The Anarchists of Dune

From The Transmetropolitan Review

“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.”

-Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

Across the world, the movie-watching public will soon behold the Fremen of Dune sack and destroy the Empire, starting on their homeworld of Arrakis. This irresistible moment, where the rebels actually win, is sure to sink into the mass-public consciousness, but despite all the Arabic names and parallels between spice and petroleum, the true story of the Fremen deserves to be told, especially now, given what’s at stake.

Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, lived the happiest parts of his childhood in a failed socialist colony called Burley, located along the Salish Sea near the city of Tacoma, Washington. It was dreary and cold during the fall and winter, and back in the day, before Herbert was born, all the excitement further down the sea in the anarchist Home Colony, a much more successful experiment in collective living. While the socialists of Burley struggled to replicate their small colony, Home grew bigger every year, even converting some of Burley’s socialists into anarchist defectors.

Home and Burley in relation to other socialist colonies in Washington State

Regardless, both the anarchists and socialists were used to living a rugged lifestyle in the middle of nowhere, remote communities with no road access that were connected together by twice-a-day ferries, if that. Everyone had to chop wood, shovel animal shit, hammer nails, grow food, cook food, mill lumber, construct houses, erect piers, build bridges, and all the like. However, in the anarchist Home Colony, there was far more autonomy than in Burley, and teenage anarchists were building their own houses, using dynamite to blow up stumps, shoot rifles, pilot their own boats, and dancing late into the night by raging bonfires.

The dreaded anarchists of Home

When the young Frank Herbert was growing up, Home was known for many things, among them its Saturday night dances, the wildest and most popular around, and even when Herbert was himself a teenager, Home was where you went for a good time. Given the drabness of Burley and his own semi-Catholic upbringing, it’s hard to not see these dances as the infamous spice orgy of the Fremen, a moment when the rebels finally let down their rock-hard armor and feel good for a change, rather than being ruthless fighters committed to destroying the Empire.

Make no mistake, Home housed some committed, dedicated, and fervent anarchists, and some of them weren’t just homesteaders like Frank Herbert’s family, they were anarchist homesteader militants who smuggled dynamite, fomented uprisings in the coal fields of Vancouver Island, sheltered fugitives, shot at private detectives during strikes, and called for the death of capitalism. Beyond this, these anarchists were directly implicated in the 1910 bombing of the ultra-reactionary and anti-labor Los Angeles Times building, given they helped hide the man who supplied the dynamite, the anarchist David Caplan.

The anarchists who bought the land where David Caplan hid out were from Home, and their names were Ersilia Cavedagni and Leon Morel. Both of them ran the anarchist metal foundry at Home and could fabricate anything their community might need, including gears, keys, nails, fixtures, stoves, candlesticks, type-face for printing plates, anything metal, be it brass, iron, or copper. Just like the Fremen fabricate thumpers, sand-compacters, and still-suits in their hidden sietches, the anarchists of Home fabricated everything in their remote region, something they were well known for.

Morel Foundry, Home, Washington, 1909

Frank Herbert’s grandfather Otto had been a socialist and follower of Eugene Debs, and he moved his family to Burley Colony in 1905, just as the community was falling apart. Given how close Burley was to Home, the Herbert family learned much about their anarchist neighbors, especially when several of them were arrested during a nude bathing scandal. The Herbert family was in Burley from 1905 to 1919, the year Home ceased to exist as an anarchist community, and they were nearby for all the major intrigue and conspiracy that took place there. Given young Frank Herbert’s love for his grandfather Otto and grandmother Mary, both socialists, it’s likely he cherished their stories from the old days and sought them out over stories from his father, who became a cop.

Socialist Burley, in the old days

Born in Tacoma in 1920, Frank Herbert moved to Burley with his family in 1928, although the young boy was already familiar with the region, having gone on many family trips. Like the anarchists of Home, young Frank woke up in the frosty time before dawn, he milked the cow, collected eggs and fed the pigs, just as his family had a large vegetable garden, with corn, peas, beans, carrots, lettuce and other crops. This was the type of self-sufficient, backwoods living Herbert shared with the anarchists of Home, the living legends of their sleepy region.

Just like them, young Frank fished for his supper, and especially liked to fish in Burley Creek, which was loaded with brook trout. In the fall, salmon were so plentiful that they would be caught with bare hands. There were many smokehouses in the area, some dating back to the days of Burley Colony. It was a picturesque creek, winding through a forest of cedar, alder and maple and falling across a sequence of rocky beaches. This primordial landscape was shared by the anarchists of Home, and similar to them, young Frank smoked much of the salmon he caught, and took it to school for lunch, along with fruits, vegetables and hard-boiled eggs from the family farm. Even in regards to hunting deer, Frank Herbert would recall, there was no sport to it. They just went out and got meat for the family.

There was still dancing in Home when Frank was growing up there, and not only was he known to canoe down there, his parents moved from Burley in 1931 and opened a dance hall on old Highway 99 near Seattle, a speakeasy that made a lot of money. Keep in my mind, Frank’s father was a former cop, and he quit to become a boot-legger, but he and Frank’s mother were pushed out of the dance-hall business by their partners, and by 1933, the family was broke and living near Tacoma to be near their family.

This allowed young Frank to return to Burley where he sought refuge in his canoe, and during one journey, he met a member of the Hoh tribe, known as Indian Henry, and these two became good friends. Similarly, the anarchists of Home had known an indigenous Squaxin who was called Indian Jim, and just like Frank, the anarchists would meet the natives as they paddled around in their boats and canoes, exchanging much local knowledge. All this to say, Frank Herbert was raised very much like the anarchists of Home, and while the socialist colony had fully collapsed by 1920, there were still many anarchists who lived in Home in the 1930s, and Frank moved among them.

Frank’s dad eventually returned to being a cop, just as his alcoholism got worse, and soon enough the wild child raised by socialists was consumed by work and school in Tacoma, where he lived the big city life and left behind his rugged childhood. Without doubt, Frank knew of the anarchist rebels hidden out in the woods, having grown up hearing tales of explosions, guns, and arson, and if the Fremen are meant to represent anyone, its those hard-working, do-it-yourself, bomb-throwing anarchists of Home, and just like the Fremen, they had suffered years of defeat and repression at the hands of the US empire. With such an irresponsible cop father, Frank Herbert held an eternal soft-spot for those anarchists who lived just south of Burley, just as he encoded his own love for his grand-father’s old brand of socialism in his writing.

In the novel Dune, a character named Duncan Idaho is sent to make an alliance with the Fremen, something he barely achieved with these distrusting rebels. Many have laughed and wondered why a character from the year 10,191 would have the last name Idaho, but back in the old days, Idaho was where the crazy bomb throwing miners lived, the ones who blasted apart their ex-governor in 1905. It was a place where Eugene Debs had called a rebel army to invade Boise, a place where rebels had hijacked trains and gone mine to mine blowing up their shafts with dynamite. Before it was known as a racist, conservative hotbed, Idaho was where the hardest, fiercest rebels were known to reside, and young Frank probably learned of this Idaho from his socialist grandfather Otto. Fittingly, Duncan Idaho is not only the best fighter, he is naturally trusted by the Fremen for his dignity and honesty.

Bunker Hill mine, Idaho, 1899 (completely destroyed by dynamite)

In the end, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah serve up some of the oldest anarchist propaganda, not only by commenting on the corrupting influence of centralized power, but by spending nearly 1,000 pages to reaffirm one of anarchism’s oldest slogans: no one is fit to rule, and no one deserves to be a slave. Herbert’s natural sympathy was with the rebels, the underdogs, the Fremen, the anarchists of Home, and that’s why the upcoming cinematic rendering of the Empire’s defeat will be so gratifiying, as is being teased out in the official trailers. However, Dune is only one half of Herbert’s initial warning, or act of prediction, as he called it, and the second half is much darker

Nevertheless, the Fremen are meant to represent the best of those who lived in that isolated backwater of the Salish Sea, the hardcore anarchists who made everything for themselves, who organized attacks on the empire themselves, who never stopped fighting, not in the 1920s, not in the 1960s, and not today in the 2020s. Without doubt, the anarchists of Dune are the Fremen of Home, and their backwater paradise of total freedom, that violent, nomadic utopia, is what many characters long for when the state becomes too powerful, those simpler days when one could wander forever in a land that was a part of them, just as they were a part of the land, however hostile and uncompromising it may be.

Death To The Empire!

Long Live The Fighters!

Long Live Anarchy!

There are 37 Comments

"if the Fremen are meant to represent anyone, its those hard-working, do-it-yourself, bomb-throwing anarchists of Home" to say this in today's media climate demonstrates an awe-inspiring degree of self-absorption and cluelessness--how much did warner bros. pay for this ad?

Alex, you must be new here because you have it backwards. Every time some big movie comes out there is an essay posted here about how it’s a teachable moment for anarchy for some reason - yet another variant of what I have often called “political ambulance chasing”, a kind of pseudo-populist style which many radicals are addicted to due to the shallowness of their own ideas and projects. It’s very cute that you think there are enough anarchists in the world for big companies to pay to advertise to, though!

See, but the flipside of this kind of kneejerk cultural populism is the inability to relate to anything moving the zeitgeist in any register besides judgmental moralism, which is also symptomatic of a political and spiritual dead end.

Wasn’t one of the original crimethinc “actions” flyering screenings of Fight Club? Like a lot of things they do thats kinda cringe but there’s an element of it that’s sorta canny.

SooOoo nIce seeing anarchists not looking into cell-phones or marching and holding placards, but actually living anarchically!

When are any of these Home colony pieces gonna talk about…the colonizing? And no, that doesn't just mean explaining "well colony was an acceptable word at the time" or whatever. Are the people that US genocided in order to establish Washington and Idaho not opponents of the empire? Did the anarchists have any deeper engagement with native life than having a friend called "Indian Jim"? Did they think or do anything about their "total freedom" being based on others exclusion? These aren't rhetorical gotcha questions, I wanna know what actually went down. Just like I wanna know what Salish Sea anarchists do about any of these things today

"the anarchists of Home had known an indigenous Squaxin who was called Indian Jim, and just like Frank, the anarchists would meet the natives as they paddled around in their boats and canoes, exchanging much local knowledge."
Well brah, if you have a friend this implies that the notion of colonizing is passé, because friendship surpasses land sovereignty and ownership, it is a deeper and more intimate relationship than one based on borders and boundaries, and these anarchists made many friends amongst the survivors of the colonization which occured 2 to 3 generations and about a century earlier. They exchanged knowledge and cohabitated inclusively with the natives and their offspring continue to fish in the Salish Sea to this very day.

Just like how having black friends proves racism is passé and a non issue in any community. Astute

or it could be about how actual human relationships between individuals aren't the same thing as structural critiques of "big bads" like colonialism.

do you really think it's wise for an indigenous person to automatically hate every settler they meet, even if those people also hate the gov't? maybe they could ... i dunno, relate as equals or whatever?

And where is the structural critique of colonialism around the Salish Sea as well as anarchists role in it in any of these Home colony writings?

you mean from the time or ... are you criticizing the more modern historians or ..? i don't know? i'd like to see one too.

perhaps you should write the fucker yourself? me, i'm lazy and also not even pretending to be a historian

Whether or not an individual Native person likes or hates every settler or group of settlers they meet, and whether the Home colonizers were friends or not with any Native individual is irrelevant to the fact that they were white settler colonists engaged in settler colonialism (with anarchist characteristics), stealing land and resources to make "homes" for themselves. No amount of anarchy-washing makes a settler colonial project not settler colonial.

No, it would change the nature of all of that if they were friendly with the locals surrounding their home. It would make a fundamental difference in things like "settler" "colonist" "stealing" ---- hell, even "land!"

See, some defining characteristics of settler colonialism is that it didn't happen on terms of friendship and it involved stealing. Like, say you live in an apartment and someone else moves into that very same apartment while you are living there. Let's say it's your friend. Hell yeah, you're living with your friend now! Since you're friends, the likelihood that this situation involved any stealing is pretty low, cause that'd terminate the friendship pretty fast and that hasn't happened since you're friends and all. That's a pretty decent living situation for both of you! Okay now let's say it's NOT your friend, it's roughly 1,000 people with guns and they are shooting at you and everyone you've ever met in your entire life. Shucks, that's a pretty different thing to imagine innit?

A defining characteristic of settler colonialism is that it involves the state and its violence, not just individual violence. Two or more people being friendly towards each other doesn't erase the settler state and its violence, which is what ultimately secures land for settlers (which their vigilantism and deputization also contributes to). My people would still have their land if not for state violence. Individual settlers and settler groups were militarily too weak to accomplish the theft on their own in this specific case. A couple of my own relatives, distant cousins, even collaborated with the Canadian state against their own people. So save your typing energy and educational efforts for someone else.

"A defining characteristic of settler colonialism is that it involves the state and its violence, not just individual violence. "
the state, state violence, AND individual violence are all absent here.

Wasn't aware the state of Washington and the United States didn't yet exist at the time of the Home Colony, established in the 1890s. And that there was no state violence involved in establishing them. My bad. The white people of Home were Native to North America, you're so right.

if you're done flexing, you might stop to think whether i'm native too, hmm?

the pedantic lecture started with you

never said anything about you being Native or not, and I don't call a single paragraph saying that nice feelings don't magically make white colonizers Native when there's a settler state in the foreground much of a pedantic lecture, but hey, that's subjective too, have fun with it, anything goes

i know you didn't. but perhaps i'm stressing why we shouldn't use that structural lens when we relate on an individual level because anarchy?

I don't find "because anarchy" a compelling reason to pretend that interpersonal relations take place in a vacuum absent the State. Of course, not every interaction with every person is focused on us dealing directly with the State, but this in itself also doesn't make the State and its influence disappear. It's no mystery that settlers and Natives can be friendly or be friends. But no matter how friendly they may be, it doesn't make state structures irrelevant or ineffectual, it doesn't make settler colonists into Natives.

you're going to keep strawmanning too huh? we both know i never said that. you can just scroll up.

why tf would i have been saying settlers magically become natives?

i'm pointing at how structuralism is a shitty way to analyze how people relate to each other on an individual level. it wasn't designed for that and at worst, veers in to toxic demagoguery when it's used that way.

none of this is my opinion either, it's just demonstrably true.

But amongst some colonists there were a majority of their law's criminal class forced to construct the infrastructure as in the Australian colonizing. The West Indies and southern Muhrican's used slaves. By any definition this founding majority were not willing and intentional colonists. Every philologist knows that a society's description evolves with time into a modern -unrelated to its past- mode of interrelationships.

This is literally more LARPing by yuppie liberals desiring to create their Commune that they'll privatizing for their cliques later (or earlier). Also what I find more disturbing is how the anarcho-lefties are returning to the actually-conservative vision of history, where any consideration of comparative historical context (between today and 100 years ago) was just bluntly ignored by these brutish "Communards".

History: come to terms with it, of you're its eternal prisoner...

Fuck these ancoms with their predictable Hollywood product placements, every single time there's a blockbuster that's nearly appealing to anarcho-liberals ('member their godawful anarcho-spins on "V for Vendetta", "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Andor"?). I mean where the fuck where these posers when films like, say, "Dinner in America" or Sean Baker movies came out!?

The Fremen are brutally authoritarian, not anarchists (but maybe socialists, to some extent). They are the equivalent to the Pan-Arab movement during the '20s-'30s, with Paul acting as Lawrence of Arabia. Of course the Dune books as a whole are a very important read but for fuck's sake leave these movies outta here? They got advertising agencies to promote... oh wait.

Anyways, the books that followed the first one, especially Children and God Emperor of Dune, are the most relevant. Only leader that deserves being glorified would be a supernatural non-human who can effectively whip the ass of humans for a few millenia, 'til they finally grow up, and become wild again.

I recently read that FH passed before writing his projected last book in the saga, which was supposed to show the universe finally evolving past monarchy (the ultimate goal of the Golden Path?). Some kind of a version of it eventually came out based on his notes, but I haven’t read it. I never got the impression that he really had a political point of view, fwiw, as much as he discussed aspects of politics, philosophy, religion, sociology and so on. I think he was just a weird counterculture sci-fi guy who wanted to explore a bunch of different ideas. Take it for what it is, some of his books are super entertaining, others less so. I don’t think he had a grand vision or partisan beliefs and it was ultimately meant as entertainment.

He admitted late in his life to be anarchist. Any clever anarchist writer wouldn't be blatantly promoting anarchy through writings but would instead be showing why/how authoritarianism -of any kind- is ultimately a failed model, and that there is no good, skilled enough human to be rightfully claiming to lead the masses to better ends... unless it's some supernatural hybrid being who's omniscient and can't be destroyed. Which would be my assumption on real-life authorities.. that they'll forever be crap unless maybe one day some really superior post-human immortal being with a grand vision takes over the place and whips all the parasites' butts. But this might only happen in, yes, sci-fi fantasy.

He was a pro-Reagan libertarian who worked for the Republican Party. Yes, he was a politically eclectic counter cultural weirdo who did a lot of psychedelics. I love Dune anyway and I love Villeneuve’s interpretation. I actually just got back from seeing Dune 2 and I cried at a scene that was way too reminiscent of ongoing events in Gaza. It’s insane to me that this article says so little about fremen, franks very obvious anti colonial sympathies and the very clearly articulated MENA cultural roots of a lot of the elements of his fictional universe. He once claimed that his Arab friends asked why Dune was considered science fiction considering its religious voice has so much Islam and Arabic in it and its political geography is so much about imperialism and resource extraction.

The author is dead brah, anarchists of all people should feel free to detourn fragmentary cultural visions. I love that the new movies are so shifted towards the perspective of indigenous resistance (aside from being light years ahead of Lynch’s version in terms of sheer enjoyability). There’s subversive potential here for sure.

I found it incredibly boring and mediocre, I instantly thought of Saudi Arabia when I first read it 30yrs ago, got to about page 15. This is just Lawrence of Arabia meets Alladin and Godzilla, NO!

Lawrence of Arabia is also a beautiful though problematic work of art with plenty of teachability for emancipatory insurgents, you philistine. What’s your idea of a good movie?

You didn't really understood Lawrence of Arabia if you didn't read the book it was based on. The movie just created a myth out of a very problematic dude (who btw was a Nazi sympathizer, among other issues).

Still much enjoyable as a movie if you haven't, but the book reads like what happens in Messiah and Children of Dune. It takes down the heroism and fascination with the otherness to break down in a mature way how it was really just about the recuperation and management of indigenous revolt.. or at least not making efforts to cover that up with a myth. Something both Hollywood studios and their paid sycophants at TR are about, too... :-/

The God Emperor fully understood the power of myth-making.

I've read the book "The 7 Pillars of Wisdom" soOoo Hollywood admits its fictional aspects, that's Hollywood, however they did make a significant chapter in the movie where the Muhrican Hirst sycophant sensationalist news paper photographer is momentarily entertained like a model photo shoot of Lawrence ontop of the Turkish train full of soldiers that they've blown up and killed. Lawrence was just being his narcissistic self. Hollywood can sometimes throw some more modern truthful interpretations of a past era and cut through alot of the myths also. That's why there are critics such as myself keeping the discussion logical ;)

You only have to know one thing, It wouldn't have been made if there was no oil in Arabia. mmkay.

Yeaaa, and that part where Lawrence realizes his pleasure to kill. But regardless, this non-Hollywood big indie production (it was only distributed by a Hollywood studio, look it up) was hiding the aspect of how the protagonist had been intetionally or not, taking part in a major operation of instrumentalizing Bedouin tribes and Syrian mercenaries into a successful revolt against the Ottoman. As a matter of fact it's very likely the British Empire took Lawrence as the prototype for the later SAS, and the famous MI6... as he was a de facto British special agent. It was made clear, if you did read the book, that he was looking at the Arabs for their potential as instruments, especially for their ease to being manipulated... due to their lack of intellectual values and intense, totalizing normativity. Not exactly something to sell in a mainstream movie.

The comparison in Dune between the British Empire/Atreides and the Ottoman/Harkonnen was interesting, but it didn't stop there.

"Lawrence realizes his pleasure to kill." But unconditional revenge is best served cold, there wasn't any sadism here, justice has always been pleasurable.

Hey brah, "philistine" is MY label to describe uncreative boring people loaded with spooks. T.E.Laurence could teach you a thing or 2 about aesthetics and philological rambling narratives!

"He who drinks their own recycled pee controls the universe." ~Muad'Dib

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