There are 14 defining characteristics of a fascist government, so i thought it might be useful to look at those with regard to this old chestnut about whether the Imperium is fascist.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
No. The is very little evidence in the sources of Nationalism being a part of local planteary structures or Imperial governance.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights

Maybe. I don't think we much of an idea of what 'human rights' the Imperium recognises or allows so can't really assess this one.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
YES!!! Firmly part of the Imperium. Enemy without, enemy within, enemy beyond.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism

Yes. The military is a massive part of the Imperium.

5. Rampant sexism
No. Women appear to be entirely equal in status whenever portrayed in the 40k sources.

6. A controlled mass media

Maybe. We really don't have much idea what mass media exists in the imperium. I suspect the Adeptus Terra will control it though!

7. Obsession with national security
See 1. Although security in general appears to be prevalent.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together

No. Sure there's the Ministorum, and personal faith in the God-Emperor may be widespread, but...following Goge Vandire's Reign of Blood i think the separation of religion and state has been formly a part of the running of the Imperium.

The Imperial Cult was originally a part of the Administratum, but separated into the Ministorum.

9. Power of corporations protected
Maybe. there's no evidence of capitalist or corporate power in the Imperium.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated

Yes. The masses appear to be oppressed.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts

Yes. Ignorance is bliss.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment

Yes. Most things appear to be subject to arbitrary capital punishment...although what those things are is much less clear...

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Maybe. I don't think we have enough evidence to say for sure.

14. Fraudulent elections

No. As far as i'm aware, democracy and elections aren't a part of the Imperium.

Imperium fascist?

Yes = 5

Maybe = 4

No = 5

Hmmm.....so that didn't help at all!! D'oh!

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism

You applied a definition "by the book". But "the book" was not written with regard to a multi-solar-system empire. If you take the word "nation" and exchange it for "Imperium" it does apply.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights

I would not say "maybe" here. The Imperium regularly ignores even the most basic rights of its citizens. One only needs to look the fact that a human being becomes subhuman in the eyes of the Imperium as soon as a mutation arises. The deprive a human of his/her statues as a human... this is disdain for human rights. Full stop.

5. Rampant sexism
I was not aware of this definition of "the book". So, if Hitler would have treated women as equal he would not have been a fascist? How droll!

6. A controlled mass media
Again, I would not say "Maybe" but "YES".. IH p.128 says that "...what little mass media exists is rigidly controlled by the Ecclesiarchy & state..." In the quated article, this a statement for a hive world society, but as long as it isn´t mentioned otherwise for other modern technology worlds I would assume the same to be true whereever mass media is possible at all.

7. Obsession with national security
Again, I am convinced that "national" needs to be widend to "imperial" in order to translate the definition to a muli-planet Imperium.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
I think the definition of "tied together" does apply. After all, Imperial Law is "Holy" and the head of state is identical the one and only GOD . How can religion & ruling be any closer then this?

9. Power of corporations protected
I say "yes". Captilist power is present in the form of the merchant houses and guilds which are allowed to raise armies and wage wars in order to protect their interest. See the Fanes of Gunmetalcity and the "Trade Wars" about production matters mentioned in the descripiton of the Hecuter pistol.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment

Yes. Most things appear to be subject to arbitrary capital punishment...although what those things are is much less clear...

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Again, I say yes. Whenever the FFG-fluff starts to mentioned enforcers, they are mentioned as being corrupt. Whenever it comes to judgement, it is stressed that who is "right" is often a matter of whom is of the higher status/greater wealth.

To ask " is the Imperium facist ?" is to ask if the pope is catholic.

I think Luditte took the easy road and his answers are to subjective and came to quick.

1. The Imperium can't express nationalism on the scale we are used to. The ever expanding Imperium has replaced nationalism (because there are no fixed borders) and racism (there is only one race everything else are mutants and xenos) by imperialism which is in fact nationalism on a larger intergalactic scale.

so yes

2. The Imperium shows an extreme disregard for human rights, because every citizen outside the ruling entities has to perform a purpose. If this purpose violates the human rights depends mostly on the living conditions of their Homeworlds, but most of the time everything is acceptable as long the wheels keep on turning and the Imperium gets its tribut.

so yes

3. The same as Luditte

so yes

4. The same as Luditte

so yes

5. This will mostly depend on the culture of the homeworld but the Imperium in general doesn't make any difference in sex.

so no

6. There is no real mass media because every technology which can be used to spread information is controlled by the Mechanicus and indirectly by the Imperium.

so yes

7.As in 1. national security is replaced by intergalactic security but in most parts this only concerns dissidents and heretics as the Imperium doesn't forbid it's citizens to defend themselves and own weapons.

but yes

8. Religion is used by the ruling elite to legitimate their power also as Luditte says they are not one but interwoven for the purpose of maintaining power.

so yes

9. There are a lot of evidence of capitalist and corporate power but mostly for consumables as the Mechanicus as always control the more complex technologies. In the end every corporation has to kneel before the might of the Imperium but to fullfill the demand for food and consumables they got every imperial support they need.

so yes

10. As mentioned in 9. and

definitley yes

11. The Imperium made Ignorance into a art itself!

so yes

12. There is no unified law in the Imperium and it depends on the culture of the homeworld. There are even worlds where stealing and assasinations are accepted as long as some rules are followed. But if something is outlawed it will be punished accordingly.

so yes

13. The whole imperial system with planetary governours who are only responsible to pay their tributes is a hotbed for corruption.

so yes

14. There are even some worlds where the leaders are elected democratically but the system of the administratum and other imperial entities as the final ruling bodies is undemocratic.

so yes

This makes 13 Yes for me but this is only my subjective view.

Some interesting counter-interpretations there Gregorius21778 .

A few comments though.

'...take the word "nation" and exchange it for "Imperium"...'

Aye, thats a good point. In that case you're right.

'The Imperium regularly ignores even the most basic rights of its citizens.'

Really? What are these 'basic rights of its citizens'? Do you have a reference for where these are defined?

The reason i said 'maybe' is because i've not seen the rights of people in the Imperium defined anywhere.

IH p.128 says that "...what little mass media exists is rigidly controlled by the Ecclesiarchy & state..."

Interesting freference. In general i don't consider the RPG books as primary source material so tend to disregard their contents which is why i missed this one!

I wonder what they mean when the say 'Ecclesiarchy & state'? What is this 'state'?

Interesting though and given that i can see why you'd say that state control is a definate yes!

'How can religion & ruling be any closer then this?'

Because the Imperium is 'ruled' through the secular Administratum not the Ecclesiarchy. As i said, this separation of powers comes from the distaster of Vandire's Reign of Blood.

However, very interesting counterpoints you raise sir!

@Kain McDogal

I think Luditte took the easy road and his answers are to subjective and came to quick.

This makes 13 Yes for me but this is only my subjective view.

Its all subject sir!

And in general, i avoid the easy road as a matter of course...otherwise i wouldn't ask all these tricky questions about the Imperium...hehe...

Hi Luddite

Luddite said:

@Seperation between Administratum & Ecclesiarchy
While the actual rule is divided, the law is not. As you will have noted, most of the crimes that are against the state are considere heresy and excommunication is a sentence with very secular consequences since a "heretic" is basically not only "scotts free" (is this the term? I mean the german "Vogelfrei") but citizen are forbidden to help and shelter him. To even deal or associate with him is forbidden.

Last but not least, their can be no ruler that is not accepting the God-Emperor as ...well, as god! If their is no rule and no ruler (and CANNOT be) that does not accept the state religion... isn´t that proof that rule & religion are entvined?

Gregorius21778 said:

Hitler wasn't a fascist, he was a national socialist - a completely different ideology that produced somewhat similar results.

Morangias said:

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology.It advocates the creation of a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and family policy (such as eugenics). This state is led by a supreme leader who exercises a dictatorship over the fascist movement, the government and other state institutions. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition.

Hitler (and the IoM for that matter) was a fascit AND a national socialist.

You can be a national socialist without being a fascit (probably) but you can't be a fascit without being a nationalist. The socialist part of national socialism is just window dressing.

Luddite said:

In a galaxy-spanning empire, specieism effectively replaces nationalism. And it's not like various planets within the IoM aren't profoundly proud of their role in the empire.

So it's a definite yes.

Luddite said:

Billions of people forcefully drafted into the military.

Thousands of psykers sacrificed daily to the God-Emperor.

Entire planets summarily executed for suspected misdemeanors.

Legal system built on premises such as "Innocence proves nothing".

Thought police.

Feudalism (i.e. masses born as serfs to a select group of nobles, very small and unequal opportunities for social advancement).

Children forcefully taken from parents to undego a hellish training regimen combined with unstable genetic modifications for the sake of the ongoing supersoldier program.

Need I say more? The Imperium has no concept of human rights whatsoever. Your only right is to die in the God-Emperor's service. Any of those points alone would make Amnesty International **** bricks if it happened in the real world. So that's a definite "yes".

Luddite said:

For all we know, there are no media in the Imperium other than various propaganda channels (and porn-slates if we are to believe Dan Abnett). So I'd say yes.

Luddite said:

The deity which everyone is obliged under pain of death to worship is also the supreme ruler of the Imperium. Ministrorum controls entire worlds, Sororitas Famulous control the marriages between the nobility and educate their children, best human cadres (including highest ranking officers of the Adeptus Arbites and Imperial Guard) are trained on Ministrorum-controlled Schola Progenum worlds. Confessors.

A definite "yes".

Luddite said:

Two words: Adeptus Mechanicus. They may style themselves as a religious group but their practices are classically corporate.

Luddite said:

Feudalism is pretty much the synonym of cronyism. Corruption... Mechanicum alone meets the quota by demanding a cut of any action that involves technology more advanced than a flashlight.

Luddite said:

So... no points here because it's actually worse? Okay.

Luddite said:

Actually... not really. It's a totalitarian confessional state that controls all aspects of citizen activities and has no working concept of individual rights, but it's not fascism per se - it has at least as much in common with socialism, national socialism, absolute monarchy, and other totalitarian systems throughout the ages.

Musclewizard said:

Nationalism != national socialism. You can easily be a nationalist and a capitalist. Or a nationalist and a corporationist. And unlike any sort of socialism, nationalism itself isn't inherently criminal.

Hitler admired Mussolini and the Italian fascism... but he also admired Stalin (who was more of a national socialist than a communist himself). The whole practice of the Third Reich was socialist to the bone.

Some very interesting points being made people. Very good debate so far!

I think it'd be productive to stay away from debates about the relative aspects of actual historical societies though. I'm really just interested in looking at the potentially fascist aspects of the Imperium of 40k!

Morangias

Need I say more? The Imperium has no concept of human rights whatsoever. Your only right is to die in the God-Emperor's service. Any of those points alone would make Amnesty International **** bricks if it happened in the real world. So that's a definite "yes".

Well, that's why i said 'maybe'.

What 'human rights' do people in the Imperium have?

Without knowing that its hard to determine wether the Imperium is fascist in its outlook in terms of disregarding human rights.

If as you say the only right a person has is to die in the emperor's service, then the Imperium upholds that quite well and therefore isn't fascist in that regard at least.

I'm not sure its possible or appropriate to judge the imperium by today's standards. Article 8 of the ECHR (Article 12 in the UDHR) gives the right to privacy in private family life and correspondence for example...not something i'd suspect a member of the Adeptus Terra would expect! Or would they?

But to roleplay within it, i think its important to try and understand what the Imperium's like. It's often accused of being 'fascist, so i thought it would be interesting to really look at that assertion critically.

Luddite said:

So... it's not breaking human rights if the people aren't aware of them in the first place?

Either you got it all ass-backwards, or you just found a way to make Amnesty International shut up about China and North Korea.

Human rights are subjective.

We created them for our moral and cultural time, in accordance with what is generally accepted.

The human rights of the Imperium aren't likely to be the same are they?

A note on nationalism and feudalism.

The Imperium is fairly explicitly a feudal society, (albeit with trappings of the modern state due to its scale - a whole local state apparatus of many worlds stands in for a local lord and his fief, but its relationship to the rest of the Imperium is that of a lord to other lords, or to the king. There is no real continuity of state throughout the Imperium). The rise of nationalism in Medieval Europe was a part of the transition away from feudal societies towards states. Prior to nationalism, there was no broad concept of the nation state per se. The sentiments that today attach to a nation would then attach to the local lord and the king. The modern concepts of patriotism and nations were (re)inventions of the 13th century, and only slowly adopted. You can see their rise in the interminable wars between England, France, and Spain, which transitioned only slowly from wars between kings and loose covens of lords to wars between nations as we would understand the term "nation".

An interesting question, then, is to what degree advanced feudalism is fascist or not once you explicitly rule out nationalism in its modern sense. I would say the place to look is the relationship between means of production and the king / highest lord: the degree of serfdom and control.

Luddite said:

If you want to see it this way, the whole idea of human rights is meaningless and you shouldn't consider it at all for the sake of determining whether IoM is fascist or not.

Morangias said:

The idea is far from meaningless! Its just a subjective construct.

The human rights accepted as inalienable for our world are unlikely to be the same as for the Imperium, given what we know about the world of 40k.

OK, how about this...

1. What human rights do you think the citizen has within the Imperium?

2. Are they the same as the human rights we accept today?

3. IF they are different, then surely an assessment of wether the Imperium is fascist should be based on the human rights of the Imperium not of 21st century reality?

Luddite said:

Luddite said:

Actually I find it kind of hilarious that this point is discussed at all.

First thing: the Imperium does not give a rat's arse about the law structures of its worlds. Hive worlds with a rigid class system are as accepted as tribal structures or slavery. The Administratum does not care. Only the tithe matters.

Neither does it give a **** about individual humans. On Scintilla it is an accepted custom to abduct underhivers, drug them senseless and then kill them during a play because it's fun (see Purge the Unclean). An Inquisitor or a high ranking Arbitrator even may burn down entire hive structures and kill thousands if he finds it necessary. Workers are more often than not property of corporations and treated accordingly. Tech is more valuable than life.

So. I'd say yes.

It's all a matter of a paradigm we accept, and it boils down to two fundamental choices in this regard:

1. We can judge a fantasy culture based on our contemporary philosophy/morality/ethics. In this case, it's painfully obvious the Imperium of Man violates every definition of human rights ever coined by humanity.

2. We can only judge a fantasy culture based on their own philosophy/morality/ethics. In this case, we can't judge the IoM at all, neither in regard to it honoring/not honoring human rights (because they have no discernible concept of those) nor in regard to them being fascist, because the concept of fascism is meaningless to them as well.

From the philosophical and logical standpoints, both paradigms are equally valid on grounds of internal consistency. Only one of them, however, lets us discuss anything at all, so guess which one I'm paying more attention to?

There's a lot of elements to the Imperium which are as best I can interpret, as being a murky-grey transitional state between Feudalism and Fascism due to both historical events and some degree of evolution to reform the Imperium into presenting a unified front.

Feudalism pops up when there's been some kind of catastrophic failure of central government and the decentralisation of support mechanisms, bit like the fall of the Roman empire when Europe went back into a feudal society for several centuries and the endemic violence of those times. That violence is measured by people's ability to wield it and runs the gamut of society from serfs to aristocracy, he/she who kicks the most arse ends up at the top of the food chain. Now, it is also important to remember that a code of human rights did exist under feudalism (brutal as they may seem) and wasn't thrown away on a whim by those in charge because otherwise all their support mechanisms to feed, arm and maintain their defences, implodes into civil war and uprisings. Your serfs had holidays, got fed and protected, otherwise the **** hit the fan and you got deposed!

Fascism was a curiosity as a response to Communism in the early 20th century, due to the political ideology differences of the time and its a centralised mix of socialism and capitalism. While private property isn't nationalised; commercial competition, wages, laws and prices are set by the government. Officials are appointed by the government leadership instead of being elected by the people, who by and large have even less human rights than the poor old serf! Workers under the rule of fascism can have their little unions, worker collectives and so forth, but they got thrown out frequently in the interests of national security. Also unlike the Feudal aristocracy, there was something akin to equal rights (few as they where) between the citizen and the party member where everyone had sweet f-all rights as the whole system was intended to be as efficient as possible with basically no middlemen in between them.

The Imperium would "like to be" fascist with its centralised government and laws, however practically it doesn't work so they come to a comprimise (distance, different cultures and isolation are all a factor) All the mechanisms of the Imperial government are fascist, efficient little cogs (Adeptus Administratum, Arbites etc) that end up on a million and one little worlds scattered by vast distances, who by and large run themselves as feudal states due to their isolation from one another and have to remain independant, self defended until help from the Imperium arrives.

MKX said:

I agree, and this basic separation is also something i've discussed in my thread about what Imperial citizens are like.

Which...is very interesting from a roleplaying perspective as it sets up some basic narrative tensions that GMs and players can explore. the nature of local cultures and how they clash with the 'Imperial culture', and more importantly what happens as a result of one or the other gaining dominance is, for me at least, an interesting topic to explore.

Luddite said:

Gregorius21778 said:

I agree, the basic idea may be that, but in conception, development and practice they are subjective.

Gregorius21778 said:

Yes, you're right...except that they are.

Gregorius21778 said:

Human rights charter? Which one? The UDHR, ECHR, or any one of the national conventions?

As for including it in the list - i didn't. the 14 points i put forwards are generally accepted as measure of fascism in the activities of the government, so i thought it was a useful point of reference to the longstanding debate about the nature of the Imperium.

I'm rather interested in this diversion into the detail of one of these points as the nature of the rights of people in the Imperium is something i'm interested in understanding.

We can, i suppose, simply say thay the insane intergalactic culture of the 41st Millenium has the same basic conception of human rights as we do today and get on with popping heretics. No worries.

However, for me, that seems unlikely and i'd like to spend some time looking at how the conception of 'human rights' might be defined in the Imperium.

What rights do people in the Imperium have?

As a reference here are the 30 Articles of the UDHR (nice simple wiki form).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

I'm pretty sure almost none of them will apply to people in the Imperium.!!

Luddite said:

Simple, they aren't. Humanity as a whole has the Emperor-given right to rule the galaxy. Humans as inividuals, they have no indispensable rights, their lives are entirely in the hands of their superiors.

No set of guidelines that was ever marketed as "human rights" covers something like that. It's a system that doesn't concern itself with any sort of humanitarian philosophy, having sacrificed any notion of good, dignified living the humanity might have ever coined, and replacing it with a bloodiest regime imaginable.

Morangias said:

Point of order...

While the psykers are largely innocent, their powers are so dangerously unstable that without the Black Ships and the cull, human civilization would rabidly collapse due to rampant warp incursions and other nastiness.

Secondly, not every planet is fuedalistic, with people born as serfs.

Most importantly, we have not seen any examples thus far of (loyalist) Space Marines recruiting anyone but willing volunteers. They may not quite understand what they're volunteering for (for most it's a vague notion of being an eternal warrior for the Sky Emperor), but noone is ripped from the arms of their weeping parents and forced to endure the extremely dangerous training regime and screening process of Astartes initiation.

Morangias said:

Interesting, so you assert that in regard to Human Rights, the Imperium has become so fascist as to not even recognise the concept?

I think that's a viable arguement.