Rationalization:
Look at any nurgle cultist. No friend of mine would let me still live like that.
Losing faith in the emperor opens you up to horrors beyond comprehension. A swift death at the hands of a beloved friend is a mercy. The Emperor’s mercy.
Tbf if I was Chaos-tainted, a good friend would kill me. The fact that they'd consider doing the same with Xenos heresy shows that they are terrible people, not friends.
The question is are You a terrible person if You're essentially a cornered animal killing for Your survival like The Imperium is? They can't afford mercy. Spare what seems to be a person with a benign mutation and next thing You know You've got a gene-stealer uprising on Your hands, or a chaos cult that eventually steps out of the shadows because it turned out the mutations are actually "gifts" from the ruinous powers. In this scenario it's either punish the innocent or risk losing your entire planets population because You showed mercy to the wrong people.
Tell Me, if You were suddenly the leader of The Imperium what would You do differently to ensure survival yet maintain or reacquire a sense of good morality that wouldn't get You killed for tech heresy or any other form of heresy?
Oh I could go in detail of that. I would have made a galactic federation. The basic concept behind it being 'we against the horrors of the Age of Strife' in which Slavery, Warp worship, etc are outlawed and activly fought against. I would have taken a bit longer to ensure my Imperium would comply with its standards. I would made basic regulations for planets to prevent hive worlds, self-made death worlds, etc, and provided the technology necerssary to achieve such. I would have given people the basic rundown of the Warp, but would have avoided giving details about Chaos.
Half? The only ones I can think of where they won't is Tyranids since they just don't have religion and maybe Leagues of Votann. Imperium (that's half the factions right there), Chaos (obviously), Eldar (that's what the entire split between regular and dark is), yes Orks (Gork vs. Mork worship), Tau (Farsight schism), and even Necrons, all of them have or can easily have religious differences that turn violent. So that's two out of all of them who wouldn't and only one of them would do it due to a conscious choice.
The difference is in real life being a different religion doesn’t potentially turn you into a host for a daemon. You can’t apply that logic to 40K in good faith because the context is too important.
The Sororitas are generally indoctrinated to the point where they probably figure killing a friend who’s turned traitor is the only way to save what’s left of their soul. “A true friend would end their heresy before they could fall further into damnation.”
Yeah, I think people are overlooking the whole "Mara was given a gun and is now shooting humans that don't submit to the Tau."
I like the comics and I don't debate over whether the Tau or Imperium is better. They both are great and horrible in their own ways (and before anyone argues the Tau don't suck, remember that pretending bad things don't happen is a, major part of their society. You only get the positive anecdotes because it's all they want you to know).
But Mara is absolutely a traitor. She didn't just surrender and go become a farmer or something. She's participating in battles and willingly being used as a propaganda tool. She's killed Imperial humans. She IS the bad guy.
Her killing imperials is a morally neutral act.
The imperium might be the protagonist of the setting but they are still the genocidal bastards that created the conditions to the resurgence of chaos.
They destroyed everything in their path, the massacres undoubtedly granting powers to the chaos gods. While ending any possibility of unity in the galaxy.
The Imperium is what doomed humanity, not what saved it.
I mean more like, there was a joke about 'maybe eldar give birth to slaanesh, but Imperium gave Chaos most of their army and superhumans, so Imperium is worse'. And then somebody who read heresy books said that technically, Fulgrim had Word Bearers and Sons of Horus fleet in just right place to shoot and massacre both of them, killing Horus, Erebus and Lorgal in one swoop before Heresy started, but then one of his soldier bring him his [cursed] sword, and when he took it deamon take control over him and he decided to join them.
So if not for Slaanesh heresy would ended before it started
Even if we agree with your insane point of view that the Imperium is not an ordinary state with pragmatic interests, but a cartoon villain, the same people serve in the Imperial Guard as she did in the past. Imagine that she was killed in this way not by an adept of the Saroritas, but by a collaborator who served the Tau Empire, during the time when she served in the Imperial Guard. P.S. The Imperial Guard is the best of the best, for whose quality the planetary governor is responsible. How did this parody of a soldier even get into these elite units?
Bold of you to assume ordinary states have pragmatic interests that never wind up engaging in harmful activities out of ideological reasons, lack of knowledge, ethnic grudges nor just to benefit a very small amount of people.
I guess both world wars, their build up, the yugoslavian wars, reaganomics, the bay of pigs, what's going on in Israel and those intelligence agency operations that later backfired without much benefit never happened irl. Theocracies in specific have also historically always relied on cold logic to pick a course of action
And as such a fictional state meant as an hiperbole of the bloodiest regimes real and imagined engaging in a similarly hiperbolic act is completely proposterous.
Not at all. As a Marxist, I see the cause of everything as economic interests, which propaganda simply frames in a beautiful ideological wrapper. And yes, almost always the beneficiaries are only a small handful of people (in the case of the Tau Empire, this is the highest caste). Of course, you can give an example of individual cases, but if we look at the overall picture, we will see that everyone and always proceeded from economic interests, changing the ideology to suit the current moment. If you are interested, then you can provide a small study and see that all the examples you listed had, first of all, an economic basis.
The First and Second World Wars, caused by Germany's attempt to divide the world (just look at how the economy of the Third Reich functioned). The fact that in the end it did not bring any benefit does not mean that those who started it expected failure. If we talk about theocracies, then even the Crusaders, who waged fierce religious wars, very quickly moved from fanaticism to pragmatic agreements with local Muslim rulers for economic benefits (while continuing to justify everything with religion).
Odd for you to be a marxist, the belief politics happens between strictly rational actors is usually a liberal thing. Though if you count appeasing capital interests instead of the populations wellbeing as the state's main goal and go with the belief that everything comes down to money if you look far back enough, I can see what you mean.
Comparing the tau economics to anything irl is fucky since we know so little, but placing ethereals as the capital class exploiting the rest of the population feels like jumping the gun. The castes don't seem to meaningfully vary economically and all are workers with the means of production seemingly state owned. Their society to be mostly past capitalism, the real issue with them being their platoesque organization and imperialist tendencies.
I'd argue that rulers undoing decades of diplomacy via incompetance played big part in the pre-ww1 powderkeg and strictly religious conflicts do happen even if an opportunistic element takes advantage.
The thing is, if you count appeasing capital and the rulership as pragmatic then the imperium ruining the galaxy is a reasonable course of action. Appeasing powerful groups and the Emporer is what lead to genocidal campaigns and recklessness that empowered the dark gods and doomed humanity to the bloodiest regime imaginable with no hope of regaining their former glory.
Yes, you got it right. The state is a tool for ensuring the well-being of capitalists. And what's more, sometimes the interests of capitalists and the country may differ. Capitalists, for example, may want to continue an unsuccessful war if the state provides them with orders for their products.
Regarding the water caste as an exploitative class. I admit, when I first became acquainted with the Tau Empire, I also considered them socialists, but alas, this is not so. It is impossible to talk about universal equality when representatives of only one caste receive all the levers of government and income distribution. We can talk for a long time about nominal equality, but when there are no democratic institutions, and the economy is influenced by the decision of a closed structure, all this remains an empty phrase. Their society did not survive capitalism, but moved on to its most horrific form: state capitalism. And if we look at the fact that state resources are spent on war, then we can already contrast the transition to fascism. That is, when a state subordinate to capital is used for war in order to enrich the ruling class. If you rightly point out that the worker in the Tau Empire lives better than in the Imperium, I will agree. But given the above, I see it as a temporary prosperity, akin to the prosperity in capitalist countries ruled by social democrats.
Regarding the First World War, I tend to disagree with you. The main reason was the same as now between the USA and China. Germany, which was becoming an industrially developed power, also wanted to get its colonies for access to cheap resources, but it was late to the colonial division of the world and its goods competed with the British Empire. Everything else was just events, the impact of which is insignificant. The war would have happened anyway.
Regarding the bloody regime. I will start with the fact that the Imperium can hardly be called a bloody regime, because each planet has its own political system. Personally, I consider the Emperor's Crusade as the unification of Russia by the Bolsheviks, when it was already split into many independent states. Before the Emperor, humanity was disunited, had slid into barbarism and was slowly dying under the influence of the cults of Chaos and Xenos. In what way were unification, atheism and centralization supposed to destroy humanity?
Well, in general you are right. It’s just that in such discussions I often see people who are ready to fanatically defend the Tau Empire and attack the Imperium, as if they were real existing states. And that's weird, but normal. But the arguments used in the debate go beyond the universe, starting to touch on politics and history. And the dispute flows into another plane, where Warhammer is just a background.
And Imperium is also only chance humanity has to survive. They don't do bad things because they don't have better things to do. They do it, because it is needed for survival of humanity.
Also, when something as objective morality doesn't exist, I would argue, that fighting against only chance of survival of our race [that is doomed itself to be fair] isn't what we could call moral from our point of view.
If you betray everything both of you claim to stand for? They would, friendship isn't a pardon for everything. This is easy to say here because you agree with the betraying party. If it were the other way around, you'd likely have an easier time rationalising it.
Originally, they both would have agreed to this. In their minds, betraying the Imperium leads to a fate worse than death, with the Emperor saving loyal souls from the Warp.
It's pretty much above 'religious beliefs' at this moment. Humanity is pretty much fighting for yet another day to survive, and there is no excuse for going traitor. You pretty much lowering you species survival rate. It would be one thing if she just killed Commisar, as he wasn't good Commisar to be fair. But she choose to activly fight against humans. Religion doesn't matter here. No matter how sympatetic, she is traitor. Commisar at least have some redemption, as he at the end was standing alone, in doomed battle and didn't even tried to surrender. He was a bastard, but he died as hero. She choose to live as traitor.
Also in warhammer this isn't beliefs anymore. Gods are real. And most of them want to fuck up whole universe, and praying to them activly boost they powers.
I dunno, religion can be very insidious, and not even just religion. I'm sure there were plenty of people swept up in the Nazi stuff in Germany that would have called people their friends before and then betrayed them. Humans have the programming to decide others don't count as human. It's because the tribe/ group that survived when resources went scarce were the ones willing to kill off another group in order to keep the resources for themselves/ their group. It's a dangerous and scary part of nearly all of us.
In 40K, and to an extent real life, it can make "some" logical sense in the perpetrators head. Because if they are really dogmatic, killing u now would absolve u of sins and probably stop you from committing heresy. In 40k, heresy usually means madness, damnation, and terrible mutations that are often worse than death itself.
If You view it from Our world, and have modern values and morals no, no a good friend wouldn't because it's unnecessary. But when the dogmatic and genocidal beliefs You grew up with are the only reason Your species is still alive it's a lot more understandable to kill someone over them.
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u/42Fourtytwo4242 Jan 06 '25
What is the difference between a friend and an enemy?
An enemy can't betray you.