The Wokeness of Dune

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“Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies.”
–God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert

Warner Bros Discovery, after pulling off two hit Dune films with its adaption of the classic Science Fiction novels, is bringing a Dune series to HBO. Like most modern media adaptations, the Dune adaptations are hopelessly mired in wokeness, swimming in identity politics and feminism, with little regard to the message of the original novels or their author.

Frank Herbert, a West Coast libertarian, had been working on the first Dune novel while also working on the Senate campaign of Republican Senate challenger William B. Bantz after a decade in Republican politics. The Dune novels are replete with disdain for liberalism, socialism and all forms of big government. And outside Dune, Herbert’s other Science Fiction works depict a Bureau of Sabotage whose mission is to sabotage the other arms of a galactic government.

The Dune novels were filled with Herbert’s suspicion of governments and mass movements and were dedicated to remedying the popular public misunderstanding of the first Dune novel. It’s that first novel that was adapted into the first movie Dune (1984) and the modern reboots Dune (2021) and Dune Part Two (2024) because of its convenient heroic tropes and accessible plot.

Like many modern adaptations, the current Dune movies are dedicated to remaking the source material in order to apologize for its offenses against wokeness. They weaken Paul, the protagonist, to apologize for what wokes see as the ‘white savior’ tropes of the novels, and focus their ire on the oppression and manipulation of the Fremen by all the white figures. And they overlay a feminist reading to apologize for the masculine reading of the original novels.

The Fremen desert warriors in 1984’s Dune as hippies with psychic powers were at least closer to Herbert’s own inspirations in libertarian Oregon than the current decade’s transformation of the Fremen into heroic Muslim terrorists and black men with dreadlocks fighting western capitalism. This facile woke parable is perfectly made for Hamas fans on Ivy League college campuses who thrill to the sight of ‘people of color’ fighting against white oppressors.

Marxists all too easily mistook the first Dune novel for an anti-capitalist narrative, but Herbert had as little use for Communists as he did for corporations. The Third World reading of Dune is equally ignorant. Dune’s universe envisioned a remixing of religions and races across thousands of years blending variations of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into a complex stew.

The 2021 version’s insistence on depicting the battle for Dune as a racial conflict between extremely pale Harkonnens and a careful selection of ‘people of color’, Muslim and black people, the current poster boys for the oppressed, panders to ugly racial hatreds in much the same way as the white supremacists like Richard Spencer obsessed with the books.

The Fremen can be seen as a parable for Islam, but not in a way that any modern sensibility would accept. After all the Fremen are colonists who wrongly believe they’re the indigenous people, superstitious barbarians who are tricked into following a false messiah on a campaign of conquest and galactic genocide that claims sixty billion lives, and whose fixation on leaving behind the desert ultimately destroys them. The resemblance to Islam is not wholly accidental.

Herbert uses Arab words and Islamic concepts (along with Jewish ones, Kwisatz Haderach is a Kabbalistic concept) along with religious and philosophical ideas drawn from various cultures in keeping with the philosophical interests of late 1950s and early 1960s American intellectuals.

But Dune is no more a critique of Islam than it is a valorization of it. Herbert saw the story of Mohammed as a recurring pattern that recurs once again in his novels which dissect such patterns, how they can be exploited and the carnage that they cause across time.

The current Dune movies grapple with the contradiction through a feminist reading that attributes blame for what follows to the white characters while concluding with Chani, the protagonist’s Fremen love interest, returning to the desert to follow her people’s traditional ways.

The wokeness of the current Dune movies always seeks to limit Herbert’s general critique along the lines of whiteness and toxic masculinity. Colonialism and imperialism is something that people of color, especially women who are people of color, can only partake in when white people, especially white men, manipulate them into it. That one simple trick turns what was a story about the patterns of human history into another story about the awfulness of white men.

By setting his story far into the future, mixing together races, nationalities and religious concepts, Herbert had hoped to avoid such simplistic readings, but they came anyway.

In his later Dune novels, Herbert had written bitterly about the “viciousness” of liberals whose “secret ego demanding to feel superior” led them to seek power. That power isn’t just limited to the politics of government that Herbert worked in, but pervaded the culture every bit as much.

That same egotistic sense of superiority has taken to remolding Dune from a critique of human patterns of power into a selective woke critique of what its members see as the ‘other side’.

Herbert’s vision of Dune began when he saw the California desert being rolled back. The Dune novels envision a rhythm of human history that is as cyclical and organic as the environment. It was not a story of winners or losers, but a story in which striving for power was a defeat for all.

Wokes, for whom striving for power is a sacred act, cannot and would not process such a general message. A critique of power to them can only be a critique of someone else’s power.

The only power they are willing to condemn is the power being wielded by someone else.

“‘Only liberals really think. Only liberals are intellectual. Only liberals understand the needs of their fellows.’ How much viciousness lay concealed in that word!”
–Heretics of Dune. Frank Herbert