The Nightmare Truth of the Imperium of Man (100th Episode Special) (Warhammer 40K Lore)

the imperium of man the eternal domain of the god emperor who for ten thousand years has sat immortal and unmoving upon the golden throne of holy terror it is a galaxy spanning empire a realm of a million worlds and quadrillions of citizens toiling within its gargantuan magnitude it is the cruelest and most abominable regime imaginable breathtaking conglomeration of corruption vice bigotry hatred superstition and fanaticism it is fueled by the fires of terror and revulsion held aloft by the cardinal virtues of intolerance and ignorance millions are fed to its malaccan appetites as millions more are birthed to succumb to that same fate it is the ur tyranny the end state of the concept of authority a monstrous bloated cherub thing endlessly fearful and depthlessly abominous by these words i have utterly damned myself i the oculus investigators of the logos historical virtia have by writ of the lord regent of the imperium the primark been granted access to records and archives deemed utterly secret for millennia that i may compile chronicles on the past for use in the human future in whatever form it may take the purpose of the logos by the primark's reasoning was to attempt to stymie the seemingly irrecovable loss of information of facts that 10 millennia of administrative and ideological rot has caused i and precious few like me have learned i have read i have compared i have comprehended i have elucidated upon things thought lost uncovered secrets thought long redacted and cast light upon wonders and terrors both i know not if my work actually amounts to anything if these records i compile reach a single set of eyes or ears i labor over them for it is all i know how to do however with learning comes thought with history perspective few to none within this regime are allowed either those that do usually wield such power over so many billions of souls that any thought or perspective they may have is simply turned to the perpetuation of that power rare is it that the powerless of education true education where is it further that they have the ability or the luxury to think this is the way of things the imperium assures this for like all autocracies before it the masses must simply not be allowed to think unless they begin to question i have been questioning this record will likely never be more than my own treaties of damnation should any within any position of authority chance upon it they will have not even made it this far before my door is crashed down on a bullet placed within my skull or perhaps a fate worse i've committed heresy already simply by thinking and i am dead for it this work is penance acknowledgement an admission of guilt perhaps or culpability remorse for being a cog in a system of such and cruelty that i have to break my own heart with the breaking of each day to simply exist within its hideous mechanisms i know not perhaps i will know by the end or maybe i will pass before i even reach it know that that this is the personal confessional of an imperial citizen the record and exploration of the structures of brutality a testament to the unspeakable viciousness of authority and power a study of the imperium of man the great crusade has oft been remembered indeed even so by yours truly during one's uh earlier years within the logos as a halcyon age of the imperium but the greatest virtues of our species were to be writ across the stars themselves the establishment of the imperium the emperor's greatest achievement yet was to seemingly all concerned the deliverance of mankind's manifest destiny a term one has frequently used to describe the endeavor for it was often the go-to for the imperial iterators of the day it is an old one relevant of divine provenance and like the term great crusade itself seemingly deliberately at odds with the emperors rigidly secular imperial truth ideology therein lies both contradiction and intent the words in congress with the times and governments within which they existed yet also representing a statement of repurposing the master of mankind had stripped to them of their overtly religious connotations but deliberately retained the feelings said connotations invoked of a righteous and militaristic endeavor to deliver unto humanity the galaxy it deserved how was this claim to dominion over the stars justified well by the imperium's own self-righteousness it was a facet of many in iterators internal training seminars this need to substantiate the justice of humanity's crusade for it was a question that it inevitably begged the great carroll cinderman arch iterator of the 63rd expeditionary fleet of the war master horus lupercal phrased it thusly is all we have to say in response to their why a feeble i am right so you are wrong yet we are we are right they are wrong because we know so we will not say i am right and you are wrong because we have bested them in combat we must proclaim it because we know it is the responsible truth we cannot should not will not promulgate that idea of any other reason than we know without hesitation without doubt without prejudice that it is the truth and upon that truth we bestow our faith they are wrong their culture was constructed upon lies we have brought them the keen edge of truth and enlightened them on that basis and that basis alone go from here and iterate our message heady words and certainly more than enough to have carried not only the masses but almost the totality of the population of the galaxy during even headier days of what must have felt like true deliverance humanity had emerged from a period of untold devastation strife and pain and now united around what was seemingly a truly singular being had been given a purpose like never before it was a renewal in mind body and spirit even if the existence of the latter was formally and firmly denied under pain of strictest punishment in darkest retrospect syndromes and by extension the imperium's argument is fully circular but reducing the justification for the imperium's conquests to the fact that they are the bearers of a singular objective truth relies on the premise that such an objective truth is even possible something philosophants of times long past have to put it mildly have been in differing opinions of the assertion that the secularity of the imperial truth is the system to which all must ultimately accede to simply because it has swept away the pagan superstitions of many religions before it does not prove that it supersedes all other belief systems merely that it has superseded some empirical reasoning he proffers as overcoming all others disappears when sinterman is faced with the ultimate question of why falling instead to a fairly vague assertion to the duplicity of faith while also using faith itself to structure his final argument it's regressive at its core a statement such as it needs to be proven by another statement just as true which syndraman and the iterators ultimately failed to provide because they simply did not need to they were bearing the word of the emperor and the emperor's word is truth it is a trope of regimes based around absolute leaders that said leaders are the sole font of truth a ceaseless infallibility upon which rests their foundations of their right to rule it is naturally in and of itself recursive becoming its own justification as a serpent devouring its own tale for when one is in command of all one's word tends to become true that regardless of whether or not said truth corresponds with observable reality indeed often reality will shift to accommodate us or at the very least everyone else's perceptions will such a thing was observed about the emperor himself by none other than the primark alfarius or an individual asserting to be him in the pages of a tome known as the transit of the human soul through strife otherwise known as the codex hydra within its pages he observed that his father and creator was a being whose word others tended to take simply at face value not merely his word being law even though it absolutely was but that he embodied that supreme leader quality of making the world organize itself to his desires objective truth in a purely philosophical sense is moot under such absolute rulership for he has become the bearer of it an interpreter for seemingly universal veracity thus rendering his political sociological and philosophical philosophies akin to prophecy they are delivering upon something if not divinely ordained in the emperor's case universally ordained that manifest destiny of humanity as the galaxy's rulers you see the emperor held forth the promise of stability even if his regime was ultimately predicated around permanent instability never-ending revolution bound to the stars with the goal of ultimate war there were early challenges to this it must be acknowledged the case of the first provost marshal of the imperium uama kandawyar is an excellent case study born in the banda confederacy of sud afrik upon terra candeweir's life was a product of both the age of strife and the unification wars some 10 millennia before our present time when the emperor was seeking to unify tara under a single banner for the first time in many thousands of years she was raised in relative safety and security but in a situation that was frequently nomadic owing to the severe instability of terror's various polities during that time it was a life marked by running from various warlords and petty kings staying one step ahead of barbarism and death and it inculcated in the young candy wire a fierce sense of justice which given the historical timing drew her into the workings of the imperium and up and up through its various offices until she was honored as the first grand provost marshall and given charge of implementing the newly minted lex pacifica upon a planet still not wholly conquered still not wholly compliant these legal codes and frameworks adopted in large part from codes kandawya herself had developed from long thought lost law tracts of old earth or for her what set the emperor and his regime aside from the many many other strong men that had risen and eventually fallen upon terra the law bound the various arms of this new imperium subordinating the military to civilian oversight rendering none above it it was a lesson born from her father nothing upon terror had worked for millennia and all was unto chaos for the warrior was in charge whenever the warrior was in charge things stopped working for things to work the warrior needed to be the servant of the worker for the worker made things work the warrior just makes wars a blunt and simplistic lesson yes but one that can dwyer had internalized of course things were not that simple in the emperor's new regime for the warriors were now not strictly speaking human they were beyond that this is in turn what makes the case of owama kandawire so compelling for even in the face of such trans-human horrors as the emperor's own custodians whom canned wire earlier in her tenure as provost marshall pursued an investigation of she had reason to believe that the custodians and the command of captain general constantin valdor had perpetrated an extermination of the legio catages also known as the thunder warriors that the defeat of these soldiers of unity at the battle of mount ararat had not as the news hollows claimed been a glorious last stand for the thunder legions but a slaughter wherein one branch of the imperial military had summarily and unilaterally wiped out another with no legal justification this of course could not be abided by the lex pacifica or for kandawa personally she adjusted the full force of her commitment to the imperium upon its legal framework and if an act should happen entirely without the input of the new highlords and the tenuous civilian authorities then the emperor was just another warlord ruling by absolute fiat and her efforts at building a better and more just world within his new empire were for naught the imperium had not in its earliest days needed administrators or bureaucrats there were only the generals and above them above all the emperor the lord of lightning knew however that with conquest came the need to administer those conquered and as the imperium expanded across terror so had come the magister's temporal then the lord's civilian and then finally the high lords civilian the ancient precept of democratic mandate was never raised beyond hastily withdrawn queries with those in power reasoning under the emperor's gaze the dangers present upon terror were too great to allow the populace to direct things this becoming something of a maxim for the imperium's future i believe you will find it was always a dictatorship always an authoritarian rule but one according to its art and supporters with benevolence at its core the high lords and those civilians under them stepped in that direction non-military personnel with actual power not just figurehead baubles trotted out for the masses workers ruling warriors as kandahya's father would have said it was not true civilian rule and likely all knew it but it was at least an improvement upon the millennia that had come before it and while mcandewire was dedicated above all else to ensuring that this did not slip from the grasp of those without guns and swords her stand was one on principle that if nothing else must be remembered as such of course to those of us with ironically clearance to parse the records it is truth that the legio custodes did in fact exterminate the thunder warriors on the explicit order of the emperor an act deemed a necessity superseding the codes of the lex pacifica candewire in an attempt to avert what she herself perceived to be a dire threat to the imperium launched a coup with the sole surviving primark general of the legiontatus ushatan only to find herself utterly outmaneuvered by valdor who had of course seen the attack coming valdor the emperor's man to his literal core was known to have justified his actions and by association the unilateral extra-legal authority the emperor and the imperial household still claimed as a necessity prosaically the enforcing of ignorance essential to stave off annihilation a common theme in the early imperium as those who have parsed one's records upon the imperial truth will no doubt recognize kandawyar was spared by the captain general her only crime deemed to have been her belief in the imperium access to the power to defend it and a lack of knowledge of its secret workings entirely to be expected when none outside the emperor's own inner circles knew anything of his truest plans her dethroning was again a necessity she had come too close to the real truth and must make way for a civilian that was more pliable in almost all aspects kandahar had her fears confirmed unity for all its grandeur was a lie the emperor was just another warlord but one whose ambitions whose scale was far far grander than anyone could have possibly conceived of course when striving to unite it is important to have enemies and certainly the imperium has never wanted for them in its earliest days it was the religious the wayward those last tribes of humanity squatting under a pall of superstitious beliefs or standing too proud to realize the ultimate truth that the emperor was the only way they were to be pitied taught the imperial yet granted no mercy should resistance be offered there was to be no mediation compliance was a binary choice and one that determined future existence this pattern had been laid down early in the unification wars discernible interestingly enough from the account of the maul and sen confederacy campaign as told by the captain general valdor to candwire during her deposition of him the sorceress gene-bred horrors of sen are of course without a doubt a threat in need of action which the imperium answered with a savagery and brutality of their own the horrors of that war and other wars on terror like it became the reasoning for the compliance model itself without the emperor's guidance alone humanity would stray into the depths of these horrors and he as sole ruler was the only one to keep us upon our truest path submission to this reality was the only way to avoid extermination there was to be no negotiation nor compromise you were subject or you were foe annihilating these potential gray areas surrounding themselves now with nothing but enemies the imperiums won against all policy destroyed the humanity of those without to bolster the humanity of those within then of course there were those whose humanity needed no destroying for by the imperium's wrist they never had any to begin with the alien be the ildari greenskin rod rangda rackgal crave through al jorgal calarden nephilim all came to extermination at the hands of the legionnaires astartes and the imperial army the roots of imperial xenophobia and indeed the imperium's eternally genocidal policy are old older than the empire itself to the extent that we can never truly be assured of how and why they arose and became so deeply ingrained but it is discernible that the emperor certainly sought to perpetuate them for his own ends the annihilation or subjugation of wayward humanity was never a pleasant task for the soldiery of the imperium but the alien the outsider their leiapho into which could be channeled the hatred of an entire species myths so old they could easily become rebranded as racial memories were restoked grievances rekindled had not the aliens mankind encountered during the stellar exodus been uniformly perfidious and hostile had at the conclusion of the machine wars the xenos not betrayed man sinking daggers into our weakened and bleeding stellar empire they were to be feared hated for this faithless and accursed never given quarter lest their treachery be allowed to fester until they would inevitably strike again this hatred was stoked further by more nebulous assertions were they not loathsome in appearance and thought errant things bereft of good human sensibilities and honors was there form not an unspeakable blasphemy to the human one such is how an enemy of all who dwell without is made it matters not that the records from the past are few and fragmented that the histories of xenos wars are so occluded by myths and legend and the crushing bludgeoning passage of time as to be impossible to parse with any veracity an enemy was necessary and as a boon for imperial conquest efforts their removal through genocidal campaigns of annihilation cleared planets and star systems for colonial purposes the hatred of all things alien forms one of the cardinal fears of the imperium to this day persisted now through not merely social tropes but the religiosity of the imperial creed besides it has merged as the fears of regimes such as ours do with the divine mandates of the god emperor making it the sacred duty of the imperial citizen to purge that which is not human as a method of fear of control and of focused loathing it is one of the imperium's finest achievements and one i am no stranger to i feel it kindled in my heart perpetual terror hate for the outsider i am not naive to the horrors of this galaxy both through my readings of the materials at my disposal and even through my own personal experiences xenophobia permits the most perfect whitewashing of the sins of one's own kin mirrored in its totality by the tarring of the other as the most hideous blight upon all creation it is a truth that there are things within the depths of the void that seek only to perpetrate death and destruction like the drukari or the greenskins or who seek to simply feed upon humanity like the crave or the high fleets of the great devourer that we are victims of the hatred and hunger of others is clear but and one has questioned this for a long arc now as i have read more and more of what remains of history we perpetuate it for it has become the great focusing trope for the direction of hatred outwards it is superlatively useful in this capacity as motivating as hate has ever been for regimes throughout time there is nothing in the way of true evidence of what happened during the stellar exodus or the dark age of technology or even the age of strife beyond tales that they themselves fulfill aspects of a grander narrative of alien treachery the initial crusade era justification for the hatred as is so often the case for such things was vastly out of proportion with what evidence existed and steamrolled over all competing evidence that arose to contravenous why acknowledge the existence of the diasporax when one can instead point to the xenos slavers that had ruled the outer sole planets for centuries better to hold up the destructiveness of the greenskins as an example of what tolerance would let persist rather than allow the existence of blended societies such as the human and alien interex to allow the imperium to question the truths that the regime held to be self-evident in the case of the latter even when presented with a hostile alien species with whom integration was fundamentally impossible the interacts simply deprived them of space flight and consigned them to a single remote planet rather than resorting to xenocide there is no room for mitigating circumstances or measured responses or policy development in the emperor's xenophobic mandates only the dichotomy human and outsider eldar is the same as orc tau is the same as rangda no quarter no mercy only annihilation functionally there is no difference in the response of the imperium to the alien or to an abstinent human regime only a relational position humanity is superior to the alien unless it does not submit to the emperor's will should this happen well their fate is the same the great crusade sought to be remembered even as it was barreling towards the stars as a human renewal a grand new era of our unbridled supremacy and it fully was but behind the guilt exterior lay the beating heart of a tyranny like so many that had risen and fallen since the beginning of the age of strife the scale had changed it is true the complexity most absolutely but not the means it was certainly one that was more efficacious than any before it in the arc of human history and one led by far more singular a being but so much of it was to anyone in possession of the scraps of historical knowledge that yet persist or even who have experienced living under said tyrants during old night predictable in its utilization of the tropes of the absolute ruler the creation of exterior enemies to bolster the tribal nationalism of those within the regime while simultaneously warning of recidivism a return to the degeneracy of a prior age should society deviate from the path prescribed by the leader both aspects combining in the creation of the outsider the creation indeed of a civilian authority that was ultimately wholly subservient to the military leadership not to mention a judicial system with precisely the same stratification of authority rampant propaganda based upon cyclical logic the desire to maintain the permanent revolution towards a utopian end state that was at best questionably achievable all centered around a mass leader whose infallibility was infallible whose ends could never not justify his means whose word was truth and whose truth would move reality around it to be accommodated what it would have ultimately led to had it continued we will never know the fires of the warmaster's ambition torched his father's realm forever closing off the path he had placed the species upon what followed is the imperium that is as ever it will be it matters not if it is the imperium he intended it to be or not it is all done in his name regardless and he has been silent upon the matter ten thousand years after its creation the imperium of man is a testament to the pulverizing perpetuity that is unremitting entropy it is a colossal machine that was set in motion millennia before and has persevered through sheer inertia its gargantuan systems persist though they are rotten to their cores degraded past the point of anything that can even charitably be considered efficacy it does not in any sense function each of its innumerable constituent parts are so hopelessly corrupted as to be an island unto themselves acting alone with only atrophied traditions and ideologies to guide them to link them to the rest ritualized practices that have in and of themselves become vitrified brittle things incapable of adaptation lest they shatter deviation from the norm is immediately punishable by death and pain and something far worse a norm that is depending on the power of the one who decides it entirely subjective thought is heresy progress is a distant memory what fragments remain of it eroded with the grinding passage of each pain-staking year the imperium is a juggernaut that devours endlessly an insatiable gaping maw consuming everything as it careens wildly hopelessly towards oblivion it is cruelty manifest the absolute state in its purest and most degraded nightmare form it is everything and it is unspeakable those words i write are of course heresy the imperium is perfect it is a god's testament shaped by the will infallible safeguarded in its flawlessness by those of truest faith it has endured despite the infinite hatred possessed by its enemies whoever seek to plunder what the emperor has built for his people and its endurance is what else but ample demonstration of its perfection only through devotion to its preservation ironclad adherence to tradition unquestioning submission to the word of holiest law can it survive to deviate is to invite disaster to question is to create anarchy you must maintain you must acquiesce you must keep the faith within you i by even panning this have damned myself and my soul i have questioned the foundations of the imperium and i will yet question further its current reality i see this as a logical progression of my remit and yet i truly begin to see why the imperium operates as it does the controlling truth it precludes the creation of souls such as myself who will ask why i will look upon its myriad cruelties and speak the words it forever fears is this necessity i doubt whether the lord regent envisaged this in the creation of the logos historica virtya he is his father's son after all the recent events of the hexarchy's coup its rapid and extremely fatal conclusion demonstrates the primark's deafness with the same tyrannies despite his massive drive to inject some measure of change and progress into this ailing empire i do wonder did he believe his little historiters in their efforts to supply him with data with facts would begin to doubt their own purposes or their existences he deliberately sought questioning souls or else yours truly would still not be alive but did he intend us to delve this deeply i wonder ask questions yes but ask the questions he wants us to as he merely excised the imperium's most necrotic flesh allowing the body to persist while the cankers within its soul simply continue to macro metastasize it matters not i guess these are my thoughts my sovereign domain none may take them from me not even him not even his father i am no longer the average imperial citizen i left that life behind long ago by the primarks beneficence i've learned much and seen more i am in possession of knowledge's merest hints of which would end the lives of untold billions i wonder could i possibly be considered an imperial citizen any longer for i am no longer held by most of the virtues the regime demands of us the average exemplary imperial citizen is not precisely a true and ardent devotee of the government or the regime or even the ideology but one for whom the distinction between fact and fiction the ability to match one's view of reality with one's own lived experience simply no longer exists the truest imperial citizen is for example perhaps the residence here upon holy terror dwelling in the spires far above me and further still beyond the walls of the palace they are people for whom the average lifespan is 40 years terran standard who are at birth torn from their mother's arms hosed with industrial disinfectant bombs and vaccination deluges to ward off the throne world's cascading plague waves and stamped with time and date ident tags to be logged by their hive stacks sensocrats once time in the manufacturing natal compound is complete they are crammed into the hive's ministorum-run indoctrinations columns to learn the truths of their lives to come the three cardinal fears alien mutant and heretic this will occupy fully one quarter of their expected lifespan meager human interaction with classmates an existence under the pain lash and electro staves of the ecclesiarchy educators coupled with if they were permitted to be retained after birth a life caring for their working parents in a single room tenement shared with two or three generations of their family subsequent to the education they will be assigned their work detail for life the smartest will be scooped up by the mass recruitment drives of the adeptus terra to fulfill a nominally privileged existence of a low to mid-level element in the vast bureaucratic chain of the imperium the vast majority are destined for far less illustrious positions manufacturing hands food processing details infrastructural maintainers refuse collection squads corpse retrieval agents terra like all worlds of comparable size within the imperium devours the majority of what can be considered employment here is well essentially maintenance of its own vast juggernaut a populace persisting only through its own perpetually lagging efforts to keep itself alive there is of course nothing approaching a safety net for those who cannot keep up with the imperial colossus an illness a missed day on the job a deviance be it perceived or real from the strictures of civilian life all may cause a citizen to plunge between the proverbial cracks forcing them to eke out existences of preying upon their fellow humans to merely survive or degenerating into half feral things in the depth of the hive sump with the discarded human effluvia considered non-grata by the world above unknowingly their lives are no better than the fauna that once tens of millennia ago trod the crust of the same world they now live upon if such an existence can even be called living worse indeed for those beasts at least had an intact biosphere to inhabit not the choking ever smog that was considered an atmosphere of the throne world ultimately when the citizen's life has ended their fates become the same in death they are all as equal as at birth their flesh stripped for rendering into nutrient corps starch their hair shaved for use in pillows for their children their organs harvested to replenish those worn by servitors their naked bones fed to the gulping furnace mouths to spew yet more ash into the choking air the exemplary citizen lives this life sees its numberless masses the quadrillions of packed gasping humanity around them doing the same and considers it in its myriad of crushing horrors better than the alternative they consider this the true just and devout state of the human species the greatest empire that has ever been or ever will be the eternal realm of god and they think it good despite the overwhelming reality of their existences they cannot match it with the suffering it engenders within them at every single moment the cardinal fears rule their lives fear of the alien fear of the mutant fear of the heretic it is as above bred into them from birth the world is shaped by this hate in its totality an education in terror the mass propaganda of the imperium has long since discovered that his audience was ready at all times to believe the worst about their reality there is no need for deception for there is only one word that of the emperor filtered down through the innumerable layers of the imperial machine from the voice of the god emperor to the minister and preacher with his pain stave bellowing defect straight into your face as his weapon screams electroshocks through your nerves all the while a massive hymnal aerostat drones overhead its votive melodies augmented at such a volume that the notes are rendered an indiscernible blaring of static noise terror used to be the means by which a regime would bully its opponents either as a survival mechanism or as gleeful sadism but now in the imperium of man it is the means by which the masses although already perfectly compliant remain ruled by the terrors wielded by the imperium are constant they strike without any provocation the victims are citizens innocent even by the most rigorous standards of those who prosecute them for we have made innocence impossible we have removed it as a concept it is no longer a state of being there is merely guilt and temporary unguilt greatest tool in the hands of the inquisition and indeed any within the regime who wish to leverage was the ability to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive to flip any behavior into a test of the purity of they who had perpetrated it this is not merely a tool of the inquisitors or the arbiters no far from it we have ensured that it is bred into the masses themselves this indoctrinated herd is the best tool within the imperium's arsenal for the perpetuation of its reign taught from birth to hate and fear and submit they are awash with suspicions they are actively told to wield indiscriminately for the enemy may be lurking around every corner one particular poster of an arbiter's judicator has always remained within my mind's eye reading suspicion is your greatest virtue feed it the concept of engagement with anything remotely political erodes under this ceaseless barrage vague but utterly pervasive hatred of everybody and everything without a focus for its furious attentions with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs its possessor actually lives within until finally life presents one this could be in a very real way or anything crime of body of action of thought need not even be one defined as such under the lex a subjective perception of the righteous be they individual or mob is all that is necessary for one to have been committed the crime is wrought out of these mass desires and reality simply bends to accommodate it the creation of internal enemies was far more vital to the sustainability of the regime than the existence of those assailing it from without that could perhaps possibly maybe come a day when the last xenos within the galaxy has found a bullet within its brainstem where there are no outsiders left to purge well then what what enemy could possibly unite the masses in hatred and fear the imperium has sidestepped this potential concern since the days the emperor still walked with the creation of the recidivist the traitor they who exist within and sow seeds of chaos within his great works they persist to this day albeit in slightly different forms now that the tenants of the imperial creed have blended the concepts of heresy and treachery into an amorphous deviant hole the crew of a merchant hauler voidborn and thus long of limb may request a brief shore leave as their ships are restocked word will then get around of mutants abroad within the port the crew unaware not realizing that their perfectly normal and indeed legal bodily form has marked them out the mob will gather the priests will preach the fears bred into the populace literally since birth overflowing now in righteous fury and the crew will be lynched burned alive in front of baying crowds there is no trial indeed the local arbiters not only allow such things but many will be within the lynch mob themselves the crowd will disperse having lashed out in emperor mandated hatred content in having done their duty to their god again no crime was committed not even by imperial legal standards and yet death and suffering has followed as per the hate machine set in place millennia ago there is a pseudo-mysticism in this bureaucracy of torment concept of rule by arbitrary decree and mass feeling suffering as a subjective and bitterly human experience is not limited by reason or reality it is infinite in its horrid possibilities unshackled by the moors of what truly is the action that drives it is however always limited by reality in a bureaucracy all that matters is the brutal naked event of the domination of its subject there are a few limits on a bureaucracy's power to expand and the adeptus administratum is no exception its scope is cyclopean its structure byzantine to a literally insane degree and above all its decisions are kept completely secret by virtue of the actual lex or sheer monstrous inscrutability as a result the citizens of his majesty's internal imperium will only ever experience the bureaucracy of the administratum of the imperial machine as a series of events throughout their lives few of which will at all be explicable by anything approaching reason under the regimes of millennia past a citizen would be reasonably expected to hold a degree of visibility over the lex that dictated their lives to them of course this is no longer the case the macro bureaucracy of the imperial adapter is so incomprehensibly vast and entropic as it utterly occludes the action from the suffering embedding the former within the chain of its fellows all the way from the scratch of an autoquil to the actual effect upon a human soul there is a perverse appeal to this the disengagement of cause and effect the dulling of impact of action to outcome it provides an insulation removal from your fellow man you never even have to look them in the face as your ruling has consigned their planet to death necessity is a word often used by those who seek to justify their ends and their means within a regime such as ours it is oft heard in the speeches of the long dead iterator order in combination with another and far more inherently frightening word a soft bomb to quote a much harder statement the necessity of tyranny the ancient systems of democratic rule were never considered at the imperiums foundation the threats to terror were deemed by the ruling powers as i discussed earlier far too dangerous to invite the masses into the political process no instead beneficent rule from one font was deemed appropriate for without such stern rulership surely all would come to anarchy and despair weakness has caused the collapse of the human stellar empire progress had built tools that turned instead to killing us only authority direction control could allow humanity to survive today this legacy of necessary evil persists in the innumerable cruelties the imperia meets out upon its citizens the emperor's own flock every second of every minute of every hour of every day the human herd is a resource those with whom the privilege to live with power and influence our wealth may spend freely and wantonly with no recourse to pain or suffering the masses the great human species whose destiny the emperor proclaimed it was to rule the stars now squat amongst them in an existence of abject torture in terror for their lives and their souls at every waking moment the sheer horrific truth of this is that their agonies are inflicted upon them by their own kind far far more commonly than the aliens or even the arch enemy they are taught to hate and fear the totalitarianism of the imperium has completely destroyed the whole life of the human as a human we have become a mere means to an end in the endless march of history the grueling death lockstep towards the gulping chasm of the end more devouring all who step forth in depthless greed all in the name of necessity for our protection protection we do need of course the galaxy is a hateful place filled with alien devourers the wretched spawn of the arch enemy and far worse things far more unknowable things that there are many who seek our destruction is doubtless not merely of the body but of the soul there are threats to our very beings from beyond space and time blasphemous horrors of incomprehensible nightmare lurking in the unlight beyond all things given all that one has learned of these impossible knowledges it feels that the universal system itself is one of utmost hostility to the human condition as if reality itself was somehow fundamentally and irregularly broken i will never deny these truths never deny the infinite hunger of the great devourer the incessant belligerence of the orc the sheer unshackled malice of the dark pantheon for one simply cannot yes they must be resisted yes they must be fought yes yes what we have keeps them out but it simply cannot be this way it cannot the necessity we invoke does not excuse the brutalities of the imperium of man necessity is an excuse to disguise the abuses of the powerful to wave the responsibility to common humanity those who at the top seek to divest themselves off so that they may remain there it is not necessity that allows the chartist captains to live in realms of spectacular wealth and comfort while those in their employ subsist on nutrient gruel harvested from the bodies of the dead it is not necessity that we have whole planetary societies bred in vats for the sole purpose of feeding a meat grinder war under careless alien skies it is not necessity that we inflict irreparable damage upon a world's climate and ecosystem simply for the sun to shine on one lord marshall's triumphant celebration it is not necessity that upon hive worlds there exist petitioners whose entire lives are spent in queues for a single meeting with a bureaucrat who will die before it even occurs and leave whole clans of descendants to continue bearing forth the original request it is not necessity that a low-hive manufacturer worker will kill his own mother to inherit her hab unit a windowless leaking unheated box three meters square with no sanitation devices simply because this is the best he will ever achieve in the four decades that he will live i could compile an archive in and of itself enlisting the imperium's cruelties i would need an army of scribes to catalog terra alone the task is impossible for the system is impossible and the response always the same it is necessary there are those even within my order the idealistic or the naive who wish to excuse the hideous excesses of the regime through incompetency citing an age-old law that one should never ascribe to malice what can instead be ascribed to idiocy certainly there dwells within the macrostructure of the imperium idiots and incompetence both and one and the same it is a facet of the totalitarian regime that the intelligent the diligent and the just will be rapidly whittled away in favor of the loyal for to such a regime that is the most important quality in maintaining control sick of fancy and obsequiousness are ideal it is far easier to manage and far more reliable especially when it can be readily combined with fear of punishment and reprisal should an undue amount of intelligence or creativity be demonstrated it is equally certain that this fear this cervility contributes to a system where one's incompetency is wholly excused by one's loyalty or piety should the latter be firm enough all manner of atrocity can be excused because they were done in the emperor's name because they are necessary but to ascribe idiocy to the powerful in their totality misses the point entirely and demeans their sins against their fellow humanity lev tiren the former chancellor of the sanatorium imperialis opined in his writings upon his time in office that such a view is a popular one of the high lords of terra the 12 most powerful personages within the imperium venal corrupt power hungry sociopathic and even technically insane yes but they are no idiots the legends and myths of imperial virtues well they attract the best and brightest drawn by its light as a pharos to the shining glory of the ideals they pretend to represent just as surely as the clutches of the ideologies of church and state attract the average and the occluded suggestions of all the grisly clandestine influence afforded to those lurking behind the scenes attract the very worst the high lords upon the council are 12 amongst countless quadrillions raised that status by privilege and power yes but also ability maintaining their grasp upon this supremacy and responding to the demands of it in kind with their own wits this is of course worse worse by far than absurd inability in full possessions of their faculties and authorities do the high lords act and perpetrate in doing so this monstrosity of an empire one would almost prefer it if they were shambling dull things but they are quite the opposite keen vital and alive they with strokes of pens consign billions to misery and death they are beasts monstrous fiends soaked in the blood of their own species and they would not have it any other way the imperium is perpetuated by them and we are all its products this is the ultimate and horrid truth of our existence as humans beneath the crushing jack boots of the imperium of man we are the products of a system that teaches us to live and breathe hatred suspicion zealotry a system that promulgates obliviousness as a prime quality martyrdom as the noblest end and abhorrence as the sole means of survival those pious amongst you if any have ever laid eyes upon this record or who have made it this far into one's damnation diatribe may yet scoff and ask what possible alternative is there question me upon how i should like to look into this universe and accomplish more than the imperium has than the emperor has [Music] and to them i can only say not this this is the worst and most abominable regime imaginable by any of the meager standards history can provide us it is terrifying and detestable on any level moral ethical or political it is the metastasized end state of totalitarian authority a brittle and yet impregnable monster machine of all consuming control it is not necessity it is shameless cruelty it is not the best of all possible scenarios it is a nightmare made unbearably real we could do better we can do better because nothing could be more wretched and atrocious than this shambling corpse of an empire it survived through sheer force of motion the dynamic tyranny of the emperor ascendant barreling through the millennia of history as a crushing colossus of bigotry and violence surrendering all that was even remotely human about it to corruption indolence and greed the cynical those who claim themselves realists will hear these pleas and to claim that should the imperium be torn down in the fires of reform or of change or of renewal that our enemies will immediately move in upon us that such weakness cannot be tolerated lest it risk the wholesale destruction of us all that the rot within our empire our very selves exists yes but the two excise it would cause damage irreparable to the whole that we live they will say in an imperfect age i've heard these arguments before from the lips of any from astartes to inquisitors to simple bureaucrats hells i have studied everything that they have and in some cases much much more and yet there is nothing to be done they say the risks are too great our enemies are too many be they of our own creation or not i wonder do they know that they simply parrot the same sad lies the system breeds into them to preserve its own existence to disseminate the inhumanity of its processes maybe they have resigned themselves to the lies for in them dwells a comfort of not having to try to surrender oneself to the system that bred them to submit to history and be ground to dust by its passage how does one be better in this system this regime there are those who exist who attempt to do the right thing whatever they may deem it is objective morality has long since been obliterated by the sliding of what the imperium considers atrocity into the realm periodic that does not mean that in the endless wars of this galaxy of ours there are not good people and that these good people are not attempting to do good deeds for others to live just lives in an unjust world to be honorable in the universe that does not but spit upon the honorable do these heroes hear us do they carry hope within them that is subjective the truth as the oculus sees it is that the nightmare of life in this the 41st millennium is the inescapability of this blasphemous joke of a regime our swollen autocratic hell with the ten thousand year silence of a god at its core how can one possibly claim to be moral in such a world when we have annihilated the concept so totally what does it mean to be a just being in an unjust system i have asked many a rhetorical question in this record questions that will go unanswered because there is no response that will not lead to my death which ironically isn't of itself an answer hope is dead hell is empty and all the devils are here we cower and crawl wretched and cursed in an entropic necropolis of our own design prisoners trapped within the maw of a careless god there is no justification for this by any standards there never was only sheens of benevolence or tepid justifications of necessity i am a part of it and i hate my part within it i possess faith in the god emperor because it is the only thing i know to have and i hate that i hate this universe i hate what it has done to us and the father it provides for those within my own species that seek to keep this world as horrid as it has become for their own petty ends i wish to be a good man to help yet i am the creation of the most terrible thing imaginable my very brains stamped out from patterns of thought and principle laying down millennia before i came to be i am entombed in this sepulchral existence you are entombed we are all of us entombed i find myself wondering what those who dwelt within the past may think if they saw the nightmare that this future would become if they saw the ideologies that rule us now and see to the seeds that begin to germinate and putrefy in the loam of their own thoughts what would they do if they heard the words the necessity of tyranny would they balk at how unspeakably horrific it is i know not i am thankful that they do not live to see such times this age of grimaced darkness this future is a nightmare it is one i will never wake from ave tour gloria in excelsis terra this video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my patreon subscribers if you'd like to help support the channel head on over to patreon.com oculus imperia if you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos you can contact me or follow me on twitter at oculus imperia otherwise please like subscribe comment let me know your feedback and as ever thank you very much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Oculus Imperia

Views: 216,082

Keywords: Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Lore, Warhammer 40k Lore, Warhammer 30k, Horus Heresy, Horus Heresy Lore, Forge World, Games Workshop, Astartes, Primarchs, Space Marines, Adeptus Astartes

Id: jXmEa2SLLMg

Length: 66min 19sec (3979 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021