Quasit's Queeries

It doesn't follow that because orks in particular reproduce asexually they therefore have no concept of gender, any more than the human model of gender is an inevitable result of us reproducing sexually. Gender is a system by which humans attribute social significance to physical differences. Orks do this, but they don't do it the same way humans do. Ork gender is quaternary and includes orks, gretchin, snotlings and squigs. All these things are the same species, they're produced through the same spore-based reproductive process, but they exhibit physical differences and ork society attributes social differences based on those physical differences. That is gender.

So uh, orks are non-binary because their gender is quaternary, but that's not how we understand non-binary gender. Anyway.

Humans imposed the human model of sex onto bees and ants and decided that any of these organisms that don't contribute to sexual reproduction are female. The Tyranid hive structure is based on those insects so it's likely that there are organisms within the hive fleet that are responsible for the reproduction bit and chances are the majority of Tyranid organisms don't contribute. Undoubtedly some Magos Biologis has come to exactly the same conclusion about Tyranids and called everything from termagants up to bio-titans Female. Except genestealers. They probably wrote a whole thesis about the ovipositor called Sexing the Genestealer and concluded that Genestealers are male.

So, sometimes you say the Imperium is Fascist and you learn form some dude online that actually they're a dictatorial theocracy or something. This is called splitting hairs but I think there's potential here for a more interesting conversation. It may come as a surprise but Warhammer 40,000, a game about spending whole Sunday afternoons moving little toy soldiers and tanks around on your dining room table with lore written by a whole bunch of different nerds over the last 35 years doesn't have a coherent political narrative.

We're not going to get the answers we're looking for by going over every bit of lore with a fine-toothed comb. Also please don't ask me to do that, some of the writing is really terrible. I've talked before in, I guess, Part I about how Warhammer 40,000 draws on the aesthetics of Fascism and I think this is what's really important. It really doesn't matter if the Imperium fulfils all of Umberto Eco's characteristics of Fascism or if you can find some other political ideology that you think fits better. The fact is that Warhammer 40,000 is a piece of largely visual media that draws on the imagery of Fascism, the same way it draws on the imagery of Feudalism and the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

There's a lot of talk lately about how people like Rick Priestly and Brian Ansell (may he rest in peace) and Richard Haliwell weren't really trying to make statements with their games but just wanted to sell miniatures, and they borrowed liberally from things like 2000AD because it was cool. I think that in itself says something about the game's ideology. It was developed and written in the context of Thatcherite Britain and I wonder if in that context there was an idea that it wasn't necessary to have the thing make political sense (and maybe that's naïve in hindsight, idk?). I don't know for sure but I wonder if 40K comes out of a time when you could be like "hey these cops are Fascists" and wouldn't need to expand on that. People would just get that you were painting in braod strokes and wouldn't demand that you prove that their brutality wasn't justified. I think it's fair to say the writers didn't foresee how big their game would get, or its popularity among military bros, or the rise of Fascism in the Anglosphere in the 2010s.

So, what do we do with this? I think it's important to recognise two things. Firstly, the Imperium isn't just a Fascist state. It's also a Theocracy, and Feudal. More than one of these things can be true. But secondly, we tend to assume our political concepts are universal and timeless. They're not. Here's an interview where Corey Robin situates the Left and Right historically for Adam Conover:

The point being that the Right isn't just authoritarian, it's a movement to reestablish the power of ruling classes in response to modern Democratic movements. Similarly, Fascism is a distinctly modern concept. It's an attempt to return to the idea, as identified by Robin above, that certain people should rule over everyone else, and it's a reaction against a move towards Democracy and people having freedom from authority.

So, political systems are historically constituted, I think it's fair to say that 38,000 years in the future our politics will be unrecognisable to us now. So like, does Fascism exist 38,000 years in the future, would it even be possible when you're trying to govern a billion worlds, is it "necessary" when state control of humanity is total, and Democracy, Socialism and Trade Unionism aren't even distant memories? Maybe the answer is it doesn't matter. I don't find that terribly satisfying.

The Imperium's political system isn't not Fascism. Rather, the writers of Warhammer 40,000 depicted a political system that's a sort of aggregate of political systems that are recognisable to a modern audience (and particularly pertinent to an audience living in Thatcherite Britain), and Fascism plays a major role in that aggregate.

Now, I realise I'm going to be fighting an uphill battle here because there seem to be people working for Games Workshop and producing their media who also missed that memo, and for a while now the studio has started producing actual depictions of the Emperor, and some of those depections show him as 12 feet tall and immortal. This might be controversial but I think what this shows is that Games Workshop don't understand Games Workshop's source material.

Here's a picture of the Emperor from the original Rogue Trader rulebook.

Even this is obviously meant to be a propaganda image, but here he looks like just a regular guy in armour, he's about the same size as the people around him. Not a superhuman, just a guy with an excess of hubris.

There's this literary construct called the unreliable narrator. When I studied literature we were given this short story to read called Bartleby the Scrivener. It's told from the point of view of an employer about a clerk who was apparently really difficult to manage. The subtext is that the narrator is trying to manipulate the reader to make themself look good.

For a long time, that's what Warhammer 40,000 did, the Imperium was made out to be an unreliable narrator. Stories about the Imperium's "glorious past" were told through the haze of ten thousand years of unending war, by an ecclesiastical class with a vested interest in keeping Imperial citizens committed to feeding the war machine. To the Imperium, the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy serve the function of myths, more than history. I've gone on before about how important heroic figures like Siegfried and Perseus and Prometheus were to the Nazis. The Imperium, being a fictional state that draws on the aesthetics and ideology of Fascism, uses the figures of the Emperor and Primarchs the same way.

Basically what I'm saying is that when Imperial sources state that these people were twelve feet tall and immortal and could, um, turn a giant ork into a lightbulb on a whim, it's not because they had these powers, but because they've been ascribed these powers by their priesthood, who have total control over the flow of information in this setting.

And I get that this is hard, because most people don't get taught this stuff, and often people are probably looking for escapism from their fiction and why would the book I'm reading lie to me? But I think it really makes the setting more interesting if you look at it this way.

Also, I realise that since 2006 there have been books around that describe the Emperor, and they do show him as superhuman, and I think those depictions are based on the writers misunderstanding the material they're working from. I guess Tolkien wrote the existence of The Hobbit into Middle Earth as the Red Book of Westmarch so I can tell myself that the Horus Heresy novels are meant to be in-universe Imperial propaganda.

ADDENDUM: I need to add this because I've been reading about Perpetuals, which is apparently what the Emperor is since the Horus Heresy series was published. Apparently these individuals are human mutants that are both immortal and invincible. I remember Mechanicum heavily implying that the Emperor and St. George are the same person. Here's the problem with that. There are two themes that I think are really important in Warhammer 40,000. One is the Emperor's hubris, the idea was that he was playing god, genetically engineering monstrosities in the form of the primarchs. In the Greek tragic mould, it's this hubris that leads to his downfall. This kind of loses its sting if he's just trying to recreate what what he already is.

So my gripe with this is to do with what the primarchs represent in Warhammer 40,000. Specifically in the 41st Milennium that is, I’m not talking about the Horus Heresy. I think this image here is an important casting off point to discussing it:

It’s got two heads but only one eye. The head facing to the right, the future, is blinded. The Aquila, and by extension the Imperium, can only look to the past. The Imperium’s whole schtick is that it’s a crumbling beaureaucratic organisation, mired in the past. Everything about the Imperium, from the beatification of genetically enhanced super-soldiers, to the religious observance of what are basically procedural documents in order to keep technology running, is geared towards the glorification of a near-forgotten and mythical past.

Before GW started resurrecting Primarchs, they and the Emperor held the status of ancient Heroes in that mythical past. The early descriptions of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in the original Rogue Trader rulebook are really vague, as befits something that’s supposed to have happened ten thousand years before the current setting. It’s an age of myth, its heroes are long gone. This is what the great hero of the Imperium looks like in the 41st Milennium, according to the 1st edition rulebook:

I’m sorry but that’s a corpse.

Maybe you think the Traitor Legions are lying when they call him the Corpse Emperor but I really think the subtext in early Warhammer 40,000 is that the Imperium has managed to hold on to the corpses of some of their ancient heroes and interred them in machines that require an enormous investment of resources (a thousand psykers’ souls a day in the Emperor’s case) to run, in a futile exercise to cling on to the glories of the past. It’s true of the Emperor’s Golden Throne, it’s true of Roboute Guilliman’s stasis machine, and it’s true of the rumours that Lion El’ Jonson was lying somewhere under Caliban convalescing for all that time.

It’s felt like there’s been a drive among 40K fans and Games Workshop themselves to move Space Marines away from the hidebound traditionalism of the Imperium and make them more ‘genuinely’ heroic.The problem is that it’s exactly this heroism that ties them into the Imperium’s traditions. Space Marines are important to the Imperium in the same way Siegfired and other figures from Germanic myths (and Wagner’s operas) were important to the Nazis. Fascist ideology venerates heroic warrior figures to engender a culture that is comfortable with war.

When the Warhammer 40,000 lore didn’t make it clear whether these heroes of the Imperium’s past were dead or alive, but carried the subtext that they were dead, and the Imperium was wasting an enormous amount of resources on keeping them in a sort of un-life, it expressed the futility of this kind of hero-worship. If you start bringing them back, you communicate the idea that it wasn’t futile, and maybe that it was worth slaughtering all those psykers, and maybe that we should revere these bio-engineered sort-of-people as heroes.

And like, no. This is the image that’s always expressed the essence of *Space Marines* to me.

But then I started reading about Roboute Guilliman and apparently he’s the most logical, the most rational of the Primarchs, and I get the sense that in a lot of people’s minds this means he’s the most equipped to save the Imperium, whether from itself or everything outside it is unclear. But I think it’s interesting that according to this new lore he’s supposed to have woken up, seen what the Imperium’s become, and been totally apalled by it. Not by the genocide, of course, but by the fact that they’ve turned the Emperor into a god and the Primarchs into his angels. So he went and had a *conversation* with the Emperor, then turned around and started the genocide all over again, with a whole new crusade.

I’m going to talk about the 11th of September 2001 now, because it’s had consequences we’re only now starting to realise, and I think it definitely had consequences for Warhammer 40,000.

So, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and other reprobates had been doing the rounds before 2001, but their movement really found its feet in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Much of the Anglosphere and the West in general constructed an ideological divide between us and the Islamic world, where the West was civilised, rational and free, while the East was mired in superstition, religiosity and authoritarianism. In this context, a movement that characterised all religion as barbaric and anti-intellectual found itself in very fertile ground. For many people in the West, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could be dismissed not as retalliation for Western Imperialism, but as the deluded actions of religious fanatics. Rationalism and superstition were set up as ideological opponents, and rationalism was assumed to stand up for other values like liberty, intellectual freedom and human rights.

Horus Rising, the first of the Horus Heresy series, was released in 2006, the same year as Dawkins’ The God Delusion and the year before Hitchens’ God is not Great. Not much had been written about the Great Crusade or the Horus Heresy before this, and the idea that the Crusade had been an attempt by the Emperor to spread the light of reason into the galaxy first appeared in the lore at this point. In hindsight it’s pretty hard not to see this as a response to the post September 11 environment.

So, where the Space Marines of 1st editionhad been a bunch of psychopaths given genetic engineering and combat drugs, by 2006 you had the idea that their original function had been a sort of idealistic rationalism that was to make the galaxy a better place without religion, but that maybe some of them had fallen into superstition since then. Since then there’s maybe been a growing sense that Space Marines don’t really believe that the Emperor is a god and consider all of this a bit embarrassing.

So then you get a guy who’s been brought back to life, who was there with the Emperor during the crusade, he’s the one son who most embodies the Rationalist ideology that Games Workshop decided would drive the Great Crusade when the zeitgeist of the early 2000s taught that that ideology would lead to all good things.

And the reason he’s shocked by what the Imperium’s become isn’t because they sacrifice a thousand psykers a day to feed the Golden Throne, or because of the constant expansionist wars, or the genocide, it’s because they’re a bit religious about it.

If you walk into a Games Workshop store, this is the first thing you’re likely to see:

These are the power fantasies you’re encouraged to identify with. I think we all know how appealing this stuff can be to twelve year old boys, and, sure, that’s nothing new. When I was growing up all the kids were into GI Joe and Transformers, and the generation after me were very excited about the Power Rangers and there is absolutely a discussion to be had about selling kids media that tells them violence is a good way to solve problems. In many of those cases though, the message is that the violence is in defence of some quality like freedom, justice, the earth, etc. Space Marines are Facists, they’re involved in a constant expansionist war in service of an Imperium that’s theocratic, xenophobic, and doesn’t seem to have any concept of human rights.

Sure Bernard, let’s not talk down to children, but also, let’s recognise that they don’t always have the context to be critical of the media that’s being presented to them, particularly if that media is one-sided in its narrative. This is why I think we need to be concerned about how military simulators like Counterstrike can act as recruiting tools. In the case of 40K, it’s been a long time since the game and the media around it have made it explicit that the Imperium is a Fascist state. All that’s really presented is the power fantasy associated with the ‘human’ space marines, and the values that come along with it, so I don’t think it’s really surprising that we’ve ended up here:

Trump doesn’t quite share the values of the Imperium of Man, he’s more isolationist than expansionist, and he’s more kleptocratic, while the Imperium is more Theocratic, however there are definitely similarities in how his followers see him, and how the Emperor is presented in 40K. They’re both seen as the heroic ideal of a charismatic strong-man, able to take a stand against ‘alien’ forces arrayed outside the state, and ‘degenerate’ forces inside, through a focus on militarism and national security. Again, the 14 characteristics of Fascism include a number of points where the politics of Donald Trump and the Imperium of Man intersect. I’m absolutely not saying that all kids who play 40K grow up to support Fascism, however it is likely that some people who were presented with the ideology of the Imperium as teenagers and weren’t equipped to critique it would have grown up to see something they could identify with in Trump’s politics.

It’s funny because if Trump did exist in 40K he’d be an ork, but the biggest ork already shares a name with Margaret Thatcher, and of course contemporary GW are too cowardly to name a space ork after Donald Trump.

Back to the point though. I think it’s really easy for kids to identify with Space Marines partly because they look really cool and heroic, but also in large part because they’re part of the human faction. We’re used to looking at humans as the good guys in Sci-Fi and Fantasy because it’s easy for them to act as audience inserts. There’s a common refrain in 40K spaces that ‘there are no good guys’ and I think this comes from an assumption that if humans aren’t the good guys then nobody else can be. The Eldar and Tau are definitely *less* messed up than the Imperium and I think what’s often overlooked is that their actions against humans are a response to Imperial expansionism. It seems like the Tau were originally intended as a foil to the Imperium; their value of the greater good was presented as a genuine positive, the Fire Warrior video game showed the Imperium as Fascistic and put you in the role of a Tau fighting their expansionism. These days, however, GW seem more focused on redeeming Space Marines (lol), and they’ve introduced all sorts of stuff about the Tau maintaining power through mind control (because of course nobody in their right mind would submit to Space Socialism). In any case, I think kids are less likely to associate with the Tau because they’re not human. I guess GW thought the anime aesthetics would appeal to a younger audience because kids like cartooons, right?

This is where I remembered there was an attempt a few years ago to put together some Warhammer media for kids. There’s still a website and a Youtube Channel but it doesn’t look like it went very far. Watching the Adeptus Mechanicus child inventing things with his cute Jokaero friend gave me whiplash. I’m confused that they’d make all the characters Imperials, but maybe they were giving it a bit before they showed an Eldar child setting out on their journey to become a ranger or a young Tau and their Kroot friend. Or maybe GW think only human characters are accessible to kids.

Anyway, if GW are going to be selling to a young audience (and I don’t think that toothpaste’s going back in the tube), then I think that at least for that audience they need to shift 40K’s focus a bit, it needs an outside perspective on the Imperium. One of the reasons the Imperium is so normalised is because they are the perspective faction. Most of the books, most of the video games and all of the TTRPGs are from the Imperium’s perspective. Players can’t see the Fascism for the Fascists. My suggestion would be to have the perspective characters be humans who aren’t Imperials, and who are engaged in resistance against the Imperium.

Gue’vesa by ComradeMatt on DeviantArt

They’re called Gue’vesa. Some time in the 2000s someone decided to release rules for using human auxillaries in Tau armies. It makes sense, the Tau Empire is unique in 40K in being multi-ethnic, and the Tau would much rather incorporate ex-Imperial worlds into their Empire than fight them. Having the Gue’vesa as perspective characters would work because it would put the Fascism of the Imperium into perspective. Gue’vesa characters would be aware of the tyranny that caused their planets to secede from the Imperium, as well as the threat of being reconquered, they know they’re all considered excommunicate traitoris. The Tau Empire is multi-ethnic, which is a foil to the Imperium’s xenophobia, Gue’vesa characters would likely work side-by-side with Tau, Kroot and others. The Gue’vesa can’t be Nationalistic because they’re part of a wider Empire. The wiki page describes these worlds as having freedom of religion. Also, the joke is that the Tau are Space Communists. If that’s the case then perhaps the Gue’vesa have actual trade unions. Imagine! Trade unions in the 41st Millenium! So yeah, Gue’vesa make good perspective characters because they’re humans, but they’re also involved in a Star Trek like alliance of worlds that’s a more optimistic view of the future and doesn’t bring the Imperium’s Fascist undertones.

There are some things I’d want to change about how these units are depicted though. The rules that were released just take an Imperial Guard unit and put it in a Tau army, with some Tau weapons. What this fails to recognise is that the way Imperial Guard squads work is a function of the Imperium. The Imperium just throws bodies at their problems, with little regards for human life. The Tau Empire is much more efficient, partly because they’re younger, but also because they’re smaller and can’t treat their troops with the same disregard the Imperium does. It’s likely that human troops serving the Tau Empire would be much better trained than their Imperial counterparts. Gue’vesa troops would likely be elite and highly specialised. They would have the advantage of Tau technology, but also, given Tau would have access to Imperial technology through the Gue’vesa, but without the superstiton of the Adeptus Mechanicus, there’s a possibility that Earth Caste scientists could reverse engineer Imperial technology and make improved versions of it available to Gue’vesa troops. With those kinds of advantages it makes sense for the Gue’vesa to serve not as auxilliary units but as an army in their own right.

So here’s what I’m picturing. The Gue’vesa army is made up of very small, highly trained and specialised, well equipped units. Commanders are accompanied by various T’au and human advisors. Units similar to Catachan veterans could be accompanied by Kroot trackers, while using drones and stealth battlesuit technology to keep themselves safe. They could even field something similar to a Space Marine in a melee role using battle-suit armour and power weapons. T’au likely have the technology to provide Gue’vesa with jetbikes or similar. This would all be accompanied by the standard battle suits and hover tanks.

Obviously all these units are completely mixed-gender. No more squads of dudes with a single femme head option.

(Here’s the bit where I might really upset the GrimnDark fans, but the absence of the Imperium from human worlds is likely to result in a lot of unsanctioned psykers, and there’s a possibility that Exodite Eldar seers might notice this, and grudgingly offer to train these psykers in the path of the seer so they’re equipped to resist the warp’s influence, because having daemons crawl out of their heads is a problem for everyone. So maybe they can field units of actually stable psykers)

Guard verteran units can look really cool, which is a shame because they’re likely to get annihilated just like other guard units. With a bit of extra stealth and drone technology though, (and perhaps pulse rifles) they could fill a role similar to Eldar Rangers. It’s the armoured, power weapon wielding melee units you want to make the cut-outs for the store though. They’d look badass like a Space Marine, but their fervour is about freedom from Imperialist oppression and standing side-by-side with their non-human allies. It’s still a violent power fantasy, and that’s not great, but it’s one with better values behind it and it at least makes a space for a conversation about the Imperium’s Fascism.

So Eldar represent two things that Fascists don’t like (see my previous post if you want evidence that the Imperium is a Fascist state). The first is intellectualism. Fascism demands an uncritical adherence to national myths, and intellectual movements tend to question things like that, so Fascists are by necessity suspicious of intellectual “elites”. Eldar are depicted as more psychic and more cultured than humans of the Imperium, and they’ve been around longer, so they have greater knowledge of things. It’s the Eldar who maintain the big repository of information about the galaxy, in the form of the Black Library. (Maybe someday we can look at the weird relationship the Inquisition has with the Eldar, and how that organisation seems to simultaneously seek out knowledge and supress knowledge) The second thing is that Eldar, shall we say, fail to live up to the Imperium’s heteronormative models of gender. The Imperium, like all Fascist states, venerates hyper-masculinity, I’m not sure I need to argue this one when I can just point at a Space Marine. The Eldar, by contrast, are represented as somewhat efette; elegant and graceful, but physically weak. Orks used to refer to Eldar as “pansies”, GW seem to have realised that maybe getting rid of that bit is a good idea in the 21st Century and so it seems to have been retired. The fact remains, though, that Eldar’s relationship with gender is a bit queer. From the start Eldar have been depicted as androgynous, they’re slight of build, wear form-fitting clothes and tend to wear their hair long. In 1998 GW first released Dark Eldar, which complicated things. Dark Eldar are kinky, but they’re also much less androgynous than Craftworld Eldar or Harlequins. Wyches in particular are really interesting. They’re the first genuinely mixed-gender unit I remember GW releasing, (there were also some Craftworld and Dark Eldar plastic kits around the same time that included a single chest piece with boobs) the miniatures were explicitly gendered, and they were really kinky, there was a lot of skin, a lot of spikes, and a lot of whips. Basically Craftworld Eldar are sort of gender neutral and Dark Eldar are chaotically genderqueer. All of this is the kind of thing that Fascists hate. Fascism centers the role of the heteronormative family unit, which has the role of making more “racially pure” babies (the Nazis called in the Lebensborn program), queer people who reject the gender roles that that unit relies on are therefore instantly suspicious to Fascists. So, to the Imperium, the threat of the Eldar is not just that they’re Xenos, they also present an ideological threat. The Eldar’s intellectualism and knowledge about the galaxy is a threat to the Imperium’s narrative and myths about itself and the universe it’s up against. Their queerness is a threat to the heteronormative gender roles that the Imperium is structured on.

At this point maybe some people are thinking “but aliens and daemons and cults and unsanctioned psykers are a real threat and the Imperium does need to keep throwing bodies into wars to stop them.” The thing is, Warhammer 40,000 is a fantasy about what would happen if all those threats really did exist out there, it’s the aesthetics and ideas that are important. In the real world Fascism is never justifiable, its arguments are never coherent, it only makes sense in 40K because 40K is fantasy.

So, decadence and degeneration, the things I put in the title. If you’ve ever been called a degenerate by some keyboard Fascist, just know that you’re being interpolated into a long tradition. Around the Fin de Siecle (the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries) there were some ideas about decadence and degeneration doing the rounds in Europe. Now I’m probably going to mess this up a bit, but the theme is that due to the rationality of Men, civilisation generally advances on an upward trajectory. I assume this idea came out of the enlightenment, reason leads to progress and makes society better (obviously there are some Colonialist ideas that come out of there). Maybe it’s useful to call this process generation (idk, I’m really winging it here), but anyway, these men are distractable, and if they allow themselves to be distracted by aesthetic things, like the colour yellow, or the taste of absinthe, or the feel of high quality brocades, or the skin of other men, they might become... decadent. Decadence is supposed to be when you give up rationality and hard work to focus on a life of sensation. Obviously there’s an implication here about sexuality. Oscar Wilde was regarded as a decadent. Too much decadence, it was thought, could lead to the reversal of a civilisation’s progress, degeneration, in other words. Versions of this idea pop up all over the place, certain Conservatives regard Western Civilisation as having fallen from the ideal state embodied by the Ancient Greeks (and I don’t doubt these people would blame decadence), and it’s also really common in fantasy. In the Lord of the Rings, the state of the world has fallen from the Númenorean and Elvish civilisations of the distant past, and Elric of Melniboné describes a previous civilisation brought low by decadence.

But, Eldar. So the story of the Eldar is they had this big galaxy-spanning civilisation before humanity reached the stars. As their civilisation became more advanced and the automation of their physical needs freed up their time they started to become decadent, and as they pursued various pleasures and became more and more jaded, the decadence gave way to sadism.

The descriptions of the dying days of the Eldar civilisation sound like being at the worst kink club you’ve ever seen, where nobody’s heard of consent and everyone’s really into knives and medical role-play. Various groups of Eldar began to leave their empire. First the Exodites, who went to live a sort of monastic existence riding dinosaurs about on idyllic worlds as far away from the Eldar empire as possible (it’s a travesy that GW have never made models of them because they’re the coolest thing in 40K).

Then the Craftworld Eldar fled. All the bad and horny psychic energy released by this debauchery built up in the warp (because Eldar are very psychic) and gave birth to Slaanesh, the Chaos god of excess and decadence, exploding all the heads of the decadent Eldar and ending their civilisation. Those Eldar left are supposed to be fallen from civilisation. There’s a sense that they’ll never be able to regain their old empire and their only role now is to become extinct with as much dignity as they can.

The fall of the Eldar is exactly the kind of thing that the Imperium would use as a cautionary tale to frighten its citizens. “Get too curious, or too decadent, or fail to uphold the family model, and your civilisation might collapse.” I wonder sometimes if the whole story was originally just meant to be Imperial propaganda, but these days the game certainly treats it as real. Now, I’m not sure there’s a heap of evidence to suggest that 20th Century Fascists were particularly interested in the concept of degeneracy (although the Nazis thought it relevant as regards art). 21st Century Fascists seem to love the concept. I think it’s fair to say that ideas of degeneration formed part of the cultural millieu of the early 20th Century that fed into Fascism. In any case the ideas that some cultures are more civilised than others, and that decadence can cause a culture to fall into a less civilised state, are consistent with Fascism.

So, there’s this idea that came up a bit in the discussions around space marines and gender that sometimes these guys can be heroic, and, um, actually it’s how they’re perceived as heroic that’s kind of the point, but we’ll come back to that.

Milton Bradley and Games workshop teamed up to release Space Crusade when I was 6 or 7 and I pestered my parents until they bought it for me for Christmas. Later, when I was 11 I was stuck at home with glandular fever and my family picked up some White Dwarf magazines from the local library for me to read and I realised there was more going on with this world, and I thought space marines were pretty cool. I used to imagine being a space marine. That’s because I didn’t understand what they represented. As I got older, and started to learn more about the symbols that GW were drawing on, that idea became less and less appealing.

In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is a Fascist state. To be very clear, I don’t think it’s a bad game or fascist piece of media for depicting this. I think it was the intention of the game’s original creators to critically depict a futuristic dystopia, and the Fascist setting is part of that.

I think it’s clear that the Imperium engenders several of the 14 characteristics of Fascism identified by Lawrence Britt pretty unambiguously. The first is powerful and continuing Nationalism, Nationalism is based on the idea that a state should be congruent with a particular people, or volk, and outsiders should be excluded. Nationalism in the 41st Milennium is different to the Nationalism we’re used to because the volk in question is all of humanity, and the excluded parties are what the Imperium calls Xenos; Eldar, Orks, Tau, etc. Then there’s disdain for the recognition of human rights, human rights don’t really exist as a concept in 40K. You might ask the servitor or arco-flagellant about their human rights, or the 10 year-old child who’s taken from their home to begin the process of becoming a space marine. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause is a big one. The vilifcation of heretics, mutants and xenos is kind of a central tenet of the Imperium’s culture. There’s supremacy of the military, uh, I’m not sure I need to explain how the Imperium glorifies the Imperial Guard, the Astartes, all the chambers miltant, the knightly houses, the titan legions, the imperial navy, etc. etc. Rampant sexism, I hope my previous post has demonstrated this, but I think it’s important to note that sexism isn’t just disliking a particular gender, it’s expressed in the reinforcement of traditional and hegemonic gender roles, as I think the comparison of the Astartes’ and Sororitas’ roles demonstrates. There’s an obsession with national security, the Imperium’s entire economy is geared towards expansionism and dealing with internal and external threats. The intertwining of religion and government is pretty clear, the head of state is seen as a god and his church is the beaurecracy that runs the Imperial state. Supression of labour power is kind of assumed, there are no unions in the Imperium. The disdain for intellectuals and the arts is demonstrated by statements like “an open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded” (That’s from Dawn of War). And there’s an obsession with crime and punishment, embodied by the existence of the Inquisition, in particular the Ordo Hereticus, who are a police force with unlimited power and the capacity to dragoon military units into their service.

These points often meet with the objection that the internal and external threats *do* exist and that therefor the Imperium’s response to them is justified, which kind of misses the point that this is a piece of fiction, an exploration of ideas. The existence of Xenos and the Chaos Gods doesn’t make the Imperium’s response to those things any less Fascistic, and they definitely don’t justify the existence of Fascism in the real world.

But, Warhammer 40,000 is an aesthetic game and Fascists looooove aesthetics, so I think an examination of how the Imperium draws on the aesthetics of Fascism is a bit more interesting.

Here’s a Susan Sontag quote I copied from the Wikipedia page on Fascism: “[f]ascist aesthetics ... flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, 'virile' posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death."

I’m not going to provide a reference for that because this isn’t an essay and you’re not my lecturer and someone already did all the work (it’s in the wiki, linked above). I think I’m just going to take some extracts from that and juxtapose them with 40K art. Here goes:

a preoccupation with situations of ... extravagant effort

and the endurance of pain

they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude

a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people

the turning of people into things

an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force

The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers

a congealed, static, 'virile' posing

it glamorizes death

(I thought about adding a little speech bubble saying “even in death I still serve” but I think most people reading this recognise that that’s a walking, fighting coffin, I don’t think there’s a more explicit depiction of the glamourisation of death than the idea of a warrior so commited to war they they allow their corpse to be interred in a fighting machine so they can continue to kill after they’ve died.)

I’m particularly interested in how space marines fill the role of the ‘hero’. Nazis loved art that showed idealised male figures, preferably from pagan myths. Here’s a sculpture of Prometheus that was exhibited at their “Great German Art Exhibition”:

They loved heroic figures, muscular and mythic men of action. They saw in Nietszche’s ubermensch an individual who had the strength and will to do what he wanted, and take what he wanted, without concern for the morality of the ‘sheep’. It goes without saying that these figures were meant to be of Aryan descent and in the Nazi state the SS were meant to be the modern expression of this. Recruits to the SS had to ‘prove’ their Aryan ancestry and Himmler had plans to institute requirements for appearance and height. I think it’s clear how they were meant to be a fighting force who’s superiority came from their supposed genetic superiority and connection to an idealised Aryan heroism.

And that’s where space marines come in. Astartes are the way they are because of their connection, through gene-seed, to the primarchs (The Emperor’s largest sons), heroic and promethean figures from the dawn of the Imperium who made war on a grand scale and spread the Emperor’s light to the far reaches of the galaxy. Their genetics make them into literal superhumans, able to perform heroic feats that would be impossible for a regular person. This isn’t a good thing, it’s an expression of Fascist ideology. Warhammer 40K, being satire, recognises this, and so it’s constantly made clear that these people are incapable of anything but war. Also the marinification process makes them so muscular they resemble sides of beef more than actual people, they’ve become a grotesque mockery of the ideal of the Hero.

Also there are skulls and eagles on, like, everything, and that’s normally a sign that Fascists are about. There’s also a particular fascination Fascists have with the imagery of the Roman Empire, the word Fascism comes from fasces, a bunch of rods bound together with an axe that was the symbol of Roman dicators. Ultramarines in particular use a lot of Roman inspired armour elements.

The headpiece, wreath at the midriff, and leather straps hanging between the legs are all screaming Rome at me, and I don’t think these guys are history buffs (They’re Fascists).

Anyway, there we go, I think I’ve established that the original 40K writers intended for the Imperium to be a Fascist state. I’m enjoying this, maybe next I’ll write something about the Eldar and Slaanesh and ideas aboout degeneracy that were floating around at the turn of the 19th Century.

Dudes who play 40K love to point out that there can’t be any space marine women (they say female space marines) because of how you can only have like eight livers and two hearts if you’ve got XY chromosomes or something. Anyway it’s really difficult reading about this stuff because every post about it has this energy.

So why aren’t there space marine women? There were, back in 1st edition, this post from Bell of Lost Souls includes two models that were released of space marine women and talks about how retailers asked GW to stop sending them because they couldn’t sell them to their players, who in the 80′s were mostly men. As far as I can tell the stuff about only men being able to survive the space marine making process because of some chromosome rubbish was just post-facto justification for discontinuing those models.

Which is a shame because there’s a better justification. Someone on Twitter was pointing out that they’re basically children kidnapped by the Fascist empire and turned into supersoldiers. Of course the Catholic Fascist space Empire isn’t making space marine women. I think it’s pretty clear that the space marines were initially intended as a pastiche of Thatcherite militarism, just like Judge Dredd. In the Rogue Trader they’re depicted as thuggish, inhuman instruments of the state.

I also feel like there’s something about English boys’ public schools going on here. I’m not from the UK so I’m not sure I can quite make sense of it but there was a decision made to have the punk hive-ganger’s butt be really prominent in the image.

There aren’t women space marines for the same reason there weren’t women in the Sturmabteilung. Military organisations in Fascist states serve a double purpose, they don’t just fight, they also serve as propaganda. It’s clear from most 40K imagery and fiction that the image of the space marine is meant to communicate the strength of the Imperium. Imperial propaganda calls the Imperial Guard “the anvil” and the Adeptus Astartes “the hammer” in an empire that seems fixated on hammers, in a game that is largely about hammers (it’s called Warhammer).

But here’s the interesting bit, the image of the space marine *also* communicates the Imperium’s ideas about the role of men. The figure of the space marine represents the glorification of toxic masculinity, not just because it depicts men as warriors and protectors who are inherently violent, but also because these are men who are utterly disposable and who’s subjectivity and individualism have been completely erased for the sole purpose of making war. The primary role of a space marine apothecary isn’t to heal wounded marines, it’s to ensure that their gene-seed is harvested at the point of death so they can make more marines. It doesn’t matter that space marines die, only that hyper-masculine bodies can continue to make war.

I can imagine some Imperial Guard recruitment poster with a picture of a space marine saying “They put their bodies on the line to protect the Imperium, and you should too! Join the Imperial Guard!”

But, if we’re going to talk about what ideas the Imperium wants to engender about women, we need to talk about everyone’s favourite nuns with guns.

Okay that image probably doesn’t communicate what I’m trying to say but I had to include it, here’s Saint Celestine.

So the Adepta Sororitas, actualy first here’s a Reddit post with an extract from a Rogue Trader scenario including a chapter of space marine women called The Little Sisters of Purification (you know they’re carrying a lot of flamers). This is interesting because while Astartes are technically supposed to be monastic, their imagery (with the exception of the Dark Angels, and in that case the major theme is HERESY) rarely leans on that aspect. From the start, the Imperium’s women warriors have been explicitly coded as nuns.

The themes that come through with the sisters of battle are things like purity, innocence, piety, faith, martyrdom. They have a propaganda role, like the space marines do, but it’s a different message. While the Astartes’ singular military role communicates the idea that men are only good for violence, the Sororitas fill a bunch of different roles, the order hospitaller provides medical aid to Imperial citizens, the order dialogous are diplomats, and the order famulous are scholars. This communicates that the role of women in Imperial society is more diverse, and less dispensable, an idea that’s probably reinforced by the various orders’ integration into Imperial society. Sisters would be a much more familiar sight to Imperial citizens than marines, who are largely aloof on their fortress-monasteries. It’s likely that most Imperial citizens would be much more shocked by the idea of the nurse-nun they go to see every few months being killed than some armoured super-human with no personality other than anger who they’ve never met.

And that’s where the idea of martyrdom comes in. Toxic masculinity says that women must be protected, by men, because they’re not dispensable in the way men are. The Emperor, in all his masculine wisdom, will not countenance women to be killed in his grimdark future of only war, so Sisters of Battle aren’t killed, they’re martyred, and often when they are He brings them back in the form of living saints (See Saint Celestine, above). There are no resurrected space marines because the Imperium treats men’s bodies as expendable, and women’s bodies as sacred.

And then there’s the whole purity and innocence thing. Sosoritas are obedient to the one man in their life (Him on the Golden Throne). They take vows of chastity, they spend most of their time in prayer, they’re probably the faction in the game with the most number of abilities based around faith, piety and purity (I didn’t count or anything, but I think it’s a safe assumption). They play a propaganda role to demonstrate to Imperial citizens what a woman should be like, and also how men should enlist to protect them.

So when I see people modding their space marine armies to include women space marines I end up in two minds. On the one hand it makes me happy because it’s clear that it’s going to upset guys who are invested in the idea that women are inherently weak, but at the same time I worry that they’ve missed the bit where this is a sexist Fascist Empire and maybe they’re thinking the space marines are the good guys.