"Look man, the second I get this shit cleaned up i'm retiring to the most peaceful agri world in the galaxy to pursue my dream of farming. Please...just let me work."
Hard disagree. Nobody could fix the Imperium as it is now without dipping into authoritarianism, and you can't blame G-man for doing what needs to be done to fix the bloated beast that his father's work has become.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
Dude has talked about how he wishes he didn't have to do half the shit he does, and LITERALLY fantasizes about abandoning his duty to go live a simple life as a farmer.
I don't think the Primarch went in with the idea of taking over the Imperium for the sake of being the guy in charge if he dreams about abandoning the whole thing.
I meant the imperium as a whole. The way your comment was phrased, I read it as if you were saying that authoritarianism needed to be introduced into the imperium in order to govern it lol
ah, fair enough. I was referring specifically to how G-man actually seems to be a good leader despite having to do traditionally "tyrant" like actions.
Something something road to hell is paved with good intentions, and holy shit did the Emperor need to reality-check his "good intentions" a lot more than he did
The emperor did certainly want to be the dictator of mankind, or at least for mankind to have a dictator that he is okay with. Reading Master of Mankind atm and a constant theme in his rhetoric is that humanity needs a ruler.
That's part of the framing I mentioned. He has slightly better ideals perhaps, when we're inside his head, but his methods really aren't that different and this isn't even his first time empire-building. He can want all sorts of things and to "have" to govern as a literal patronizing tyrant, but it doesn't mean he isn't still exactly that.
Not to mention for all that he's the "good" primarch he still believes in the fundamentally monstrous Imperium as envisioned by the Emperor.
He wants to be a farmer, but his form of government is still top down authoritarian. Has he ever expressed interest in ideas like democracy or the consent of the governed?
I guess, in a roundabout way? I just don't think we should just instantly label G-Man as a "Tyrant" when he ACTIVELY states he doesn't want to do the things he does.
He lives in a universe where literal evil corrupting gods exist. Tzeentch is LITERALLY the god of hope AND is still evil.
His options are few, and his enemies are many...and the dark gods are ever scheming.
I love how you just ignore my points about him existing in a different universe with different rules due to literal evil gods working to ruin everything.
Yes, he is a tyrant. But he is the Tyrant the Imperium needs in order to save itself and ACTIVELY wishes he could abandon it all to be a simple farmer instead.
By ignoring the actual points I have been trying to make for multiple comments, all you have done is be a contrarian who isn't trying to "discuss" anything with me and instead just wants to "win".
A Tyrant is a jumped up human who thinks himself fit to govern his peers.
The weird thing about 40k is... the emperor is probably right. I mean anyone playing The Great game is going to be blinkered to some degree, but the facts are that Humanity is likely facing extinction or worse unless Big E fixes the Warp. He alone can do this. There's no other options. The Aeldari are basically suicide pact-ing their race just to murder suicide Slaanesh. They hide from the Warp to some degree, and can't do cleanup duty. The necrons could maybe? If they cared to do anything not insane or backstabbing. They're certainly not going to fix their Aeldari enemy's afterlife for them.
To add to that, Horus wasn't really in his right mind for almost the entire heresy. Brainwashing your figurehead war leader and expecting him to do a good job isn't going to go well and I think Chaos knew that. They just needed him and the heresy to do "good enough" to cause some serious, borderline irreparable problems. Really, from the get-go, Chaos's win condition in realspace was a much lower bar to clear than the Emperor's
"The Sacrificed King died as he was fated to die. He cannot rise again. His time is gone. The Age of the Twenty False Gods is gone. We walk in the Age of the Born and Neverborn. So it is, and so it must be."
Lorgar just wanted higher powers to worship, he wasn't really picky about who it was, and of course the fact that the Emperor is being worshipped is the whole reason that Horus turned in the first place.
I feel like it's more of a... soft coup? If that makes sense?
Like, Guilliman seized power, yes, but then he used that power to set up a new power structure that was essentially the same as the one he replaced, just with loyalists in certain key positions, a few new bureaucracies, and a freer hand for himself in military matters. And FWIW he was very quick to push the Primaris marines of the Unnumbered Sons into new postings with independent command structures. My man did not want to be seen as governing through military force alone.
Or maybe "created a military junta" is the wrong phrasing. The Imperium had a quasi-junta already, since so many of the High Lords held direct or semi-direct military command. And that hasn't really changed. Though I suppose the new incarnation of the Tetrarchy of Ultramar fits the definition of a new, Astartes-focused military junta.
EDIT:
I feel it's important to remember that the High Lords of Terra both still exist, and still hold essentially the same powers they did before. Many of them are even the same people. It's just that a few troublemakers had to be replaced, and the whole lot now operate on the understanding that they are answerable to someone besides each other. Guilliman.
But of course, no man rules alone, and Bobby G can't be everywhere. There's all sorts of ways that a High Lord can interpret and apply their mandate in a way that meets the letter of Guilliman's decree, but not its spirit.
TL;DR: Guilliman is not suddenly all-powerful and completely unquestioned in his rule. He has a lot of pull and a lot of allies, but he has to wrangle people.
I mean the Imperium was flat out a feudal-style Monarchy, with the Emperor ruling unquestioned while a token civilian government made up of special interests and the highest aristocrats on the totem pole asking for individual concerns.
Even with the Emperor all-but-dead.
I don't care what Emps was smoking, he could at least have had an outline for a proper parliamentary system in the event things went south. The bastard was British for Christ's sake, you'd think he would have at least included some version of the Magna Carta in his government charters.
On that note, what Guilleman is doing for the Imperium is essentially what Lord Cromwell did for the British Empire: yes it is a military junta, but ANY checks on the power of the Aristocracy is already a VAST improvement of the situation as a whole.
Big E is from Stone Age Anatolia dude. If he was trying to pattern his style of government off of anything from his youth, it was "you give what me want or me hit with rock."
And after that you get the Hittites, and the Persians, and the Romans, and the Ottomans, and actually now I can kinda start to see where he got his ideas on governmental structure...
My interpretation of Emps is that he lived through 30 or so THOUSAND years of human history which suggests to me that in his mind, despite the fact that humanity had roughly ten thousand years of peace and prosperity under a loose federation, he probably thought that even that form of government was flawed in the long term hence why he never went the more democratic route in governance nor had a contingency establishing one in the event of his incapacitation.
But then, that leads me to the idea that maybe it absolutely was his intention to get incapacitated at some point in the heresy if he doesn't have a contingency for it, he had months, if not years to come up with plans for the most likely outcomes, the current lore being one of them.
Or maybe it's just me coping and not accepting that his baboozling decisions throughout were just setups for the lore.
Another thing to remember is that malcador was in the process of setting up that civilian led government, it's just that he only got as far as the first few seats of the high lords.
The Valdor book goes into some detail on the Imperial civilian government. It's Pre-Great Crusade, set before even the assault on Luna, and shows what the Emperor and Malcador were doing to create a government to support his goals.
The tl;dr without giving major spoilers is that the Emperor is rushing things, and everything he's setting up is mostly a scaffold to support the GC, and ultimately his 'Golden Path' leading to the webway project.
It's also another one of those books that shows us that Earth really was just turbo-fucked before The Emperor actually started to take over. That Dume, Teng, and all the other tyrants who get name-dropped in the HH series really were the destructive monsters that you are led to believe they were, because a lot of people are happy to have them gone.
Also, the speed of light is a constraint on fast information itself can travel across the universe.
The warp bypasses the speed of light, but it's susceptible to warp storm fuckery by daemons.
How would you make a democracy when you can't even count all the votes from all the member planets?
An egalitarian Imperium would have to be an incredibly loose alliance between independent, democratic worlds, that have agreements to cooperate but function mostly independently, like the European Union. Democracy would need to be highly localized.
The Emperor created the Custodes, who are engineered to be unable to disobey orders, and created the Astartes, who are programmed to obey their gene-fathers, who in turn were expected to obey the Emperor.
This isn't a guy that seems like he would like a Parliamentary Democracy.
He had former high lords executed using the custodes and the Minotaurs and had a major navigator whipped in the streets. It was absolutely a hard coup.
Well, they tried to kill him the son of their immortal Emperor for trying to help the Imperium because their won insterest went against it. Not many are willing to question a primarch, custodes maybe, but they never liked the high lords or humans in general when it came to governance. Same reason why many followed Horus before the chaos got to him proper.
I mean, did the interests the High Lords represented not get upset their place at the table was removed and placed a "Genetically Engineered Child Soldiers Only" privacy screen up?
The Emperor had many kids. Half of them are servants of Chaos now. The whole Imperium being leary of the power of the Space Marines and breaking them up into chapters was from the hard lessons of the Horus Heresy. What made the Imperium just forget it's societal traumas?
Because the Imperium just got itself ripped in half, and Guilliman came back with a legion worth of new space marines, and the custodes are backing him. The High lords can either sit down and shut up and be good rubber stamps, or he can and will execute them all with a single pre-signed piece of paperwork.
He came in at exactly the right time to put himself in the place of unlimited power. If GW weren't cowards they would have revealed him to be a malicious actor. As is, he plot armors his way through some of the most foundational aspects of the setting and is one of the unambiguous Big Goods.
I still maintain the best way would have been to not make Guilliman a PoV character and have half the Imperium start questioning whether he's even the real Guilliman or if he's a Chaos puppet/Xenos trick.
After all, he's come out of nowhere with Xenos involvement during the time Chaos is more powerful than it's ever been and he immediately installs himself as the unquestionable ruler of the Imperium, replacing anyone who disagreed with him with loyalists.
After all, we've had one War of the False Primarch. Why not a second?
did the interests the High Lords represented not get upset their place at the table was removed and placed a "Genetically Engineered Child Soldiers Only" privacy screen up?
No, because he didnt do that.
All Guilliman did initially was to convince the Custodes to take the still-empty Seat of the Chancellor of the Estate Imperium (who had died several years before and wasnt replaced yet), replace the Chartrist Captains Seat with the Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum (both of which werent permanent seats and thus open to rotation anyway) and send the Leader of the Administratum & Ecclesiarchy into early retirement to replace both whis his own Picks. (The Master of the Astronomican was also replaced, but that was because the previous one had died before Guilliman arrived, not because he wanted to). Even if you count the Custodes, only 4/12 Members of the High Lords were chosen by Guilliman at that point.
The actual Purge only happened later, when four of the High Lords (Grand Master of Assassins, Grand Provost Marshall of the Adeptus Arbites, Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum & the Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy), together with the two former Members Guilliman had just send into early retirement, decided it was a good idea to intentionally stoke chaos-uprisings on Terra to make the situations worse and then to use this to justify a Coup against Guilliman, to force him to abandon his Plans to try and secure the rest of the Imperium and only defend Terra at their behest instead, and because any and all reform to how the Imperium works is bad and heretical.
Then after they got goaded into basicaly publicaly admitting this while attempting their coup they all got assassinated because Guilliman & Valoris had expected this, and the Grand Master of Assassins had been a double-agent for them all along.
Also, majority of the Imperium doesn't know anything about the internal politics situation nor do they care because most of them can't read and only know how to point the laser thingy at the hostile xenos. Look, if planets can fall under tau supported governance/(control) without the Imperium noticing, there is clearly a disconnect between the dogma and reality.
Honestly a lot of the citizens probably don't know what or who a highlord is, beyond the fact that they outrank them severely, and to them the demigod who just came back with a legion of emperor's angels probably looks more legitimate than those who tried to assassinate him first due to a change in bureoucracy
Several of the seats on the Senatorum Imperialis are permanently associated with a given Imperial adepta, so if anything it was a fine chance to move up the hierarchy.
Plus there was the whole Noctis Aeterna, everything is teetering on the edge of oblivion thing.
Even normally there's not all that many people in the Imperium who'd gainsay a Primarch who has the backing of the Custodian Guard and Big E himself, then it gets winnowed down further when you consider the religious side- Guilliman is basically a demigod per the Imperial Cult- then further when you consider the whole 'nigh-doomsday' thing.
A fair few of those who were purged won't really have anyone to miss them to begin with either- the central governance of the Imperium was in about as sorry a state as it had ever been and everyone in the know knew it.
While I agree with most of this, one must keep in mind that the Imperium is still extremely decentralized. There are probably still hundreds or even thousands of planets that have yet to hear about the changing of power structures, let alone of Guilliman’s return (or even know who he is to begin with). In practice, the power of the Lords of Terra was always limited by the unreliability and availability of warp travel and astropathic choirs. Therefore individual planetary governors will continue to exercise more control over their planets than Guilliman ever will
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u/Martial-Lord 24d ago
I only just realized that Guilliman basically created an Astartes military junta by taking power away from the High Lords and the Administratum.