Satire Dies in Grimdarkness: Warhammer 40,000 and Fascism
The term “grimdark” is bandied about a lot these days, but the origin of the term is in the tagline of the Games Workshop (GW) franchise…
The term “grimdark” is bandied about a lot these days, but the origin of the term is in the tagline of the Games Workshop (GW) franchise and series of Warhammer 40,000 (40k). The opening diatribe of the rulebook to this day ends with “In the Grim Darkness of the far future, there is only war”.
Pretty scary stuff, you’ll agree. After all, war: what is it good for?
The world of Warhammer 40k is a lot of things; it’s a futuristic science fiction version of the tabletop game Warhammer Fantasy Battle (RIP), it’s video games, it’s a thousand vanity-press pulp novels of varying quality, but most of all (for this article’s sake), it’s satire.
I got interested in Warhammer 40k primarily through the lore. It’s not particularly deep, it’s extremely silly, and it is taking the absolute piss out of the ideas of state religion and conservatism more broadly. I don’t pretend for a moment that it’s great literature and I don’t think you’ll find anyone who does, however it is widely read, and that means the ideas it portrays need to be interrogated.
The world of Warhammer 40k is a xenophobic, theocratic dictatorship running off the misunderstood will of a near-dead god, powered by a heaving beaurocracy that relies on eugenically enhanced shock troops to ensure that the corruptive forces that they deny the existence of to the general populous doesn’t infect their minds, while tens of thousands of people per day are sacrificed to the entombed supreme leader.
It’s 1984 crossed with North Korea multiplied by a military industrial complex, squared. It is in every sense of the word, a hellhole of a universe to exist in, and it is explicitly and repeatedly lampshaded within the text and by Games Workshop themselves. If I know my history about this, it’s in part a sendup, parody, and dark lampooning of the politics of Thatcherism in the 1980s.
The phrase “there are no good guys in 40k” is bandied about often enough, but it clearly hasn’t sunk in with everyone who participates in the hobby, because Warhammer 40k has… how to put it? A bit of a Nazi problem.
At a tournament for the tabletop game in Spain , there was a player who called themselves “The Austrian Painter” who painted swastikas on his toy soldiers and wore neo-nazi iconography. A prominent 40k Youtuber “ArchWarhammer” was deplatformed for being a hateful Nazi shit, and there are other examples of Fascist and Nazi sympathisers being involved with the hobby and just… not getting the joke.
The vast majority of people get the joke. They scream “For the Emperor!” when rolling their dice to get His Divine Blessing or whatever, or they understand that Loken, while principled, is still an asshole, or they get what they mean when Dan Abnett describes the act of enforcing the will of the beaurocracy as an inevitable slide into madness in the Eisenhorn series.
So why don’t the Nazis get the joke? Why is there a certain section of the player base that doesn’t realise that the entirety of the game is a loudspeaker through which their ideals are mocked? I think there are a few reasons that it’s possible to point to within the lore, or background, of the universe, a certain geographical and temporal distance from the original source of the satire, and also:
Fascists are fucking stupid
I think I have to start here. As much as their tactics are effective, and powerful, and prey on the weaknesses of the human psyche that evolution has left us with, it needs to be known that fascists and fascistic thinking are stupid as hell. They’re not only wrong, they’re obviously wrong, and their thinking is so devoid of the ability to understand context, nuance and subtext that they get the wrong idea just because they don’t do the thinking good.
Let’s keep that in mind, moving forward. None of the things I’m describing here are actually a problem if you aren’t the kind of lead-paint-licking, stunted, gawping, drooling goon who actually thinks fascism is a good idea. And I know you aren’t. I’ve always liked that about you. But these people do exist, and as long as they do, I think that GW has some responsibility to ensure that their fiction does as much as it can to decry the world it’s set in. While they have said as much out of universe, I think looking into the ways that their fiction in some ways reinforces these ideas is important as well.
Sorry, can I do that one more time, for good measure? Fascists are fucking stupid. I get just… a visceral feeling of pleasure from writing it. I also think that unlike my last article, which I took care to lend the gravity it deserved, the ideas that I’m exploring here deserve relentless mockery. Because, one more time for good measure: Fascists are fucking stupid.
So now we’ve got that first and most major problem out in the open, what does this stupidity cause them to do in the sphere of 40k that means they end up pissing in the pool that the rest of us are paddling in?
Nazis or Cthulhu? They’re the same picture
I’m going to be using the “foundational myth” of Warhammer 40,000 as a case-in-point for what I’m talking about in this article. The myth in question is “The Horus Heresy”, which happened approximately 10,000 years prior to the events of the mainline tabletop game, books, videogames et al. It’s a long tale, which started as a column in one of the rulebooks and is now dozens of novels and an entire game line all to itself (more on that later). To compress it for enough context for this article, here’s a short summary:
The Emperor of Mankind, after a glorious victory on the field of a planet infested with Xenos species, grants his favoured son (Horus) the honoured title of Warmaster(tm) and urges him to continue a great crusade across the stars, reuniting humanity and bringing them back to the light of the Imperium.
Those who consort with Aliens are impure and must be purged. Those who refuse the call must be purged. Only those who pledge complete fealty are spared.
The Emperor leaves to attend to other business, and the Warmaster discovers that he has been lied to. Far from being a universe of secular truth as his father has said, it is a universe of dark powers, of coercive and malevolent spirits. This, and other revelations, lead the Warmaster and several of his other sons to commit mutiny against the Emperor, and attempt to kill him for keeping this fundamental truth of the universe from them, aligning with the malevolent powers of Chaos along the way.
In the end, Horus is slain by the Emperor, and the Emperor is saved from the brink of death by being placed in a life-saving device that leaves him comatose. His secular ideal is corrupted and becomes the state religion, and the universe he once sought to free from religious fervour becomes a theocratic state in his name.
Yeah. Dark stuff. And may I say, dumb as hell. It’s a lot of fun, and the cruel ironies of the Heresy are some of my favourite in any background lore, but here’s a few points I wanted to make:
The Emperor was lying: his ideal secular world free from the control of gods did not exist.
Horus’s betrayal was essentially one of like-for-like: The Emperor’s Imperium was already a eugenics-led, warmongering, hateful place that sought to destroy or subjugate the entirety of the human populace. To side with Chaos was to do the same, but from a promise of freedom, not a promise of control. Both promises were lies.
So, how does this manifest in the mind of our moronic fascist of the 21st Century?
The protagonist problem
The original text for the Horus Heresy was only a few sentences long. It was included in an early version of the rulebook as a boxout; a bit of flavour text. Before long, it was developed into a more robust mythology that spread over a couple of pages. This was told as though it were a textbook. It was impersonal, a short piece of information given to the lore enthusiast to fully understand the horrid situation that led to the chaotic universe that means they can roll 120 dice while shouting “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!!”.
In 2006, this changed. Instead of small elements of lore in a rulebook, the Horus Heresy got the first novel in what ended up an enormous series. Horus Rising is a great start to the fifty-something book monolith, and it does what the lore hadn’t done up to that point: given the story a protagonist.
Garviel Loken of the Luna Wolves, a eugenically selected and enhanced Space Marine warrior whose devotion to the Emperor is only matched by his lack of humour, is the first time we see the Horus Heresy from a point of view character. We see him achieve things. We see his internal struggle. We see him clash with his peers and despair as they fall away from his truth — they betray the Emperor, and they represent a threat to the future of the Imperium.
What you and I, clever clogs that we are, know in this situation, is that for all we’re seeing the world through Loken’s eyes, we know he’s a monster working in service to an interstellar dictatorship. His desire to return to the status quo is so that he can remain the same kind of reprehensible murderer he’s always been. We know this, and so we can still enjoy the story for what it is: explosions and gunfights in a place where everything is terrible, and a kernel of mockery at those who would place us under the jurisdiction of state religion and regressive nationalist politics.
However, and this is the problem, what our fascists see is the word “loyalist” used to describe those who follow the Space Nazis, and the word “traitor” used to describe those who don’t.
In addition, they see the protagonist of the story achieving a lot of deeds. Reading a story of someone as they continue to survive against, frankly, ridiculous odds, is a surefire way to make people identify and cheer for that person. Unfortunately, people mistake “protagonist” for “good guy” far too often (just ask a self-identifying “Alpha Male” whether or not they think Jordan Belfort is cool or not). In the case of Warhammer lore, it can mean that stupid Nazis start reading some background stories and come away from it thinking that the IP is actually in favour of this bullshit. Which it’s not. At all.
It’s a problem, and a big one. The vast majority of the works in 40k feature the Imperium as the protagonist, and unfortunately a lot of them are blithely uncritical of the world they’re exploring. Fetishistic descriptions of ceremonial armaments, oaths sworn, reckless violence, and above all, devotion to the rotting corpse from which their holy edict to destroy is borne is delivered through the Black Library novels with the satirical sensibility of a brick in an oven. Sure, it’s there, and you pay lip service to it, but it’s just a weird thing you can ignore, or even not notice if nobody opens the oven. There are examples of mockery of the beaurocratic process, but they are too few and too sparse to drive home to someone without an inch of introspection that the world being portrayed here is not an aspirational one.
The decision by Games Workshop to “fill out” the background lore of Warhammer is an excellent business decision: tell stories that feature your latest characters and models, make them look cool, and watch them fly off the shelves! However, the act of expanding the lore by definition means obscuring some of the satirical detail for more intense plotting and character. This problem is starting to rear its ugly head in the endless Star Wars and Marvel EU work as well, but the difference is that in Star Wars we are never told that the Empire is anything but a Bad Guy.
In addition to this, GW have made the decision to go past the endpoint in their timeline, which has brought with it a new set of problems.
Time goes on, but should it?
For a long time, the Warhammer 40k universe was stuck. The latest part of the lore has been stuck at the year 40,999. Humanity’s Imperium (the space Nazis, remember) are beset on all sides, by aliens that resemble British football hooligans, BDSM elves, Slightly less BDSM elves, clown elves, gundam suits, robot pharaohs, hungry bugs, and the humans that betrayed them 10,000 years earlier.
They’re doomed. There’s no future, humanity is a regressive and scarred failure of a species. They’re subject to ridiculous religious mindrot, they’ve forgotten how to progress technologically, they’re scared, they’re hunted, and they are losing ground. Only misplaced hubris and the misplaced idea that they are deserving of the universe keep them battling.
At least, this was the story. The lore left the universe teetering on the brink of total ruin for the longest time, because that’s what humanity deserved. In this Universe, the grimdark(tm) future of mankind deserves nothing. A hopeless battle where all that they have sought to destroy has beset them on all sides and is slowly drawing in.
But then Bobby G came back and got his Primaris boys.
In the late 20-teens, Games Workshop decided that the best way to boost interest in the game was to reintroduce select characters from the Horus Heresy era of the lore to the tabletop game of 40k (again, Heresy is its own game system now and has different miniatures). Belisarius Cawl, owner of a cool name and a cooler genetic lab, built new space marines that weren’t subject to the flaws of the original, and one of the Emperor’s sons came back from the dead.
Suddenly, the galaxy of human endeavour, hoist by their own petard and driven to the inevitable brink of extinction through their short-sighted ways, has a ray of hope. In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only war and special upgrades to the eugenicist super soldiers and a literal resurrection for one of the primary supporters of the fascist regime.
With this single marketing (and it was marketing — I don’t genuinely believe GW has actively courted this idea deliberately) decision, the world of the fascist is validated. Instead of “you will be surrounded by the enemies of your insular and dangerous worldview, and they will come for you”, they see “simply hold the line, and more and better things will come to you”. An Imperium on the brink of collapse is an Imperium receiving its just desserts. An Imperium with a sweet host of upgrades and a reborn general is an excuse to double down.
Who cares about the backstory of toy soldiers anyway?
So the main question one might reasonable ask about all this is: who cares? Why does it matter whether or not Warhammer 40k is about space Nazis or not? It was a satire of Thatcherism and the specifics of the problems of the 80s in Britain, why does it matter that it’s gone away now?
It’s because of the Nazi Bar theory. If you let one Nazi come into your bar to have a drink, they might seem nice. You might be able to ignore the iron cross, maybe even have a conversation about — you know — anything but politics. Then next week he brings a friend, and then that friend brings another friend. Before you know it, other people start to leave your bar because there are too many Nazis in it, and suddenly your bar is known as the Nazi bar.
I’m not saying that’s going to happen to Warhammer 40k. I’m just saying, that dude with the iron cross? He’s sipping his beer, and not enough people have told him to fuck off yet.
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