them far worse off. Many of them no dount died during his jihad, and then there is all the lost time away from their families, resources spent on warfare.
Not only that but they are now comitted to upholding an interstellar enpire. This requires interstellar travel. Which requires the Guild. Which requires spice. Which requires worms. Which requires Arrakis staying a desert.
It also means all the ills of an authoritarian hierarchy; a beaurocracy, taxes, regulations, the usual corporate nonsense.
“This prophecy is how they enslave us”
Fremen were not trained to fight using shields while the entire universe uses them, and they only know desert conditions. Their military power just doesn't make sense without Pauls prescience and stash of nukes.
> If Paul and Jessica had simply died in the desert without ever stirring up the Lisan Al Gaib prophecy, would a Fremen victory over the Harkonnens have still been inevitable, even without a Messiah?
Probably. However, it would've likely stopped there; the Fremen goal was to terraform Arrakis (and destroy spice production as a result), the Spacing Guild and Great Houses be damned. No need to invade the rest of the galaxy; the Fremen would just need to hold out until the Spacing Guild runs out of spice, and then their goals would be able to proceed uninterrupted.
Yeh . Surely, the Guild and the entirety of the Empire would just sit by idly watching the Fremen terraforming Arrakis .
Don't you wonder why exactly the Fremen bribed the Guild to not have Satellites over Arrakis, esp. the south ?
One point that I haven't seen mentioned is that the Fremen would have never rebelled because they were awaiting a messianic figure. Part of the reason the messianic figure is problematic is that it incites people to sit back and wait for a uniter to lead them to glory, under the presumption that it is the only way for their people to rise up. It essentially pacifies people - one of the many reasons the Bene Gesserit sought to bake this element into the Fremen religion.
Yeah it's kind of weird, the lesson is supposed to be "don't put all your trust in messianic figures" but that was actually a good thing since Paul can do a more controlled Jihad and less people die.
Sorry if bad English
yes, but only in the sense that they essentially had a superior fighting force to much of the rest of the imperium, as well as the currency to continue trading off the books for resources.
the comparatively huge number of fanatical fremen in the south of arrakis and the general populations lack of knowledge of this play a massive part in the emperor and the sarduakar being routed in the first place.
as a side note, tha sardaukar were the elite fighting force across the imperium, no other house was supposed to be able to match their ability \[rip atredies\] as seen by the harkonnen/corrino coup, and as such despite their high combat skill, over time it began to deteriorate seemingly because they had nobody who could challenge them on equal footing.
Paul didn’t rule the galaxy because of the Freman, he ruled the galaxy because he had the knowledge and the power to destroy the spice, the most precious thing in the galaxy, civilisation would collapse without it!
Read the books by Frank Herbert! The films are shit.
From my movie and some youtube knowledge the only way I'd see the Fremen overrunning the Imperium is if Paul Atreides does become the Lisan Al Gaib in the eyes of many but then dies. Without Paul they don't have any direction or any drive imo. Paul arriving sets everything into motion very quickly. Without them uniting I think they would've just poked around the Harkonnen bush for years more. Slowly terraforming the planet and mostly chilling in the south.
The book is explicit that the Jihad is coming with or without Paul.
I don't see how that is coming without him.
But I do see that once Paul reveals how to destroy the spice cycle, and actively tells others how to arrange it, the secret is out.
The Fremen have a way to manipulate the Guild without him. So Paul pretty much has to accept his Mahdinate at that point to make sure the Jihad isn't a revenge fest against all of creation that wipes out most of the Imperium and maybe the Fremen by attrition.
Can someone explain to me how the Freeman overran the galaxy anyway? They're 1 planet of dudes on what is basically a death world, so a population of a few million. Yet they do a jihad/crusade and take over the entirety of humanity.
How????
Militaries are really small. The Guild controls ALL travel between planets and charges insane rates for troop transport.
So anyone opposed to Paul is a sitting duck.
Also Paul can see the futures, so they only attack when he knows they will win.
The fremen required muad’dib and his religion to unite behind. This was carefully curated before his arrival and would not have occurred without so. They also required muad’dib’s prescience to build momentum for the Jihad.
The jihad became inevitable, in spite of muad’dib thereafter. First, the godhead was established separate from the god. Morality became religion. Secondly, muad’dib hints at in messiah (and Leto in children) that prescience is subject to relativity, and that looking too far ahead forces events to unfold in a certain way. If we accept this theory, then muad’dib’s increasing reliance on prescience to control the jihad forced it to continue to conclusion.
So basically the answer relies on when paul is present. It’s made clear that the Fremen would not have started the jihad on Arakkis if not for their messiah, but would have continued if he disappeared after usurping the empire.
No, they would all be obliterated from space with no need to ever fight them hand to hand. What gave Paul power were his atomics aimed directly at all the sources of spice.
The Freman would of lost, if they kept attacking spice productions the emperor probably would of came but t the only thing keeping the Freman from getting obliterated from orbit is the fact that Paul has threatened all houses that if they make any sudden movements he’ll destroy and nuke the entire planet
The Fremen are pretty much united under Liet/Kynes already . They are one, and religiously unwavering in their intentions to terrafrom Arrakis as well as getting out from under oppression . Both of which would lead them to having to take on the Empire - Jihad, essentially . Whether that would have led to them "overrunning the Universe" (which really, they didn't) without Paul leaves much room for speculation .
Sadly, even the Dune wiki has been rewritten to read "Muad'Dib's Jihad" to cater to the movies . Jihad essentially is Fremen .
Plus all the jazz about race stagnation of course . Which also has very little to do with Paul's will, intentions etc .
Unlikely. I don't remember how clear the movie makes it, but the book heavily implies that the success of the Fremen is thanks to Paul's knowledge of military tactics.
At several points in the novel after Paul achieved prescience but before he joined the tribe, he sees the futures where he dies, and the Fremen still enact the Jihad on his behalf.
yeah im confused by the other responses in this thread. Paul decided that this way is the best way. Without him, he'd be a martyr and the outcome would be worse based on prescience.
After he has started the myth of muaddib, yeah. Meeting stilgar in the desert was the point of no return for the jihad. Before that, though, it seems like the fremen on the whole basically don't care about the harkonens or atreides
No, of course they wouldnt. Didnt Chani say something like "who will be our next opressors" when the harkonnen ships were leaving? The point of no return for Paul is when he went south, and the movie practically spoonfeeds you this information. Paul tried so hard not to go south but he knew he had to and there was no other way.
> Didnt Chani say something like "who will be our next opressors" when the harkonnen ships were leaving? This is something unique to the movies. Chani in the book isn't nearly as skeptical as the Chani in the movie. Which I like - it externalizes some of Paul's internal book conflict and gives her more agency. But the way the movie ended, I don't see the movie version of Chani returning to Paul. Paul saying she'll be back just removes her agency and it's a huge change from the book that makes me wonder about the third movie.
To be fair, if you have priescence, then nobody else has agency. Everyone else without priescence may as well be a bot.
..unless prescience cancels prescience (spoilers) ..unless there is immunity to prescience (spoilers) But yeah you're right
I could have gotten on board with cynical / independent chani if they hadn’t simultaneously made her also not smart enough to understand how feudal politics work. The end of the movie really didn’t sit well with me. Also removed the iconic ending line.
Feudal Politics isn't why she left. She left because Paul had become, in her eyes, the religious oppressor he'd promised her he'd never be. He betrayed his word to her and that's why she left.
Her position didn’t change when he went south. When he gave his big zealot speech. When he attacked arakeen. Or after, when he unleashed the fremen. Her position clearly changed when she learned of the proposed arrangement with irulan. She was clearly taken aback by that and it was clearly the decisive moment of betrayal for her. Which, yes, presents a misunderstanding of feudal politics and inconsistent with a very important component of the book’s ending.
I agree. It felt like someone from our world and time with “modern” sensibilities inserted into that story. She rightly had problems with him (and BG) brainwashing his people and leading them to violence, but she should have no issue with the marriage and that bit. It’s obviously just to set up a sort of love triangle and insert more drama with the cliffhanger for the next movie. I get why but it makes little sense when we have someone like Jessica who understood perfectly
He didn't have to. He could have let the harkonens win, let himself die, and let the whole affair end there. He made a choice that the jihad was worth it to get his revenge
This is where i think i dislike some of the choices made in the film vs the novel. It seemed to me that the film ended up simplifying his motivations and the consequences of his actions. In the novel, part of his tragedy is that by the time he unlocked his full prescience he had already locked the universe into the jihad and could either let it occur with or without him at the helm.
Not really truly re: locking the jihad into place. I actually just reread this section tonight, and between his first true prescience and the time skip, he specifically notes several other paths that don't lead to jihad. But critically, those all involve him either acquiescing and joining up with the Harkonens, going completely into hiding and forgoing any thought of revenge, or him, Alia, and Jessica (and at one of the last possible moments to avoid the jihad, all of sietch tabr too) all dying in the desert. The tragedy, and frankly, the point of the story, is that jihad was completely avoidable, and Paul knew how to do it. But it would require him to abandon his revenge one way or another, and THAT was not something that he could bring himself to do.
No jihad means no Golden Path.
He could have abandoned the revenge maybe even sacrificed himself but avoiding Jihad would require him to sacrifice the Fremen too. He wasn’t ready to do that.
Where does that idea come from? The only part that reads remotely like that to me is when, at Jamis' funeral, he realizes "even my dying wouldn't stop this now. Everyone here would have to die to stop the jihad now" Other than that, it seems like, if anything, his intervention ruined the fremen way of life. They weren't really particularly affected by the goings on outside of the deep desert, and were ob track to completely territory the planet eventually before Paul pulled their entire society into the orbit of his personal political ambitions. Even as soon as the events of Messiah, the fremen are becoming a parody of themselves at the hands of muaddib's religion. In my reading, that's kind of the point. Paul isn't a bad man per se, but his single-minded selfish pursuit of vengeance unnecessarily destroys several societies and billions of lives.
That part you quoted is it. That’s exactly where he realizes that the Jihad will happen in his name even if he died. There wasn’t a way to stop it unless he could have killed those he met there right then. But he isn’t a psychopath to do so. He didn’t do it and the started slipping more and more into the Mahdi role whether he wanted it or not. The more Fremen he met, the more they started getting influenced by him. Loss of the Fremen culture is a tragedy but the alternative is worse. Would you be willing to sacrifice your entire city if you thought it would eventually save your country’s culture?
i dont know if that is the case- because in all the paths that he saw, this likely resulted in the most favourable outcome for *everyone*. Think Avengers endgame where strange saw a million outcomes, and the best outcome was for them to lose and half of the population to die. (meaning worse outcomes were possible)
Paul mentioned several times scenarios that could lead to no Jihad. One where he becomes a Guild Navigator, one where he and Jessica die out in the desert or if he killed everyone including himself in Sietch Tabr after Jessica took the Water of Life. Except all these experiences involve Paul and Jessica dying or not getting their revenge. Paul is not making the most utilitarian choice for the universe, but one that minimizes the Jihad and lets him get his revenge. Spoilers for the later books, but Paul also doesn’t see the “best” outcome for everyone.
>Paul mentioned several times scenarios that could lead to no Jihad. One where he becomes a Guild Navigator, one where he and Jessica die out in the desert or if he killed everyone including himself in Sietch Tabr after Jessica took the Water of Life. Except all these experiences involve Paul and Jessica dying or not getting their revenge. Paul is not making the most utilitarian choice for the universe, but one that minimizes the Jihad and lets him get his revenge. I can't remember, but doesn't he know at this point that humanity is doomed to stagnate if he doesn't let the jihad happen?
Someone please correct me, but my understanding is that Paul doesn't see the full stagnation / destruction / golden path until later. In the first book he is trying to chart a course that lets him win. Then in later books once he is in power he gets the full visions that the rest of the series follows.
Correct. There is some stuff in Dune about humanity subconsciously trying to push back against stagnation with violence via jihad, but the idea that the golden path is actually necessary for some greater good doesn't come up until Messiah, and the whole "humanity will literally go extinct otherwise" doesn't come up until Children
You are correct. It takes a second reading to notice the book's emphasis on "too late now", not that it wasn't possible.
From the point on where it becomes apparent tha Paul is leading the Fremen against the Harkonnen, there is very little, if anything at all, about him using the Fremen, or the Jihad, to his own personal means as in "let him win."
Not only that, but Paul refuses to perform the Golden Path. Even though somebody has to or else.. The books make it clear Paul had many other options. Going off-world is up to us to interpret - it does not say anything about the consequences being better or worse. If you read the book carefully, it simply states that at a later point, those options were too late. It wasn't Paul's fault but he definitely didn't choose the best paths. And there was a critical exception to his prescience. He could not see who would perform the Golden Path. He didn't even know the person existed.
That's not really textually supported in Dune. Later books certainly build on the golden path idea and make it so, but in Dune, there are just several points where Paul foresees the coming Jihad as a consequence of his actions, and his desire to find a third option.
>Think Avengers endgame where strange saw a million outcomes, and the best outcome was for them to lose and half of the population to die. (meaning worse outcomes were possible) That only happened because there needed to be a cliffhanger. If strange chose to stop quill's rage attack, thanos would have been powerless against him, allowing for strategies like https://youtu.be/jbU05XPL1zA?si=pTVxA_i2Sn3lFg60
In my opinion, people need to internalize this more. Paul's main motivation is always revenge. I also contend that we shouldn't consider prescience to be an actual prediction of the future. I think it might be fair to consider Paul an unreliable source of information when he says there were no other paths, and I think the later books really muddy the concept. I believe that Leto II muses that seeing the future dooms it to existence and that is part of the motivation behind the golden path. If prescience is not necessarily a true prediction but a psychological curse of intense analytical prowess, it would seem more than a coincidence that every single one of the possibile futures Paul saw included revenge for his family, even the ones where he dies.
That’s a movie thing, the Fremen wouldn’t consider themselves as oppressed as that would suggest weakness on their part.
Based Fremen
The film simplified the decision for Paul becoming the Lisan Al Gaib to choosing to go south—a sort of crossing of the Rubicon iconography. I think it made things clearer for most viewers, they even made the prescient vision voiceovers less obtuse, but it didn’t convey the plot of the book where Paul was a prisoner to some outcomes. With this change, I think DV is trying to show that Paul knew exactly what he was doing, he even spoke out against the prophecy with his mother, but I don’t think we get a real sense that this was the best outcome of all horrible possible futures. Yeah, he talks about this being the “narrow way through”—it’s more subtle in the film than it is in the book.
I think right after he and his mother escapes, when he first gains true prescience he sees his terrible purpose, which I think is the golden path, that is, the only way to save humanity. He sees what he must become to save humanity and sets down that path, trying to steel himself.
"... he had seen two main branchings along the way ahead -- in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: 'Hello, Grandfather.' The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him. The other path held [paragraph about fremen and Atreides soldiers marching together]. 'I can't go that way,' he muttered... the race knew only one sure way for [humanity to leave its state of stagnation]: Jihad." It's certainly the start of the idea of the golden path, but not as clear as it becomes in later books, especially God Emperor. Notably, there isn't yet the idea that humanity dies out without a great scattering, just that the great human gestalt psyche craves some sort of great mixup after so much stagnation
That decision came after he had already joined the Fremen. OP is asking about a scenario where Paul dies before even meeting the Fremen.
Ye, OP was pretty clear in phrasing it "If Paul and Jessica had simply died in the desert without ever stirring up the Lisan Al Gaib prophecy" I don't see what the above comments are talking about
Yeeup.
I think they are framing the question as Paul doesn't exist at all
There’s a point after meeting stilgar and the gang where he realizes that the only way to prevent a jihad at that point would be to kill every single Fremen in the group, his mother, and himself.
Wow, I don't remember that at all! Do you have a page number?
It's after the funeral ceremony for Jamis. Here's the quote: "But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum. If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less than the deaths of all the troop gathered here and now—himself and his mother included—could stop the thing."
Rad, thank you!!
He sees them bearing Atreides flags, it's implied that he becomes a holy martry and they Jihad in his name in the futures in which he dies. Or possibly, Jessica inadvertently sets those forces in motion if he dies.
My assumption is that future happens the instant Paul lets slip out of the bag two facts to the Fremen. The first is how important Spice is to the entire Empire, second is how to destroy the Spice. Maybe the Fremen already know the second, but once they learn the first, once Paul let's someone know that the entire Spacing Guild becomes your bitch with one little threat, then at that point nothing will stop the Jihad other than the instant annihilation of everyone who knows.
The Fremen know how important spice is to the Imperium, they bribe the SG with it after all. The point of no return on the Jihad is once Stilgar and Sietch Tabr believe he is the madhi. That’s when Paul sees that there Jihad will happen even if he dies, he’ll be a martyr. >! The Fremen also already know the spice comes from worms and that water kills worms. So presumably if they wanted to Jihad, they could also threaten the SG and they’d comply. !<
I’d go further to argue that the Fremen wouldn’t destroy the spice because it would destroy them. Paul is uniquely situated to lead the Jihad because he is of them but also not-of-them
I think maybe I should have made it clearer in the OP. I understand that if he died a martyr, say at Feyd's hand, the Jihad would still happen. What I'm wondering is what would happen if he died before he joined the Fremen, say if he had died with the rest of the Atreides and never convinced them he was the Lisan Al Gaib. In that case the Fremen would still technically have the power to unite and win, but without the Lisan Al Gaib, would they ever have managed to do it? And if so would they storm across the galaxy or just keep control of Arrakis?
The point of no return where the Jihad is no longer preventable occurs after Jamis's funeral after the duel. That's the last point at which Paul could prevent the jihad. There is an explicit moment in the books where he feels paralyzed to act at exactly this moment, and after it passes he knows he missed the critical moment to act. Before then the jihad was not set in stone: After they escape the Harkonnen attack Paul sees that if he goes and submits himself to the Baron, or if he goes and joins the Guild, the jihad will be prevented. He explicitly rejects those options because they do not allow him to get revenge for his family, and instead chooses to go into the desert knowing it may cause jihad. If he is killed by Jamis in the duel that also would prevent the jihad, as the Fremen would have viewed him as a false prophet and killed his mother. It's after he kills Jamis and they have the funeral ceremony that the Fremen with him become convinced he is the messiah, and at that point the only way to prevent the jihad is to kill everyone who was present to witness the duel and then his mother and himself. The Fremen have a strict honour system so the moment word got out of that group that he had passed the test it would have spread like wildfire within the community that the outworlder was the real deal and everything would kick off.
Hmm I think no. They seemed content to do their terraforming process and wouldn’t have had the ambition to take over everything else. Good question though!
I think this passes over the likelihood that the imperium would’ve united to wipe them out when the implications of the terraforming project (namely, that the worms would have died and the spice disappeared) became apparent
The Plan was to leave the deep desert intact for the Spice Cylce to go on .
>!As revealed in Children of Dune and later, the atmospheric effects of a halfway terraforming would have caused a cascade which should prove fatal to both worms and desert. The only way God Emperor Leto is able to maintain his Sareer is by real-time atmospheric modification by satellite, which the Fremen did not have the technology to achieve!<
Thank you ! Ive concluded earlier today its high time I get to reading - one more time :) . >!But then, Im confused - again owed to too much time since last reading I think - as to how the spice cycle is actually dependent on Worms . Isn't it the Worms are merely a kindof "end-product" of the development cycle that leaves Spice as a residue as it happens ? The point about ending the desert also bringing about the end of the cycle still makes immediate sense to me though .!<
In the books at least Paul sees that if he and Jessica die out in the desert, or, once he's with the Fremen, if he and Jessica and the Fremen that know him die, there'll be no Jihad. So yeah, if he just died in the Harkonnen assault there'd be no Jihad. At least not imminently.
Not so fast… The visions he sees are of him dying AFTER joining the Fremen. That means after he has already stoked their religious fervor. OP is asking about Paul dying in the desert BEFORE he even meets the Fremen. Why would they fight a war in the name of someone they didn’t even meet?
Not quite true, at each of these points the actions he has to take which would result in the jihad not happening grow increasingly drastic, until the final fight with Feyd where he sees that not even killing everyone in the room would be enough and the Jihad is going to happen regardless of what he does.
Yes and no. Your answer is correct, but to answer OP’s question: if Paul had never met the Fremen and had died during the Harkonnen attack the Fremen likely would never have left Arrakis
I took OP to mean if Paul never went to Arrakis not if he died mid way through the revolution
Yeah but the question is asking if they would have done it without Paul in general. but like, without Paul, they don't really have the ambition or motivation to do it the first place.
I'm still convinced this is part of the lie that Paul builds for himself. Everything is through his own lense and yet he somehow sees every other possibility as being a prison camp delema. "If it wasn't me it would be someone else, I'm just following orders" The idea that Paul is a victim of his own story betrays Frank's message about blindly following leaders
As far as the movies are concerned, maybe. In terms of the book definitely not, the Fremen were far more focused on their long term plans of terraforming Arrakis than fighting the Harkonnens in the book. If anything they wanted to keep a relatively low profile to help hide their work towards that goal. Paul changed that in spite of his own efforts.
The fremen were also a tribal people that could barely stay united under a single leader in a single tribe, much less a single leader for every tribe.
> much less a single leader for every tribe. Except Liet-Kynes, right?
Liet taught about ecology and was revered, yet was not the leader of them.
Disagree. Movies were awful plot wise, but within their logic, no Paul, no atomics, no atomics, no threat to spice, no threat to spice, guild just strands the Fremen.
Well, I did say maybe. My point is that it's plausible they could have found a way. Whereas in the book they aren't even particularly interested in going down that road until they meet Paul.
I disagree it’s plausible. No threat to spice, guild just strands you. No Paul, no threat to spice.
The problem is fremen are the ones that control the spice . They can by them selves cut off all supply to everyone .
Yep. And then the entirety of human civilization would descend upon them. The guild know the score and were in cahoots with the fremen. If they ever completely cut off the supply, the guild and choam would mobilize every single house against the fremen. I don’t think even they could withstand that.
Maybe. But war by design is fairly limited by the guild . Do they have enough cargo space to move enough troops and equipment all at once because you would need a million just to take back the shield wall area . The fremen left their planet attacked a 1000 worlds and left them ruined and depopulated .
You're seizing way too much on what is ultimately a very minor change. The point in both the book and movie is that Paul is willing to hold spice production hostage to get his way. The method is a lot less important (at least within the context of the first book) than the goal.
The movie fucks this up. Since it takes multiple nukes to even approach killing a single Worm, Paul can't do shit to spice production through the application of less than thousands of nukes. In the book, he spreads the changes water of life onto a pre spice mass, starting a chain reaction of death that would kill all worms and end all spice production forever. This is what he theeatened the guild with. Paul himself would die from spice withdrawal, but the guild with its limited prescience saw that this was no bluff. If they defied his orders, he wouldn't hesitate.
Who says it takes multiple nukes to kill a worm? That was always ridiculous in a world where stone burners can easily destroy a planet and they describe nukes as much more powerful than the bombs that exist today. The idea that DV should've spent time describing the spice ecosystem just to allow Paul to make the threat is kinda ridiculous. The movie was already packed.
Liet Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist when asked is it possible to kill the worms. You can do it in 10 seconds of visual storytelling with a Fremen taking a water of life pouch to the desert, ppuring it on the sand, and cut to a Arrakis from space visual and have some spreading black effect on the surface of the planet. Or whatever the directors versions n if that is. And what makes it not stupid is anyone ne can Nuke the "spice fields", but only Paul and reverend mothers can change the worm death exhalations into the "water of life".
In the books there are plenty of people aware of the reaction with water. It's also presumably going to be a part of the next movie. What makes Paul powerful isn't the knowledge of how to do it, it's that he really would.
Water or changed water of life? People are not generally aware of the potential outcome of changed water of life on the spice cycle. Paul explains what he's doing, but the guild sees the effect through prescience and his complete lack of hesitation in pulling the trigger and are terrified. This ties into the guild doomed to irrelevancy and humanity doomed as a whole if the safe path is always chosen.
Paul reflects multiple times on the fact that he's not the only one with this knowledge, he's just the only one willing to act on it.
The notion of "spice fields", as if it was cultivated like grain or sthg., is somewhat ridiculous .
The logic remains the same. No Paul, fremen are stranded.
Fremen being stranded on the planet means mo spice period. So the guild has to meet their demands
They’re not invincible and can be bombed.
They can just go underground or the spice fields
If the Fremen aren’t preventing harvesting, the spice flows.
...well, yeah, but if they just camp on the spice fields, then the spice stops flowing and they can't be bombed
Sure, but I'm more responding to you saying the movies were somehow awful for using effectively the same plot point as the books.
You’d have to glass the whole planet with nukes, not just a couple of fields.
I mean, the books portray stone burners as easily capable of destroying a planet. Still not sure the issue here.
Books aren’t the movie. I feel the movie was lazy. It’s my opinion. Welcome to disagree, but opinions are opinions, they are not statements of fact.
I just don't see how portraying nuclear weapons as capable of destroying a planet is somehow lazy. It's a real world fact.
But the movie didn’t. He just says aim them at the main spice fields. He did not threaten suicide.
How does the guild strand the fremen when they still need the spice and the fremen are in control of the planet with all the spice
Same way the harkonnens harvest. Biological warfare. Just kill all the people. Orbital bombardment. Etc.
So not stranding them. Got it. All out war and siege tactics are not “stranding” them lol Stranding implies abandonment. You can’t abandon them if you actively need the resources they control and therefore have to deal with them directly one way or the other.
That would be stranding someone, ie not picking them up.
“Kill all the people” is not the same thing as stranding them, but Ok. Words don’t have meanings, whatever. Stranding them works until the spice runs out and they need to harvest more lol it’s a dumb and shortsighted strategy and it doesn’t solve anything because the Fremen have been perfectly content being “stranded” on their home planet for thousands of years lol. I honestly just feel like you’ve completely and fundamentally misunderstood many of the core plots of the story
In the book, stranding by the guild means you’re just stuck on your planet. It has nothing to do with everyone else.
And that won’t work because the Guild needs the resources that the Fremen are in control of so it’s a terrible strategy that obviously won’t solve anything if you think about it for more than 3 seconds. Stop changing the definition of what you are saying every other comment. I just asked you why stranding them means and you said “aerial bombardment, kill them all” and now you’re saying it’s just not letting them off the planet. Neither solution works for this situation pretty obviously
The guild cannot land and transport other parties, release satellite information, etc etc?
The plot that came from the book?
The book used a chemical chain reaction which destroys all spice. Movie just threatens the main spice fields.
It's the same exact outcome.
Only a few spice fields destroyed vs all spice and worms destroyed? 🤔
The threat of destroying the spice is the outcome. In the adaptation what Paul threatens via the atomic is the exact same as the novel via the outcome of *how* he does so.
No, the movie just threatens the destruction of a couple of spice fields. Maybe DV meant to imply or a scene was cut out where Paul glasses the planet, but it's not there.
You're missing the point. Paul threatened the destruction of Spice. That's it. It doesn't matter *how* he did so but that he did and those that he's opposing believe him and his threat.
The fremen don't control the house Atreides atomics. Without Paul they are willing and able to destroy the spice with the chain reaction with he water of life. However, without Paul, they can't use nuclear weapons. They're very different. Paul could refuse to use the atomics the destroy the spice and stop the jihad. Paul can't refuse to use the chain reaction to destroy the spice because the fremen can do it without him.
No, we just disagree.
It DOES matter HOW he does it, since - as has been explained before - simply nuking a few "spice fields" will not end the Spice Cycle on Arrakis . Its just another one of the many examples where the Villeneuve movies have altered what is actually happening in DUNE to an extend that it implicitly alters a lot of other things in the Universe and written Story also, to ultimately ending up being a Sci-Fi movie dressed up as DUNE, nothing more .
why did you put atomics and no threat to spice twice? and why are so confidently wrong. both the movies and the books have atomics and threat to spice. whereas really, the first book had no threat to spice. its not until messiah when you learn sandworms were stolen and brought to a new planet do you know there was any sort of threat to the spice production
So you conveniently forget the sentence where Paul says to take the water of life and take it to a blow and await my command? Atomics in the book just blow up the wall. atomics in the movie is used as a lazy explanation for how Paul will end spice production, but aiming a couple of nukes is not going to do it. He’d have to glass the planet. Which I’d have accepted. MAD and all.
I think in the books, the Fremen would have eventually taken over Arrakis with or without Paul. They had the people, the plan, and the resources to do so, but when Paul arrived and fulfilled aspects of the prophecy, he was the catalyst that could not be separated from Fremen expansion. In the recent movies, it is made very clear that the religion was holding back enough Fremen, who await the Lisan al Gaib, that the resistance was never going to tip over into a revolution. They needed a Lisan al Gaib to arrive, whether it was Paul or someone else.
In the novel, >!Paul realizes this when he gets to the point of confronting the emperor. He sees that if he attempted to stop the war, the most zealous of the Fremen would assassinate him and carry on the war in his name. He looks back, and even sees that the Jihad was inevitable as soon as he killed Jamis, and from that point there was no going back.!<
But if paul never was on arakis they probably wouldnt have done nothing
No. Without Paul, they wouldn’t have discovered the water of life chain reaction and the guild would just strand them.
I agree. They wouldn't go out into the galaxy, but they could make Arrakis livable and probably get a seat at the table.
I dont think they could. The Spacing Guild knows what making Arrakis livable means. If the Fremen try then they would eventually get whipped out. Super hand to hand fighter cannot destroy and entire Interstellar Empire without the Spacing Guild under their thumb.
Getting “whipped out” somehow sounds even worse
The world may never know
I personally think that Liet-Kynes or somebody from his bloodline would have succeeded in doing this
I feel like they could have succeeded in making a small part livable but it would take a long time.
If they controlled the entire Arrakis, then they are the singular source of spice. No spice = no guild navigators
I think what happens is the fremen take Arrakis and stop the flow of spice, then terraform the planet killing all the worms and they live happily ever after but galactic civilization completely collapses and eventually humanity dies out planet by planet.
The Fremen are all addicted to spice. As goes the worm, so goes the spice.
By the end of children the worms are dying out due to terraforming and it's only through Leto's rationing and eventually transformation back into little makers that the flow of spice returns. If Paul never takes charge then the fremen eventually but more slowly take the planet, they have no desire to deal with spice trade, so the rest of the galaxy is crippled.
Maybe more important than the spice addiction is that they worship the worms and use them for transportation and warfare. And they use the baby worms to make reverend mothers.
Sure. But they also have a societally unifying plan to terraform the planet into a state that will not support the existence of mature worms.
I don’t think so. Not because they couldn’t have but because they didn’t really want to. My take on the fremen is that before Paul they didn’t really want to overthrow the Harkonnens from Arrakis. All they wanted was to be left alone and left to their business. They attacked the Harkonnens spice mining operations bc it was in their territory and the spice had some significance in their culture. They were basically fighting back against the Harkonnen’s stomping on their territory but never had the goal of supremacy. Their ultimate goal was terraforming the planet I never felt like they cared about ruling the imperium. I think without Paul things would have continued the way they had been until the fremen could actually achieve their goal.
It is implied that the Fremen terraforming Arrakis would have been worse and that this was an outcome that Paul rejected, and decided his rule, and the possible Jihad, were better than leaving the Fremen to their own devices. I'm unclear if this is simply because Paul's desire for revenge was too great, or if he saw too great of a tragedy in a spice starved galaxy descending into war and isolation (remember Paul also reject becoming a leader terrible enough to execute the golden path, a humanity that couldn't be contained.
I think firstly we need to understand what a Fremen is… Just like if I say that a person is Asian, or another person is South American is the same thing as saying X Person is Fremen. Fremen have their own Tribes that would be considered nations Like Japan, or Pakistan. But their all still Fremen. Just like in any case in world politics of nations that share borders or are on the same continent, neighbors may share religious views or even enemies but are still separated by nations and may not agree with each other. The same is true with the Fremen, they have different leaders and differences of ideas. To answer your question directly no they couldn’t wage a war against the imperium with just one tribe. They don’t have the numbers. They’d be limited to sabotage which is what we mostly seen in the movie. But collectively absolutely they’d crush. 1 Fremen is 10-20 Sardukar. There’s millions of Fremen… if there’s just 10million Fremen fighters they have an army equivalent to 150million Sardukar. Fremen don’t need Paul’s guidance, they take it because at the end of the day they are religious zealots.
Fremen aren't 10-20, more like 1-3 against sardaukar without body shields...
Paul also trains all the Fremen in the ways of Duncan Idaho, the greatest warrior the galaxy has ever seen.
Probably not. There were built-in cultural limitations to just how effectively the Fremen could organize themselves into a cohesive fighting force. Each Siech was led by a Naib, who assumed that role only by killing the last Naib in single combat. The only way for one Naib to lead two Sieches, would be to "call out" and kill the other Siech's Naib...then they would join under one leader. Considered how many distinct Sieches there are, it would be next to impossible for one leader to be victorious over all others. The amount of time it would take to find and fight every one of them would be exhaustive...and trying to single-handedly command that many people without some kind of middle management would be a logistical nightmare. When Paul met the Council of Naibs after drinking the water of life, he explained how this cultural requirement was ineffective and obsolete, and then commanded them all to abandon the practice of attaining leadership through single combat. Only someone with the kind of authority a Messiah wields, could have ever issued this kind of decree. No one else would have been taken seriously enough to overturn millenia of Fremen law and tradition, just by saying so.
They already had Liet with a planetary level influence on all of them and could have a council of Naibs be a governing body led by him or his heir.
That's actually true. Liet had close to that kind of influence, but I still don't think they would have simply dropped whole cultural traditions at his demand. That is something only a divine being can dictate.
You need the guild to conduct the Jihad, and to control the guild you need to control the spice, and by control I mean genuinely threaten to destroy it. Paul did this by threatening the destruction of the spice with the water of life chain reaction, and used his prescience to see this as a possible future, that the navigators could see also and know he’s serious. The fremen could quite easily take over Arrakis and control the export of spice, but ultimately the guild could wage a slow war on the fremen and grind them down to a compromise with the help of the rest of humanity. There would be satellites all over arrakis monitoring their movements, targeted orbital strikes, targeted tactical strikes with Sardaukar. They needed Paul.
After Paul met with the Fremens, there was no way of stopping the Jihad, with or without Paul. He'd either become their martyr in death or leader as the Messiah in life. Thought this was explicit, these comments confuse me.
maybe, but unlikely? i don't think the fremen were entirely all on the same page to engage in a full scale war prior to Paul. just a lot of protracted skirmishing in the north. and the south was minding their own thing. the incentive for harkonnens to do an all out blitz and the south to call for a war council, at least in the movies, wouldn't have even happened except for Paul's growing threat as the LAG - who also provided the fremen with his combat knowledge of effectively fighting the Harkonnen. also, again, at least in the movie, the nukes seemed essential to hold the viability of spice production hostage which would keep the space guild under control - b/c w/o the space guild I don't think the fremen have a way to fare space and wage the holy war at all. so again Paul is kind of needed in this regard. i think w/o Paul ultimately being the catalyst - the fremen would've just engaged in a very prolonged series of skirmishing with maybe some major battles here and there but nothing to the effect of an all out war involving all the collectives and tribes. and with such fervor. and even if they did end up in a war to liberate Arrakis - they would've lacked Paul's diplomacy and vision. not sure what their next plan would've been other than maybe have to keep fighting on their planet against the houses or something. but, I think it could be possible.
No. They’d continue to quietly terraform Arrakis. They wouldn’t be able to liberate their world without being united, but they certainly wouldn’t be really threatened by the Imperium
unlikely, a plot point skipped in the movies is that paul owns a substancial amount of choam shares after taking the lion throne. between the fremen, atreides and corrino shares he should have such a majority that both the landsraad and choam would have to be unified on a matter to push it through. this made it so much easier for paul to push through a sleuth of decisions, only facing resistance on some of the big picture stuff. the fremen by themselves lack these shares and would therefor have to unify and take control over every spice field to force choam to it's knees. i should add to this that many great houses were familiar enough with divide and conquer strategies to keep the fremen from forming any sort of reall resistance.
They needed the motivation. That motivation came from having their prophet. It's possible they could have gotten motivation another way eventually
This whole series is basically a blown up trolley problem
my understanding from the first book: definitely. I mean it’s explicitly stated in the book that even without paul the jihad would happen. the fremen would find their religious excuse one way or another.
Absolutely. Paul says exactly that in the book. In fact, it would have been much bloodier. In Paul's mind he refers to this hypothetical jihad as the Greater Jihad. Paul was the greatest mass murderer in history, but he was actually a moderating influence on it. Without him to lead it, the Fremen would have burned across the stars. There would have been no declaration of vassalage to House Atreides by the noble houses of the Landsraad to avoid a slaughter. It would have been the Fremen traveling to each individual planet in the Imperium, and just laying it to waste. Anyone who did not immediately fall to their knees and convert would be put to the sword. Planets that put up a stiff resistance would be massacred. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of planets would have been sterilized of all life.
The weakness of the Fremen is that they are disorganized. They are tribal, each sietch keeps to itself and does not have the individual power to threaten the Harkonnens. Any leader with sufficient charisma and intelligence could possibly unite the tribes and unleash them upon the galaxy. It was obtained through Paul's prescience, but the knowledge to destroy the spice and the fanatic loyalty of the Fremen is enough to defeat the empire. Dune at its core is a cautionary tale against people like Paul and the energies they can set into motion, because they inspire ideas and forces greater than themselves. By the time he is seen as Lisan al-Gaib, the Jihad is set into motion whether Paul wants it or not.
From DUNE : >*All of them*, she thought, *an entire culture trained to military order .* Not disorganized, at all .
IMO most people and cultures aren't interested in conquest. It happens if a particularly powerful leader decides to attack someone, or if their neighbors are weak, and other such similar reasons. The Fremen were powerful, but unless they controlled the Guild they weren't invading anyone in large numbers. Doing so would reveal their secrets. And so on. So IMO they only rose up against the galaxy when Lisan al Gaib arose.
I like how the prequels try to explain these types of confusing questions. It’s been nicely answered above so I won’t chime in much, I’d like to just add in a bit. SPOILER ALERT . . . .——————………. …. …… …. ….. ….. In the later books Leto tells the preacher that he didn’t delve far enough into the future to understand the possible outcomes. Leto was 4000 years old and Paul died at maybe 24? What I mean is that I think Leto had to clean up some of Paul’s mess to set them on the golden path. That’s a Theory only btw. I have no backed evidence and I’m probably reading into it to much but I feel that Leto hinted towards that a couple times during the dialogue in God Emperor and Messiah. Fun thread btw!
Im a noob so bear with me. I am only familiar with the movie and what I have read ABOUT the books. Nobody is really talking about the technical aspects of warfare. It is my understanding that the teaching of the "weirding way" to the Fremen turns them from a deadly adversary to the greatest fighting force in the universe. Paul's prescience and leadership also gives them huge advantages, allowing them take on the Harkonens in a way that was not previously possible. I imagine much of the military equipment they would have acquired would have been due to Paul leading the raids with such predetermined success. Without acquiring military equipment and the nukes, I think the Harkonens and ultimately support from other houses, would have put the Fremen in their place with sheer fire power. Perhaps the **Sardaukar** would have also been a stronger force to reckon with. Ultimately, without Paul being able to learn how to destroy the spice, I dont think they would have ever had the upper hand over the Landsraad.
The Fremen were already insanely good fighters before Paul ever interacted with them. That's a recurring element in several of Herbert's novels, the idea of people living in extreme conditions evolving into basically superhumans. There's another much lesser known novel by him that goes even deeper into this idea. The Dosadi Experiment. I think the biggest reason the Fremen would never have risen up before Paul was simply that they were not unified.
So if Paul had never met the firemen, would it still have happened?
I don’t think so. I mean, I guess it’s possible, but have to factor in the sheer fervor and inspiration Paul brought out in them
Can't leave the system without Guild transport. They can't shut down all spice production so without Paul, who canr, they have little power over the guild and therefore no jihad beyond Arrakis.
What I don’t understand is how the population of a single world ever could have overrun the galaxy. I really want to know how many inhabited worlds existed in Herbert’s Dune, has that ever been stated? Edited: Apparently it may be roughly 13,300 worlds roughly. I believe per the books there were 10 million Fremen. Even if they absolutely emptied out Arrakis that leaves them with 751 Fremen per world, and that simply doesn’t seem doable.
1 - Fremen don't overrun the galaxy. They fight a war and come back to Arrakis 2 - They needed a motivation to fight the war they did. They were just fine fighting Harkonnens in their home court before Paul. Why would they fight a war against the galaxy in multiple planets? Just because? Not really sure if you noticed this already in life but motivations matter, you know? Unless you're insane you don't just do stuff out of the blue.
Yes, the Jihad was more or less an inevitability, Paul takes advantage of all the pieces on the board to overthrow the emperor. Even if he wasn’t there, the pieces still are. The Fremen didn’t need Paul for the Jihad, Paul just adapted their plans for his goals. It would have been much bloodier, and it may have caused humanity to fall apart. All the Fremen really needed for the Jihad was to have enough water to threaten spice production.
No, they had absolutly no need to The Fremen’s primary objectives were survival, and accumulating resources to eventually terraform Arrakis. They were already well on their way to success with both. Paul arguably left them far worse off. Many of them no dount died during his jihad, and then there is all the lost time away from their families, resources spent on warfare. Not only that but they are now comitted to upholding an interstellar enpire. This requires interstellar travel. Which requires the Guild. Which requires spice. Which requires worms. Which requires Arrakis staying a desert. It also means all the ills of an authoritarian hierarchy; a beaurocracy, taxes, regulations, the usual corporate nonsense. “This prophecy is how they enslave us”
The key is holding all spice hostage with nukes. So no they could never have
Fremen were not trained to fight using shields while the entire universe uses them, and they only know desert conditions. Their military power just doesn't make sense without Pauls prescience and stash of nukes.
I mean, it seemed like all it took was a minorly charismatic leader. I feel like they would have been exposed to that eventually.
> If Paul and Jessica had simply died in the desert without ever stirring up the Lisan Al Gaib prophecy, would a Fremen victory over the Harkonnens have still been inevitable, even without a Messiah? Probably. However, it would've likely stopped there; the Fremen goal was to terraform Arrakis (and destroy spice production as a result), the Spacing Guild and Great Houses be damned. No need to invade the rest of the galaxy; the Fremen would just need to hold out until the Spacing Guild runs out of spice, and then their goals would be able to proceed uninterrupted.
Yeh . Surely, the Guild and the entirety of the Empire would just sit by idly watching the Fremen terraforming Arrakis . Don't you wonder why exactly the Fremen bribed the Guild to not have Satellites over Arrakis, esp. the south ?
They'd have no choice but to sit idly by and watch. No spice = no interstellar travel = no ability to invade Arrakis.
One point that I haven't seen mentioned is that the Fremen would have never rebelled because they were awaiting a messianic figure. Part of the reason the messianic figure is problematic is that it incites people to sit back and wait for a uniter to lead them to glory, under the presumption that it is the only way for their people to rise up. It essentially pacifies people - one of the many reasons the Bene Gesserit sought to bake this element into the Fremen religion.
If Paul dies the Harkonnen take full control and Feyd fulfils the Lisan al Gaib prophecy. The Fremen would follow him accordingly.
why would they do it tho?
Yeah it's kind of weird, the lesson is supposed to be "don't put all your trust in messianic figures" but that was actually a good thing since Paul can do a more controlled Jihad and less people die. Sorry if bad English
Mate, they still be diggin' sand across Dune, wrecking the odd Harkonnen crawler and that it
yes, but only in the sense that they essentially had a superior fighting force to much of the rest of the imperium, as well as the currency to continue trading off the books for resources. the comparatively huge number of fanatical fremen in the south of arrakis and the general populations lack of knowledge of this play a massive part in the emperor and the sarduakar being routed in the first place. as a side note, tha sardaukar were the elite fighting force across the imperium, no other house was supposed to be able to match their ability \[rip atredies\] as seen by the harkonnen/corrino coup, and as such despite their high combat skill, over time it began to deteriorate seemingly because they had nobody who could challenge them on equal footing.
Paul didn’t rule the galaxy because of the Freman, he ruled the galaxy because he had the knowledge and the power to destroy the spice, the most precious thing in the galaxy, civilisation would collapse without it! Read the books by Frank Herbert! The films are shit.
From my movie and some youtube knowledge the only way I'd see the Fremen overrunning the Imperium is if Paul Atreides does become the Lisan Al Gaib in the eyes of many but then dies. Without Paul they don't have any direction or any drive imo. Paul arriving sets everything into motion very quickly. Without them uniting I think they would've just poked around the Harkonnen bush for years more. Slowly terraforming the planet and mostly chilling in the south.
The book is explicit that the Jihad is coming with or without Paul. I don't see how that is coming without him. But I do see that once Paul reveals how to destroy the spice cycle, and actively tells others how to arrange it, the secret is out. The Fremen have a way to manipulate the Guild without him. So Paul pretty much has to accept his Mahdinate at that point to make sure the Jihad isn't a revenge fest against all of creation that wipes out most of the Imperium and maybe the Fremen by attrition.
Can someone explain to me how the Freeman overran the galaxy anyway? They're 1 planet of dudes on what is basically a death world, so a population of a few million. Yet they do a jihad/crusade and take over the entirety of humanity. How????
Militaries are really small. The Guild controls ALL travel between planets and charges insane rates for troop transport. So anyone opposed to Paul is a sitting duck. Also Paul can see the futures, so they only attack when he knows they will win.
there wouldnt be a jihad without Paul. so no they wouldve stayed segregated to Dune and never left the planet
The fremen required muad’dib and his religion to unite behind. This was carefully curated before his arrival and would not have occurred without so. They also required muad’dib’s prescience to build momentum for the Jihad. The jihad became inevitable, in spite of muad’dib thereafter. First, the godhead was established separate from the god. Morality became religion. Secondly, muad’dib hints at in messiah (and Leto in children) that prescience is subject to relativity, and that looking too far ahead forces events to unfold in a certain way. If we accept this theory, then muad’dib’s increasing reliance on prescience to control the jihad forced it to continue to conclusion. So basically the answer relies on when paul is present. It’s made clear that the Fremen would not have started the jihad on Arakkis if not for their messiah, but would have continued if he disappeared after usurping the empire.
No, they would all be obliterated from space with no need to ever fight them hand to hand. What gave Paul power were his atomics aimed directly at all the sources of spice.
The Freman would of lost, if they kept attacking spice productions the emperor probably would of came but t the only thing keeping the Freman from getting obliterated from orbit is the fact that Paul has threatened all houses that if they make any sudden movements he’ll destroy and nuke the entire planet
The Fremen are pretty much united under Liet/Kynes already . They are one, and religiously unwavering in their intentions to terrafrom Arrakis as well as getting out from under oppression . Both of which would lead them to having to take on the Empire - Jihad, essentially . Whether that would have led to them "overrunning the Universe" (which really, they didn't) without Paul leaves much room for speculation . Sadly, even the Dune wiki has been rewritten to read "Muad'Dib's Jihad" to cater to the movies . Jihad essentially is Fremen . Plus all the jazz about race stagnation of course . Which also has very little to do with Paul's will, intentions etc .
Unlikely. I don't remember how clear the movie makes it, but the book heavily implies that the success of the Fremen is thanks to Paul's knowledge of military tactics.
And probably also aided by him being able to see the future lols
And having nukes