Well, after reading Dune three or four times during my life, I just finished the sequel, Dune Messiah, today, and found that, despite all of Paul’s desires to prevent one, the galactic jihad he foresaw did, in fact, occur. Somehow, in that space of twelve years, sixty billion people were massacred, although, as wikipedia puts it, this, by far, was not the worst outcome.
What I don’t understand is why the jihad happened. Sure, Fremen got their mythical leader, but would that drive them into the galaxy and start killing like that? Do they have the raw numbers to kill that many people? And even if they do (they’re at least equivalent to the Sardaukar after all), why would they want to? I mean, even the Aiel had their reasons for spilling over the wall.
And let’s say that it simply boils down to “It doesn’t matter”. Would anyone, given a choice between avenging the death of their father with the side effect of 60 billion people dying and simply letting it go… choose the former? All things being equal, as an average citizen, I’d think I’d prefer living under a corrupt government (but all equally corrupt), than under Emporer Paul Muad’Dib.
The thing about Paul was that he never chose anything. He became addicted to the prescience and that addiction basically took away his freedom of choice. He believed that what he saw was inevitable, so never did more than ineffectually try to prevent it. It took Leto II, with his preborn mind, to challenge this and master the vision rather than being mastered by it.
The underlying theme of the the first four Dune books is this difference between the father and the son (over three generations). Duke Leto was powerful, but limited. He was hemmed in by tradition and loyalty to the Emperor, forcing him to take a vassalage that he KNEW was a trap. Paul was equally hemmed in, the most powerful man in the galaxy yet slave to his visions. Leto II was just as bound by the visions, and could not completely ignore them, but was capable of bending the circumstances to produce a different (far distant) end product.
Sometimes, you forge a weapon that you THINK you can control and find out too late that you can’t. The Fremen were such a weapon. Even if Paul could bring himself to rein them in, it’s unlikely that such an action would be effective.
In the grand scheme of things, Paul was the exact same thing. He was the Kwizatz Haderach and wasn’t the pawn that the Bene Gesserit were expecting, I guess because Paul was supposed to be a female.
That’s true. If you only read the novels once, it’s easy to miss it, because she’s not really the central character in any of them, but the prime mover of the first tetralogy, the one who really set things in motion, is Jessica. It was her decision to ignore the orders of the BG and let a male child implant that created the whole situation, up to and including Leto II’s (roughly) 3,500-year reign.