 The Imperium of man. The eternal domain of the God Emperor, who, for 10,000 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 Malachian appetite 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 deptlessly abominate. By these words, I have utterly damned myself. The Oculus Investigatus of the Logos Historic Avertia have, by writ of the Lord Regent of the Imperium, the Primarch Robert Goleman, 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 Primarch's reasoning, was to attempt to stymie the seemingly irrecoverable loss of information, of facts, that ten 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, rare is it further that they have the ability or the luxury to think. This is the way of things. Imperium assures this, for like all autocracies before it, the masses must simply not be allowed to think. Let's begin to question. I have been questioning. This record will likely never be more than my own treatise 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 and a bullet's 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, it is penance, acknowledgement, admission of guilt perhaps, or culpability, remorse for being a cog in a system of such wanton 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 then, that this is the personal confessional of an imperial citizen, a 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 often been remembered, indeed even so by yours truly during one's earlier years within the Logos, as a halcyon age of the Imperium. The greatest virtues of our species were to be ripped across the stars themselves. The establishment of the Imperium, the Emperor's greatest achievement yet, was to seemingly all concern 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, realent of divine provenance, and like the term Great Crusade itself, seemingly deliberately at odds with the Emperor's rigidly secular Imperial truth ideology. Therein lies both contradiction and intent, the words incongruous with the times and governments within which they existed, but also representing a statement of repurposing. The master of mankind had stripped 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 claimed to dominion over the stars justified? Well, by the Imperium's own self-righteousness. It was a facet of many an iterator's internal training seminars. This need to substantiate the justice of humanity's crusade, for it was a question that it inevitably begged. The great Kiril Sinderman, arch-iterator of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet of the Warmaster Horus Lupacal, 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 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, syndromens and, by extension, the Imperium's argument is fully circular. By 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, philosophents of the times long past, have, to put it mildly, 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 had superseded some. The empirical reasoning he proffers, as overcoming all others, disappears when syndromen 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 syndromen and the iterators ultimately failed to provide, because they simply did not need to. They were bearing the word of the Emperor. 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 tail. Four, when one is in command of all, one's word tends to become truth regardless of whether or not said truth corresponds with observable reality. Indeed, often reality will shift to accommodate it, or at the very least, everyone else's perceptions will. Such a thing was observed about the Emperor himself by none other than the Primarch, Alpharius, or an individual asserting to be him, 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, the 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, Obama Candoire, is an excellent case study. Born in the Banda Confederacy of South Africa upon Terra, Candoire'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 Terra 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 Terra'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 Candoire 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 marshal, 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 Candoire herself, had developed from long thought lost law tracts of old Earth, were 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 Terra 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 Candoire 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 Obama Candoire so compelling, for even in the face of such transhuman horrors as the Emperor's own custodians, whom Candoire, earlier in her tenure as Provost Marshall, pursued an investigation of. She had reason to believe that the custodians, under the command of Captain General Constantine Valdor, had perpetrated an extermination of the Legeochatages, 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, more in 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 Candoire personally. She invested 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 High Lords and the tenuous civilian authorities, then the Emperor was just another warlord ruling by absolute fear, 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 Terra, so had come the Magister's temporal, then the Lord's civilian, and then finally the High Lord's civilian. The ancient precept of democratic mandate was never raised beyond hastily withdrawn queries, with those in power reasoning, under the Emperor's gaze, that the dangers present upon Terra 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 ardent 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 Candlewire'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 McCandlewire 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 true that the Ligio 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. Candlewire, in an attempt to avert what she herself perceived to be a dire threat to the Imperium, launched a coup with the sole surviving Primarch General of the Ligio Catatus, Ushotan, 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 in 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. Candlewire 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, Candlewire 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 were standing too proud to realize the ultimate truth that the Emperor was the only way. They were to be pitied, taught the Imperium, 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 sorcerous gene-bred horrors of Sen are, of course, without a doubt a threat in need of action, which the Imperium answered with the savagery and brutality of their own. The horrors of that war and other wars on Terra 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 faux. Annihilating these potential grey areas, surrounding themselves now with nothing but enemies, the Imperium's one against all policy destroyed the humanity of those without, to bolster the humanity of those within. Then, of course, they were those whose humanity needed no destroying, for by the Imperium's writ they never had any to begin with. The Alien. Be they Aeldari, Greenskin, Rudd, Rangda, Rackgall, Crave, Thrual, Jorgal, Calardon, Nephilim, all came to extermination at the hands of the legionnaires of starties and the Imperial Army. The roots of Imperial xenophobia, and indeed the Imperium's eternally xenocidal 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 discernable 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 Leopho, 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 Alien's 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 their 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 xenocidal 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 is 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, but 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 Drukhari 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, and one can instead point to the Xenos slavers that had ruled the outer Sol 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 inter-rex, 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 inter-rex simply deprived them of spaceflight 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. Tao 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 obstinate 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. The 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 painstaking 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 penning 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. A controlling truth, it precludes the creation of souls such as myself who will ask why, who 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 historic avertia. He is his father's son, after all. The recent events of the Hexarchy's coup, its rapid and extremely fatal conclusion, demonstrate the Primarch'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 historians 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, because 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. Has he merely excised the Imperium's most necrotic flesh, allowing the body to persist while the cankers within its soul simply continue to macro-metastasise? 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 Primarch's 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 Terra, dwelling in the spires far above me and further still beyond the walls of the palace. They are people for whom the average lifespan of the year is Terran Standard, or 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, censocrats. Once time in the manufacturing natal compound is complete, they are crammed into the hive's ministerium run indoctrination 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. Manufactoria 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-ferral 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 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 and rendering into nutrient corpse starch, their hair shaved for use in pillows for their children, their organs harvested to replenish those worn by servitors, their naked bones fed into 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. Their 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 painstave, bellowing deific writ straight into your face as his weapon screams electro-shocks 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 un-guilt. The greatest tool in the hands of the Inquisition and indeed any within the regime who wished to lever it 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 Arbiters Judicator has always remained within my mind's eye. Reading, suspicion is your greatest virtue. Feed it. This work 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. Anyone or anything. A crime, of body, of action, of thought need not even be one to find 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. There 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 whole. The crew of a merchant hauler voidborn and thus long of limb may request a brief shore leave as their ships are restocked will then get around of mutants abroad within the port the crew unaware not realizing that they're 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 bane 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 few limits on a bureaucracy's power to expand and the adeptus administratum is no exception its scope is cyclopian 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 adeptus 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 auto quill 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 often used by those who seek to justify their ends and their means within a regime such as ours is often 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 imperium's 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 imperium 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 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 irrecovably 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 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 of 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 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 marshal's triumphal celebration it is not necessity that upon hive worlds there exist petitioners whose entire lives are spent in cues 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 macro structure 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 favour of the loyal for to such a regime that is the most important quality in maintaining control sycophancy 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 servility 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 the former chancellor of the senatorium 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 pharist 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 grizzly 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 in ability 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 consigned billions to misery and death 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 boot 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 soul 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 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 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 unparably 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 has 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 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 that to excise it would cause damage irreparable to the whole that we live they will say in an imperfect age I have 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 the atrocity into the realm parodic 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 a universe that does not but spit upon the honorable do these heroes heroes 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 10,000 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 accursed in an entropic necropolis of our own design prisoners trapped within the moor 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 fodder 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 brain 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 welts 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 putrify 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 and it is one I will never wake from of a imperator gloria in excelsis terra if you want to help support the channel head on over to patreon.com slash oculus imperia if you would 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