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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read the original novels, I always imagine the jihad to be a fairly benign if not peaceful exercise more akin to a protest than a war. Like if one day people started rolling across the world smashing data centers and laptops.

I was fairly surprised when his son wrote a novel that felt like a generic, bland robots run amok storyline that happened, more or less, because one guy/titan "ruined a good thing" by telling his AI to run in permissionless mode.

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this is an interesting interpretation. i always imagined the jihad as being a violent struggle.

the other jihad in the first novel is that of the Fremen, which is described as being unspeakable violent, so I find it hard to imagine these to be different in that regard.

It's an interpretation if you ignore the impacts of feudalism, slavery, and religious war on Dune. The idea that people were able to express freedom of speech during a time described as the enslavement of 99.99% of the human race seems off-kilter.

the Fremen express freedom of speech despite overwhelming oppression

The desert Fremen of the first book were a tribal society where it doesn’t really make much sense to talk about freedom of speech due to the lack of any sort of formal government. But it seems likely that each naib makes his own decisions about how to run the sietch that he leads. How Stilgar is running Sietch Tabr may not be how every sietch is run.

It doesn’t talk too much about political conditions the city Fremen lived under, but the Harkonnens don’t seem to be too keen on civil liberties so we can probably make an educated guess.

In the second book, the Fremen have established a brutally repressive theocracy that is obsessed with rooting out heresy. Regular people being afraid to openly speak their minds about political issues is a plot point.

> I always imagine the jihad to be a fairly benign if not peaceful exercise

"Jihad" is an Arabic word meaning "struggle", and usually used in English to mean "violent religious war". Are you unaware of this blatant plot hint?

I am not unaware. I reread the original books every few years, and every time the butlerian jihad comes up I never imagine a traditionally violent war. Something about how he describes it, I guess.

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