No, fascism has a "very specific definition" only if you want to define fascism poorly. The fascist ideologies of the early 20th century were not homogenous, they had a variety of ideals and government structures. It's far more practical to define fascism by the common characteristics of its adherents.
Furthermore, I already addressed this, the Imperium is not decentralized because it wants to be. It's a product of the logistical problems of having an empire that size. Using it as evidence that they are not fascist is fallacious, it would be like asserting that Nazi Germany wasn't genocidal because it failed to completely exterminate the Jewish race. A lack of capability is not the same thing as a lack of intent.
I am not aware of any definition of fascism that does not cover the IoM, and any that doesn't is almost certainly worthless. If you compare the Imperium of Man to fascist states like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and others the similarities are clear.
I think the imperium lacks the core ideals of fascism to be actually fascist, but has enough of the trappings that it is easy to read fascism into it, although, ironically, the imperium is more fascist under guilliman than it was before. Ultimately though, they lack the concept of the popular will through which the supreme leader is to embody in the face of intense bureaucracy. It isn't solving the issues of economic turmoil through intense subversion to the will of the state.
There is more to fascism than the racism and brutality and cult of violent death. It's all consuming submission to the will of the nation embodied by the state, through the will of a supreme leader. There is an ideology there.
that all said, most of GW's writers are hardly historians or political scientists and fascism is an easy mine, for good or ill.
Good thing that no one is doing that.
I am using the common traits of fascism
as defined by Umberto Eco.
There is no "technical definition of being fascist", the term is not one that has a neat definition. You're obviously right that utilizing an excessively broad definition is not useful, but it's just as bad to use a hyper-restricted definition.
Actually, when you take into account Eco's definition, ironically the protagonists of many imperium based books are more fascist than the general governance of the imperium. Fascism doesn't play well with stratified bureaucracies that are the obstacle many an imperial hero has to cut away, often violently, to get things really done.
Now, it is possible that the imperium is roughly the shape that a fascist nation will settle in to provided the time to do so, but, I dunno, fascism is such a volatile ideology that I'm not sure there can ever be a stable enough fascist state that manages more than a generation. Certainly no fascist state in reality has survived much longer than that. Even the Iberian fascists didn't outlive their leaders for long.
I do think examinations of fascism through the lens of fiction are interesting though, particularly since, well, none of the authors or creators of 40k are, themselves, fascists. How did so much of the trappings of fascism sneak into 40k? Why did it start to lose the satire? Why are so many of the heroes even more fascist than the state they are fighting to support?
I am rapidly tiring of this discussion, you have repeatedly asserted that the Imperium of Man *definitely* isn't fascist and yet the only one to provide any traits of fascism is myself.
Dogmatically insisting that "true" Fascism cannot be decentralized at all is neither useful nor particularly compelling. Fascism is a type of ideology, it is not a government structure. There is nothing contradictory about a fascist state that is feudal out of necessity.
I do think you're wrong here. Ideologies coincide with certain structures. Liberalism seeks out certain political structures. Fascism does the same. Fascism is a political structure, you can't have really have a non totalitarian fascist state. Totalitarianism is required to be fascist, and a totalitarian government only has so many forms. Further, the veneration of the will of the volk embodied by the leader trends super hard to autocracy, and the ideal fascist state is an autocratic one. You can't drain these out of fascism and keep it fascist.
Avoiding the rabbit hole.
Personally, i think the best stories from the universe are either
- Partially comedic (Cain Archives)
- Emphasise the plight of the common man/Eldar who isn't one of the big named character either trying to live their lives
- Focus on people trying to rationalise the horrible decisions they make, and seeing the internal contradictions manifest and bite them in the arse. (commander who callously abandons his troops see's everything he has burn, dark eldar trying to understand romance, Tau chafing under the constraints of the greater good)
- Humanise the unlikable characters (chaos, dark eldar), them remind you how horrible they actually are.
The thing i hate most would be faction invincibility.
Chaos: Never really losing anything in story and not really having a loose condition. The Dark gods are perfectly safe and unthreatened. Demon Princedom is the best immortality in the verse. Chaos Space marines and cultists are an effectively limitless resource and demons and dark mechanicus provide an infinite supply of special equipment. There's never a sence that the faction suffers any loses that matter, and the same force will always come back no matter the defeat.
- Necrons loose tombworlds and its a big loss to the forces they have available, and they have to awaken soon otherwise the galaxy will be lost to them (Nids Chaos)
- Tyranids loosing a hive fleet is a loss of genetic potential that they have to recover from. Even they are worried about the galaxy becoming non-viable (Chaos), and enough gun will stop them.
- Orks are reliant on a Big Warboss to unify them, so the loss of any major warboss is a big setback to their threat factor. But they don't really care
But Chaos demons have no avenue to be weakened as a faction or reason to be concerned about the state of the galaxy. A nameless/Fodder Chaos lord getting stopped doesn't weaken Chaos nearly as much as the 5 systems and 10 Gaurd regiments that died before the space marines showed up.
Tau: Their small size means that they can never faec a major loss otherwise they'll cease to exist as a faction. As such they just keep getting handed victories over forces that should have rolled them for plot reasons
I mean, chaos space marines really shouldn't be as unlimited as the literature makes them out to be, but it's the nature of the fiction to utilize a contrast in numbers between the hordes of bad guys fighting the few proud heroes. It's sort of baked into our society, and one way to show the depravity of an enemy is a disregard to the amount of soldiers he sacrifices. Ironic because the imperium is noted to spend the lives of its soldiers easily, but imperial protagonists are almost always the ones that stand against the wanton sacrifice of their men.
It's pretty hard to blame the Imperium for being the way they are when you look at their history, and the kind of threats they face.
It was written to be a dystopian setting after all.
Has anyone ever written an AU where the Emperor reveals himself during the DAOT, the technology is never lost, and there is no Horus Heresy?
I mean hard to blame in the sense that it is fictional and never had a choice in how it was supposed to be, but in setting it did not need to be the way it is, and, like, the setting has gone through authorial telephone. The satire sort of fell away.
And the imperium under the emperor was actually turbo fascist.
The other I saw a post on r/40klore where someone ranked First Heretic as their number one. Cant say I disagee, First Heretic is so good.
Does anyone know how long an Eldar cycle lasts? Google gives me no answers.
Yeah, but first heretic is about the worst primarch.
I never said the Emperor was a good guy, but that he was far more nuanced in the old cannon and actually had some degree of compassion and empathy for others. THAT was the original tragedy of the post Heresy era, that the Emperor actually gave a shit about humans as opposed to the cult that followed him.
The HH books just turned into a full asshole and there´s hints he even planned a civil war between the legions to cull the primarchs and their legions after the Great Crusade. Even the Thunder Warriors being culled by him I think comes from the new cannon.
I think the ultimate issue is that the emperor and the early imperium was just better when left as a bit of a mystery. It's clear now that there was probably never a good state for the imperium to end in.
Although you can read some tragedy in the idea that, as a fascist leader, the second the emperor tried to steer from the course of autocracy and fascism, his military threw a bitch fit and blew everything up.
The Imperium is fascist because it meets Umberto Eco's 14 Common Features of Fascism. Fascism doesn't stop being fascist just because it's partly feudal. You have been refusing to engage with everyone in the thread and it's extremely tiresome.
I think it actually fails on point 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13. The imperium is really not populist, and there's no real attempt to embody a popular will in the leadership of the imperium. Even the idea that everyone is educated to be a hero rings hollow as the vast majority of the imperium is, in fact, kept completely stratified and discouraged from conceiving of living better.
Imperial protagonists, again, ironically tend to be more fascist than the state they operate in.
