Dune and the Law of armed confict

The speaker welcomes the audience to a presentation about DUNE and the Law of Armed Conflict. They mention a special guest, Safir, who calculates the value of an hour with the speaker. The speaker sets two rules for the webinar: no spoilers for DUNE Part 2 and no telling Anakin Skywalker about the event. They discuss the background of DUNE and its lore. They explain that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is about reducing suffering during armed conflict and protecting civilians and combatants. They relate IHL to DUNE and the Great Convention mentioned in the story. They discuss the concept of kanla and the emotional and literal embodiment of IHL in DUNE. They analyze the fall of House Atreides and the classification of conflicts under IHL. behalf of the American Red Cross and our International Humanitarian Law Program here at National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., I want to welcome you to our special presentation of DUNE and the Law of Armed Conflict. I'm going to introduce myself to those that don't already know me. I'm Thomas Harper. I'm IHL Senior Counsel, seen here on Caledon. And if we're going by our very normal DUNE names, you can refer to me properly by this name, which is very real. I want to say that we have a special guest here. We have a MENCAT who's given us his services, Safir. He's a brainiac. He has a brain that has the power of a supercomputer. And I brought him here today for one purpose and one purpose alone, and it's to calculate precisely just how valuable an hour with an expert like me is to talk DUNE and the Law of Armed Conflict. So, Safir, if you will, please run that calculation. Okay, 2.43 salaries. If you could break that down into maybe U.S. dollars to help our audience, please. Okay, 78 cents. Well, Safir, why don't you get out of here and everyone boo him on the way out. Please don't let the door hit you as you leave, Safir. So, a lot of good that MENCAT did me. Couple house rules. There are two rules for this webinar. One, there are no spoilers for DUNE Part 2. Go see the movie, but because it just came out a couple weeks ago, I'm going to stay away from any kind of spoilers for the plot of DUNE 2. I'll leave it to you to go see it, and we'll have a future DUNE event that will cover the events of that movie. I will break that rule immediately to spoil the fact that Austin Butler's character is probably the creepiest character, creepiest acting job ever on film. Maybe there's an Oscar category that's introduced next year just for him and just for that performance. So, beyond that spoiler, the second rule is under no circumstances is anyone here to tell Anakin Skywalker about this webinar. It's no secret that I personally am a big, big fan of Star Wars. It's also no secret that Anakin does not like sand. It might be his least favorite thing other than Jedi, and if he finds out that I'm doing an event or that the American Red Cross is doing an event not only not about Star Wars, but that also involves a lot of sand, I'm going to be in deep poodoo, as they say in the Star Wars universe. So, please, please keep this quiet for my own sake. We're going to be limiting our discussion here today. I say limiting because there's still a lot to talk about, to the 2021 film adaptation of DUNE. So many of you in the audience, so many of you watching this in our recording are long-time fans of DUNE. The novel came out in the 60s, the original. It was succeeded by just a number of successive entries in the series. The lore runs as deep as any chasm goes, but we're going to contain it in terms of our analysis and how we'll frame the story for that analysis to the 2021 adaptation. And no worries if you haven't actually seen that adaptation, because this presentation is solely going to consist of just a boatload of slides about Timothee Chalamet. I'm kidding. We'll have plenty of Timothee as we go along, but his adaptation of Paul, it'll just be a vehicle. That's another presentation for another day. But to frame things at the broadest level, we're talking today about international humanitarian law. And by that term, I don't mean necessarily like the delivery of water and first aid packages to a conflict zone. It encompasses some of that, but broadly speaking, when you use the term IHL for short, we're talking about a set of rules, a set of laws, a subset of international laws whose overall goal is to reduce suffering during armed conflict. It's there to limit the destructive effects of armed conflict, to rein things in. And IHL is all about protections. It's there to protect not only civilians and combatants. It also has room for just weird, sadistic nephews like Rabban. But it's all-encompassing. The idea here is that suffering doesn't know boundaries during armed conflicts. The business of suffering doesn't concern itself whether you're a civilian and sort of innocent in the conduct of the war, or you're a combatant, or even if you're Rabban, you can all suffer equally and so that we need some restraints put in to be able to put a check on that suffering. When it comes to IHL and DUNE, they actually go hand in glove, even if you've never thought about sort of the rules of war in the context of the film or this franchise before. And in reality, the lore, give me one second, the lore actually backs this up. So in DUNE, you have multiple great houses. I have three of them represented here. And you also have two other powerful, powerful entities in the DUNE galaxy. The Imperium, who we see in action in the film, and the Spacing Guild. Well, in DUNE canon, these sort of power players in the universe get together and they draft something called the Great Convention. Now without deep diving into the lore, understand that the Great Convention does a couple things. It lays down some strict rules governing war and feuds. And overall, it's put into place as agreement comes about because human life is seen as being absolutely precious. The protection of human life is determined to be paramount amongst these power players. So they come together, draft the Great Convention. It also has rules that specify how wars can be fought or the manner in which wars can be fought. So a key example of this is no use of atomic weaponry against humans. That represents a regulation of the type of warfare that's also embodied in that Great Convention within the story. So you have two sort of main call-outs for types of warfare that appear within the Great Convention. That of kanla, which is a sort of derivative of a Turkish word that I'm sure that I butchered and I apologize for doing so. And the concept of the war of assassins. These are two sort of okay or lawful types of warfare within the Great Convention in Dune. Now, kanla is demonstrated on screen in the 2021 film. This is the idea that certain houses are going to have these feuds or certain entities within the Dune galaxy are going to have feuds. It is a structure in which those feuds can be pursued, including through armed conflict, without exposing innocents to unnecessary danger or death. And so you see here that coming into the film, as we'll unpack here, both House Atreides and House Harkonnen are involved in a long-standing sort of centuries-old kanla form of warfare. Now, the Great Convention sounds a lot like our IHL. In fact, it sounds a lot like one of the bedrocks of IHL, the Geneva Conventions, which turn 75 years old today. There were Geneva Conventions that preceded the four famous ones coming after World War II, but they start to sound pretty similar. And outside of that sort of narrative structure, so the canon that has or embodies IHL within the actual story, the film really invokes the sort of emotional reaction that IHL is meant to get at, that sort of human urge to sort of balance the scales and not see or recoil from human suffering. We see it in the treatment of Leto Atreides as he is betrayed and killed. We see it in the treatment of Lady Jessica at the hands of the Harkonnen as they have really awful, nefarious plans for her after their attack and kidnapping her. So both in an emotional sense and a very literal canon sense, you have IHL embodied in Dune. So I want to use the fall of House Atreides, which sort of centers in the first movie as the device to analyze some specifics within the story. And for those that maybe haven't seen Dune or aren't familiar with the book or it's been a minute since you've watched the movie, let me just catch you up real quick. So the central planet that's involved here is called Arrakis. It has everything that you need, sand, more sand, even more sand. That sand happens to have a really valuable substance called spice, which floats through the air. It's essential to space navigation or interstellar navigation. It is extraordinarily valuable in the universe. Oh, by the way, it also has gigantic carnivorous worms that will come at a moment's notice sort of on demand. At the beginning of the movie, Arrakis is under the control of the very huggable, very lovable House Harkonnen. They're the stewards of the planet. They're in control of spice production and distribution. Just look at that face. It's a it's a face that any mother could love. 60 seconds into the movie, House Harkonnen gets the boot from Arrakis by the emperor and a new steward is put into place. That is House Atreides, led by Leto Atreides and his wife, Lady Jessica. And they in the background, as they are known to do, House Harkonnen is very good at taking bad news. So they take it predictably well. You know, they're completely OK with having to leave control of this valuable substance. And House Atreides answers the emperor's call, goes to Arrakis, sets up shop and then is immediately attacked, not just by House Harkonnen, but in sort of secret by the Imperium backed by the emperor. And so I'm going to talk about that, the business of classifying. Because that's central to any other analysis that we're going to do, and it's really critical to analyze really any IHL type of issue. Understand that IHL is not concerned with the reasons that someone or that parties go to war. There is a separate body of law that concerns the actual use of force between one party and another. What IHL is concerned with is the manner in which war is waged, the tactics, the means and methods, as we like to say. And so under IHL, there are two primary types of conflict, two and two alone. They try to make it fairly simple. You have international and non-international armed conflicts. Let's take a look at each of those in turn. An international armed conflict, fairly straightforward. You have two or more states. So in the context of IHL, we're talking about countries, right? And we have a resort to the use of armed force. Armed force is a fairly low bar. There's not a sort of requisite amount of armed force that has to be used. Notice in there that there's no requirement that there need to be a declaration of war. That's why we use the term armed conflict instead of war. Just understand that the terms, when we talk about this body of law, IHL is synonymous with the law of armed conflict. It's synonymous with the law of war. Armed conflict is just a term of art that recognizes that very rarely do we see outright declarations of war. So think about this. You've seen these, including in modern day, think about World War II. That's a classical IAC, as we call it. Additionally, the current war in Ukraine is also an IAC between Ukraine and Russia. So fairly straightforward concept. Applied to Dune, we see a classical structure of an international armed conflict. We have two major houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen. These houses are sort of the Dune equivalent of countries. They're sovereign. They have their own territorial control, their own political systems, their own military. You can liken Atreides and Harkonnen to random countries in the world. But suffice it to say that these are states. So you've got two or more states. Understand, I'm simplifying it here. I understand the Imperium is involved in the background. But for our purposes, we do have two or more states. And then we have a whole lot of armed force that's used. In fact, Harkonnen suddenly attacks House Atreides on Arrakis with multiple legions of troops. They're backed by three battalions of the emperor's sword. The Sardaukar, these ruthless soldiers, sort of indoctrinated and trained nearly from birth to do nothing but kill in conflict. So you have more than the requisite amount of force and of states to represent an international armed conflict. And this is exactly what the Great Convention sort of envisioned. In the Dune universe, the parties foresaw, including from their own history, the business of houses being in conflict against one another, the Imperium potentially being at war with houses, etc. So it makes sense that they fit within that sort of broad scope. This is also sort of the classical concept of war under international armed conflict. So as IHL was developed, really, you know, including in 1949, when you had the four Geneva Conventions adopted, the business of war was very typically a country versus a country, maybe versus other countries. Right. That was our real central concept of war. But warfare looks different on Arrakis. You don't just have the houses battling each other. And so that brings up the question of, well, if there's another conflict on here that doesn't necessarily fit the framework of an IAC, where do we go? And that's where non-international armed conflicts or NIACs come in. So understand NIACs are a more sort of recent legal term. I say recent in relative terms. You had additional protocol, too, of the Geneva Conventions, which came about in the late 70s. And it really put some legal framework recognizing NIACs sort of in a formal sense. Understand that this sort of recognition, AP2, came about because as World War II ended, the preceding decades saw lots of conflicts that didn't look like your classical IACs. You had internal war, civil wars, proxy wars that just proliferated around the globe. And suddenly there was a gap in IHL because those didn't fit the sort of classical definition of an IAC. So you have non-international armed conflicts. And what we're talking about here are conflicts of a non-international nature, so internal conflicts, right? The key factors that you're going to look at to consider whether something is a non-international armed conflict versus, say, just a sporadic riot or a civil disturbance are some key factors. We'll look at two, organization and conflict intensity in turn. So the conflict that we're looking at here is not House Harkonnen versus House Atreides, but Harkonnen versus the Fremen, so the native peoples of Arrakis. Their conflict has been going on even before House Atreides set foot on Arrakis and it continues after the beginning of this movie. So when we look at Fremen, the first category that we're going to look at is that of organization. And what we're talking about when we say organization is organization of an armed group. The Harkonnen are sort of an easy question, right? They are organized. They have a uniformed military. They are a sovereign nation, right? It makes sense from that standpoint. But in the context of a Nyack, you often have these organized armed groups or in some cases, unorganized armed groups that aren't affiliated with a sovereign state. That's a classic example of the Fremen. So we need to look at how they are organized to determine whether this is actually a Nyack. And you look at several factors, things like command and control, coordination and military operations, the territorial control that that armed group has. So the more of these categories that you have, the more command and control structure, the more coordination in their use of military force, the more territory that they control. Understandably, that means that they're actually an organized armed group that gets you into the realm of what would be considered a Nyack. And for the Fremen, they have all of these three things. So they have a fairly distinct command and control structure. It's clear throughout the first film that Fremen attacks, Fremen military operations are not a free-for-all where everyone just does whatever they feel like. You have Stilgar here, who's a classic sort of example, an embodiment of this command and control. He's a Naib, so that's a sort of a tribal leader of a Sich, so the Fremen term for a village or a community. But he also serves a combat function. He's sort of the commanding officer, at least in a sense, and helps to coordinate Fremen operations. You also have, you know, other examples throughout where it's clear that the average Fremen foot soldier is not just doing whatever they feel like. They are taking orders. That bleeds right into the category of the coordination of their military operations. It is absolutely clear that the effectiveness of the Fremen military operation, their insurgency against House Harkonnen in the Imperium, relies on their coordination. So they are conducting and have been for decades upon decades, these coordinated attacks. They are marshalling sort of high-end weaponry. They're marshalling troops from all over, from different Sichs. And with great effect, within the first few minutes of the movie, you see one of those attacks play out. The business of attacking spice harvesters, the business of attacking and waging conflict against someone as powerful as House Harkonnen, that really is going to demand a high level of command and control and coordination of your military operations. Otherwise, your insurgency just falls apart. Really, the dune is sort of anchored on the strength of the Fremen, not just as individual fighters, but as this sort of insurgent military force that's capable of really squaring off in a non-equal conflict against a far sort of technologically and numerically superior army. We call that asymmetrical warfare. They also control a sizable amount of territory. Now, you do get a little more flavor for that in this dune part two. But suffice it to say that on Arrakis, the Fremen have Sichs, these villages all over the place. They control the entire southern hemisphere of the planet, which is sort of shrouded by sandstorms. And there are millions of Fremen, you know, estimates between two to five, maybe as high as 10 million Fremen all over the place. It is clear throughout the film that the scope of House Harkonnen's control is pretty limited. You see Arakeen there on the screen there, sort of in the top right side of the map. That's sort of the central focus, focal point. But the Fremen have a really good foothold across. They control large slots of territory, even if they have to hit and use insurgent tactics against the Harkonnen military. And so what's clear here is that they have the requisite amount of organization to meet that standard for a NIAC. Now, the second factor that we have to look at is the intensity of the conflict, right? NIACs are not just sporadic sort of terroristic attacks or riots, that sort of thing. There has to be a sufficient bar that has to be cleared in terms of how intense that conflict is for it to clear the bar and be considered a NIAC. And so when we look at the conflict intensity, we're talking about things like the types of weaponry that are used, the number of soldiers that are being used, the length, the sort of time lapse of the conflict, all sort of kind of common sense factors that go into that analysis. And I submit to you that it is clear from the very beginning of this film that this conflict between the Fremen and House Harkonnen is incredibly intense. It easily clears the bar here. The Fremen have advanced weaponry, including the lase guns that you see there taking out a Harkonnen spice harvester. They have advanced tactics. They have been at war for years and years. And it involves just numerous soldiers. I mentioned that that number of Fremen that live on Arrakis, you know, two to ten million. If you took even say one to five percent of those soldiers, you're talking one to five percent of those of the Fremen population and said a one to five percent of Fremen are involved in military operations. That's a tremendous number of fighters, even for an insurgent group. You're talking tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of fighters involved. So you have a sizable, well-equipped, albeit insurgent military force. Certainly they are going toe to toe in vicious fashion against Harkonnen and their spice harvesting operation. So you clearly have conflict intensity here. And that gives us definitionally a non-international armed conflict. And so DUNE is great at showing us that how these two things exist in sort of the real world. But the question becomes, why do we care? What does this matter anyhow? Understand that different parts of IHL are implicated in both types of conflict. So you have international armed conflicts where the full scope of IHL applies. So every bit of IHL that you could think of is going to be triggered when you have an international armed conflict start. Not so with NIAC. So in a non-international armed conflict, you have a much narrower scope of rules that apply. Doesn't mean that there are no rules at all for a NIAC, but there is only a much smaller subset of them that are going to be triggered and apply. Understand that that changes sort of the protections that are afforded to those that are in the conflict. Very classically, prisoners of war. We've all heard that term, right? POWs for short, that's a legal status. It only exists in an international armed conflict. You're not going to have POWs as a legal status for folks captured on the battlefield in a NIAC. Just a classic example of the difference in some of those applicable laws between the two conflicts. So the result here is that we see a that sort of I, not Paul Atreides and the ladies on Al-Qaeda, but also you can have multiple types of conflicts in a single armed conflict. That sounds sort of brain busting. And I understand that if you're Rabin, you're probably not taking this too well. But here you have layered on top of one another, an IAC, an international armed conflict between Atreides and Harkonnen, layered on top of a non-international armed conflict between the Harkonnen and the Fremen. You could argue in some ways that maybe Atreides, as Paul joins the Fremen, that that changes the character. I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. Rabin would just rip me into pieces. But I know what you're all here for. You're like, why have we, it's been 27 minutes, why have we not talked about sandworms yet? Let's talk about sandworms in warfare. I almost made the entire presentation about sandworms. If you're not familiar with Dune, understand that beneath that beautiful desert surface of Arrakis live these horrifying creatures, sandworms. They're sort of revered by the Fremen. But these creatures, as you see here, that's not art, that's from the film. They are massive, massive carnivorous creatures that inhabit the subsurface of Dune and willingly attack sort of any living being. They're brought about by sort of the rhythmic motions on the surface of something like walking. Not that you would need to do that to get around Arrakis. So before we take a look at that sort of specifics with with sandworms, we have to ask about our focus is on animals and warfare, right? What does the law have to say about those two? And understand that historically speaking, animals have been around armed conflict, have been involved in armed conflict for as long as humans have fought one another. So whether that's as cavalry mounts for soldiers to carry them around or carry supplies, whether that's being used in a medical capacity such as in World War One, or whether you just have some elephants around and you think it would be cool for them to carry a machine gun, animals have been sort of intertwined with armed conflict time immemorial. Now, an issue that we run into is that both the Geneva Conventions and the Great Convention within Dune, well, they're human focused, right? These these aren't conventions or laws that are meant to deal with animals, right? It's right there in the title, International Humanitarian Law. It's anthropocentric, right? There's there's not a sort of a mention specifically of any animal in IHL. You're not going to find lions, tigers and bears. And so what you're left with is that in its current form, IHL regards animals as objects, the same as maybe a building or a weapon or a piece of property, et cetera. So you have this this weird treatment because of there being a gap in IHL. So you have these sort of ancillary references to animals that you sort of stretch and apply. Well, it begs the question, well, can you use sandworms in the context of Dune as a weapon of war? That seems pretty effective, right? If you can wield the power of these gigantic, just nasty creatures, that might be an effective tool against your enemy. Understand that IHL doesn't outright prohibit you from using an animal as a weapon of war. There's no provision in there that says you can't do this. So that means for Paul and the Fremen's purposes, right, it's a free for all. No rules. You could just summon them whenever. Well, not exactly, because as animals are regarded as objects, we can treat them if they're being used as sort of a weapon of war, just like any other use of military force. It has to comply with some of your core fundamental principles of IHL, things like military necessity. So only using your military force against the legitimate military target, distinguishing between civilians and combatants when you use that force and using force in a proportional way. So balancing collateral damage against that military advantage that you're going to gain. I didn't list here another category or another principle of unnecessary suffering. We won't touch that one, but I understand that's a consideration as well. So we see a sandworm get used in this exact fashion. So Kynes, as she is stabbed and rolled down a hill at the hands of the Sardaukar soldiers, she calls in a sandworm and we have to apply this analysis here to consider whether this complies with IHL. I don't think Kynes really cares because she obviously dies in the attack, but understand that sandworms don't really mesh up with the use of animals in war as we know it, right? Animals are and have been used as sort of a means of warfare, not just as a supply carrier or a way to sniff out bombs or something like that, whether it's using a horse machine gun or bat bombers. I assure you this is real. In World War Two, the American army invested about two million dollars researching turning bats into like bomb delivery devices. In current dollars, that would be like 30 million dollars in 2024 money spent to figure out if we could drop bombs by bats. It went horribly wrong. I don't have time for that now, but I look it up. It's crazy. But still, these are very different sort of scales of damage and destruction. These sandworms are massive in size. But here we get a nice black and white example of where a use of an animal is valid under the law of war. So she's using, she calls in the sandworms to attack these three fighters. So they are clearly combatants. Sardaukar, the sword of the emperor. So these are our soldiers through and through. They're uniformed. They have just attacked her. So in some regards, she's defending herself, although she's sacrificing herself. And there's no one around. There's no civilians. So when we talk about something like proportionality or distinction, she's calling it in a situation where the only folks that are going to get killed in this attack are the three Sardaukar and by extension herself. So there is no collateral damage in this except Kynes, right? She's sort of collateral damage if you want to consider her a non-combatant or a civilian. But in any event, it's a nice black and white example. And unfortunately for the Sardaukar, this is a lawful use of an animal in warfare. It's a crazy use. I remember seeing this and it blew my mind watching this happen. But if you're pounding the sand under certain circumstances, you can call in a sand worm and comply with the law of war. Sorry, Sardaukar, I wish I had better news for you. So the next bit we're going to talk about in our last issue here in the webinar is going to be the business of assassinations. So assassinations take center place in the 2021 Dune film and they take center place all too often in armed conflicts in our world as well. We're going to use two examples of assassinations from 2021 to illustrate how this works. We're going to take them in kind, but Dr. Yueh and Paula Trades are going to provide us a nice juxtaposition in analysis. So we talk assassination, right? This is a term like POWs that has wound its way into popular conscience, right? This is a term that has legal weight to it, but let's understand just the commonplace meaning. When we talk assassinate or assassination just in normal terms, we're really talking about a murder that is done by some sort of sudden or secret attack. I mean, it's easy to think about, say, the assassination of President Lincoln after the Civil War here in the U.S. is a great example of that, right? Nobody expected John Wilkes Booth to open fire on President Lincoln, sort of the classical example of an assassination, albeit one in peacetime at that point in time. The legal origins are far too long for me to go through here, but understand that the business of assassination and how it's regarded in the law goes all the way back, way before the Geneva Conventions were even a thought, to the days of knights and their code of chivalry that developed during this era of conflict. In sort of short fashion or concise fashion, the code of chivalry is this idea at its core that warfare, while it could be total in nature, had to have some limits. And the code of chivalry is this idea of honor or some level of professionalism, some boundary that constrained our actions during warfare, that not everything that you could do during war would be OK. So there's this concept that weaves its way through history, that assassination in certain contexts is looked down upon. It is outside the bounds of chivalrous conduct in armed conflict. It's a sneaky way, an untoward way to attack or kill your enemy. Understand that assassination, just like the example that I gave you of President Abraham Lincoln, it isn't confined to wartime. Assassination can and does happen during peacetime. But what we're concerned with here and in the context of Dune is assassination during armed conflict. And the term does encompass and IHL considers this practice in the context of armed conflict. When we analyze what assassination is under armed conflict, you're going to see a similar definition, but with one key difference. So we're going to talk about treacherously killing or wounding an adversary by sort of similar means. IHL doesn't consider or doesn't put limitations on what assassination or by another term, a targeted killing could be. It doesn't have to be by some surreptitious or clandestine means. That's just sort of classically how we think about it. But the key word there is treacherously. That is what differentiates it from a lawful act and an unlawful act. And when we mean when we talk about treachery in the context of IHL, it's really embodied in the concept of perfidy. Right. So the idea here is that assassination within armed conflict has a much narrower scope in terms of what's allowed and what's not allowed. So when we look to the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols, perfidy is specifically mentioned. It is described as in layman's terms, basically tricking an enemy into believing that you have legal protection and your whole intent is to betray that confidence. So IHL gives us some great examples of this. The Geneva Conventions does. So think about faking a surrender. So waving a white flag only to have your enemy sort of drop their guard and then you attack them. Faking an injury. So pretending to be down and out of the fight to have the enemy come to prevent provide you aid only to attack them or pretending to be a civilian only to open fire. So understand perfidy is that idea of treachery in armed conflict that certain things are allowed. But the business of inviting that confidence only to betray that confidence, that's outside the bounds. That's that's not allowable. So let's take up these two examples of assassinations in turn. We'll talk Dr. Yueh first. And we see early on in the Dune film that Dr. Yueh betrays and helps assassinate Leo Atreides. So he has sort of given the Harkonnen key information, key intel to be able to attack House Atreides. He helps lower the shields and he ends up incapacitating Leto in order to deliver him to the Harkonnens. And he describes this to Leto in sort of really cold terms. He struck a deal and Leto is the price and by extension House Atreides is the price. Now to frame this, you have to understand a little bit about Dr. Yueh and they don't give all the context that really adds weight to this betrayal in in the film. But Dr. Yueh is a Suk doctor. He is the longtime House physician for Atreides. And what's not explained in the film, but it is in the book, is that he has just years and years of imperium conditioning, this intense training and indoctrination that to all outward appearances makes him just incorrigible. He cannot be forced to betray anyone. He cannot be made to turn on those that he's loyal to. And House Atreides knows this. Leto knows this. And so they have him in this this close position to the family. You see him with access to Paul, with access to Leto and Lady Jessica. He knows intimate family secrets. He obviously knows tactical secrets that the Atreides, that's important for the Atreides military. So he's in this really close knit trust. You do see that closeness in the film, even if you don't have the background. It's just that the the sort of weight in the surprise behind his betrayal is a little bit more intense in the film. But understand that background. So he's in this position of trust and all along he is a Harkonnen agent. Now, we're going to set aside the rationale for his decision to betray House Atreides. In reality, the Harkonnens have Dr. Yueh's wife. They're torturing her. It's cutting the steel is Yueh's only way to sort of release her from this awful fate at the hands of House Harkonnen. But bottom line, he is a double agent for the Harkonnens, for the Atreides enemy. And the weight of that betrayal or that the core nature of this sort of treacherous element of the assassination is embodied just in one word that Leto utters. Dr. Yueh tells him he's the price and Leto just he can't get out much, but he does say why. And you're left as an audience member to just scratch your head. I mean, it's shocking in the book and it's shocking in the film as well that this close advisor, this confidant of the family would turn in this capacity and use that sort of confidence to incapacitate, to seriously injure Leto and ultimately lead to his death. Now, let's contrast that and look at the assassination attempt on Paul. So the difference here, Paul faces an assassination attempt sort of shortly after Dr. Yueh puts his plan into motion. And there's this hunter seeker that burns its way through a wall. These are tiny, just very, very deadly automated devices. The tip there is not just a scary looking needle. It is a poison tip needle that can bring you instant death, right? It is a just a ruthlessly efficient killing machine. And we see after Paul foils the attempt and smashes the hunter seeker that it's being controlled by a Harkonnen agent that's embedded himself surreptitiously in the wall. Understand that this is a good example of a ruse or deception in armed conflict, so that Harkonnen agent has in clandestine fashion hidden himself in the wall. He's using this automated sort of killing machine. It is controlled directly by that operator. He has to be in close range. That's sort of how they find him after the attack is foiled. And under IHL, ruses and deceptions, broadly speaking, are permitted. The law of war IHL doesn't operate to prevent you from deceiving your enemy or conducting a ruse. Think about D-Day, the invasion of Normandy in World War II. That entire invasion, the success of that huge operation was hinged on deception, a ruse to make the Nazis think that we were going to land in a different place, forcing them to commit the bulk of their forces in a different area than where Allied forces actually landed. Without this sort of provision or this allowance, warfare would be much, much tougher. And I would say, I would submit to you that if ruses and deception weren't allowed, the overall level of suffering would actually go up in armed conflict. However, when we contrast these two assassination attempts or assassination examples, you see the difference in legal analysis. So in Paul's case, you do have a ruse and a bit of deception there by the embedded Harkonnen agent. But no one has tricked Paul into thinking that there's some legal protection that's owed. He thinks he's safe within the confines of this building in Erekin, but that doesn't really match with the definition of perfidy, just a geographical confidence in where you are doesn't constitute perfidy, right? What we are seeing here is a clandestine means of trying to attack an enemy. I understand I'm setting aside questions of whether Paul is a lawful target. He is 15 in the film, so he's young. I think there's an argument that he's a civilian and not a combatant. But we're going to set that aside here and just say that in the context here, you're looking at a lawful ruse of war, a lawful deception during armed conflict. Contrast that with Dr. Yue, who used that close-knit status with the family to invite their confidence, to allow him to gain information that was in proximity to key members of the Atreides family to get close. He then all the while had the intent of betraying them, or at least as they arrived on Arrakis. And so that's a classical definition of perfidy. So that betrayal of confidence versus, in Paul's case, albeit deadly, but a ruse or a deception in war. So one is lawful, the other is not. I want to thank all of you for coming out today. I know we went through a lot of analysis. There are so many IHL issues. And what I hope is that you can go back and watch Dune Part One or Dune Part Two. Go back and read the books again and see things through a different lens. These movies are chock full of IHL examples. I could have gone on for hours here, dissecting everything from using the voice on combatants to sort of Paul's status as a combatant. I'm going to fall down the rabbit hole if I keep going. But if you want to learn more about our program here at the Red Cross, about upcoming events that we have like this one, or volunteer opportunities, how you can get involved, please go to our website, RedCross.org slash IHL. You can navigate there using that QR code, and I'll have that at the end here. You can also check out our YouTube channel, which houses all of our content, all of our IHL content. This video will be on that YouTube channel in short order in a few days. But you can explore different types of IHL content and really learn a lot about the field of law. You can also join our email list and get informed. We send out monthly updates on upcoming events and whatnot. So I want to thank you, and I hope that you learned something here today. I hope that at the very least, I've inspired you to watch Dune again or maybe watch Star Wars. I would be OK with either. But thank you for coming. There's your QR code in the corner there. We'll be back hosting this again tonight in a live encore. So if you have friends, if you have colleagues, family members who didn't make it to this one, please encourage them. We'll be live tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. Thank you so much for attending, and we hope to see you next time.