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If you did then I must have imagined the exact same thing.
In The Grimdark of Fanfiction -40k
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samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Assuming that a (mostly) unified humanity was necessary, the way in which Big E went about doing that was not, even if we think that the line about a hundred worlds rejoicing for every one that refused the initial offer was exaggerated.
Agriculture is typically part of civilization, yes.
Altering existing humans to make them into cattle, but yes.
Although I would like to point out that Orks understanding the concept of "cattle" at all is hella impressive already, let alone comprehending the idea that you can do more with a civilian beyond kill/eat/work-to-death.
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Wobulator
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And yet, somehow, I'm not very inclined to think of them as having humanity's best interests in mind.
So.... if you make 40k not 40k, you change things about it. Congrats?
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This is a shitty argument though. With this logic then we can "choose" for the IoM to be a totally nice place and justified in its actions and we should be right by following your logic.
Something being fiction does not preclude one from having a meaningful discussion and if you think it does then you may as well not get involved in any such argument.
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They're saying the galaxy does not justify the Imperium in all 40k media, and that if someone can cherrypick to present it as justified, someone can do the same in reverse.
Like, really easily. Hell, given current canon has Guilliman desperately trying to unfuck things, there's strong evidence that current canon is that for much of the last 10 thousand years, things were fucked.
Like, really easily. Hell, given current canon has Guilliman desperately trying to unfuck things, there's strong evidence that current canon is that for much of the last 10 thousand years, things were fucked.
Chloe Sullivan
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No it wasn't.
anyone who tells you facism is necessary for anything except misery is full of shit.
Fascism is an inherently inefficient way to set up your society.
given the Warp and how chaos gods feed off the misery the correct strategy is to minimize the awfulness of your society, not increase it.
the mere fact that's it's named the Imperium is enough to show that shit is fucked. Imperialism is a fundamentally self defeating posture to take in the face of fucking evil warp gods of despair and violence and plotting against others.
what the Emperor is a a dude who came into being in an age where humans were tribes led by strongmen, and who never really understood how to be a leader in any mode except that of the primitive strongman. Sure, with space tech and gilt plating, but ultimately just a strongman ruling on the basis of personal power and coercion, no more enlightened than immortan joe.
He's basically the Classical Greek or Norse god - just a upjumped human nobleman writ-large, mandatory assholeness magnified by 'divine' power.
And let's be clear, while he may have preached an atheistic Imperial Truth, his philosophical justification for rule is basically just Divine Right. I know what is best because I am bigger and (psionically) stronger than you puny mortals.
However, just like with the pagan gods who were more an amplification of human flaws than any expression of divine superiority, the Emperor clearly did not know best. Any fucking second year Sociology student could point out the glaring flaws in what he was doing.
but no, he knows best and he has the psionic chops to declare than by might and make people go along with it. Which is kind of the problem. He doesn't persuade people he has the right way, he uses coercion- Be it raw psychic might or armies or the offer of desperately needed supplies (mind the strings) and services. It's fundamentally an unstable structure rooted, at the end of the day, solely in coercive application of force.
tzeetch and nurgle and khnorne couldn't ask for better playground than one built on such foundations.
This guy was never going to beat the chaos gods. He's too fucking dumb and up his own ass to have any idea how.
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Not saying that, just that they were leagues ahead of other Orks on the whole "actually has a culture" thing.
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So they're Imperial but honest about it, it's still not a worse situation than canon for most humans! Less genocide even, since they practiced sustainable farming practices with conquered sentients instead of wiping them out!
You have the human victory, where the Imperium is half-destroyed fighting the Beast anyways, wipes out a bunch of species, technologies, and alternate governments that might have helped out, and then periodically commits genocide for the next ten thousand years while horribly repressing its own population.
And the Beast victory, where the Imperium is half-destroyed fighting the Best, and the Orcs enslave a bunch of species, technologies, and alternate governments that might have helped out, then periodically commits less-thorough genocide for the next ten thousand years while horribly repressing its own population.
Really, raising humans as cattle is just the Beast being more honest about things than the Imperium is. There are definitely canon examples of the Imperium reprocessing corpses as food, after all.
(There's a solid argument that post-Emperor Imperium is better than the Beast but hey this is mostly me meming)
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This is not the Beast victory. The Beast victory is a completely destroyed Imperium and the Orks (or should I say Krork?) finally reaching their true potential as von neumann weapons and killing off all life in the galaxy as they snowball into the worst nightmare this side of the Devourer. Then they actually meet the Devourer a few millenia later and probably collapse the Milky Way into a supermassive black hole.
Mind you, some people may consider this a better ending than letting the IoM "win" but liking of 40K aside, I do not like EDGE that much.
Wobulator
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Dictatorships(or generally highly powerful states with weak citizenry) tend to arise when facing large amounts of external pressure- democracies tend to be too slow at the sort of decisionmaking required(if you want an example of this, look at the vast increases in executive power in WW1 and WW2 in the US and UK). Pretending that democracy(or any other form of citizen rule) would work in the Imperium is incredibly dubious at best, especially given the issues with communications and travel that they have.
People like to exalt democracy as the end-all be-all government structure, but it has its flaws, the same as any other form. It is probably the best in peacetime, but in times of war(which the imperium has been in for *ten thousand years*), it simply is not fast enough to do act as the situations require. If all of the people trying to eat humanity stop doing that(probably via large-sale application of ordinance), then sure, a democracy would be better. Given that that's not likely to be completed anytime soon, democracy's flaws still hold it back.
Saying that it being an empire is a damning indictment is.... odd, to say the least, given that the definition of an empire is "a large nation with a single person heading it". Not exactly awful.
You are also completely ignoring how the one statistic we have regarding peaceful vs. forceful assimilation is a hundred to one in favor of peace. Is there some room for fuzz? Sure. Is there enough room to make the ratio even remotely negative? No.
So you're saying that.... humans being turned into livestock for slave labor and food is better than the Imperium? That's an.... interesting opinion.
Chloe Sullivan
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That one statistic does not override dozens of other sources that imply it is at best propaganda if not outright deluded. Peaceful integration does not require euphemisms like "compliance." You use such euphemisms when you are war-crimes-ing your way to taking over.
I have used the word "democracy" zero times up until now. You brought that up. Again, you seem set on false dichotomy. Even dictatorships can do better than fascist failure hatewheel - and have, historically
The Pre-Emperor could have tried to hold together or restore the Federation. He could have built alliances with other human factions and even Xeno ones. He could even have gone the hegemonic route, which would likely have been pretty bloody but less genocidal.
instead he went full genocide and conquest. No associated powers, no semi-autonomous subordinate states. Everything must be absorbed into his imperium or wiped out. That's morally repugnant on top of being wasteful of resources and feeding the very chaos gods who are supposedly the Great Enemy so much slaughter and misery to strengthen them.
And the Imperium very much was an Imperialistic system as a historian would define it - his massive projects were focused on Terra, he bled systems outside the center for resources (literal Human Resources often enough), he deliberately chose to run with a heavily stratified society with a gene-engineered warrior caste and literal nobility. Human populations were left in primitive circumstances, even as the resources of their world fed a massive military industrial complex.
The fundamentals structure of the imperium is stratified, extractive, exploitative, and unresponsive, and while it got worse after the Heresy, all these elements were strongly present from the start.
and all these elements make the imperium more vulnerable to subversion by chaos and tyranids and other forces, not less.
but hey, maybe it's not fair to lay it all on Big E. The shamans who merged into him fucked up. They didn't know the strength that collective action and institutions could give to humans who had the chance to really build up a society. They only knew tribal strongmen because thwas about the extent of their socialpolitical and sociocultural development. So they made big strong psionic dude who could be the strongman who warded away lions and kept the village in compliance by might.
this may be been a okay plan for their time. It was not a plan that could scale up to a galaxy-spanning nation.
Ironically while the eldar werre in a worse position than humanity when it came to the soul eating evil gods bearing down on them, they did a much more culturally advanced job of responding to "oh shit chaos gods." They used community planning and institutions and other more advanced social tools than the mere 'big dude.' WH40k lore likes to portray the eldar as backstabbing, prone to disunity, and generally not cooperative with anyone, they at least had a more complex and sensible approach than 'let's try to outgod the evil gods and expect our baby god to know what the fuck he is doing with no playbook beyond "be a bigger shaman, I guess" guys, how could this go wrong?'
and it went wrong. That's canon. Emps fucking up is explicitly canon. I don't know whey people try to defend his fuckups.
You can barely Internet at all without tripping over memes about Big E being a shit parent. Why would anyone think he's any less shit a head of state? The guy can't into leadership enough to have his kids get along. If he thinks the imperium is necessary, that's a glaring red warning sign that the imperium is not only not necessary, it's an active detriment.
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Isn't the Eldar's defence against Chaos literally "let's outgod them with our own pantheon if (probably) artificial gods"? Which worked pretty well for them until said pantheon fucked off to do their own thing and the Eldar created a new Chaos god...
Virian
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He fucked up in implementation not in what he actively tried to accomplish. Uniting humanity was something he succeeded at, at least mostly.
Because parenting skills=/= leadership skills. Also the guy met his kids for the first time ( before they were stolen doesn't count as they were babies) when they were literally centuries old in some cases. They already developed their personalities with little to no imput from him. Raising centuries old demigods of death and destruction is no walk in the park, especially when you start doing it when they're adults.
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So by your standards if I say that eating food is necesarry, then it's in fact a detriment to my wellbeing? Please explain your logic.
And look where their so called 'sensible approaches' left them. The craftworlders require a limited resource they can't produce on their own in order to not get their souls eaten by the god they created, The DE feed said god the suffering of others so that their souls get spared for a while longer and the Exodites decided to say fuck it and live on Maiden worlds isolated from the galaxy. Truly their solution is so much more sensible. And the baby god approach is something they're now trying to do, or did you forget about Y'nnead.
You keep shitting on the Imperium but just like most of the people doing so, you fail at providing an alternative solution to what the Emperor could have done. Sure all this work of cooperation and doing only diplomacy is all nice and good on paper but does it actually work? I'll tell you a secret, In 40k it doesn't. It's been said that there were civilizations built on mutual cooperation between species but what happened to them? They got stomped.
The most successful/advanced civilizations are not those that tickle your own sense morals, but those that survive the test of time when those that once stood equal or superior to them do not, because unlike what you might believe you can't claim to be superior to someone that is looking at your corpse after they killed you.
The most advanced and 'morally superior' civilizations are not the most benevolent, but those that can claim they've survived the longest.
Chloe Sullivan
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No, the elder didn't give a shit about chaos gods until the fucked up and made one - and then it went on to eat their pantheon, and then started eating them, at which point they then started making paths and shrines and organizations other stuff that actually takes advantage of institutions.
A major problem with the imperium is that the emperor clearly did not grok institutions, which is why all of the imperiums institutions are terrible at their jobs assuming they actually try to do them or even know what they are in the first place.
the ministorum is a dumpster fire that fails to allocate resources well and doesn't actually fix problems it should fix because there is no accountability to the people who need resources or help. Calling the inquisition a dumpster fire is an insult to dumpsters.
like "let me make 20 demigod sons (Who May be pieces of my self) to rule my legions" is not the act of someone who can into government.
Might and survival don't make right. They just mean you can asshole harder and longer.
Point of order 1: The Emperor did not succeed at uniting humanity. The Horus heresy was a literal civil war. Civil war is the opposite of United.
and the post-heresy Imperium, which isn't even all of humanity, isn't really united for the most part. The few institutions that survive hold some things together, but functionally the Mechanus Ecclesiarchy and Ministorum are rivals whose cooperation is grudging and often only nominal, and sometimes is outright warfare. The leading cause of death for inquisitors and nobility in the imperium is other inquisitors and nobility, respectively.
Point of order 2: I listed multiple alternatives:
Be NATO instead of being the Spanish Empire - an ally leading an alliance rather than a forced colonizer/occupier
Be Ming China instead of Nazi Germany - the paternalistic hegemon rather than the genocidal looting economy.
Bring worlds into "association" rather than "compliance."
Space Catholic Nazis Empire is not the only option and anyone who says it is probably has some nasty ulterior motives.
NATO and Ming China are far from my idea of Good, but they are by any sensible measure much less Bad than the Nazis and Conquisadors.
Point of order 3: Someone who has repeatedly shown to be bad at people should be distrusted when they make claims about society. It's not fucking rocket science.
If Trump says X cures corona virus, assume it's actually poison.
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Baron Ouroboros
Emerald Leaves and Crimson Petals
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It's simple: imperium's evil, emps is flatly ridiculous in his golden getup, and treating the great crusade as a serious attempt in a serious rational universe results in fascist apologia, which is gross.
Man was an arrogant tyrant who happened to have cosmic powers. That should be obvious. Maybe he had good intentions once, given he's a Perpetual who's lived for millennia, but by the Great Crusade he's the very picture of an militaristic-imperialist dictator.
Taking the universe so seriously as to attempt to find justifications for all the jackboots, when it has corpse starch, cockney-accented fungus men, and daemons from hell, is cringeworthy. And trying to paint the Imperium as a necessary evil, 'best of all possible worlds' society is frankly disgusting as it is stupid. It reeks of someone's desperate attempt to conceive a universe where their fascistic fantasies are fully justified and actually good, instead of being the deranged propaganda of real life fascist states that they mirror.
Man was an arrogant tyrant who happened to have cosmic powers. That should be obvious. Maybe he had good intentions once, given he's a Perpetual who's lived for millennia, but by the Great Crusade he's the very picture of an militaristic-imperialist dictator.
Taking the universe so seriously as to attempt to find justifications for all the jackboots, when it has corpse starch, cockney-accented fungus men, and daemons from hell, is cringeworthy. And trying to paint the Imperium as a necessary evil, 'best of all possible worlds' society is frankly disgusting as it is stupid. It reeks of someone's desperate attempt to conceive a universe where their fascistic fantasies are fully justified and actually good, instead of being the deranged propaganda of real life fascist states that they mirror.
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Except the galaxy HAD the Roddenberry ideal during the Dark Age of Technology. However, that all came crashing down with the birth of Slaanesh (Eldar Parties, not even once) and the Men of Iron going full skynet. Then you had 5000 years of a galaxy wide Mad Max fest until the creation of the Eye of Terror, which doesn't lend itself to the Roddenberry ideals surviving (Remember, Star Trek is from the perspective of Philosopher Kings living in Space Ivory Towers until DS9). That's the thing many forget about 40k, even though the opening text is very much that the Imperium is far from the glory days of humanity and that the twilight days are upon it.
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Chloe Sullivan
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I don't think we have all that much information on the federation, but what little we have does not indicate it was very Roddenberry, AFAIK.
Also, there's nothing to suggest the imperium would weather half it's technology turning against it's masters suddenly and widely the way the men of iron did. If anything, the imperium is less able to resist such a thing since so few, proportionally actually understand their tech.
Virian
Sage of Reason and incomplete information
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Rule 3: Be Civil - I've seen this on places like reddit before so I know the intended usage of "trump derangement syndrome" here is meant to be completely uncivil.
If being an asshole means you survive then that means that you get to be an asshole. Survival is a priority, moral superiority is not. Why didn't the so called 'morally superior' societies survive too? Why didn't they get to be mighty too? That's because being a pacifist is not conductive to survival when you're surrounded by people that want you dead.
That's a direct result of enemy action not a failure of the government. A faction that would have been hostile to the Imperium regardless of what the Imperium tried to do.
What you said here is a direct consequence of the civil war making things worse and worse. Yes the system in place did make it all possible but considering the system hadn't been properly set up that's a given. The Imperium was in the process of consolidating it's gains after 2 centuries of war, and then the civil war came.
NATO vs Spanish empire. Hmm be an alliance of nations with a common enemy but no actual power or unity. NATO might look good on paper but so far it hasn't been tested in an actual crysis that affected it's very foundation, so the first of your suggestions is a mostly unbloodied military alliance, we're off to a great start. Especially as the thing is not even a century old
China... you want to use China as an example of unity. Sure Ming China was better than most iterations of the country but falling into civil war every few centuries is not much better than what the Imperium did. I mean 276 years vs 200-ish years is an improvement but not by much.
On the Association vs Compliance. Hmm, I'll concede that the name could have been more thought out.
Don't bring politics into this, and take your TDS( or TAS if we're using the official version) out of here. The last thing we need is for this place to be closed off because you couldn't hide your Trump hateboner.
It did... the HALF of the Adeptus Mechanicum rebelled as well and they held many technologies the Imperium now can no longer replicate because the onyl ones holding it decided to infest it with daemons and start killing off everyone.
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Chloe Sullivan
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Imperium apologists like to argue that the imperium's terrible practices are necessary to resist chaos.
The fact that chaos managed to break into the imperium's (weak) institutions and cause the heresy in relatively short order, is in fact the obvious counterargument to such arrant nonsense.
Far from having to tear down multiple resilient institutions with built-in cheks and redundancies, Chaos only had to infiltrate a handful of corruption-priests into a few legions and it snowballed rapidly from there.
If this is your idea of a strong defense against evil cognitohazard psi-gods, boy do I not trust you to run anything, let alone a government.
The eldar Path system has a lot of downsides but it's known to have kept many individual eldar stable for several times longer than the Imperium stood "unified."
because again, the eldar response was the response of a culture/society. The imperial response to chaos was the response of one superman way in-over-his-head; dragging trillions who frankly deserved better with him into his fascist hatewheel fail-state.
Except, the Imperium was the result of half of humanity's technology turning against it (AI being considered Abominations and the use of human brains instead). Even the standard preamble to any 40k book hammers home that the Imperium is the decaying remnants of humanity, and that the Great Crusade was a rushjob to unify humanity before the Rangda and Orks could wipe out humanity ("I'll leave that problem for later" was what bit Big-E in the ass, big time). As for the Eldar, they spent 5k years partying Slaanesh into existence, and most of its remnants still party away in the Webway (with the Pathway being a minority, most of whom are tiptoeing on eggshells lest the Prince of pleasure devour their soul).
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The Curious Fan
Perpetually sleep deprived
Between the implied slave revolt of the MoI and the widespread genetic collapse because of the DAoT's reckless tampering they were hardly an ideal. The people who made the Butchers Nails (among other things) part of the standard colonist kit were probably a nightmare of their own, just a more automated one.
Virian
Sage of Reason and incomplete information
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Imperium's practices post Heresy have made it harder for rebellions to have the same effect as Horus but indeed have done little to prevent them. That is indeed a problem, but what do you expect of a rush job of a government?
Yes Chaos succeeded in bringing down the Imperium's institutions because those institutions were not yet fully formed. It's easier to bring down a house when you haven't finished building it.
Also if your response to dealing with multiple civilizations that probably want you and yours dead or enslaved is to sing of the power of friendship and hope they listen then I don't think you should ever be outside the ivory tower you call home.
As for the craftworlders look where they are now. Vagrants in space, without planets, without a fixed territory and little hope for expansion while constantly being in decline and hated by everyone that ever met them.
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Chloe Sullivan
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The imperium justifies it's cruelties and horrors on the basis of fighting Chaos. big E knew called chaos the great enemy. Yet his action if anything did more to push his sons into chaos's waiting arms than anything.
if you want to justify Yourself on the basis of X, it's reasonable to expect that you actually address X in some constructive manner. The imperium did not address X competently. Therefore, it is not justified, QED.
i don't expect anything, let alone a government, to be perfect, but 1) calling the imperium a government is dubious, and more importantly, 2) a state that tries to justify itself on the basis of fighting X being subverted by X almost immediately (on the historical scale) is clearly a shit show.
The Chaos justification is a lie. The emperor did the awful things he did because that's just the sort of guy he is, not to resist Chaos. Because his actions clearly did not in any way slow down chaos. If anything they accelerated it.
it's the lie fascists and totalitarians and other shitty ideologues always tell. "There is a threat and we most do X to avert it. It's the only way."
It's a lie. It's always a lie.
Real problems are complex and need to be addressed holistically and with understanding of context. Otherwise you don't actually solve them.
The imperium is not justified. The Emperor did not save humanity from chaos and pretty well damned half his own sons to it.
there were many possible alternatives to the IOM of canon and it's absurd to believe that none of them were better.
Except there were more immediate threats (Rangda - Who were a big enough threat that at least one legion was wiped out, and the rapidly evolving Orks) and Big-E had to focus on them first. The Heresy series spells out clearly that he had made a lot of mistakes and was scrambling to the finish line and cutting corners. And coming off the heels of the Age of Strife, you aren't going to get many options that a 2nd ed Paladin would approve of.