Everybody is Wrong About Fascism and the Imperium of Mankind
It seems from the discourse on social media that there are two kinds of fans when it comes to the Imperium of Mankind of the Warhammer 40000 universe. The first kind of fan enjoys the Imperium of Mankind as a grimdark future-medieval regime engaged in a desperate yet perpetual war for the survival of the human race. We will name this gang of fans the Chudhammer.
The second class of fan loves to hate the Imperium of Mankind as a “satire of fascism”. This class of fan also labels almost everything “fascism”, from drinking milk to not being gay, so that is no great surprise. These fans we will refer to as the Wokehammer because they tend to be lefty subversive types with weird pronouns and fetishes.
The Chudhammer response to the Wokehammer is that, no the IoM is not fascist. Yes, it is a harsh, even dystopian, regime but fascism is a very specific thing and the IoM is not that very specific thing. They may mention that it is loosely based on the Holy Roman Empire from real history and Frank Herbert’s Dune from fiction.
The Wokehammer take on the Imperium of Mankind is of course the cringiest and least accurate but the Chudhammer are a little off in a subtle way too. The essence of the disagreement between the two camps comes down to the meaning attached to the word “fascism”.
The Wokehammer use the word extremely loosely, as I have already mentioned. Milk is “fascism”, punctuality is “fascism”, not claiming welfare is “fascism”, freedom of speech is “fascism” and so on, and on and on. If one will use that word that loosely then of course the IoM will fit in that box.
However the Chudhammer’s defensive reaction is to be too narrow in their working definition of “fascism”. They will reference the ideology championed by the socialist politician Benito Mussolini. This fascism was only born in 1922 and died in the ashes of World War Two only two decades later.
Clearly the IoM references a much larger sweep of history including Caesarian Rome, Byzantine Empire, Charlemagne, Holy Roman Empire, Russian Empire and British Empire. So if you use fascism this narrowly then the IoM is far too big to fit that tiny box.
It is a defensive reaction because of course the Wokehammer use “fascism” as a character assassination. The popular post-world-war view is that “fascism” lost the last world war and so it has been proven by history to be “bad”. This is the one thing both the subversive progressives and the conservatives agree on. So this is what makes the word “fascist” a useful verbal weapon for subversives to use on normie conservatives.
This is where the Chudhammer are in error. Mussolini’s fascism is not the only or definitive fascism. It was not his invention. The symbol of the fasces goes back to ancient Rome but the concept the symbol represents is as old has civilisation and is pervasive among all the tribes on earth to this very day. The fasces represents nationalism and the concept of safety and strength in numbers.
The symbol is an axe bound in a bundle of sticks. The axe is power, the bundle of sticks represents numbers of individual people. So the symbol represents strength in numbers. E pluribus Unum, latin for “from many to one” is the same concept and you will find that to be motto for the world’s most liberal and democratic nation, the United States of America.
That is the real fascism, just ordinary nationalism or tribalism. Mussolini innovated very little. He added socialism to nationalism, that is all. By default nationalism is about the defence of a tribe or nation from hostile rivals. It is not necessarily totalitarian and could be very libertarian internally.
That is not to say that the totalitarian twist that the modern fascists like Mussolini put on ordinary nationalism is antithetical to the ancient fascism. Totalitarianism was not even Marx’s invention. Socialists of the more authoritarian bent were mostly imitating, in their own clumsy way, the big state reforms of the Kaiser Fredrick the Great. The Kaiser himself would look back to ancient Rome as an inspiration. The very title Kaiser is derived from Caesar.
It is not just 40k universe that is grim and dark. Our own is too. War between the individuals and the tribes of earth is universal, perpetual and eternal. National consciousness is a survival strategy, because war is a numbers game, usually big tribes beat small ones.
In this sense, the embattled Imperium of Mankind, as an ancient Rome or Byzantium of the far future, really is fascist. The numberless hordes of humanity across the stars find the power to defend themselves from all their terrible enemies by binding themselves together into a unified force. A bundle of sticks bound to an axe, a fasces.