Green Energy
(Spoiler warning: the post contains book and movie spoilers.)
Frank Herbert published the first Dune book in 1965. Considering that, I would say, in jest but not completely so, that some of the prescience of his main character, Muad’Dib, rubbed off onto his creator. The series handles many subjects, but what I find striking is how it deals with the relations between “sophisticates” and “natives”, with the resultant romanticism and with the fact, still widely overlooked today, that religion can assume a life of its own and cause its adherents to shape reality rather than the other way round.
Besides the book, there’s also the movie Dune, by David Lynch, which, when compared to the books, even just the first alone, does them great disservice. Not that I think Lynch is a bad director—the books contain just too much in the way of word-conveyed matter to be expressed adequately in any movie of reasonable length. The movie, because it needs to focus on actions like most movies do, is simplistic, and on the other hand it adds things not found in the original. Still, it is useful for demonstrating some points—some ideas appear the same in the movie and the first book. What I now engage in is interpretation within the framework of my blog, which means ideological defense of the West in general; creative interpretation, yes, but not that far from the intentions of the author. If anything, his extensive use of Arabic words makes this very relevant to our time.
The setting of the books is essentially the Middle Ages copied and pasted onto a far-future Space Age. Where the Middle Ages had barons, dukes and earls with plots of land as their fiefs, in Dune their fiefs consist of planets. At the center of all this is the desert planet Arrakis, also called Dune, the only source of production for the spice, to which so many in the Imperium are addicted. Through antiquity and medieval times up to the Age of Discovery, Europeans were addicted to the use of spices coming by way of Arabian merchants; and today the modern world is addicted to the oil of Arabia, paying through the nose for it if need be, with the petrodollars providing the lifeblood for Islamic terrorism.
[...]
In full on Our Children Are The Guarantors »
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Green Energy
“…With Thousands of Fremen Warriors”
Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint. (Proverbs 29:18)
(Spoiler warning: the post contains book and movie spoilers.)
Frank Herbert published the first Dune book in 1965. Considering that, I would say, in jest but not completely so, that some of the prescience of his main character, Muad’Dib, rubbed off onto his creator. The series handles many subjects, but what I find striking is how it deals with the relations between “sophisticates” and “natives”, with the resultant romanticism and with the fact, still widely overlooked today, that religion can assume a life of its own and cause its adherents to shape reality rather than the other way round.
Besides the book, there’s also the movie Dune, by David Lynch, which, when compared to the books, even just the first alone, does them great disservice. Not that I think Lynch is a bad director—the books contain just too much in the way of word-conveyed matter to be expressed adequately in any movie of reasonable length. The movie, because it needs to focus on actions like most movies do, is simplistic, and on the other hand it adds things not found in the original. Still, it is useful for demonstrating some points—some ideas appear the same in the movie and the first book. What I now engage in is interpretation within the framework of my blog, which means ideological defense of the West in general; creative interpretation, yes, but not that far from the intentions of the author. If anything, his extensive use of Arabic words makes this very relevant to our time.
The setting of the books is essentially the Middle Ages copied and pasted onto a far-future Space Age. Where the Middle Ages had barons, dukes and earls with plots of land as their fiefs, in Dune their fiefs consist of planets. At the center of all this is the desert planet Arrakis, also called Dune, the only source of production for the spice, to which so many in the Imperium are addicted. Through antiquity and medieval times up to the Age of Discovery, Europeans were addicted to the use of spices coming by way of Arabian merchants; and today the modern world is addicted to the oil of Arabia, paying through the nose for it if need be, with the petrodollars providing the lifeblood for Islamic terrorism.
[...]
In full on Our Children Are The Guarantors »
- Digital Censorship At Amazon
Surreal, but not totally unexpected (hat tip to Bloviating Zeppelin):Amazon Secretly Removes “1984” From the Kindle Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle...
- Some More Items About Holy Terror
Why not, I'll add some more stuff about Frank Miller's new graphic novel about a battle against Islamofascism. If anyone's looking for a positive review from a leading website, this one from Broken Frontier is probably one of the closest you...
- Strange Vindication
My 27 year-old son was just visiting. He was here for a week. Of course, I talked about Islamic supremacism quite a bit, and being 27 (and from Southern California), my son was trying to find every way he could to not believe it. I could tell from his...
- Follow-up: Alms For Jihad
To this and this. From this source (emphases mine): Here’s a story with huge implications for freedom of speech (all negative), and it’s apparently gone almost entirely unreported in the mainstream press. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education...
- Twenty-first Century Book Burning
In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury published a story about a dystopian society in which all books are burned. According to one review at Amazon.com, In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't...