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Even the faint gaps were closed now. Here was the unborn jihad, he knew. Here was the race consciousness that he had known once as his own terrible purpose […] The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive. All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier.
And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. […]
A sense of failure pervaded him.”
In the
Dune sequels, Paul and his family rule tyrannically. The war that he began costs the universe 61 billion lives.
This complicates the “white savior”; critics of this reading of
Dune, like Harris Durran
in an essay for Medium, have argued that this (and an interview given by the author) makes
Dune a critique of the white savior rather than a recapitulation of it.
But where this misses the mark is the very inevitability of it all. The idea that the crypto-Arab Fremen are destined only either to be colonized or to undertake a mega-jihad—and that being “uplifted” by a white superman is the fulcrum on which that rests—removes their agency completely. That the idea of a messianic figure was embedded in their culture by their colonial masters does not particularly change that. A lack of agency on the part of the people of color is the core of the “white savior.” Whatever “it” is, they couldn’t have done it without the white savior.
In the story, Paul cannot see any way out of the coming jihad. But this is making the way that white saviors see themselves into a deterministic inevitability. The author can have his cake and eat it too; the hero of his story can cause the deaths of millions and remain sympathetic. Despite all his agency through the book to that point, oh well, genocidal war was “inevitable.”
He is not the white savior critiqued, he is the white savior transcended to a shrugging Calvinistic godhood.
And ultimately, “the Arabs are destined to kill everyone in a religious war” is not a good look, no matter what complicating factors are in play.
