The problem of the Emperor?

[Wade Garrett]

I will say one thing in the Emperor's favor in comparison to Curze:

 

Given that according to some of the lore he's been around since the guys banging sticks togather to make fire were being told that they were seeking forbidden knowledge and transgressing in the gods's domain, we can assume he tried at least some of the "politics of peace, ideals of social enlightenment" stuff before rolling forward with "Kneel or be knelt."

[godking]

I will say one thing in the Emperor's favor in comparison to Curze:

 

Given that according to some of the lore he's been around since the guys banging sticks togather to make fire were being told that they were seeking forbidden knowledge and transgressing in the gods's domain, we can assume he tried at least some of the "politics of peace, ideals of social enlightenment" stuff before rolling forward with "Kneel or be knelt."

Well he did qoute Lincoln in a thousand sons

[Trel]

...assume he tried at least some of the "politics of peace, ideals of social enlightenment" stuff before rolling forward with "Kneel or be knelt."

 

That was always my impression of the Emperor.  He's so powerful and so old, he's become a little detached from the species he's dedicated his existence to saving.  Simply put, he doesn't actually relate to people normally, because he's beyond them.  He has a goal and he has methods that will achieve that goal most efficiently and reliably: violence.

 

In terms of his relationship with his primarch "sons", by M31, he realizes his plans are at a crucial turning point and when they come to him whining about how they want some attention or they'd rather be preachers or architects or professors or they just want to die gloriously pointlessly on some pointless planet, he's probably not terribly interested, but he's probably more than a little frustrated.

 

The Big E has a plan that's so large and long-term as to be unfathomable to any mind.  I don't know if he's been unfairly portrayed in the books so far, but I can say that the grandeur of his plan almost feels a little understated.  "It's a hundred-thousand year Golden Path ® to safely lead humanity into its next phase of existence without splattering itself inside its own collective skull."

[Kol Saresk]

 

 

I will say one thing in the Emperor's favor in comparison to Curze:

 

Given that according to some of the lore he's been around since the guys banging sticks togather to make fire were being told that they were seeking forbidden knowledge and transgressing in the gods's domain, we can assume he tried at least some of the "politics of peace, ideals of social enlightenment" stuff before rolling forward with "Kneel or be knelt."

Well he did qoute Lincoln in a thousand sons

 

 

That comparison is probably more apt than you realize.

[Augustus]

Save for Horus, the Emperor probably thought of the Primarchs as pets. 

I like Wade's assessment of the Emperor. He has seen and tried it all. He's also been forming this plan since from when he buries a shard of the Void Dragon on Mars. (How did he get it there?)

[Wade Garrett]

I really hope that if ADB does his "Master of Mankind" Emperor-centric novel we get a being in the vein of Walter Kowalski from Gran Torino or Julius Caesar from, well, Julius Caesar. Age may wither and custom stale him, but:

 

"Destiny knows full well

that he and I are two lions litter'd in one day,

and I the elder and more terrible. The Emperor shall go forth."

[Hereticus81]

I do feel sorry for ADB, Abnett, McNeill, Swallow et al. at times. They're basically fleshing out snippets of background information andwhen said fleshing out is done the emperor often comes across as a bit daft. They can't change it too much to make a bit more sense so they're doing what they can with a background that has evolved over the years e.g. I was surprised when i heard about the BA and Signus Prime a few years back as there was no mention in my cherished 2nd ed. codex back when I collected all the minatures before some 'person' stole the carry case with my painstakingly collected and modded army from an open event at a GW open massive battle day (Yes I'm still annoyed about it 17 years later!)


We need to bear in mind that so far most of the books are written from a traitors PoV and they, the authors, need to make their decisions to turn against the Emperor understandable. I hope we get a book where the Emps or Malcador explain some of the decisions because, as you rightly say, some of the decisions he made are fricking stupid. However I'm sceptical of the prospect of us ever getting a book from the Emps POV, making him 'accessible' would probably lessen him. Also in the 40k universe it's not black and white morality, just shades of grey so the Emps isn't going to be perfect and rational all the time, after all despite his immense power he's still human with all that brings... just a step or two ahead of the rest of us.

SAying that the way he acted with Angron was plain stupid. Even without psychic powers and foresight I know taking a warrior like Angrona way from his 'brothers' and letting them get slaughtered is a bad idea!

[Marshall Bretton]

im not sure why everyone is calling the emperor a blood thirsty tyrant, yeah i can agree to an extent with the tyrant bit, but can anyone else think of a better way to rule the imperium? but blood thirsty? all the planets that we come across in the heresy books where the marines wiped them out and committed genocide, that was always instigated by the planets not the imperium. The space marines and crusade fleets always tried diplomacy first (apart from certain legions like the world eaters or when gits like erebus were using them for their own ends) but the wars were always started by the planets themselves, look at the space wolves in prospero burns. the crusade fleet tried diplomacy, the alien machine guys cut up thousands of captured sailors and declared that they were not actually human. personally i would wipe someone that did that from the face of the universe as well. and the aliens? well every alien species we have come across has attacked us first or been pretty ugly

 

the emperor is even portrayed as merciful sometimes. again in prospero burns (can you tell im reading it at the moment?) it talks about one of the independent nations back on earth 150 years after the official unification where the emperor gave them 150 years to give up their control and join a united earth, 150 years!! that seems pretty merciful and patient to me. it was only after that he decided to send in the army and wipe them out

 

in terms of his ability to see the future as well, he was battling against the 4 chaos gods and there are an infinite amount of possible futures, there is no way anyone, not even the chaos gods themselves could predict the true future, and even if he could, just look at horus. by trying to change the future he was shown where the emperor was worshipped as a god he caused it to happen.

yeah maybe the emperor could predict the future, but trying to work out how to avoid or make certain futures happen would be impossible

 

and don't make any mistakes, the human race was right on the very edge of destruction, one slip and our race would have been wiped from the face of the universe, yeah the decisions the emperor made might not be considered morally correct but given the circumstances of the time, can anyone say they would really have done differently?

 

to quote Dr Leonnard Church (im sure some of you know who he is) who i actually think was making a quote himself:

"when faced with extinction, any and all possibilities are preferable to annihilation"

 

anyway thats just my ramblings

[Kol Saresk]

Gaius: that seems to be a very loose interpretation of "instigate." Look at the Interex and the Auretian Technocracy. There was another planet that Astelan of the Dark Angels was forced to conquer. There was a fourth that the Space Wolves 13th Grand Company helped fight off Dark Eldar and then turn around and conquered it just because they wanted their freedom from everyone. All it takes for "compliance" to be necessary is the word "no." No gesturing of weapons, just "no" in any way, shape or form. Whether it be the Imperium as a whole or some of its policies.

 

And considering how many human cultures seemed to be friendly on the first encounter but were guilty of "consorting with xenos," there could have been another way. We didn't have to kill every xenos species we came across.

[Olis]

We didn't have to kill every xenos species we came across.

 

Not to be pedantic (but it is) Jokaero were spared during the Heresy, weren't they? Or is that me confusing fanon with canon...?

[Marshall Bretton]

Gaius: that seems to be a very loose interpretation of "instigate." Look at the Interex and the Auretian Technocracy. There was another planet that Astelan of the Dark Angels was forced to conquer. There was a fourth that the Space Wolves 13th Grand Company helped fight off Dark Eldar and then turn around and conquered it just because they wanted their freedom from everyone. All it takes for "compliance" to be necessary is the word "no." No gesturing of weapons, just "no" in any way, shape or form. Whether it be the Imperium as a whole or some of its policies.

 

And considering how many human cultures seemed to be friendly on the first encounter but were guilty of "consorting with xenos," there could have been another way. We didn't have to kill every xenos species we came across.

 

yeah thats fair enough, just my opinions tbh

i see what you mean with it taking very little to justify assaulting a world, but even so, the attempts at diplomacy were usually made

[Kol Saresk]

I haven't heard mention of the Jokaero yet in a Heresy or Great Crusade setting. If it's an older source than I also have to apologize as I may not have access to it. Although I will say that from what I have seen and read, "consorting with xenos" is one of the many differences between the "modern" 40k Imperium and its original incarnation.

 

Another point would be to look at Terra. It didn't take one war to conquer the world. It took several. Look at the name of that time period: the Unification Wars. I wonder how many of those wars were because someone said no or that the Emperor shouldn't be the sole ruler of mankind and that there should be a council of sorts.

[Wade Garrett]

The fact that the Emperor called his grand reunion of the human race "The Great CRUSADE" is fairly telling.

 

As for the Marines negotiating with the human cultures, "Bow down or be destroyed" does not become the nice option just because you proffered an alternative to destruction.

 

As for the wolves and the Quietude (who were modified humans, not aliens) because their leadership and military cut up POWs, they deserved to be slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child?

[Kol Saresk]

I was thinking of the short story with the 13th Company, not Prospero Burns with the 3rd... Unless that wasn't directed at me, in which case, as I was.

[Marshall Bretton]

The fact that the Emperor called his grand reunion of the human race "The Great CRUSADE" is fairly telling.

 

As for the Marines negotiating with the human cultures, "Bow down or be destroyed" does not become the nice option just because you proffered an alternative to destruction.

 

As for the wolves and the Quietude (who were modified humans, not aliens) because their leadership and military cut up POWs, they deserved to be slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child?

 

 

that was directed at me i think

 

i see your point but personally i would no longer class them as human, and to be honest im not sure i would call them alive, they are more like a giant computer with organic components from the way they are described

[derpasaurus]

@Legatus

 

The only problem I have with your analysis is that everything we've seen in the Heresy series doesn't really suggest a galaxy that has one foot in the Eye of Terror, one foot on a banana Peel..indeed, many of the pockets of humanity (interex, Diasporex, the Technocracy, Shrike, the "Imperium") seemed to be doing just fine before the Titans and Space Marines dropped out of the sky on them. Compare that to every time we are shown the Night Haunted on Nostromo, where it's hammered in that things were awful, Curze made them better.

 

Things WERE awful on Nostromo. Something like a beat every 2 second and a murder every 8. The entire place was a Maximum Security mental institution with no orderlies. Night Haunter saw this and realized that the only way anything could be done was to keep everyone terrified of retribution. Not every city/planet was that bad, though.

 

Honestly, the farther into the Heresy we get the more similarities I see between the Emperor and the Night Haunter, for example the twisting of Nostromo when Curze left as a small scale reflection of the decay of the Imperium with its master interred in the Golden Throne.

That is exactly the point Curze was trying to make, too. When he left, and the threat of retribution was removed, the place fell apart, worse than before he came. Curze actually has a nice argument with Dorn about benevolence vs. fear in one story whose name escapes me ATM. And this also leads to Curze's reason for betrayal. The Emprah tried to show himself as this perfect, infallible vision for humanity, and when he called on Curze to return to Terra for committing basically warcrimes (which Curze was ordered to do, by The Emprah himself) Curze called shenanigans, and was then assassinated for his stand. Why would someone who was supposedly benevolent and perfect in every way use the very same tactics he supposedly decried to kill his own son?

 

What is harder to overlook is his behavior during the Unification Wars and the Great Crusade.  Here it is difficult to reconcile an image of the Emperor as a benevolent ruler on the side of humanity.  The creation, use, and ultimate discarding of the thunder warriors is not an act of a kind and compassionate ruler.  There's nothing remotely humanitarian or munificent about using super humans to one's own ends only to intentionally have them destroyed afterwards.  Similarly, the prosecution of the Great Crusade, as it has been written, is not a reuniting of human worlds, but a bloody war of conquest.  One would think that with the might of the Emperor's war machine he could target the leaders and organizational structures of "non-compliant" worlds, but the wars we have been privy to as readers have been wars of annihilation and genocide.  That is a far cry from how these events were alluded to in earlier versions of the fluff.  

Now to defend The Emprah a bit:

1) If you created a super race of warriors specifically for combat, and you used them to accomplish your goals, and you succeeded, what would you do with them afterwards? This is like an extreme case of combat duty soldiers trying to reintegrate into society after a campaign. Only the Thunder Warriors cannot, because they never were part of society. They were bred for war. They were tools. You said it yourself, they were created. Now, if they were, say, like MegaMan, and maybe supposed to have been vacuum cleaners or something beforehand, then just re-purposed, I could see an argument. But why would you let a horde of genetic creations bred to destroy continue to exist after you were finished using them?

 

2) Because the stories of the planets and cities that rolled over and capitulated at the first sight of the legions make for boring stories.

"Hey, uh, Mr. Magistrate, sir...? There's about 20,000 super soldiers in a giant space-ship outside that claim their daddy wants you to surrender to his will."

"Wonderful, Jeeves, send him in, I'll have Samantha prepare tea and crumpets."  

 

Also you could argue that if the worlds were indeed in the vast amount of disarray that the fluff claims them to be, it would be like the Battle of New Orleans in every city on every planet in every sector. Nobody would know (or maybe even care) that their capital had fallen because technology on at least some of those planets was probably medieval at best, so taking one city would just leave the rest of a planet needing to be pacified anyway. Also, how many rival factions are on each planet, vying for control, and possibly not even caring that yet another party has shown up to this giant planet-wide fustercluck? Might as well blast the whole thing at once.

[Knight of the Raven]

Sometimes I wonder if the Emperor simply gave the primarchs too much credit.

They were supposed to be the greatest generals of humanity, a bulwark against chaos, the conquerors of the galaxy. Maybe He expected them to crush their problems under their heels just like they crushed His enemies. To control their flaws instead of being their slaves. After all, the primarchs were His ultimate creations, His sons, how could they be imperfect?

[Vesper]

Actually, he expected them to be immune to Chaos (like the sensei). The first men of a new stage in mankind's evolution that would have no tie to the warp... Which would have more or less "defeated Chaos". But that pretty much failed big time.

[Wade Garrett]

Going by the First Heretic and when Fulgrim kills Ferrous, Emps had actively utilized warp sorcery in creating them, which makes the immune to Chaos thing an odd notion to hold.

 

Not to mention that Magnus, Sanguinus, and Russ all had mutations that should have been a dead giveaway Chaos could get its claws in a Primarch.

[Legatus]

The fact that the Emperor called his grand reunion of the human race "The Great CRUSADE" is fairly telling.

Or it would be, if that was what he had done:

 

"The Great Crusade is the name given to the period of conquest that established the extent of the Imperium. During the Great Crusade massive armies of Space Marines spread out from Earth. Their task was to seek out and liberate human worlds throughout the galaxy, uniting all of humanity in a single mighty Imperium."

(2nd Edition Codex Ultramarines, p. 7)

 

"Together with his Space Marine Legions, the Emperor set out from terra to conquer the galaxy. Fighting for their master without fear or doubt, it was the Space Marines who first referred to their mission as the Great Crusade. World after world was reconquered, alien oppressors routed or annihilated in a series of epic wars and worlds infected with the taint of the Warp cleansed with apocalyptic orbital barrages."

(5th Edition Codex Space Marines, p. 6)

[Kol Saresk]

You do remember that the Catholic church referred to their Crusades as armies to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim "heathens" and to "save the Jews from persecution" by said "heathens."

 

The Great Crusade is very aptly named because it lives up to its namesake.

[Vesper]

Not really, in fact. The very word "crusade" comes from latin "Crux" which means "cross". It's all about bearing the cross to conquer/retake a land in the name of god (it was when the Holy See had political views and when they pretty much tried to ignore what actually was in the scriptures).

So yeah, calling it a crusade is pretty much retarded, because the cross isn't in the imperial iconography and that everything before the emperor had been wiped out from the archives.

The knights templars were called that way because of the Temple of Salomon. Black Templars don't have a clue about that. They're just called that way because "Hey guys, let's be all goofy in our setting and make OBVIOUS references that could have made sense if they were subtle, but we're here to have fun". That wasn't a big deal, because back then GW's stuff was made with a huge sense of humour, but now that they try to make the setting serious and believable, well, that does not really fit in.

[Conn Eremon]

I haven't heard mention of the Jokaero yet in a Heresy or Great Crusade setting. If it's an older source than I also have to apologize as I may not have access to it. Although I will say that from what I have seen and read, "consorting with xenos" is one of the many differences between the "modern" 40k Imperium and its original incarnation.

 

Another point would be to look at Terra. It didn't take one war to conquer the world. It took several. Look at the name of that time period: the Unification Wars. I wonder how many of those wars were because someone said no or that the Emperor shouldn't be the sole ruler of mankind and that there should be a council of sorts.

 

In the book Fulgrim, it's mentioned that there was talk of making the Laerans protectorates of the Imperium rather than going to war. That suggested to me precedence. If it was part of a discussion, with no mention of any outrages or capital punishments accompanying such a discussion, then there must have been prior instances of the Imperium doing just that. Declaring a xeno race protectorates of the Imperium. Which might mean the Jokaero, who knows. But that means that if the Imperium encountered a xeno race that threatened no human worlds (as the Laerans didn't, they were very self-involved) and would require a lot of resources and time to eliminate (as everyone thought the Laeran Extermination would) then the Imperium would potentially consider the possibility of not going to war and committing xenocide. This would obviously exclude the vast majority of xenos out there, it is Warhammer 40k after all, but that means that there must be some protected xenos within the Imperium somewhere. And it means that the hatred for xenos spreads not from a sense of superiority but from a position of self-defense. I think that goes a long way in defending the Emperor's actions, as it'd be a clear example of his 'blood-thirstiness' being directed purely in the defense of humanity. The entire Great Crusade could be seen in that light. He sought the protection of all humanity that would accept his protection. Unfortunately, those who wouldn't are a weakness that could be capitalized on by his arch-enemies, the Warp Gods, and had to be removed. Just seeing his actions, we see a blood-thirsty dictator. But given what we've seen in the series, and know of his intentions, it's not about his desires or urges or mental deficiencies but is a single-minded determination to keep humanity alive in the only way he sees how.

[Kol Saresk]

Vesper: Let me see if I understand you correctly. The crusades were about taking "Christianity" to the Middle East and claiming the land for god?

 

@Cormac Airt: That is a very good point. It might that there was a precedent as well as a certain criteria that has to be met and an Expedition Fleet Commander who is willing to sign off. I don't have book on me so I'll double check when I get home but that is a very good point. And as I said, I don't know enough about the Jokaero to say one way or the other.

 

However, there is still the fact that there are more

Than a few examples of civilizations who just wanted to be left alone or perhaps even join the Imperium but were wiped off the map. The Interex is a prime example of that as well as the Auretian Technocracy. There are also the aforementioned civilizations in one of my previous posts that were conquered by the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves.

 

There is still the fact that the Thunder Warriors happened to be very brutal creatures, as described in The Outcast Dead by a surviving Thunder Warrior. I don't have exact passages but I have no problem quoting them. But as Gaius pointed out, depending on what side you are viewing from, any action that results in death can be justified. Look at the Holocaust. Hitler convinced Nazi Germany that persecuting the Jews would help them. Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs and killed two cities' worth of people just to stop the war's casualty count from going higher. And so on so forth. Anything can be justified as long as someone is willing to justify it.

[Vesper]

 

Vesper: Let me see if I understand you correctly. The crusades were

about taking "Christianity" to the Middle East and claiming the land for

god?

Absolutly. The very etymology of the word "crusade" is 100% christian. That's why crazed beardy muslims use that word to make believe Western counties are at war against crazed beardy muslims for religious reasons. The word hasn't been used only for the well known crusades in Middle East. Northern crusades (AKA Baltic crusades) and the Reconquista (taking back the Iberic Peninsula from the muslims) are other crusades.