May 20, 2026 • 50 mins
Robert and Joe Kassabian are soon launching a new podcast about Warhammer 40,000 and you. This episode acts as a legally binding teaser / preview.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hey everyone, Joe here. I also host the Alliance at
by Donkeys podcast, a military history podcast. We talk about
all eras of history, trying to make things funny and interesting.
And if that sounds cool to you, you can come
see us live May twenty ninth at the Rich Mix
in London. There will be tickets available for live show
(00:36):
and a ticket available for live streaming with video on
demand so you can watch it later. So get your
tickets now. They will be in the show notes and
I hope to see you there.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Oh, welcome back to Well. This is the Behind the
Bastard's feed and this is normally where you get new
episodes Behind the Bastard's but every now and then we
try something new. And in the not too distant future,
I'm planning to be launching a new podcast with my
friend and fellow Giant nerd Joe Kasabian, also a fellow
(01:08):
podcaster or Hey Joe, how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hey buddy, it's good to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, and we're wanting to do We're planning to do
a podcast on Warhammer forty thousand, which is a game
system that some of you are probably aware of and
others of you maybe aren't. I think a lot of
people know about this now it's reached kind of a
point of cultural critical mass. I think a significant chunk
of people on the Internet are just kind of casually
(01:34):
aware it exists in a way that they weren't when
we were kids and started playing this.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I remember back when I first
heard about Warhammer through the books, like nobody really knew
what it was other than other people that would fall
into that fan zone. But now anybody who doesn't even
know it's a miniature, maybe they know it from like
the Total War games or whatever. Yeah, it's definitely the
(02:00):
biggest it's ever been.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, and I the podcast, we'll you know, talk later
about what exactly the podcast kind of things the podcast
will be covering, But this episode, I specifically wanted to
talk about the intersection of Warhammer forty k and like
pop culture and pop politics in the United States and elsewhere,
because it's one of having a surprisingly large impact on
(02:22):
like the way people communicate on the Internet and the
way people talk about Donald Trump in particular, that's really weird.
But before we get into that, because I think that's
the thing that's going to be relevant to everybody, even
the people who you know aren't into the game at
least can get something out of this stuff, which is
why we're putting this up as our teaser episode in
the Bastard's Feed. But before we do that, Joe, you've
(02:42):
got a book to plug.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I do my debut gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn
comes out May twenty ninth, so you can pre order
it now, which is the best time to get it,
so when you when it arrives it'll be nice and.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Fresh, excellent. Well, everyone one should do that, and everyone
should listen to the episode, which you have no choice
but to listen to because I'm going to start reading
it to you and you're already listening to the podcast, right. So,
if you're at all into social media and up to
date on the current political hors of our age, you've
probably heard President Donald Trump referred to as God Emperor Trump.
(03:19):
Currently that phrase alone returns about four million results on Google,
and that is a reference to Warhammer forty thousand in
forty k as its fans call it. The God Emperor
is the founder in deity of the Imperium, a vast
million world empire that includes nearly all human beings. He
was once a mighty warrior and a deadbeat dad, but
(03:40):
he spent the last ten thousand years or so hooked
up to life support. So you can already see. You know,
the guy likes gold. He's always covered in gold, and
he's a terrible father. So you can see why Donald
Trump gets compared to him from time to time.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right, Hey, I mean recently Trump posted a picture of
himself as Jesus Christ, so maybe he's maybe starting to
buy miniatures.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
That's right, that's right. And the Emperor, being a being
who's lived tens of thousands of years, is kind of
insinuated to maybe have been Jesus or at least somebody
who like profited, you know, was influential in starting the
early Church. He's been insinuated to have been basically everybody.
But you know, getting beyond that, if you haven't don't
(04:23):
know anything about Warhammer and you just heard the phrase
God Emperor Trump, you probably didn't think too much about
it outside of like, oh, people are being weird about
politics again in the United States, right, can you? It
couldn't be right. Trump is kind of a singular figure
when it comes to global media attention, so it's not
all that noteworthy that fans of a game would reference
(04:44):
him in memes. What makes this one unique is that
people using the phrase and spreading memes about it are
kind of as likely to be mocking the president as
praising him. It's a real Schrodinger situation, and this aspect
of it is really well embodied by something very funny
that happened on February eleventh, twenty nineteen, over in Italy.
The Via Reggio Carnival is an event held in via Reggio,
(05:06):
a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade
in celebration since eighteen seventy three. It started when a
bunch of rich guys decided to make a parade with
floats that would help put the city on the map
in a cultural sense, and rather than funding the parade themselves,
they push to increase taxes on working class citizens and
poor people protested by wearing masks and presumably committing petty crimes. Right,
(05:28):
So you've got like a classic story here. It really
is a beautiful thing. I love a good carnival, And
kind of the key feature of this is there's these
huge paper machet floats, the largest of which weighs like
forty tons that people make spend the year making. There's
are massive things, they're the size of buildings. And then
like walk through the street, right, and there are drive
(05:49):
through the street I think now, and there's these big
drunken parties and everybody wears masks and it's a great time.
About half a million people attend each year. And twenty
nineteen was like any other year, except that the pride
of the was a sixty five foot tall sculpture of
Donald Trump as the God Emperor.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Of maid Joe, would you showed me this picture? I
lost my shit. I had never seen this.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
It'll be the thumbnail image of this. This one's not
going to be a video episode because it's a special one,
but I do kind of want people to see it.
If you just google like Trump God Emperor, float, parade
float or something like that, you'll see pictures and it
really is something. It's massive, right.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
I would love to be into the planning meeting on
that one, because you know, it took a small to
medium sized team to build this monster. Yes, someone had
to pitch that idea to the rest of them and
explain exactly what the fuck it was.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It was several people's whole year. The guy behind it
is artist Fabrizio Golly, who created it as a critique
of Trump's presidency. Some of this is obvious if you
like really look at the details of the statue. There
are like four blue twitter birds flying around the sword
handle the Emperor. Like this is based on off of
like a drawing in several drawings of the Emperor where
(07:03):
which is these guys wearing huge a huge golden suit
of power armour with like eagle's wings on it. He's
got a massive flaming sword. Everything about him is gold.
Often he has glorious long flowing hair, the kind that
Trump doesn't. But yeah, in the float this big Sordi had,
there's like twitter birds flying around the handle, which Fabrizio
(07:25):
put there to make the point that Trump had weaponized
Twitter against his enemies. And written on the blade in
Italian was the phrase your taxes and your duties, and
the specific way that these were written in Italian was
meant to be like bring up a different phrase, which
Galley summarized as meaning, here's your fucking tariffs, right, like
that's the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of
(07:47):
like prescient that he really picked those out as being
a weapon in a way, they weren't nearly as much
in twenty nineteen as they are now.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, and it still kind of works as a bit
of imperial propaganda. Yeah, Like this is one hundred percent
something that that the Emperor would have said to like
a planet in revolt, like here's your.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Here's your fucking tariffs with a literal sword. Yeah, Fabrizio
said of this quote, it's a joke, but in fact
he's trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of
nuclear missiles. This is one of the strongest actions let's
say that powerful people like Trump can use. So we'll
go back to Fabrizio in a bit. But what's relevant
to my point here is the point I was making
earlier is that as soon as pictures of this float
(08:28):
get online, they go viral. People are sharing this like crazy,
and Fabrizio's meaning sailed right over a lot of people's heads.
I'm going to quote now from an article in Time.
Many conservative commentators on Twitter appeared to interpret the float
as a tribute to Trump. Several tweeted that was a
parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for
(08:48):
right wing Channel one American News wrote, this carnival in
Italy looks a lot more fun than the Thanksgiving Day
parade in New York. Just look at this Trump float.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Ah incredible. Everybody knows it can't be a Trump float
because it wasn't sponsored by coinbase or right like.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Right, no one was selling crypto. It was twenty nineteen.
It couldn't have been affiliated with Trump.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, exactly, nobody could rug pull the parade.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Oh man, I do you know if the Emperor was
a real character, he's got to be a lie. He's
he should be alive then, because he's like thirty thou
forty thousand years old when the game starts, which means
theoretically the Emperor could have bought in fts. Right, that's true,
his madness could be entirely driven by all of his
apes getting stolen. He set him down the.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Path the thing that really drove him to combat chaos.
If someone tried to explain the concept of a slurp
juice to him.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
No, I got a ruled humanity. You people can't cover yourselves.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Fuck, you can't be fucking trusted.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, so Warhammer forty thousand and the God Emperor character
have existed since the nineteen eighties. For most of the
time that the game has existed, it's been a fairly
obscure pastime. It requires a lot of money in order
to actually play the game, and it used to require
a lot of money just to like buy all of
the books and guides that would teach you anything about
(10:07):
the game at all. But social media and video games
have introduced forty K to the masses in a way that, like,
you don't have to spend a lot or even any
money to at least consume the lore. A lot of
people who are fans have never played the game. You know,
maybe they play some video games, but a lot of
people just like watch hours of YouTube videos, and those
YouTube videos are largely regurgitating decades worth of lore that
(10:30):
have been like written and stored in websites or put
in wikis. Like that's all. That's the hobby to quite
a few people who call themselves fans, and so as
a result, when the long simmering US culture war ignited
the world of gaming a year or so prior to
the start of the Trump campaign, forty K became a
battleground too. The fact that the imperium that the god
(10:51):
Emperor ruled was in the text of the game a
fascist state, which was you know, largely the subject of
satire in thee made it kind of an obvious inspiration
for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
The fact that, like, people who were playing forty K
were usually playing one of the factions affiliated with this
evil fascist space space Empire. Even though the game was
satirizing the evil fascist space Empire, part of it all
meant that there was like some room wiggle room for
folks to get in and try to like propagandize to people.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The all they need is a tiny bit. There's always
enough wiggle room. It's like a mouse smashing itself under
a door. There's nothing you can do.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Right, right, especially since like it's it's part of its
wiggle room, and part of it's like, well, what do
you like Angry young men who aren't great at like
being socialized to do well? They spend way too much
time playing games. I say, as an angry young man
who wasn't well socialized, but it was, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Sensing myself in these comments.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah, playing a lot of Warhammer, right, and hey, I'm
well socialized now and I still love Warhammer.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's fine, goddamn right, which is always wild to because
Warhammer's inherently a social game. It is like even with
all the video games or whatever. If that's how you
want to consume it, great, But the second you cross
that line and start buying mini is you have to
go into a room and start talking to him.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, at some point you're going to have to be
around other people if you really want to do it.
So God Emperor Trump memes started spreading on four Chan
back in twenty fifteen, right around the same time Trump
announced his campaign, and December twenty fifth, twenty fifteen, a
YouTuber named Talent uploaded a video that collected a bunch
of early memes, entitled it Donald Trump Emperor of Mankind.
(12:36):
Talent was a very small time creator. We're talking about
a thousand subscribers, but this particular video broke half a
million views, and part of it, like the imagery in
the video, is there's a famous piece of art from
the lore of the game. That's the emperor fighting his
son who betrayed him, over the body of one of
his other sons that was murdered by the betrayers. It's
(12:57):
a very famous drawing and they just included that, but
they hadn't swapped out the Emperor with Donald Trump very crudely,
and I believe Hillary Clinton was playing the role of Horace,
his evil son. I'll do a screen share so you
can see this, Joe.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That is very confusing.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
This is a real beautiful find. I think that's Hillary
in there. Yeah, that's Hillary.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Oh yeah, that's Hillary. That's Hillary.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
And then there's a there's Donald.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Who would have thought? Who would have thought that Donald
Trump was Hillary Clinton's gene seed father.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yes, it is implied the meme because again, this is
his son, who is the evil he's fighting. So yes,
this kind of is implying that Hillary Clinton was created
by Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
And she's absolutely towering over him.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
She was way cooler. She just killed an angel. It's
pretty sweet. So the meme broke. The God Emperor meme
broke mainstream awareness in twenty sixteen when New York Times
reporter Jonathan Weisman wrote about the hate mail and threats
that he received online from Trump supporters. Quote from that article,
the anti Semitic hate, much of it from self identified
(14:06):
Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since Trump God Emperor
sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless hook nosed
jew I was served in an image of the geists of Auschwitz.
The famous words are bite, mocked, fry replaced without irony
with maccin America.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Great.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
So again, this guy and this journalist like Weiseman doesn't
recognize that this guy's making a warhammer reference or at
least right about Yeah, it's just like the the username
of the guy messaging him, and again like why would
he have right, Like if you don't, like, you wouldn't
assume Trump God Emperor is someone referencing a video game.
You just in this context, you just assume it's a
(14:43):
crazy fascist.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Right right.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah. But about two months after that column came out,
a writer with the Huffington Post, Nico Pitney, wrote an
article about the growing Trump God Emperor meme phenomenon quote
among Trump's active online supporters, the nickname is now commonplace.
The post announcing Trump's participation in the Q and A
heralded our God Emperor, and a search of the phrase
returned over two hundred posts in the day after Trump's appearance.
(15:09):
Some forum members say God Emperor is simply a tongue
in cheek attempt to rile up Trump opponents who fear
he would be a strong man as president. The term
is attributed variously to God Emperor, characters in the science
fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called Warhammer forty thousand.
We know he can't literally be one, wrote member in
New Jersey nine oh eight, but the phrase whip people
into a frenzy saying that we literally want a dictator.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Oh okay, okay. Funding that marketing back then.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, it was nicer back then when they had to
pretend it was a bit and I do lo well
it could be Dune, Well, Dune, it could be, but
it's not. Warhammer is kind of like a lot of
Warhammer was originally ripping off Dune, and the Emperor characters
based heavily on on Leo A. Trades Right, Like there's yeah,
(15:58):
that's certainly like like Warhammer is essentially all of the
sci fi that was bigg in the nineteen eighties and
before getting put into a blender and like merged together
right with.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Thatch, right uk, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
As we'll talk about yes, so like the journalist there
is correct that like, yeah, I mean they could have been,
but in this case they definitely weren't. They were talking
about the Emperor from forty k Now, a big part
of the appeal of the god Emperor character for these
people is that he was explicitly in the lore of
the game genocidal. The way the backstory goes, you know,
Warmer forty thousand is set in the forty first millennium,
(16:35):
like like thirty nine or zero thousand years into the future,
but in the lore of the game, and like the
year thirty thousand or so, about ten thousand years before
the current day of the setting. The Emperor, while he
was still alive and healthy, launched a great crusade after
unifying Earth. You know, there had been a big space
empire before, but it all crashed after the Ai, you know,
(16:55):
went crazy and fucked everything up. So Earth was just
like this warring mess of techno barbarians and shit. And
the Emperor takes over. He unifies Earth, and he makes
a bunch of gene modified super soldiers called space Marines,
and he sends them out into the galaxy to commit
mass genocide against all of the different alien species that
(17:15):
he considered a threat in any human world. That wouldn't
bend the need to him, right, They just do thousands
of genocides out in the galaxy. They take over like
a million worlds, and this all does end badly for
the Emperor, like his sons, who were his main generals
that he had created in a lab to eventually a
bunch of them betray them and he's badly wounded and
has to be on like this life support system forever
(17:37):
and ever, which leads to the nightmare future that the
game itself is set in. But the fact that like
none of this works for the Emperor, and that again
kinda in the lore, you're not supposed to be like, ah,
the Emperor, what a good guy who was doing a
good thing. You're supposed to be like, oh, he's just
like wiping people out for no reason, Like he was
just a real real dick. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
People always like to say like, oh, it's you know,
and nobody's good in the world of Warhammer Force, okay,
which the other crue yes, but specifically the Imperium is horrible.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah, absolutely horrible. And in the books about this genocide,
there's like moments where your favorite characters are wiping out
a species and like the last members of the species
will be like, we just wanted to be left alone,
Like these are. They're not subtle, like the writers are
not super subtle about them being the baddies.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Say what you will about Warhammer forty k, but subtle
is not one of them.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Subtle is not something you can apply to this game. However,
some people fail to see the broader message in the
lore and just hone in on the things that appeal
to them. And there's a great four Chan post I
found from dis the I think July twenty first, twenty fifteen,
where someone posts a picture and it's yet another one
of those like photoshop things where you've got like Donald
(18:54):
Trump in the place of a space marine. Year is
now forty thousand. Trump turned out to be the God
Emperor and initiated the imperium of man killing Xenos all day,
every day in his honor. Life is good. Get like
in the game, things aren't good in the forty first millennium.
The Emperor's stuck in a life support chair and everyone
worships him even though he was a major atheist, and
(19:17):
everything's falling apart all the time. Life is not in
fact good.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
And anywhere the space Marines came from is by design terrible.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Right, Yeah, they're abducted child soldiers who are like genetically
enhanced so they can go crack down on rebellions against
the state. They're not like, it's not a like, it's
like it's a fun game. There's a lot of like
the lore is interesting and the models are cool, but
you're not supposed to think, boy, I wish I lived
in that world. That would be silly.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Imagine if RFK Junior got the keys to the space
marine program.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
He's already got a strategic stockpile of trend and like, yeah,
butter ready to go.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's the first step towards having space marines.
Should just let RFK cook up like whatever kind of
like mammal penis based potion he can to invent the
extra organs that make you a super soldier.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Fuck, he's America's Firth, like a first neo apothecary.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
That's right, that's right. Yeah, he's the beginning of the
techno barbarian tries. So the very first edition of Warhammer
forty thousand, which was was called Warhammer forty thousand Rogue Trader.
It was a tabletop wargame published first in nineteen eighty seven.
Before eighty seven, it's manufacturer Games Workshop published a wide
(20:37):
array of board games and miniatures, most of which were
focused around fantasy wargaming and role playing. Tabletop wargangs have
a long history. The ancient Greeks were talking thousands of
years ago, had a game called Patea where players would
simulate FEALANX combat using game pieces and some sort of
rules system. I don't think we actually have the rules,
but I don't actually know that much about it. But
(20:58):
they did have a dice.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Did they need it?
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, we're kind of dice.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
We know.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
The Romans had d twenties, I mean theoretically, but yeah,
and there was like it was for military training. It
was to help people who are going to be like
officers I think sometimes figure like learn the ropes and
whatnot and learn to think strategically. The Romans, being Romans,
plagiarized the Greeks and made their own wargames, which were
(21:22):
similar but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess,
which is a tabletop wargame, was created in India, and
like the six hundreds, I think, and I think that
the sixteen hundreds is when you start to get like
modern chess. And by the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds,
people had started selling and marketing wargames with little lead soldiers,
often simulating Napoleonic combat or like American Civil War combat.
(21:46):
But this is when you start to get wargames that
at least you could recognize at a glance as the
same kind of thing as Warhammer, where you've got two
dudes and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table,
right like that, that's kind of when that comes into being.
Games Workshop had been founded in nineteen seventy five by
three friends who loved these first stirrings of nerd culture
(22:07):
and wanted to make and sell games of their own.
The first edition of Warkhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy,
came out in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty six,
Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf,
that featured an Orc model carrying a banner with the
face of Margaret Thatcher then the Prime Minister of the
UK painted on it and the piece was labeled Maggie's
(22:27):
Death Banner. And there's a show with PHO. It's fucking great. Yeah,
first off, pretty good paint job like this. It's a credible,
credibly painted Orc and that's just straight up Margaret Thatcher's
face on a banner with like a severed hand on
the top.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's great, that's good, And like the orc's understanding of
technology is pretty much Margaret Thatcher's understanding of how economics work. Right, Yes, yes,
if you privatize it a go fast though.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, that's right. Article for The Gamer, Ben Sledge writes.
She later appeared she being Thatcher in the Evil Within
a campaign for Warhammer Fantasy roleplay. The name of the
campaign itself is a reference to one of Thatcher's speeches,
where she infamously said we have always to be aware
of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to
fight and more dangerous to liberty. She was, of course,
(23:19):
talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihood
and lavelhoods in the face of countless mind closures under
her regime. The Impress Margaretha also spelled Magreeta, is a
clear satirical representation of Thatcher ascending to power in nineteen
seventy nine, the same year as the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Oh that's so.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Cool, it gets better. Ian mcgrecor leads an army of
Orcs against Arca, Zarguls, Dwarfs who themselves are suffering miners.
If those names aren't recognizable to you. Ian McGregor was
responsible for shutting down Countless Minds under Thatcher's orders, and
Arthur Scargill was the leader of the National Union of
Mineworkers during the strikes in nineteen eighty four and nineteen
eighty five, who later founded the Socialist Labour Party. So
(24:00):
that's not subtle.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
We have to unionize the dwarves.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah, yes, all dwarves are unionized, as are the sponsors
for this podcast. Unless they're not, I have really no
way of knowing. And we're back. So I think that
has established politics and political satire was kind of embedded
(24:26):
in the foundations of Warhammer from the beginning, right, Yeah,
but it was also more a thing in fantasy than
forty K. As Sledge notes in his article after nineteen
eighty seven, the people making Warhammer forty thousand, I think
in part because forty k really started to take off
and they were like, oh, this could actually be big.
We probably shouldn't like make so many jokes about partisan
(24:48):
politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Maybe we shouldn't put Margaret Thatcher's face a banner.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah, probably should have Maggie's face on as many banners.
So they got a little more subtle with the politics,
didn't disappear entirely, and you can always tell it was
like punks making it in that period of time. The
early years of forty k art and lore contained many
references and allusions to aspects of punk culture. So today
(25:14):
in the game, space marines are these gigantic much taller
than people like monk, like like heroic warrior monks, right,
and they're you know, they're all superhuman. They're the result
of all of this genetic tinkering, and you know, they're
incapable of fear, and they're these these kind of like
idealized like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical like warrior, right,
(25:37):
Like that that's everything a space marine is. That's not
what they were at first. The first space marines were
basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this
brutal imperial that were there like crack down on dissent
and stuff. There's a great from an early White Dwarf magazine.
There's a piece of art that I'm showing Joe. Now
(25:58):
that's like an early it's a drawing up. There's like
a punk who's been spray painting marines out on a wall,
and he's got his hands against the wall, and there's
two space marines standing behind him. You know, they're not
taller than him, because they weren't initially superhuman. They were
just guys in armor. One of them's got what looks
like a stun baton in his hands. And then there's
text underneath it that says, when the eye of Terror blinks,
(26:18):
ships fly between Lost Worlds and the rest of the galaxy.
Miners ship their oars, and slavers play their loathsome trade
where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark,
bringing to the Lost Worlds the brutal order of the Imperium,
if only for a few days. So there's space cops, right.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Space marine cops flying through space so they could play
candy crush and do nothing at a different location.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Right. That's not the only way space marines were depicted,
but they were often depicted as that, as like cops
and bullies. They were nearly always thugs. They were not
you know, they weren't like they looked cool but like
their personalities were not cool, right, they weren't meant to be.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, went from being like a Warrior night to starting
off as like Sully from Long Island.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
That's right, Yeah, yeah, strong Sully vibes in these so again,
even though after this point there's no more whole campaign
settings created a mock like Union Busting and the like.
The designers behind forty k were always pretty direct about
the fact that the Imperium are not the good guys
and the Emperor is not a great leader. In fact,
here's how the first ever Warhammer forty thousand rule book opened.
(27:26):
For more than one hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat
immobile on the golden throne of Earth. He is the
master of mankind by the will of the gods, and
master of a million worlds by the might of his
inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with
power from the dark age of technology. He is the
carrion Lord of the Imperium, to whom a thousand souls
are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk
and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh, the stuff
(27:49):
of which the Imperium is made.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Much more explicit. Now it's kind of couched in the
pseudo religious terms that the entire Imperium exists as, but
back that it was definitely very much you couldn't hide from, Like, no,
this is an empire that runs on blood and death. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, And there's you know, there's still that bit that
intro goes on to include some of the texts that
they have at the start of every game book now,
and they always do make the point that like, this
is a bad this is the worst possible regime, right, Yeah,
they've been very consistent about that. But I love that
bit at the start, right which you winted out, where
they're like, the Iperium runs on the blood and flesh
of human beings. It's a cannibalistic nightmare regime. Yep, nothing changes,
(28:33):
nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in
basically every book of rules and lare published by Games
Workshop in the years since. Unfortunately, they didn't do that
in a vacuum, and over the long years of the
game has existed, they also expanded the lore behind the
Space Marines and turned them into what they are today.
And because the Space Marines are what sold the best
(28:54):
and what looked the coolest. Most of like the especially
the kids who were just getting into the hobby, got
into the Space Marines were who they marketed and focused
more and more of the game around. And there's a
lot of different alien races and stuff in it, and
obviously those had to become more monstrous to match, right,
because that makes the space Marines look cooler and more heroic.
And all of this led to a situation where a
(29:16):
lot of players didn't realize really that the Imperium aren't
the good guys and that Purge, the heretic and other
Imperial catchphrases shouldn't be seen as admirable. But again, space
Marines look really, really cool, and Warhammer players and writers
have created so much fiction and fan out over the
years that a lot of people have made that aesthetic
a real part of their lives, and this has happened
(29:37):
in some pretty extreme cases. Probably the most extreme example
of this would be the fact that if you watch
enough videos put out by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense,
or just a ton of combat footage from the War
in Ukraine where you can see a lot of Ukrainian soldiers,
you'll inevitably run across dudes with decorations in their armor
or gear that look like this, And Joe, you're seeing
(29:58):
this now, but this is essentially a I mean it's
it's a wax like stamp with some papers underneath it
that's adhering it to the arm.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Oh, I've seen some, but I haven't seen this.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, yeah, these are in in the game, these like
wack papers adhered to like armor by these like wax seals.
It's called an oath of moment, right, or purity seals too.
Like there's two different kinds of things that both sort
of you know involve there being like papers attached to it,
but like these are things like the oath of moment
is like before battle, Marie space Rins like write down
(30:31):
like what their goal is for this fight, or like
make a vow that like this, you know, the enemy
won't pass this point or something, and then they'll like
adhere that to their armor to like hold them to it. Right,
And you know this was like they started putting these
on the armor of the models, these like little bitty
like you could see these like scraps of paper adhered
by like wax seals. Because they made the power armor.
(30:53):
The Space Marines had look have more of like a
medieval night vibe, and that's a big part of like
the forty k aesthetic is you have like a lot
of these medieval like weapons and armor, but it's also
like futuristic. That's a big part of like the appeal
of the aesthetic of the setting, and it appealed to
people so much, and there's so many fans of Warhammer
in Ukraine that, like one a lot of young Ukrainian
(31:16):
men started going into battle, they started putting purity seals
on their armor, like to the extent that like now
people make and sell period like seals that you can
put on your gear.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Right, I've seen like detachments named after like Space Marine
stuff as well.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, like it's it's it's fucking wild. And there's
even like if you look down there, there's another example
of one on a guy's armor with a bunch of
like Warhammer patches on his body.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Eye. Yeah, yeah, it's nothing but Warhammer stuff, going from
nothing but Warhammer's Stanicus more, Space Marines got an Imperial
Guard one from the the Death Watch of Greek Yep
or the Death Corps Cree. Sorry.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Well in that picture that you're looking at, Joe came
from a two year old post in the Warhammer forty
k subreddit that read greetings from Ukraine. Yeah, this has
become really popular here because many of the military are
Warhammer fans. So many of the volunteers who helped the
military try and find merchandise or patches of this type
for them as a nice gift, right hmm. It's and
I'm not, by the way, like we're talking about this
(32:14):
in the context of people taking Warhammer the right way
or the wrong way. I don't have any issue with this.
Like you're fighting a fucking desperate war for your survival.
Do whatever you want to your your armor. You know
that makes you feel better. It's just it's weird. It's
it was strange to see like this actually making its
way to a real war because so many of the
people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like,
(32:36):
that's just a strange moment for the hobby. And you
can for a comparison to how much this has jumped
into mainstream like consciousness. When I was in the military,
we had stupid like we call them morale patches. We
had super little morale patches too. I never saw forty
k one and I mean this is back in the
(32:56):
early two times got up until the twenty Yeah, never
saw anything never and so within a decade it's just
like no, there's detachments themed after space marine groups. There's
moral patches like it's having a moment, that's for sure.
It's having a moment, and it's gonna get weirder, Joe,
because I got another thing to show you, Oh boy.
Every year, the firearms industry gathers in Las Vegas, Nevada
(33:19):
for the Shot Show. It is the gun industry trade
show where different companies show off new weapons, both firearms
that are thing meant for civilian use and for police
and for the military. And one big trend, as I'm
sure you know, Joe, in military arms design over the
last couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the
last ten or fifteen years, have been small portable semi
(33:40):
automatic and automatic grenade launchers in many cases, ones that
can fire like smart grenades. Right, we have a degree
of control and like when it detonates, how far it
has to go? Right, Like that's a big it's like
a major area in which weapons have like weapons development
has leapt forward over the course of the last like
twenty something years in this regard, you have a lot
more options there then you used to for grenade launchers
(34:02):
of that type. And periodically, you know, as some of
these different products that are like because the main weapon
that a space marine carries is called a bolterer, and
it's this big, cool looking rifle that's actually not like
a rifle at all. It fires basically like a rocket
munition that one charge shoots the munition out the barrel
and then a secondary charge actually ignites the rocket and
(34:24):
then the rocket will like shoot towards its target and
blow up.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
And you know, they're.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Huge guns meant for future terrifying post human war. And periodically,
when you'd see one of these new automatic grenade launchers,
people online would be like, Oh, that looks like a bolterer.
We're finally making real bolters, right, because that's kind of
what they look like. And this year at shot Show, Barrett,
which is a company that makes very fucking big guns,
(34:49):
brought a semi autogmatic grenade launcher painted in ultramarines blue
with a fucking an oath of moment attached.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
To the barrel.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Oh wow, hey everyone here. The maker of that thirty
milimeter grenade launcher was actually Mars Ink, not Barrett. I
made the mistake because both Mars and Barrett are making
basically identical thirty milimeter grenade launchers and competing to get
a contract from the US military for this program called
the SSRs system, and both had models of the SSRs
(35:18):
on display at shot Show. But it was Mars Inc.
That painted THEIRS up to look like a Bolterer and
put a purity seal on it. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I have to wonder what Games Workshop feels about this.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's just it. That's just a Bolterer.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Yeah, Ultra mariines blue and everything on there, like it's
fucking wild.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
So whether or not you think that's cool depends on
your attitude towards the arms industry. Again, you can think
about that however you want, but it represents a kind
of awkward problem for Games Workshop. The fact that stuff
like this is happening is evidence of the insane degree
of cultural penetration that Warhammer has achieved. But having real
weapons made in the image of your video game or
(36:00):
of your game weapons can be problematic too, right.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, you don't want to be connected to someone being
actually murdered by your product.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Right right, like that that can be a problem. And
speaking of things that are problematic, the sponsors of this show,
we're back. So, as I kind of brought up before
we went to break, the wide popularity of Warhammer has
(36:31):
increasingly forced problematic confrontations both between sort of how much
people like it and how many many things they want
to stick Warhammer on and what the company Games Workshop
may what Warhammer's stuck on, and between like groups of
fans themselves. And about four years ago, Spain's largest Warhammer
tournament let a guy play while wearing Nazi paraphernalia, and
(36:53):
I believe his army was kind of like Nazi themed too,
Like it was like a Wehrmacht themed guard army or
something if I'm remembering correct, But he was like wearing
Nazi shit, and he'd entered the tournament under the name
Austrian painter, Like really fucking subtle, my dude, And people
weren't thrilled about this. I'm going to quote from an
article in Polygon. Gt Telavera tournament organizers gave comment to
(37:17):
tabletop wargaming site spiky Bit, stating that the club repudiates
the Nazi mentality in all its aspects. Nazi ideas have
no place in our group because they are contrary to
everything we stand for. The organizer said that the player
said he would not leave us unless they involve the police,
As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain. The
organizers hesitated let this bring legal trouble upon their club.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
And I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Enough about the situation to know, like, where these guys
really just backed into a completely fucked corner and having
a lot of options, should that Probably I'm going to
guess they could have and should have done more, But
I don't really know much about that. What I do
know is that this causes a lot of people to
get pissed off online, and it blows up enough that
Games Workshop has to publish an announcement on November nineteenth,
twenty twenty one. The Imperium is driven by hate, Warhammer
(38:02):
is not. And in this announcement there's a couple of
interesting lines. First off, they're pointing out that, like, look,
the imperium of Man is a cautionary table. Like so
many aspects of Warmer forty thousand, it is satirical. They
go through the definition of what satire is right, Like,
that's literally in this little article that they put up,
and then they note that said certain real world hate groups,
(38:24):
in adherence to historical ideologies better left in the past,
sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment
and co op them for their own agendas. We've said
it before, but a reminder about what we believe in.
We believe in and support a community united by shared
values of mutual kindness and respect. Our fantasy settings are
grim and dark, but that is not a reflection of
who we are or how we feel the real world
should be. We will never accept nor condone any form
(38:47):
of prejudice, hatred, or abuse in our company or in
the Warhammer hobby. And then they basically they straight out say,
if you come to a games workshop of nter store
and where symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you
to leave if we don't want your money.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Some things don't need to be said aloud until they do,
you know what I mean. Yeah, it's it's an implication,
and to be fair, in most places in Europe this
would have been against the law. Spain, however, is different
for different reasons.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's that c STA vibe. You know, sometimes
it applies a little further than it ought to. And
I want to note too, to be fair, I don't
want it to seem like because as you noted, like
this isn't the thing you have to say until you do.
There's some valid critiques that there were other things that
cropped up for a few years prior to this, that
Games Worships should have made a statement earlier. I'm certainly
(39:35):
not saying they shouldn't have. We may dig into some
of that, you know, later as the podcast goes on,
but like, they haven't handled this perfectly, but that's a
pretty good message, right that, like we don't want your money,
we don't want you in the hobby. And it's good
that they did say something eventually, right, you know, this
is a publicly traded corporation. They're not they're not a
(39:56):
culture warrior and they're not an activist. Yeah, but like,
I'm glad that something got fucking said, and they've That's
not the only thing they've done in the last couple
of years. There's been some more subtle and some less
subtle moves. You know, one thing that happened recently, So
for years, a lot of fans have asked for, like
as the get because as Warhammer's got more popular, more
(40:18):
women have played, and they've added in more female models
for different like sides and stuff. There's more female guardsmen
than there used to be, more female elder and you know,
they've they've at least and the Sisters of Battle, which
is an all female line, has gotten like a refresh
line and a lot more attention. You know, they've done
this a few ways. But a lot of people want
there to be female space marines and this is kind
(40:39):
of a you know, still a topic of a lot
of debate within the actual lore itself. The Emperor like
they can only be male because of how the Emperor
designed their gene seed and stuff. And the real reason
for this, obviously is that like nobody thought about it
in nineteen eighty seven, that like they would want there
to be like the female models for space. They were
(41:01):
thinking about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
And it would hardly be the first bit of lore
that was retcon, like, right, like the Tapestry of Warhammer
Law is a series of retconnings.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah, And that said, I also do kind of one
thing that I appreciate is in some of the more
recent lore when they've gone back to like talk like
feature have books that feature the Emperor and talk about
the creation of the space Marines. One way they've kind
of retcon things is because there's a conversation between the
Emperor and one of his top advisors who's like, I thought,
you should have made all the primarks, you know, your
(41:31):
sons that were the leaders of these legions women, Like
they should have all been girls, like they're leaders in
the space because we would have had less problems. They
wouldn't have all wound up going to fucking war with you.
They would have been less annoying. And I kind of
do like the idea that all space Marines are men
because the Emperor is just kind of a misogynist, like,
and it led up destroying him, right the fact that
(41:52):
he yeah, it kind of does like it sort of works.
But one thing MS Workship did do recently is they
introduced the Emperor's body guard or these other group of
fucking future super soldiers, the custodes who or the castode
is whatever it fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use.
And they've been adding like female sculpts, like female heads
(42:13):
and stuff you don't really tell with the faces. But
a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll
tell you that right now. The most I'm so surprised
by this crazy over this shit.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
And it's it's very funny because you'll see them posting
stuff like, you know, if you just want to play
the hobby, play the hobby, but don't come into my
culture and try to like change it, because like you
want to you want there to be blue haired you know,
girls in your in my fucking game and my culture. Yeah,
a lot of these guys being like, oh, this is
going to destroy the hobby, Like this is like once
(42:46):
woke gets in, it ruins everything. Fucking Warhammer has never
been worth more money, Like Games Workshop is one of
the most valuable corporations in the entire United Kingdom. Fucking
little plastic models of space marines and or and shit
are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And
it's an island.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
I can play these weird space monsters like Tyrannids or orcs,
and but you know when when you add women to
the mix, really ruining the immersion. What's the most unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Fucking fucking insane man.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah, it's it's very silly, and you know, at at
its core this is a culture war centered over a
very important problem for creatives, though, which is that, like
when you're creating fictional fascist organizations, whether they are impossibly
advanced sci fi empires or like a cult of deranged
post apocalyptic bikers, there's a risk that you're gonna make
that some of the fans of your work will be
(43:43):
fans of those fictional fascists, and not in a I
just think they look cool way, but in a I
have some opinions about you know, this racial group way right,
and real fascists, as we noticed, spent decades getting really
good at using stuff like that as a bridge to
start propagandizing to young people. Whether we like it or not,
fictional worlds are battlegrounds and the broader culture war against
(44:05):
ascendant fascist sentiment worldwide. Fabrizio Galley, the creator of that
God Emperor Trump float that we started this episode discussing,
said something similar in an interview that I read on
heavy dot com. The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and of
old and worn culture is over. We have entered the
era of fantasy video games and virtual life. Yeah, right
(44:28):
on the nose there, twenty nineteen. But bang hit the target.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
I hate when you read something from now several years ago. Yep,
that's just everything now, yeah that is that is just everything.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
Yep, that's just everything. Well, Joe, I think that's all
I've got here. You know, how are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (44:54):
I'm feeling good, Robert. And I hate to say it, yeah,
because I love talking about Warhammer, and I love talking
about to talk about Warhammer, and I love the weird
shit that comes out of it, especially hearing stuff like this,
because I don't want people to like this to be
the first introduction to Warhamer, like, oh wow, it's populated
by fascists.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I go to a local Warhammer club where I live.
I'm not going to dox it, but it is full
of incredibly lovely people and probably one of the most
diverse rooms I've ever been in in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
Yeah, and yeah, it's good that we can close up
talking about stuff like this because as conservative a weirdo
as I was as a kid, I really do think
playing Warhammer was one of like the healthier things for
me in terms of connecting me to other people who
believed different things, like even within the context of like
a fucking gaming group at a hobby store in the
(45:46):
early two thousands, Like I remember after the invasion of Iraq,
like a few weeks or months after, like my friends
and I, like, somebody brought in like a print out
of like a missile strike on I think it was
a BMP on like an Iraqi troop train. You could
see frame by frame this thing blowing up like people
inside it, and we're fucking shitty tech kids in Texas
(46:07):
being like, whoa Like, look, I'd never seen anything like that.
And one of the guys we gamed with was like
a veteran who'd been like a tanker. I think he
had fought in Desert Storm and was not like I
had always assumed it was a pretty conservative guy and
was not like the most like was a man in
his like his forties or fifties who would yell at
(46:27):
children over the rules of a video or of a
tabletop game. Oh yeah, like that kind of dude. But
also when he saw what we were doing and he
realized what it was a picture of, he was like,
don't do that, Like there were people in there. You
don't laugh at something like that, you know, like it's
not cool. It's not something to like go like whoa over,
Like it's not a game, like like it's the most
(46:47):
terrifying thing you can possibly imagine, and you need to
have more respect and as like a fucking twelve year
old little piece of shit like that actually like hit
and impacted me, and I was like, oh yeah, I
was kind of if, like, fucking this guy is calling
me out for being a dick. I might have been
being a dick.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Meanwhile, he's dressed head to toe an Imperial Guard cosplay
like he should.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Absolutely. Hey man, death isn't funny covered in I had
to tell all right, Joe, you want to plug your
book before we roll out here.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah. So I am the host of the history podcast
The Lines led by Donkeys. So if you like military history,
check us out. And my first gunpowder fantasy novel, The
Highlands Burned, comes out May ninth, and you can digitally
pre order it now, so uh check that out. Reviews
are coming in. They're very positive and I'm really excited
for it to release.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Excellent. I am very excited to read it and excited
for our listeners to read it. And also Joe I'm
excited for you and I to have a podcast about Warhammer.
When's it coming out? Neither of us know. Helly, there's
gonna be a little bit of a delay, like we're
currently dealing with. You know, there's a lot of logistical issues,
(48:05):
including like just bringing you on and signing contracts because
you're in a different country and stuff. We'll figure it out.
There will be a podcast and it'll be a weekly show.
It'll come out at some point this year. We just
don't know exactly when yet. But we wanted to tease
the idea for all of you and show you kind
of what we've got coming down the pipe because we
both kind of tease this online and social media a
(48:27):
couple times, and I felt like bad about not putting something.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Out people had noticed people had.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
So we'll be getting you. You know, we'll have more
coming out soon. The show will be usually forty minute
to an hour long episodes. We'll be covering you know,
history and the lore in game. We'll be covering like
real world reporting on different controversies around the game. You
have a great pitch for that, based on another one
of these like weird political culture war things that hits
(48:57):
like a convention where people are like playing gaming and
doing like painting contests and how the community deals with it.
So we'll be talking about like both real life, how
this this hobby is influencing and has been influenced by
the shit going on in the world, and we're going
to talk about just the nerdy shit that we love.
Like I'm looking forward to putting together a painfully detailed
history of like the concept of a space marine in
(49:20):
sci fi fiction and how that's led us to like
games workshop building an empire. Yes, yeah, and yeah, Like
what are you most excited to talk about.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I'm incredibly excited to talk about and explain how the
Imperial Guard works to people and how and how they
die by the tens of millions.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Yeah. Well that's all for today, folks. We'll be back later,
I mean, at some point.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
With a show.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast m
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hey everyone, Joe here. I also host the Alliance at
by Donkeys podcast, a military history podcast. We talk about
all eras of history, trying to make things funny and interesting.
And if that sounds cool to you, you can come
see us live May twenty ninth at the Rich Mix
in London. There will be tickets available for live show
(00:36):
and a ticket available for live streaming with video on
demand so you can watch it later. So get your
tickets now. They will be in the show notes and
I hope to see you there.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Oh, welcome back to Well. This is the Behind the
Bastard's feed and this is normally where you get new
episodes Behind the Bastard's but every now and then we
try something new. And in the not too distant future,
I'm planning to be launching a new podcast with my
friend and fellow Giant nerd Joe Kasabian, also a fellow
(01:08):
podcaster or Hey Joe, how are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hey buddy, it's good to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, and we're wanting to do We're planning to do
a podcast on Warhammer forty thousand, which is a game
system that some of you are probably aware of and
others of you maybe aren't. I think a lot of
people know about this now it's reached kind of a
point of cultural critical mass. I think a significant chunk
of people on the Internet are just kind of casually
(01:34):
aware it exists in a way that they weren't when
we were kids and started playing this.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, one hundred percent. I remember back when I first
heard about Warhammer through the books, like nobody really knew
what it was other than other people that would fall
into that fan zone. But now anybody who doesn't even
know it's a miniature, maybe they know it from like
the Total War games or whatever. Yeah, it's definitely the
(02:00):
biggest it's ever been.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, and I the podcast, we'll you know, talk later
about what exactly the podcast kind of things the podcast
will be covering, But this episode, I specifically wanted to
talk about the intersection of Warhammer forty k and like
pop culture and pop politics in the United States and elsewhere,
because it's one of having a surprisingly large impact on
(02:22):
like the way people communicate on the Internet and the
way people talk about Donald Trump in particular, that's really weird.
But before we get into that, because I think that's
the thing that's going to be relevant to everybody, even
the people who you know aren't into the game at
least can get something out of this stuff, which is
why we're putting this up as our teaser episode in
the Bastard's Feed. But before we do that, Joe, you've
(02:42):
got a book to plug.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I do my debut gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn
comes out May twenty ninth, so you can pre order
it now, which is the best time to get it,
so when you when it arrives it'll be nice and.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Fresh, excellent. Well, everyone one should do that, and everyone
should listen to the episode, which you have no choice
but to listen to because I'm going to start reading
it to you and you're already listening to the podcast, right. So,
if you're at all into social media and up to
date on the current political hors of our age, you've
probably heard President Donald Trump referred to as God Emperor Trump.
(03:19):
Currently that phrase alone returns about four million results on Google,
and that is a reference to Warhammer forty thousand in
forty k as its fans call it. The God Emperor
is the founder in deity of the Imperium, a vast
million world empire that includes nearly all human beings. He
was once a mighty warrior and a deadbeat dad, but
(03:40):
he spent the last ten thousand years or so hooked
up to life support. So you can already see. You know,
the guy likes gold. He's always covered in gold, and
he's a terrible father. So you can see why Donald
Trump gets compared to him from time to time.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Right, Hey, I mean recently Trump posted a picture of
himself as Jesus Christ, so maybe he's maybe starting to
buy miniatures.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
That's right, that's right. And the Emperor, being a being
who's lived tens of thousands of years, is kind of
insinuated to maybe have been Jesus or at least somebody
who like profited, you know, was influential in starting the
early Church. He's been insinuated to have been basically everybody.
But you know, getting beyond that, if you haven't don't
(04:23):
know anything about Warhammer and you just heard the phrase
God Emperor Trump, you probably didn't think too much about
it outside of like, oh, people are being weird about
politics again in the United States, right, can you? It
couldn't be right. Trump is kind of a singular figure
when it comes to global media attention, so it's not
all that noteworthy that fans of a game would reference
(04:44):
him in memes. What makes this one unique is that
people using the phrase and spreading memes about it are
kind of as likely to be mocking the president as
praising him. It's a real Schrodinger situation, and this aspect
of it is really well embodied by something very funny
that happened on February eleventh, twenty nineteen, over in Italy.
The Via Reggio Carnival is an event held in via Reggio,
(05:06):
a city in Tuscany, and has been a yearly parade
in celebration since eighteen seventy three. It started when a
bunch of rich guys decided to make a parade with
floats that would help put the city on the map
in a cultural sense, and rather than funding the parade themselves,
they push to increase taxes on working class citizens and
poor people protested by wearing masks and presumably committing petty crimes. Right,
(05:28):
So you've got like a classic story here. It really
is a beautiful thing. I love a good carnival, And
kind of the key feature of this is there's these
huge paper machet floats, the largest of which weighs like
forty tons that people make spend the year making. There's
are massive things, they're the size of buildings. And then
like walk through the street, right, and there are drive
(05:49):
through the street I think now, and there's these big
drunken parties and everybody wears masks and it's a great time.
About half a million people attend each year. And twenty
nineteen was like any other year, except that the pride
of the was a sixty five foot tall sculpture of
Donald Trump as the God Emperor.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Of maid Joe, would you showed me this picture? I
lost my shit. I had never seen this.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
It'll be the thumbnail image of this. This one's not
going to be a video episode because it's a special one,
but I do kind of want people to see it.
If you just google like Trump God Emperor, float, parade
float or something like that, you'll see pictures and it
really is something. It's massive, right.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
I would love to be into the planning meeting on
that one, because you know, it took a small to
medium sized team to build this monster. Yes, someone had
to pitch that idea to the rest of them and
explain exactly what the fuck it was.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It was several people's whole year. The guy behind it
is artist Fabrizio Golly, who created it as a critique
of Trump's presidency. Some of this is obvious if you
like really look at the details of the statue. There
are like four blue twitter birds flying around the sword
handle the Emperor. Like this is based on off of
like a drawing in several drawings of the Emperor where
(07:03):
which is these guys wearing huge a huge golden suit
of power armour with like eagle's wings on it. He's
got a massive flaming sword. Everything about him is gold.
Often he has glorious long flowing hair, the kind that
Trump doesn't. But yeah, in the float this big Sordi had,
there's like twitter birds flying around the handle, which Fabrizio
(07:25):
put there to make the point that Trump had weaponized
Twitter against his enemies. And written on the blade in
Italian was the phrase your taxes and your duties, and
the specific way that these were written in Italian was
meant to be like bring up a different phrase, which
Galley summarized as meaning, here's your fucking tariffs, right, like
that's the blade is the tariffs, which is kind of
(07:47):
like prescient that he really picked those out as being
a weapon in a way, they weren't nearly as much
in twenty nineteen as they are now.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, and it still kind of works as a bit
of imperial propaganda. Yeah, Like this is one hundred percent
something that that the Emperor would have said to like
a planet in revolt, like here's your.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Here's your fucking tariffs with a literal sword. Yeah, Fabrizio
said of this quote, it's a joke, but in fact
he's trying to destroy nations with the economy instead of
nuclear missiles. This is one of the strongest actions let's
say that powerful people like Trump can use. So we'll
go back to Fabrizio in a bit. But what's relevant
to my point here is the point I was making
earlier is that as soon as pictures of this float
(08:28):
get online, they go viral. People are sharing this like crazy,
and Fabrizio's meaning sailed right over a lot of people's heads.
I'm going to quote now from an article in Time.
Many conservative commentators on Twitter appeared to interpret the float
as a tribute to Trump. Several tweeted that was a
parade for Trump. Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for
(08:48):
right wing Channel one American News wrote, this carnival in
Italy looks a lot more fun than the Thanksgiving Day
parade in New York. Just look at this Trump float.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Ah incredible. Everybody knows it can't be a Trump float
because it wasn't sponsored by coinbase or right like.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Right, no one was selling crypto. It was twenty nineteen.
It couldn't have been affiliated with Trump.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, exactly, nobody could rug pull the parade.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Oh man, I do you know if the Emperor was
a real character, he's got to be a lie. He's
he should be alive then, because he's like thirty thou
forty thousand years old when the game starts, which means
theoretically the Emperor could have bought in fts. Right, that's true,
his madness could be entirely driven by all of his
apes getting stolen. He set him down the.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Path the thing that really drove him to combat chaos.
If someone tried to explain the concept of a slurp
juice to him.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
No, I got a ruled humanity. You people can't cover yourselves.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Fuck, you can't be fucking trusted.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, so Warhammer forty thousand and the God Emperor character
have existed since the nineteen eighties. For most of the
time that the game has existed, it's been a fairly
obscure pastime. It requires a lot of money in order
to actually play the game, and it used to require
a lot of money just to like buy all of
the books and guides that would teach you anything about
(10:07):
the game at all. But social media and video games
have introduced forty K to the masses in a way that, like,
you don't have to spend a lot or even any
money to at least consume the lore. A lot of
people who are fans have never played the game. You know,
maybe they play some video games, but a lot of
people just like watch hours of YouTube videos, and those
YouTube videos are largely regurgitating decades worth of lore that
(10:30):
have been like written and stored in websites or put
in wikis. Like that's all. That's the hobby to quite
a few people who call themselves fans, and so as
a result, when the long simmering US culture war ignited
the world of gaming a year or so prior to
the start of the Trump campaign, forty K became a
battleground too. The fact that the imperium that the god
(10:51):
Emperor ruled was in the text of the game a
fascist state, which was you know, largely the subject of
satire in thee made it kind of an obvious inspiration
for white nationalists looking to hide propaganda in memes.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
The fact that, like, people who were playing forty K
were usually playing one of the factions affiliated with this
evil fascist space space Empire. Even though the game was
satirizing the evil fascist space Empire, part of it all
meant that there was like some room wiggle room for
folks to get in and try to like propagandize to people.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The all they need is a tiny bit. There's always
enough wiggle room. It's like a mouse smashing itself under
a door. There's nothing you can do.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Right, right, especially since like it's it's part of its
wiggle room, and part of it's like, well, what do
you like Angry young men who aren't great at like
being socialized to do well? They spend way too much
time playing games. I say, as an angry young man
who wasn't well socialized, but it was, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Sensing myself in these comments.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah, playing a lot of Warhammer, right, and hey, I'm
well socialized now and I still love Warhammer.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's fine, goddamn right, which is always wild to because
Warhammer's inherently a social game. It is like even with
all the video games or whatever. If that's how you
want to consume it, great, But the second you cross
that line and start buying mini is you have to
go into a room and start talking to him.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, at some point you're going to have to be
around other people if you really want to do it.
So God Emperor Trump memes started spreading on four Chan
back in twenty fifteen, right around the same time Trump
announced his campaign, and December twenty fifth, twenty fifteen, a
YouTuber named Talent uploaded a video that collected a bunch
of early memes, entitled it Donald Trump Emperor of Mankind.
(12:36):
Talent was a very small time creator. We're talking about
a thousand subscribers, but this particular video broke half a
million views, and part of it, like the imagery in
the video, is there's a famous piece of art from
the lore of the game. That's the emperor fighting his
son who betrayed him, over the body of one of
his other sons that was murdered by the betrayers. It's
(12:57):
a very famous drawing and they just included that, but
they hadn't swapped out the Emperor with Donald Trump very crudely,
and I believe Hillary Clinton was playing the role of Horace,
his evil son. I'll do a screen share so you
can see this, Joe.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That is very confusing.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
This is a real beautiful find. I think that's Hillary
in there. Yeah, that's Hillary.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Oh yeah, that's Hillary. That's Hillary.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
And then there's a there's Donald.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Who would have thought? Who would have thought that Donald
Trump was Hillary Clinton's gene seed father.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yes, it is implied the meme because again, this is
his son, who is the evil he's fighting. So yes,
this kind of is implying that Hillary Clinton was created
by Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
And she's absolutely towering over him.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
She was way cooler. She just killed an angel. It's
pretty sweet. So the meme broke. The God Emperor meme
broke mainstream awareness in twenty sixteen when New York Times
reporter Jonathan Weisman wrote about the hate mail and threats
that he received online from Trump supporters. Quote from that article,
the anti Semitic hate, much of it from self identified
(14:06):
Donald J. Trump supporters, hasn't stopped since Trump God Emperor
sent me the Nazi iconography of the shiftless hook nosed
jew I was served in an image of the geists of Auschwitz.
The famous words are bite, mocked, fry replaced without irony
with maccin America.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Great.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
So again, this guy and this journalist like Weiseman doesn't
recognize that this guy's making a warhammer reference or at
least right about Yeah, it's just like the the username
of the guy messaging him, and again like why would
he have right, Like if you don't, like, you wouldn't
assume Trump God Emperor is someone referencing a video game.
You just in this context, you just assume it's a
(14:43):
crazy fascist.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Right right.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah. But about two months after that column came out,
a writer with the Huffington Post, Nico Pitney, wrote an
article about the growing Trump God Emperor meme phenomenon quote
among Trump's active online supporters, the nickname is now commonplace.
The post announcing Trump's participation in the Q and A
heralded our God Emperor, and a search of the phrase
returned over two hundred posts in the day after Trump's appearance.
(15:09):
Some forum members say God Emperor is simply a tongue
in cheek attempt to rile up Trump opponents who fear
he would be a strong man as president. The term
is attributed variously to God Emperor, characters in the science
fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called Warhammer forty thousand.
We know he can't literally be one, wrote member in
New Jersey nine oh eight, but the phrase whip people
into a frenzy saying that we literally want a dictator.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Oh okay, okay. Funding that marketing back then.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, it was nicer back then when they had to
pretend it was a bit and I do lo well
it could be Dune, Well, Dune, it could be, but
it's not. Warhammer is kind of like a lot of
Warhammer was originally ripping off Dune, and the Emperor characters
based heavily on on Leo A. Trades Right, Like there's yeah,
(15:58):
that's certainly like like Warhammer is essentially all of the
sci fi that was bigg in the nineteen eighties and
before getting put into a blender and like merged together
right with.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Thatch, right uk, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
As we'll talk about yes, so like the journalist there
is correct that like, yeah, I mean they could have been,
but in this case they definitely weren't. They were talking
about the Emperor from forty k Now, a big part
of the appeal of the god Emperor character for these
people is that he was explicitly in the lore of
the game genocidal. The way the backstory goes, you know,
Warmer forty thousand is set in the forty first millennium,
(16:35):
like like thirty nine or zero thousand years into the future,
but in the lore of the game, and like the
year thirty thousand or so, about ten thousand years before
the current day of the setting. The Emperor, while he
was still alive and healthy, launched a great crusade after
unifying Earth. You know, there had been a big space
empire before, but it all crashed after the Ai, you know,
(16:55):
went crazy and fucked everything up. So Earth was just
like this warring mess of techno barbarians and shit. And
the Emperor takes over. He unifies Earth, and he makes
a bunch of gene modified super soldiers called space Marines,
and he sends them out into the galaxy to commit
mass genocide against all of the different alien species that
(17:15):
he considered a threat in any human world. That wouldn't
bend the need to him, right, They just do thousands
of genocides out in the galaxy. They take over like
a million worlds, and this all does end badly for
the Emperor, like his sons, who were his main generals
that he had created in a lab to eventually a
bunch of them betray them and he's badly wounded and
has to be on like this life support system forever
(17:37):
and ever, which leads to the nightmare future that the
game itself is set in. But the fact that like
none of this works for the Emperor, and that again
kinda in the lore, you're not supposed to be like, ah,
the Emperor, what a good guy who was doing a
good thing. You're supposed to be like, oh, he's just
like wiping people out for no reason, Like he was
just a real real dick. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
People always like to say like, oh, it's you know,
and nobody's good in the world of Warhammer Force, okay,
which the other crue yes, but specifically the Imperium is horrible.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah, absolutely horrible. And in the books about this genocide,
there's like moments where your favorite characters are wiping out
a species and like the last members of the species
will be like, we just wanted to be left alone,
Like these are. They're not subtle, like the writers are
not super subtle about them being the baddies.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Say what you will about Warhammer forty k, but subtle
is not one of them.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Subtle is not something you can apply to this game. However,
some people fail to see the broader message in the
lore and just hone in on the things that appeal
to them. And there's a great four Chan post I
found from dis the I think July twenty first, twenty fifteen,
where someone posts a picture and it's yet another one
of those like photoshop things where you've got like Donald
(18:54):
Trump in the place of a space marine. Year is
now forty thousand. Trump turned out to be the God
Emperor and initiated the imperium of man killing Xenos all day,
every day in his honor. Life is good. Get like
in the game, things aren't good in the forty first millennium.
The Emperor's stuck in a life support chair and everyone
worships him even though he was a major atheist, and
(19:17):
everything's falling apart all the time. Life is not in
fact good.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
And anywhere the space Marines came from is by design terrible.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Right, Yeah, they're abducted child soldiers who are like genetically
enhanced so they can go crack down on rebellions against
the state. They're not like, it's not a like, it's
like it's a fun game. There's a lot of like
the lore is interesting and the models are cool, but
you're not supposed to think, boy, I wish I lived
in that world. That would be silly.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Imagine if RFK Junior got the keys to the space
marine program.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
He's already got a strategic stockpile of trend and like, yeah,
butter ready to go.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's the first step towards having space marines.
Should just let RFK cook up like whatever kind of
like mammal penis based potion he can to invent the
extra organs that make you a super soldier.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Fuck, he's America's Firth, like a first neo apothecary.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
That's right, that's right. Yeah, he's the beginning of the
techno barbarian tries. So the very first edition of Warhammer
forty thousand, which was was called Warhammer forty thousand Rogue Trader.
It was a tabletop wargame published first in nineteen eighty seven.
Before eighty seven, it's manufacturer Games Workshop published a wide
(20:37):
array of board games and miniatures, most of which were
focused around fantasy wargaming and role playing. Tabletop wargangs have
a long history. The ancient Greeks were talking thousands of
years ago, had a game called Patea where players would
simulate FEALANX combat using game pieces and some sort of
rules system. I don't think we actually have the rules,
but I don't actually know that much about it. But
(20:58):
they did have a dice.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Did they need it?
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, we're kind of dice.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
We know.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
The Romans had d twenties, I mean theoretically, but yeah,
and there was like it was for military training. It
was to help people who are going to be like
officers I think sometimes figure like learn the ropes and
whatnot and learn to think strategically. The Romans, being Romans,
plagiarized the Greeks and made their own wargames, which were
(21:22):
similar but often much more complicated. The earliest form of chess,
which is a tabletop wargame, was created in India, and
like the six hundreds, I think, and I think that
the sixteen hundreds is when you start to get like
modern chess. And by the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds,
people had started selling and marketing wargames with little lead soldiers,
often simulating Napoleonic combat or like American Civil War combat.
(21:46):
But this is when you start to get wargames that
at least you could recognize at a glance as the
same kind of thing as Warhammer, where you've got two
dudes and they're pushing little models of soldiers around a table,
right like that, that's kind of when that comes into being.
Games Workshop had been founded in nineteen seventy five by
three friends who loved these first stirrings of nerd culture
(22:07):
and wanted to make and sell games of their own.
The first edition of Warkhammer, which is now called Warhammer Fantasy,
came out in nineteen eighty three. In nineteen eighty six,
Games Workshop published an issue of their company magazine, White Dwarf,
that featured an Orc model carrying a banner with the
face of Margaret Thatcher then the Prime Minister of the
UK painted on it and the piece was labeled Maggie's
(22:27):
Death Banner. And there's a show with PHO. It's fucking great. Yeah,
first off, pretty good paint job like this. It's a credible,
credibly painted Orc and that's just straight up Margaret Thatcher's
face on a banner with like a severed hand on
the top.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
It's great, that's good, And like the orc's understanding of
technology is pretty much Margaret Thatcher's understanding of how economics work. Right, Yes, yes,
if you privatize it a go fast though.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, that's right. Article for The Gamer, Ben Sledge writes.
She later appeared she being Thatcher in the Evil Within
a campaign for Warhammer Fantasy roleplay. The name of the
campaign itself is a reference to one of Thatcher's speeches,
where she infamously said we have always to be aware
of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to
fight and more dangerous to liberty. She was, of course,
(23:19):
talking about the striking miners who feared for their livelihood
and lavelhoods in the face of countless mind closures under
her regime. The Impress Margaretha also spelled Magreeta, is a
clear satirical representation of Thatcher ascending to power in nineteen
seventy nine, the same year as the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Oh that's so.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
Cool, it gets better. Ian mcgrecor leads an army of
Orcs against Arca, Zarguls, Dwarfs who themselves are suffering miners.
If those names aren't recognizable to you. Ian McGregor was
responsible for shutting down Countless Minds under Thatcher's orders, and
Arthur Scargill was the leader of the National Union of
Mineworkers during the strikes in nineteen eighty four and nineteen
eighty five, who later founded the Socialist Labour Party. So
(24:00):
that's not subtle.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
We have to unionize the dwarves.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah, yes, all dwarves are unionized, as are the sponsors
for this podcast. Unless they're not, I have really no
way of knowing. And we're back. So I think that
has established politics and political satire was kind of embedded
(24:26):
in the foundations of Warhammer from the beginning, right, Yeah,
but it was also more a thing in fantasy than
forty K. As Sledge notes in his article after nineteen
eighty seven, the people making Warhammer forty thousand, I think
in part because forty k really started to take off
and they were like, oh, this could actually be big.
We probably shouldn't like make so many jokes about partisan
(24:48):
politics that might stop people from wanting to buy the game.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
Maybe we shouldn't put Margaret Thatcher's face a banner.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Yeah, probably should have Maggie's face on as many banners.
So they got a little more subtle with the politics,
didn't disappear entirely, and you can always tell it was
like punks making it in that period of time. The
early years of forty k art and lore contained many
references and allusions to aspects of punk culture. So today
(25:14):
in the game, space marines are these gigantic much taller
than people like monk, like like heroic warrior monks, right,
and they're you know, they're all superhuman. They're the result
of all of this genetic tinkering, and you know, they're
incapable of fear, and they're these these kind of like
idealized like the absolute ideal of like a stereotypical like warrior, right,
(25:37):
Like that that's everything a space marine is. That's not
what they were at first. The first space marines were
basically like mercenaries and like drafty cops of like this
brutal imperial that were there like crack down on dissent
and stuff. There's a great from an early White Dwarf magazine.
There's a piece of art that I'm showing Joe. Now
(25:58):
that's like an early it's a drawing up. There's like
a punk who's been spray painting marines out on a wall,
and he's got his hands against the wall, and there's
two space marines standing behind him. You know, they're not
taller than him, because they weren't initially superhuman. They were
just guys in armor. One of them's got what looks
like a stun baton in his hands. And then there's
text underneath it that says, when the eye of Terror blinks,
(26:18):
ships fly between Lost Worlds and the rest of the galaxy.
Miners ship their oars, and slavers play their loathsome trade
where chance permits, the forces of the Imperium make their mark,
bringing to the Lost Worlds the brutal order of the Imperium,
if only for a few days. So there's space cops, right.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Space marine cops flying through space so they could play
candy crush and do nothing at a different location.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Right. That's not the only way space marines were depicted,
but they were often depicted as that, as like cops
and bullies. They were nearly always thugs. They were not
you know, they weren't like they looked cool but like
their personalities were not cool, right, they weren't meant to be.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yeah, went from being like a Warrior night to starting
off as like Sully from Long Island.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
That's right, Yeah, yeah, strong Sully vibes in these so again,
even though after this point there's no more whole campaign
settings created a mock like Union Busting and the like.
The designers behind forty k were always pretty direct about
the fact that the Imperium are not the good guys
and the Emperor is not a great leader. In fact,
here's how the first ever Warhammer forty thousand rule book opened.
(27:26):
For more than one hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat
immobile on the golden throne of Earth. He is the
master of mankind by the will of the gods, and
master of a million worlds by the might of his
inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with
power from the dark age of technology. He is the
carrion Lord of the Imperium, to whom a thousand souls
are sacrificed every day, and for whom blood is drunk
and flesh eaten. Human blood and human flesh, the stuff
(27:49):
of which the Imperium is made.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Much more explicit. Now it's kind of couched in the
pseudo religious terms that the entire Imperium exists as, but
back that it was definitely very much you couldn't hide from, Like, no,
this is an empire that runs on blood and death. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
Yeah, And there's you know, there's still that bit that
intro goes on to include some of the texts that
they have at the start of every game book now,
and they always do make the point that like, this
is a bad this is the worst possible regime, right, Yeah,
they've been very consistent about that. But I love that
bit at the start, right which you winted out, where
they're like, the Iperium runs on the blood and flesh
of human beings. It's a cannibalistic nightmare regime. Yep, nothing changes,
(28:33):
nothing changes. Variations of that passage have been included in
basically every book of rules and lare published by Games
Workshop in the years since. Unfortunately, they didn't do that
in a vacuum, and over the long years of the
game has existed, they also expanded the lore behind the
Space Marines and turned them into what they are today.
And because the Space Marines are what sold the best
(28:54):
and what looked the coolest. Most of like the especially
the kids who were just getting into the hobby, got
into the Space Marines were who they marketed and focused
more and more of the game around. And there's a
lot of different alien races and stuff in it, and
obviously those had to become more monstrous to match, right,
because that makes the space Marines look cooler and more heroic.
And all of this led to a situation where a
(29:16):
lot of players didn't realize really that the Imperium aren't
the good guys and that Purge, the heretic and other
Imperial catchphrases shouldn't be seen as admirable. But again, space
Marines look really, really cool, and Warhammer players and writers
have created so much fiction and fan out over the
years that a lot of people have made that aesthetic
a real part of their lives, and this has happened
(29:37):
in some pretty extreme cases. Probably the most extreme example
of this would be the fact that if you watch
enough videos put out by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense,
or just a ton of combat footage from the War
in Ukraine where you can see a lot of Ukrainian soldiers,
you'll inevitably run across dudes with decorations in their armor
or gear that look like this, And Joe, you're seeing
(29:58):
this now, but this is essentially a I mean it's
it's a wax like stamp with some papers underneath it
that's adhering it to the arm.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Oh, I've seen some, but I haven't seen this.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, yeah, these are in in the game, these like
wack papers adhered to like armor by these like wax seals.
It's called an oath of moment, right, or purity seals too.
Like there's two different kinds of things that both sort
of you know involve there being like papers attached to it,
but like these are things like the oath of moment
is like before battle, Marie space Rins like write down
(30:31):
like what their goal is for this fight, or like
make a vow that like this, you know, the enemy
won't pass this point or something, and then they'll like
adhere that to their armor to like hold them to it. Right,
And you know this was like they started putting these
on the armor of the models, these like little bitty
like you could see these like scraps of paper adhered
by like wax seals. Because they made the power armor.
(30:53):
The Space Marines had look have more of like a
medieval night vibe, and that's a big part of like
the forty k aesthetic is you have like a lot
of these medieval like weapons and armor, but it's also
like futuristic. That's a big part of like the appeal
of the aesthetic of the setting, and it appealed to
people so much, and there's so many fans of Warhammer
in Ukraine that, like one a lot of young Ukrainian
(31:16):
men started going into battle, they started putting purity seals
on their armor, like to the extent that like now
people make and sell period like seals that you can
put on your gear.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Right, I've seen like detachments named after like Space Marine
stuff as well.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, yeah, like it's it's it's fucking wild. And there's
even like if you look down there, there's another example
of one on a guy's armor with a bunch of
like Warhammer patches on his body.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Eye. Yeah, yeah, it's nothing but Warhammer stuff, going from
nothing but Warhammer's Stanicus more, Space Marines got an Imperial
Guard one from the the Death Watch of Greek Yep
or the Death Corps Cree. Sorry.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
Well in that picture that you're looking at, Joe came
from a two year old post in the Warhammer forty
k subreddit that read greetings from Ukraine. Yeah, this has
become really popular here because many of the military are
Warhammer fans. So many of the volunteers who helped the
military try and find merchandise or patches of this type
for them as a nice gift, right hmm. It's and
I'm not, by the way, like we're talking about this
(32:14):
in the context of people taking Warhammer the right way
or the wrong way. I don't have any issue with this.
Like you're fighting a fucking desperate war for your survival.
Do whatever you want to your your armor. You know
that makes you feel better. It's just it's weird. It's
it was strange to see like this actually making its
way to a real war because so many of the
people fighting that war are fans of the game. Like,
(32:36):
that's just a strange moment for the hobby. And you
can for a comparison to how much this has jumped
into mainstream like consciousness. When I was in the military,
we had stupid like we call them morale patches. We
had super little morale patches too. I never saw forty
k one and I mean this is back in the
(32:56):
early two times got up until the twenty Yeah, never
saw anything never and so within a decade it's just
like no, there's detachments themed after space marine groups. There's
moral patches like it's having a moment, that's for sure.
It's having a moment, and it's gonna get weirder, Joe,
because I got another thing to show you, Oh boy.
Every year, the firearms industry gathers in Las Vegas, Nevada
(33:19):
for the Shot Show. It is the gun industry trade
show where different companies show off new weapons, both firearms
that are thing meant for civilian use and for police
and for the military. And one big trend, as I'm
sure you know, Joe, in military arms design over the
last couple of decades, but it's really escalated over the
last ten or fifteen years, have been small portable semi
(33:40):
automatic and automatic grenade launchers in many cases, ones that
can fire like smart grenades. Right, we have a degree
of control and like when it detonates, how far it
has to go? Right, Like that's a big it's like
a major area in which weapons have like weapons development
has leapt forward over the course of the last like
twenty something years in this regard, you have a lot
more options there then you used to for grenade launchers
(34:02):
of that type. And periodically, you know, as some of
these different products that are like because the main weapon
that a space marine carries is called a bolterer, and
it's this big, cool looking rifle that's actually not like
a rifle at all. It fires basically like a rocket
munition that one charge shoots the munition out the barrel
and then a secondary charge actually ignites the rocket and
(34:24):
then the rocket will like shoot towards its target and
blow up.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
And you know, they're.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
Huge guns meant for future terrifying post human war. And periodically,
when you'd see one of these new automatic grenade launchers,
people online would be like, Oh, that looks like a bolterer.
We're finally making real bolters, right, because that's kind of
what they look like. And this year at shot Show, Barrett,
which is a company that makes very fucking big guns,
(34:49):
brought a semi autogmatic grenade launcher painted in ultramarines blue
with a fucking an oath of moment attached.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
To the barrel.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Oh wow, hey everyone here. The maker of that thirty
milimeter grenade launcher was actually Mars Ink, not Barrett. I
made the mistake because both Mars and Barrett are making
basically identical thirty milimeter grenade launchers and competing to get
a contract from the US military for this program called
the SSRs system, and both had models of the SSRs
(35:18):
on display at shot Show. But it was Mars Inc.
That painted THEIRS up to look like a Bolterer and
put a purity seal on it. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
I have to wonder what Games Workshop feels about this.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's just it. That's just a Bolterer.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Yeah, Ultra mariines blue and everything on there, like it's
fucking wild.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
So whether or not you think that's cool depends on
your attitude towards the arms industry. Again, you can think
about that however you want, but it represents a kind
of awkward problem for Games Workshop. The fact that stuff
like this is happening is evidence of the insane degree
of cultural penetration that Warhammer has achieved. But having real
weapons made in the image of your video game or
(36:00):
of your game weapons can be problematic too, right.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah, you don't want to be connected to someone being
actually murdered by your product.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Right right, like that that can be a problem. And
speaking of things that are problematic, the sponsors of this show,
we're back. So, as I kind of brought up before
we went to break, the wide popularity of Warhammer has
(36:31):
increasingly forced problematic confrontations both between sort of how much
people like it and how many many things they want
to stick Warhammer on and what the company Games Workshop
may what Warhammer's stuck on, and between like groups of
fans themselves. And about four years ago, Spain's largest Warhammer
tournament let a guy play while wearing Nazi paraphernalia, and
(36:53):
I believe his army was kind of like Nazi themed too,
Like it was like a Wehrmacht themed guard army or
something if I'm remembering correct, But he was like wearing
Nazi shit, and he'd entered the tournament under the name
Austrian painter, Like really fucking subtle, my dude, And people
weren't thrilled about this. I'm going to quote from an
article in Polygon. Gt Telavera tournament organizers gave comment to
(37:17):
tabletop wargaming site spiky Bit, stating that the club repudiates
the Nazi mentality in all its aspects. Nazi ideas have
no place in our group because they are contrary to
everything we stand for. The organizer said that the player
said he would not leave us unless they involve the police,
As displaying Nazi imagery is not illegal in Spain. The
organizers hesitated let this bring legal trouble upon their club.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
And I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Enough about the situation to know, like, where these guys
really just backed into a completely fucked corner and having
a lot of options, should that Probably I'm going to
guess they could have and should have done more, But
I don't really know much about that. What I do
know is that this causes a lot of people to
get pissed off online, and it blows up enough that
Games Workshop has to publish an announcement on November nineteenth,
twenty twenty one. The Imperium is driven by hate, Warhammer
(38:02):
is not. And in this announcement there's a couple of
interesting lines. First off, they're pointing out that, like, look,
the imperium of Man is a cautionary table. Like so
many aspects of Warmer forty thousand, it is satirical. They
go through the definition of what satire is right, Like,
that's literally in this little article that they put up,
and then they note that said certain real world hate groups,
(38:24):
in adherence to historical ideologies better left in the past,
sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment
and co op them for their own agendas. We've said
it before, but a reminder about what we believe in.
We believe in and support a community united by shared
values of mutual kindness and respect. Our fantasy settings are
grim and dark, but that is not a reflection of
who we are or how we feel the real world
should be. We will never accept nor condone any form
(38:47):
of prejudice, hatred, or abuse in our company or in
the Warhammer hobby. And then they basically they straight out say,
if you come to a games workshop of nter store
and where symbols of a hate group, we'll ask you
to leave if we don't want your money.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Some things don't need to be said aloud until they do,
you know what I mean. Yeah, it's it's an implication,
and to be fair, in most places in Europe this
would have been against the law. Spain, however, is different
for different reasons.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's that c STA vibe. You know, sometimes
it applies a little further than it ought to. And
I want to note too, to be fair, I don't
want it to seem like because as you noted, like
this isn't the thing you have to say until you do.
There's some valid critiques that there were other things that
cropped up for a few years prior to this, that
Games Worships should have made a statement earlier. I'm certainly
(39:35):
not saying they shouldn't have. We may dig into some
of that, you know, later as the podcast goes on,
but like, they haven't handled this perfectly, but that's a
pretty good message, right that, like we don't want your money,
we don't want you in the hobby. And it's good
that they did say something eventually, right, you know, this
is a publicly traded corporation. They're not they're not a
(39:56):
culture warrior and they're not an activist. Yeah, but like,
I'm glad that something got fucking said, and they've That's
not the only thing they've done in the last couple
of years. There's been some more subtle and some less
subtle moves. You know, one thing that happened recently, So
for years, a lot of fans have asked for, like
as the get because as Warhammer's got more popular, more
(40:18):
women have played, and they've added in more female models
for different like sides and stuff. There's more female guardsmen
than there used to be, more female elder and you know,
they've they've at least and the Sisters of Battle, which
is an all female line, has gotten like a refresh
line and a lot more attention. You know, they've done
this a few ways. But a lot of people want
there to be female space marines and this is kind
(40:39):
of a you know, still a topic of a lot
of debate within the actual lore itself. The Emperor like
they can only be male because of how the Emperor
designed their gene seed and stuff. And the real reason
for this, obviously is that like nobody thought about it
in nineteen eighty seven, that like they would want there
to be like the female models for space. They were
(41:01):
thinking about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
And it would hardly be the first bit of lore
that was retcon, like, right, like the Tapestry of Warhammer
Law is a series of retconnings.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah, And that said, I also do kind of one
thing that I appreciate is in some of the more
recent lore when they've gone back to like talk like
feature have books that feature the Emperor and talk about
the creation of the space Marines. One way they've kind
of retcon things is because there's a conversation between the
Emperor and one of his top advisors who's like, I thought,
you should have made all the primarks, you know, your
(41:31):
sons that were the leaders of these legions women, Like
they should have all been girls, like they're leaders in
the space because we would have had less problems. They
wouldn't have all wound up going to fucking war with you.
They would have been less annoying. And I kind of
do like the idea that all space Marines are men
because the Emperor is just kind of a misogynist, like,
and it led up destroying him, right the fact that
(41:52):
he yeah, it kind of does like it sort of works.
But one thing MS Workship did do recently is they
introduced the Emperor's body guard or these other group of
fucking future super soldiers, the custodes who or the castode
is whatever it fucking fake Latin pronunciation you want to use.
And they've been adding like female sculpts, like female heads
(42:13):
and stuff you don't really tell with the faces. But
a chunk of people online lost their goddamn minds. I'll
tell you that right now. The most I'm so surprised
by this crazy over this shit.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
And it's it's very funny because you'll see them posting
stuff like, you know, if you just want to play
the hobby, play the hobby, but don't come into my
culture and try to like change it, because like you
want to you want there to be blue haired you know,
girls in your in my fucking game and my culture. Yeah,
a lot of these guys being like, oh, this is
going to destroy the hobby, Like this is like once
(42:46):
woke gets in, it ruins everything. Fucking Warhammer has never
been worth more money, Like Games Workshop is one of
the most valuable corporations in the entire United Kingdom. Fucking
little plastic models of space marines and or and shit
are worth more than fishing to the British economy. And
it's an island.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
I can play these weird space monsters like Tyrannids or orcs,
and but you know when when you add women to
the mix, really ruining the immersion. What's the most unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Fucking fucking insane man.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah, it's it's very silly, and you know, at at
its core this is a culture war centered over a
very important problem for creatives, though, which is that, like
when you're creating fictional fascist organizations, whether they are impossibly
advanced sci fi empires or like a cult of deranged
post apocalyptic bikers, there's a risk that you're gonna make
that some of the fans of your work will be
(43:43):
fans of those fictional fascists, and not in a I
just think they look cool way, but in a I
have some opinions about you know, this racial group way right,
and real fascists, as we noticed, spent decades getting really
good at using stuff like that as a bridge to
start propagandizing to young people. Whether we like it or not,
fictional worlds are battlegrounds and the broader culture war against
(44:05):
ascendant fascist sentiment worldwide. Fabrizio Galley, the creator of that
God Emperor Trump float that we started this episode discussing,
said something similar in an interview that I read on
heavy dot com. The time of intellectuals, philosophers, and of
old and worn culture is over. We have entered the
era of fantasy video games and virtual life. Yeah, right
(44:28):
on the nose there, twenty nineteen. But bang hit the target.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
I hate when you read something from now several years ago. Yep,
that's just everything now, yeah that is that is just everything.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
Yep, that's just everything. Well, Joe, I think that's all
I've got here. You know, how are you feeling?
Speaker 2 (44:54):
I'm feeling good, Robert. And I hate to say it, yeah,
because I love talking about Warhammer, and I love talking
about to talk about Warhammer, and I love the weird
shit that comes out of it, especially hearing stuff like this,
because I don't want people to like this to be
the first introduction to Warhamer, like, oh wow, it's populated
by fascists.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I go to a local Warhammer club where I live.
I'm not going to dox it, but it is full
of incredibly lovely people and probably one of the most
diverse rooms I've ever been in in the Netherlands.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
Yeah, and yeah, it's good that we can close up
talking about stuff like this because as conservative a weirdo
as I was as a kid, I really do think
playing Warhammer was one of like the healthier things for
me in terms of connecting me to other people who
believed different things, like even within the context of like
a fucking gaming group at a hobby store in the
(45:46):
early two thousands, Like I remember after the invasion of Iraq,
like a few weeks or months after, like my friends
and I, like, somebody brought in like a print out
of like a missile strike on I think it was
a BMP on like an Iraqi troop train. You could
see frame by frame this thing blowing up like people
inside it, and we're fucking shitty tech kids in Texas
(46:07):
being like, whoa Like, look, I'd never seen anything like that.
And one of the guys we gamed with was like
a veteran who'd been like a tanker. I think he
had fought in Desert Storm and was not like I
had always assumed it was a pretty conservative guy and
was not like the most like was a man in
his like his forties or fifties who would yell at
(46:27):
children over the rules of a video or of a
tabletop game. Oh yeah, like that kind of dude. But
also when he saw what we were doing and he
realized what it was a picture of, he was like,
don't do that, Like there were people in there. You
don't laugh at something like that, you know, like it's
not cool. It's not something to like go like whoa over,
Like it's not a game, like like it's the most
(46:47):
terrifying thing you can possibly imagine, and you need to
have more respect and as like a fucking twelve year
old little piece of shit like that actually like hit
and impacted me, and I was like, oh yeah, I
was kind of if, like, fucking this guy is calling
me out for being a dick. I might have been
being a dick.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Meanwhile, he's dressed head to toe an Imperial Guard cosplay
like he should.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Absolutely. Hey man, death isn't funny covered in I had
to tell all right, Joe, you want to plug your
book before we roll out here.
Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah. So I am the host of the history podcast
The Lines led by Donkeys. So if you like military history,
check us out. And my first gunpowder fantasy novel, The
Highlands Burned, comes out May ninth, and you can digitally
pre order it now, so uh check that out. Reviews
are coming in. They're very positive and I'm really excited
for it to release.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
Excellent. I am very excited to read it and excited
for our listeners to read it. And also Joe I'm
excited for you and I to have a podcast about Warhammer.
When's it coming out? Neither of us know. Helly, there's
gonna be a little bit of a delay, like we're
currently dealing with. You know, there's a lot of logistical issues,
(48:05):
including like just bringing you on and signing contracts because
you're in a different country and stuff. We'll figure it out.
There will be a podcast and it'll be a weekly show.
It'll come out at some point this year. We just
don't know exactly when yet. But we wanted to tease
the idea for all of you and show you kind
of what we've got coming down the pipe because we
both kind of tease this online and social media a
(48:27):
couple times, and I felt like bad about not putting something.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Out people had noticed people had.
Speaker 3 (48:36):
So we'll be getting you. You know, we'll have more
coming out soon. The show will be usually forty minute
to an hour long episodes. We'll be covering you know,
history and the lore in game. We'll be covering like
real world reporting on different controversies around the game. You
have a great pitch for that, based on another one
of these like weird political culture war things that hits
(48:57):
like a convention where people are like playing gaming and
doing like painting contests and how the community deals with it.
So we'll be talking about like both real life, how
this this hobby is influencing and has been influenced by
the shit going on in the world, and we're going
to talk about just the nerdy shit that we love.
Like I'm looking forward to putting together a painfully detailed
history of like the concept of a space marine in
(49:20):
sci fi fiction and how that's led us to like
games workshop building an empire. Yes, yeah, and yeah, Like
what are you most excited to talk about.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I'm incredibly excited to talk about and explain how the
Imperial Guard works to people and how and how they
die by the tens of millions.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Yeah. Well that's all for today, folks. We'll be back later,
I mean, at some point.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
With a show.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast m
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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