Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM) was one of the major galactic organisations in the time of the Corrino Empire and later the Atreides Empire, a gigantic monopoly encompassing all forms of commerce across the Imperium which essentially controlled all economic affairs across the cosmos, although it relied upon the Spacing Guild for transport across space due to the Guild's monopoly on faster-than-light travel. CHOAM touched almost all products the Guild will transport, from art forms to technology and of course melange. Many Houses depended on CHOAM profits, and an enormous proportion of those depended on melange. Most economic ventures were conducted through CHOAM, in which the Imperial House, the Landsraad, and Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild all had a stake.
CHOAM directorships were the real evidence of political power in the Imperium, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Landsraad as it balanced itself against the Emperor and his supporters. Directorship in the CHOAM was the key to wealth, each noble House dipping from the company's coffers whatever it could under this power.

Something something monopolistic tendencies of capital, I am on my hands and knees begging these bozos to just read a fucking book

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 43 points 9 months ago

Glad someone mentioned CHOAM, it's basically Wall Street if Wall Street physically owned all the markets as a simplification and rather blunt criticism.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 31 points 9 months ago

NOAM CHOAMSKY 😳

[–] CTHlurker@hexbear.net 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Okay serious question, what the fuck is up with the names of things in Dune? Landsraad looks suspiciously like a Danish word for a house of parliament (though I think ours was specifically called Landsting rather than Landsraad) and the bad guys are apparently named Harkonen, which is also the name of every 4th guy in Finland, so like, was that writer on some weird mission against Scandinavia?

[–] Leon_Grotsky@hexbear.net 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

This is difficult to answer precisely without my nice thick leatherbound copy of the series in front of me with its notes and appendices to quote from directly lol.

Trying to show weird through-lines and syncretism of recognizable cultural motifs is an important part of Herbert's world building. Here is a very good article published just before the first Villeneuve movie came out by a professor of Islamic Studies on this question but from the angle of the Islamic/Arabic influences on the text.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/10/11/paul-atreides-led-a-jihad-not-a-crusade-heres-why-that-matters

The trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like “Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978 interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from “colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”, mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past, present, and future.

You can replace Arabic and Islam in that final line with "Scandinavian" if you'd like, but the point being it's to make sure there's something in the setting that makes it feel both familiar and alien at the same time.

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I love Dune for things like this. For example, the religion of the Fremen is Zensunni, a religion founded by a breakaway sect from Maometh aka the Third Muhammad. Their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible, which takes from the Bible of our own time but also mixes it with points of wisdom from the Butlerian Jihad.

[–] Leon_Grotsky@hexbear.net 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

And "Orange Catholic Bible" in itself tells us that the schism in Christianity was healed, referring to the Orange Order of protestants in Northern Ireland and (obviously) the Catholic Church

[–] SpiderFarmer@hexbear.net 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No lie, Herbert saw the name Harkonnen in a phone book and thought it sounded Russian. He wanted a scary Russian name to suit the evil, Machiavellian, despotic homosexual villain that was Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Of all the names to sound Russian, it looks Nordic to me

[–] SpiderFarmer@hexbear.net 4 points 9 months ago

It's actually Ural-Hungarian, if we want to be pedantic.