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(Warhammer) The Emperor's background and the issue with him wanting to be a god

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Iron Roby said:
That's why things like TTSD and why its so popular are actually kinda relevant IMO. If you talk about the fandom, not the source canon. It means that a lot of other fans are also not just going along with accepting the facist apologia stuff seriously and you are not alone.
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And it contradicts with the Forgeworld books.

The Imperium is not fascist. It is feudal. It is as evil as a fascist empire, though it is not fascist. I will bold the quote below.

"Never afraid of extreme measures, Angron had let slip his World Eaters in the most vicious way imaginable. Remus had once heard his primarch say that Angron's Legion could succeed where all others would fail because the Red Angel was willing to go further than any other Legion, to countenance behaviour that any civilised code of war would deem abhorrent. Seeing what had been done to Prandium, Remus understood completely. This was no honourable war, this was butchery and destruction embodied. The primarch's great work could surely never have contemplated war with so terrible a face." Pg.32 Age of Darkness

The quote from betrayer as well has Russ saying the Emperor ordered him to punish Angron.

https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1457827196404.pdf

In Tales of Heresy, a Word Bearer asks Erebus why the Emperor would order them to destroy a planet for worship as he said "is it not the duty of the Crusade to embrace all the distinct strands of humanity, even its most wayward sons?"

I bolded the quote above.
 
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Alright, killer. What is fascism to you? Can you explain why the Imperium isn't fascist? Because to me, it sure as hell is.
 
killer565 said:
The Imperium is not fascist. It is feudal. It is as evil as a fascist empire, though it is not fascist.
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What Imperium is, is a mashup of a lot of things. And yes, a lot of those things are "medieval dark age" feudal/theocratic things, probably the most. But there are other elements, like political officers commonly associated with Stalinism (Commissars) and fascism (the policy towards "the Xeno and the Mutant" and like how the Adeptus Arbites are a homage to Judge Dredd, with all the fascist coding left intentionally in).

Imperium was a dystopia made by smashing together elements from all the actual real life dystopias, to represent a "bad end" dark culmination of human history. Why do you think would fascism be left out of that?

The most charitable interpretation of the Emperor himself and wh30k era is an analogue with bonapartism, that he was a Space Napoleon using flawed methods (violent conquest) that still spread some of the ideals of an earlier Enlightenment era (Age of Technology). That analogy is even helped with the one between the Imperial Truth and Revolutionary France's earlier Cult of Reason.

But the thing is, that the Imperial ideological attitude towards aliens (not the practical acknowledgement that there are a lot of hostile alien species out there, but making an almost conceptual "us vs. them" "Mankind vs. everybody else for galactic domination" ideology out of it) was already largely present in wh30k and that is an element closer to fascism than bonapartism.

Bonapartism at least pretended to have a foundational progressive ideology for the aggrandisement of a single emperor. There's nothing remotely progressive about "kill the mutant, purge the xeno". In fact, eugenics and genocide are both quite fascist. That they might be justified in universe, for in universe, Watsonian reasons, does not make them less fascist for the readers' Doylist analysis.
 
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Hykal94 said:
Alright, killer. What is fascism to you? Can you explain why the Imperium isn't fascist? Because to me, it sure as hell is.
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I'd also be interested in seeing @killer565 justify any of this nonsense beyond their petty feud with some rando who's not even a poster on SV. This whole thread has been like debating a Christian Fundamentalist whose response to any argument is "The Bible is true because it says it's true, and as evidence here are a half dozen passage where it states it's inherent truthfulness."

40k isn't real; it's a goofy ass setting that was cooked up to justify a goofy ass tabletop war game. The Imperium's aesthetic deliberately draws from a chop suey of influences, with everything from Dieselpunk (especially Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin) to the Middle Ages to everything in between. Like, the argument that the Imperium is fascist isn't springing from a vacuum; it's rooted in the fact that GW deliberately based their aesthetic on real world totalitarian dictatorships. Responding to that by spamming in universe quotes and refusing to even engage with the basics of that argument is…well, it's another notch on the "Watsonian arguments are bullshit" post.
 
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Hykal94 said:
Alright, killer. What is fascism to you? Can you explain why the Imperium isn't fascist? Because to me, it sure as hell is.
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The thing about defining fascism is that it depends on what governments and organizations you want to include into the umbrella. If you cast your net too wide you start to include any country that was just vaguely guilty of xenophobia and aggressive expansionism and mass murder, and you get anachronistic absurdities like calling New England Puritans fascist. If you get too specific, your definition might conclude that Mussolini and the Nazis were the only instances of fascism ever, which also seems ridiculous. (I'm not familiar enough to pitch in on whether Franco or the wartime Japanese government were fascist, for example)

So where does that leave us? Wikipedia gives a glimpse at how fractured and uncertain the issue is. I find myself liking Orwell's summation of the grievous misuse of the term and what problems this might pose.

I guess a problem is that the most infamous fascist regimes were crushed before they could really get their colonial empires established. Don't have much of a working model of how fascism would run a semi-stable multicultural empire over decades and centuries, so it's hard to compare the Imperium to that.

I see a lot more of Reformation-era Catholic Europe (the exaggerated way people see the Spanish Inquisition, at least) than fascistic politics in the Imperium. Them having advanced technology and industrialization certainly makes them look more Nazi-like, but it's a little surface-level. I think fascism overall has to have a revolutionary, anticonservative attitude that the Imperium mostly doesn't.

But at the same time, just like Star Wars's Empire, the audience is totally supposed to think of them as fascist. Stuff is weird.
 
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The Emperor is the Fifth Chaos God of Obidience, fear, and fanaticism.
The Imperium is just a long con to provide Chaos with easy prey.
Chaos feeds on negative emotions and desperate people.
The Imperium of Man is tailor made to provide tons of both.
The only way to really stop Chaos, is to kill this so called "God Emperor" and destroy the Imperium that the foul creature built.
 
killer565 said:
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"This here shows Lorgar and Grandpa Smurf being emo. And as we all know, you can't be an emo and a fascist at the same time, that's one character trait too many. Also, it contains a reminder that Big E once ordered an entire city to be destroyed by orbital bombardment, just to make a point, but please ignore that."

I just made that context up. I was forced to, because you didn't provide any.
 
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@killer565 could you please stop quoting snippets of the Black Library books? Because you've quoted one particular bit in Betrayer about four times now and you just came back from suspension and immediately posted another snippet absent any context and its... honestly its just kind of weird, disjointed rambling at the moment? Like, you're citing the book, which presumably means you think it proves something, but... what? What are you even attempting to show us here?
 
StarMaker764 said:
What does this have to do with anything
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Since you need to put up quotes that are out of context, I think I should put up my quotes. Prince of Crows (ADB wrote it) shows Curze being chastised for murdering children and broadcasting their screams. Its showed the Emperor was going to chastise him until the Horus Heresy came.

The Horus Heresy books (such as the 'Rules of Engagement' quote in Age of Darkness) show Angron did what other Legions did not.

The Emperor is a conqueror, though he is not a barbarian as Angron and Curze are.

And Phosphex was used in only the most extreme circumstances.
 
killer565 said:
Since you need to put up quotes that are out of context, I think I should put up my quotes. Prince of Crows (ADB wrote it) shows Curze being chastised for murdering children and broadcasting their screams. Its showed the Emperor was going to chastise him until the Horus Heresy came.

The Horus Heresy books (such as the 'Rules of Engagement' quote in Age of Darkness) show Angron did what other Legions did not.

The Emperor is a conqueror, though he is not a barbarian as Angron and Curze are.

And Phosphex was used in only the most extreme circumstances.
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Do you know what 'chastise' means? It means 'tell off'. Sometimes with some kind of material punishment, more often not. So the fact that the Emperor was going to chastise his sons for their horrible atrocities means precisely jack and shit.

And the Emperor most assuredly is a barbarian, guilty of every crime that one could level against Angron or Curze, because he is the Emperor. He is in charge. And when forces under your command commit atrocities, if you knew they were going to commit atrocities and you sent them out there anyway, if you receive reports of atrocities and do not put a stop to them as quickly as possible... you are responsible.
 
killer565 said:
Since you need to put up quotes that are out of context, I think I should put up my quotes. Prince of Crows (ADB wrote it) shows Curze being chastised for murdering children and broadcasting their screams. Its showed the Emperor was going to chastise him until the Horus Heresy came.

The Horus Heresy books (such as the 'Rules of Engagement' quote in Age of Darkness) show Angron did what other Legions did not.

The Emperor is a conqueror, though he is not a barbarian as Angron and Curze are.

And Phosphex was used in only the most extreme circumstances.
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And did the emperor do anything to stop either of them ? No , he let them do as they please until it backfired on his ass because letting obviously mentally unstable demigods (with one explicitly wanting to kill you) be your top generals is a colossally stupid idea to anyone with half a brain cell. The emperor was aware of all the atrocities done by them and the other primarchs and didn't lift a finger to stop it because he is counting on those atrocities. Konrad and his legion were practically his secret service, their brutality meant to set an example for any worlds that want to complain about the high tithes.

The emperor is every bit a barbarian as any of those two , it's just that he is a coward who can't get his own hands dirty so he lets others do it for him. As the supreme ruler of the imperium he is responsible for every atrocity it commits .
 
killer565 said:
What we went to talk about is not what I put up this thread for
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Then why did you put this thread up for? Discussion threads are usually to, ya know, discuss stuff and exchange opinions and ideas, but your OP only seem to be there to say you disagree with an idea of the Emperor expressed in the book. Well, no, not that you disagree, but that you stated to be outright false.

As you yourself said:
killer565 said:
Its fact, not what I think. I am right.
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So if this is all objectively true, why on earth did you make a thread on a seemingly obviously objectively true fact? Did you want pages of posts agreeing with you and self-congratulating in a circlejerk? What kinda discussion is that?
 
no. said:
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That's very insightful, and reflecting on it, exactly how I feel. Now, having also grown up with every single version of star trek up to enterprise, babylon 5, and other sci-fi media that produces xenos friendly content, I can confidently say: purge the xenos! The Emperor did nothing wrong. The majority liked people of this thread are Men of Iron bots attempting a plot to overthrow the duly elected God Emperor and cause heresy among his most holy subjects. The xenos, the traitor, and the heretic desire civil war. Humanity first!

Edit: Jokes aside, wearing my human cap here now...guys..this is like a 6 page thread dicking on one guy...this reporter asks, why? It looks like he's actually trying, and he's just met with scorn, passive aggressiveness, and laughter. This is what internet bullying looks like.
 
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Some Guy said:
It looks like he's actually trying, and he's just met with scorn, passive aggressiveness, and laughter. This is what internet bullying looks like.
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I've been following this thread idly since I've got a vague interest in 40K, and, uh.

Asking specifically to define a term being used and to provide context for citations as opposed to just posting the same quotes over and over and then posting a random screenshot of a page of a book isn't internet bullying. It doesn't seem like the actions of someone that is trying to discuss anything at all, which is kind of the point of a discussion thread.
 
Some Guy said:
Edit: Jokes aside, wearing my human cap here now...guys..this is like a 6 page thread dicking on one guy...this reporter asks, why? It looks like he's actually trying, and he's just met with scorn, passive aggressiveness, and laughter. This is what internet bullying looks like.
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If you believe there is bullying going around, please don't hesitate to report it to staff.
 
Squirtodyle said:
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Literally the same 4-5 people keep dicking on him for what he believes, and he's earnestly trying to come up with an argument. He's met with snark and ridicule as his only response. Can you really call it a discussion if you're laughed out of the room? All I see is a popularity contest on one side, and a man trying to make his voice heard in a sea of condescension. They know better then him, so he should just shut up and get back in line. Everything is normal here, pip pop cheerio.

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Hykal94 said:
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I don't believe in suppressing someone because of what they said. That's tyranny.
 
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Some Guy said:
Literally the same 4-5 people keep dicking on him for what he believes, and he's earnestly trying to come up with an argument. He's met with snark and ridicule as his only response. Can you really call it a discussion if you're laughed out of the room? All I see is a popularity contest on one side, and a man trying to make his voice heard in a sea of condescension. They know better then him, so he should just shut up and get back in line. Everything is normal here, pip pop cheerio.
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We don't give a shit what he believes. We don't know what he believes. Because he refuses to explain himself. He posts random excerpts and statements and acts like that's a discussion. If you come in dropping random things with no context and state things repeatedly going I AM RIGHT, yeah, people aren't gonna give you the warmest reception.

tl;dr you're seriously twisting the hell out of what's happening here
 
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