Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s “Dune” | Los Angeles Review of Books
The alt-right now regularly denounces or promotes science fiction films as part of its recruiting strategy: fascist Twitter popularized the “white genocide” hashtag during a boycott campaign against inclusive casting in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But Villeneuve’s film seemed to provoke greater outrage than normal because Herbert’s book is such a key text for the alt-right.
but geek fascists see the novel as a blueprint for the future.
As Norman Spinrad suggested, fans are willing to accept a narrative about strongmen exterminating alien hordes when it is presented in fantastic form.
Both Faye’s and Herbert’s worlds represent impossible attempts to square the circle of fusing the destructive dynamism of capitalist modernization with the stable order prized by traditionalism.
Beyond a shared affinity for space-age aristocrats, Faye and Herbert see the sovereign as one who is capable of disciplined foresight. Drawing on the Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, many thinkers on the alt-right believe that only men from genetically superior populations are capable of delaying gratification and working toward long-term goals. The alt-right asserts that white men hold an exclusive claim over the future. According to these white nationalists, science fiction is in their blood.
Fascists are repulsed by actually existing modernity but enamored with its innovations. To resolve this dilemma, they claim that capitalism’s expansionary and self-revolutionizing tendencies are actually inborn properties of the white race. In what Moishe Postone would call the capital fetish, white nationalists insist that capital’s propensity to break through every limit and remake the world is merely the external manifestation of a Dionysian drive or Faustian sprit infusing Aryan blood. Conversely, fascists displace all of capitalism’s negative qualities onto racialized others — especially Jews — who are blamed for the anomie, atomization, and alienation of modern life.
As Joshua Pearson has shown, Paul acts like the ultimate neoliberal subject. He is a ruthless entrepreneur with the flexibility to exploit even the most speculative of opportunities. Creative destruction is part of his appeal. Some reactionaries are willing to accept the most punishing of regimes as long as they share the privilege of white skin with the CEO.
Once his antagonists are out of the way, Paul uses this ability to carry out a multi-millennia plan for civilizational renewal that requires him to sacrifice billions. As he worries about his grim destiny, Paul begins to look like the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who pitied themselves for being forced to endure the difficult task of committing mass killings to build the thousand-year Reich.
we cannot forget for a moment that their political program necessarily ends in genocide. When Spencer presided over the Unite the Right rally that ended in Heather Heyer’s murder, he allowed the polite mask to fall long enough to reveal that even the most erudite or fanciful aspects of his public persona are motivated by a will toward brutal violence and racial domination.
Although the game is clearly tongue in cheek — often falling in the same satirical tradition as 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd — many misanthropic young men missed the joke and used the setting instead to play out their macho fantasies of dominance and submission. Matthew Heimbach, who founded the Traditionalist Worker Party and built an alliance between Neo-Nazis and Klansmen, radicalized himself in part through his devotion to the Warhammer 40,000 game world. In 2016, alt-right partisans circulated memes with Trump’s face pasted onto the armored body of the God-Emperor of Mankind, casting themselves as fanatical shock troops willing to die in his service.
Any speculative text that contains Jews, Muslims, or people of color therefore becomes a threat to their entire political project. This is why recent developments in fields such as Afrofuturism and Black horror are so crucial. They provide a critical alternative to the alt-right’s exterminationist fantasy of an all-white future. Just as importantly, they offer readers other ways of thinking about time that do not fall in line with the fascist dream of a history that unfolds step-by-step along the lines of the Aryan dictator’s master plan.
Paul’s army of desert guerillas, the Fremen, clearly owe something to Arabic and Islamic cultures, and Paul’s own genealogy defies the fascist demand for racial purity. The alt-right has tried to wrestle Islamophobic and Antisemitic messages from the book but they are stymied by its refusal to map existing ethnic categories onto the characters.
Herbert himself saw the series as a critique of authoritarianism demonstrating for his readers that “superheroes are disastrous for humankind.” Dune’s aristocrats replaced artificial intelligences with people deformed to act like soulless machines. As Paul becomes the guidance mechanism for a vast social system, he loses touch with humanity. Seeing the terror he has wrought, he plots to end his own despotic command over humankind’s fate. The God-Emperor in Warhammer 40,000 does not get this far: he is locked in suspended animation while the empire he built decays around him. These are obviously not ideals worth emulating.
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