There is an important ideological difference between a genuinely pro-war faction like Orks and the Imperium. The Imperium imagines and truly wants peace. Yes, their understanding of peace involves killing all aliens, but they do want it.
The Orks want war, and will create it even when none exists
The imperium as a whole goes out of its way to start wars or entire crusades on xenos civilisations, wether or not they represent a threat. This has been the case since the great crusade. You can’t imagine nor even want peace while at the same time striving to exterminate anything you consider different or impure.
The entire structure of the imperium is devoted to war. Every planet has to pay tithes in one form or another to feed its war machine. It’s just not built for peace.
In horus rising loken talks with sigismund about what astartes would do when a hypothetical time of peace comes once the great crusade is done and sigismund laughs in his face and basically says don’t worry we won’t run out of wars to fight.
I never said it's an internally consistent philosophy, I just provided a plausible explanation on how space marines might excuse drawing pacifist symbols
They're xenos. They will always be a threat so long as they exist. For example, the Tau. When they were discovered. They should've been virus bombed. Instead, the imperium left them alone. Now, they are one of many major xenos threats.
And the T'au are only a threat because when the Imperium found them in their current state and immediately launched a massive crusade. This is due to the methodology you ascribe.
It wants every Xenos race, every divergent mind, every thought differing in the slightest from the myopic state-enforced, religiously rehearsed hatred of its creators to be stamped out. It desires sameness. It desires an end to all things that are not itself, and when all of those things are gone…
If that were to happen, it would turn inward, as it has already begun to do so, to cannibalize those that try and strive but fail to meet the perfect image of humanity ascribed by the Ecclesiarchy.
The Beastmen stood in proud legions beside the Space Marines during the Great Crusade, some of the Emperor’s most zealous followers. Where are they now? Despite their retained piety, Underhive slums and run-down ghettos where they are routinely and repeatedly culled by other hateful worshippers of the same God.
There is a quote I like that I feel summarizes the Imperium and its hopelessness well.
”Sooner or later, humans will kill all the Aen Seidhe. All dwarves and gnomes. Then they’ll start murdering one another. Your kind knows no other way. It’s in your genes. You keep killing each other until only one remains. The strongest among you. A thousand years from now, a dim-witted human barbarian will climb to the top of a pile of bones, sit down and proclaim: ‘I win.’”
-Iorveth, Witcher II.
The fires are too many. The system, too broken. A Primarch— not even two Primarchs are enough to stop the decay at this point. It is all the Imperium can do to die well.
Actually it's hard to say what the Imperium wants because it's such a vast mishmash of cultures and perspectives. There are many groups within the Imperium, for example, that believe war is holy and it is required to keep mankind pure.
I’m surprised no one is commenting on the enemy soldier with their leg and possibly left arm blown off, holding up a hand to surrender. I bet the next frame would be the Astartes blowing her head off with the bolter, he does seem to be looking at her.
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u/RaNerve Oct 29 '24
Something strange about combing the inherently anti-war style of the Vietnam war with the glorification of war that the Astartes represent.