This is the official hexbear Dune discussion thread (not really)
I watched the new Dune and enjoyed the films from a cinematic/fantasy perspective but wasn’t super on-board with the politics as I thought the message was simply ‘leaders bad’, but what didn’t come across (imo) from the movies and what I’m learning from discussion of the books is that the message is more nuanced than that: Herbert’s message wasn’t “don’t blindly follow leaders because they’re evil”, but “don’t blindly follow leaders because movements based on blind belief are a force of their own and can sweep everyone up into a mess, even if that was not at all the intention”, and there are of course examples of that happening throughout human history. I want to hear all of your thoughts on the books, the films, and the messages. Thanks. 
In dune 2 (the movie) I feel that message was pretty explicit with Paul’s internal conflict with heading south and chani’s condemnation of it
In the books Paul compares himself to Hitler and Genghis Khan. I don’t think dune has much to say about left movements specifically, just that blind worship is dangerous. The first Dune was written before the cultural revolution, however. Maybe Mao would have been mentioned if it was published a few years later
He doesn’t really talk about left movements until book 4, where the God emperor has about a paragraph where he explicitly talks shit about leftist governance devolving into an aristocracy of bureaucracy.
Iirc doesn’t he compare himself to Hitler in the sense that he’s impressed with how many people Hitler killed despite the primitive technology of that age, and he’s going to kill way more people if he can’t find a way to avert the Jihad?
Pretty much, although I don’t think its so much that he’s impressed by it so much as he’s trying to impress on his hangers-on just how much suffering they’ve caused via the jihad. Paul is very bitter/ironic about the whole exchange, he’s clearly not happy about having killed so many people. Which, as others brought up, is essentially the whole point of Dune Messiah