Warhammers and Sickles, Part 2: Toys of Terror and Fascist Fun

N. A. Dawn
Sep 11, 2020
14 min read

"Hey, guys! I know this is probably a weird time to bring this up, since we're in the middle of combat and all. But do any of you ever wonder how it's possible for all these factions to wage war for millennia on end? Surely cooperative relations across all our societies would be less wasteful and ecologically hazardous, more stable and prosperous, and, um, I don't know, like, not a moral catastrophe? Oh, that's right: then we wouldn't be able to flog derivative products to the bourgeoisie and their middle-class lackeys, who refuse to acknowledge the primacy of the class-struggle and the role of their complacency in the functioning of a system accelerating human civilisation towards collapse."

What would a fascist toy company look like? Well, it would probably have to produce fascism-themed toys. That’s a good start. Maybe hard to imagine, admittedly, but not impossible. Oh, and it’d need to be created by and marketed to fascist movements’ historical core demographic: white, European men. No question about that. Most importantly, however, it would need to multiply its net worth every single year, indefinitely, expanding just like the empires represented by all the bigoted characters in its product lines.

Voilà! Fascism finally made fun!

But as authoritarian regimes sweep the globe from Europe to the USA, India to Brazil, and China to Russia, and multinational corporations twist their coils around a gasping democracy more tightly than ever before, would we the people still play their game? Or would we play a game of a different sort?

Why does representation matter and why do intentions not? Why is the role of the critic and how can we build something better than fantasies of hatred and destruction? In other words: What should we do about Warhammer 40’000?

Your Fun is Fascist.

"Quick, men! A queer college student! Insult them to ingratiate your fragile egos!" "AYE AYE, COMISSAR SHAPIRO!"

That’s right. To the uninitiated, Warhammer 40’000 – affectionately known as ‘40k’ – is the niche and nauseatingly privileged pastime you’ve never heard of. Hobby publisher Games Workshop’s tabletop game of collectible miniatures allows you to assemble, paint and advance your very own army of toy soldiers in skirmishes between magical, spacefaring anti-heroes, endlessly embroiled in the madness and mayhem of all-out war, for hours – or sometimes days – of pretend genocide.

Since its inception in the early ‘90s, the stories of 40k have come to span hundreds of novels and dozens of video games, comic books, trading card games, roleplaying games and, above all, thirty years of miniature wargaming. But while the fictional universe’s narrative has evolved into greater detail, the canon’s core politics remains largely intact as a collection of far-right propaganda.

Here, in the 41st millennium, humanity has spread across the stars in a galaxy-spanning military dictatorship: the Imperium of Mankind. Genetically engineered (and apparently exclusively Caucasian) super-soldiers echo the Aryan wet-dream, bred to ape their Supreme Leader – I mean, Fuehrer – I mean “Immortal God-Emperor” by defending their theocracy one ethnic cleansing at a time, employing hulking weapons of mass destruction to blow the daylights out of every single one of, well… Them.

Nazi emblems coat tanks, planes and gritty, fossil-fuelled ‘power armour’ that resembles an Arthurian knight wearing a tractor. (But, like, a Nazi tractor.) Soldiers, technicians and slaves all yell a range of sadistic obscenities for the bad guys (“Blood for the Blood God!” “Skull for the Skull Throne!” “Maim! Kill! Burn!”) and reactionary slogans for the good guys (“Suffer not the alien to live!” “Burn the witch, the heretic, the mutant!” “Slay the demon!” “For the Emperor!” “Glory to the Golden Throne!”). Charming, really.

Fancy a go? First, choose a faction from a list of ethnically, ideologically and sexually homogeneous, ultra-nationalist warmongering empires. Second, dish out hundreds of dollars on models (which you should glue together and decorate yourself) and rulebooks (which you should learn by heart). Third, proceed to pit your toys against a cult of pudgy middle-aged white men, to enact imaginary far-future war crimes on an epic scale (that is, roughly the size of a dinner table). Then repeat this process every three to five years or so, when Games Workshop releases a new edition of the game, modifying the rules just enough to make the current composition of your toy-army strategically dysfunctional, such that to continue playing the game with any competitive advantage, you’ll need to purchase new models and rulebooks all over again.

This, comrades, is – objectively speaking – one of the worst pastimes ever imagined. It is exorbitantly, unjustifiably expensive, horrifically reactionary, desperately slow-paced and wanting of a player who delights in months of pedantic rule-citing, obsessive strategising and craftsmanship that swiftly slips from the meticulous to the mind-gratingly tedious. In short, 40k is, by all reasonable standards, completely indefensible.

It is also, somewhat embarrassingly, a sincere love of mine: I played the tabletop game in the early part of my adolescence, and found in its extensive universe plenty of room to write the first novel I ever attempted. As such, despite my (many, many) political criticisms, I will always cherish 40k as a unique fictional setting, as portrayed in the heart-pounding fiction flowing from its dedicated publisher, The Black Library, and the darkly sublime artworks and vivid world-building that fill its sourcebooks.

Hence today, I humbly appear before you to pose the complicated question: What should one make of a game – and the world in which it is set – that is both inexcusable and, too, incredible? How should one reconcile one’s delight in an exciting and even inspiring hobby, with the rather upsetting fact that it also happens to ooze some of the most morally repugnant bile of our increasingly bigoted culture?

War Crimes.

Now all the fellas in the club say, "Yeah!" (YEEEEAH!)

Now all the ladies in the club say, "Yeah!" ( * crickets * )

Of what charges is 40k guilty, really? I suppose we could go easy on ourselves and agree to say, “All of them,” and call it a day. But that wouldn’t be terribly scrupulous, so let’s go through the list.

Perhaps we should start with the frothing fanaticism that props up the cult of celebrity at the heart of the stories’ main human society. An endless choir of religious maniacs screeches hell and holiness from the halls of every cathedral, while countless working-class conscripts descend onto the battlefield faithfully bleating their eerily Abrahamic chants. An all-white church for oligarchy! What could possibly go wrong? The righteous martyrdom of the poor, the immaculate near-omnipotence of the elite! A familiar faith to justify a perpetual race-war with every known nonhuman (see non-white) species. (As well as those humans who think the system sucks).

This cosmology of totalitarianism goes more or less unchallenged throughout the fiction, since defectors from the Imperium only seem to pledge themselves to other power-mongering gods demanding absolute devotion, self-flagellating worship and infinite sacrifice for their conquest. Everyone in 40k is a maniacal holy crusader, bible-bashing their way from planet to planet, murdering degenerates to fulfil the will of their psychotic fetish, their very own space-magic-wielding white Kim Jong-un, their if-Jesus-was-a-eugenicist-military-dictator, their fabulous, brave, beautiful, generous, wise, perfect president-for-life. What fun!

But why stop there? What about the centralisation of all state and corporate power under a single authoritarian military bureaucracy, spanning “a million worlds”? What about the constant imperialist expansion driving humans to colonise every planet they can reach, elevated by the aforementioned jingoist frenzy, much aligned with the intractable Clash of Civilisation mythologies of contemporary Western reactionaries? It’s as they say, I guess: In for a penny, in for a pound… of flesh!

What about the literal demonisation of all unaligned religions? They are worshippers of Chaos, the antithesis of order, harmony and society, as represented by forbidden magic, nonlinear time, unbridled physical prowess and intoxicating hedonism, a.k.a. dancing. Followers of Chaos are a profane, heretical cult – they are the true power-mongers, the true sadists.

Unsurprisingly, there is a grand total of one human faction – the Salamanders Space Marines Chapter – featuring people of colour. Whoops, just kidding: Salamanders aren’t actually people of colour! They’re literally pitch-black golliwogs, in armour, genetically mutated as a defection from the otherwise entirely whitewashed character cast. How daring! Games Workshop has concocted a fascist fever dream so absolute that even the ‘bad’ space marines, who worship the ‘bad’ gods, are all white too. (Take that, Tolkien! We don’t have any brown people, not even Turkish-stand-in Urukhai antagonists, and your would-be Zulu “wild men”!)

The only characters who aren’t white are a few alien factions (barring the Eldar, see: space elves, who too are somehow exclusively Caucasian). Tyranids are Ridley Scott-style xenomorph-esque, bug-dinosaur hybrids, so they can’t be racialised at all. Necrons are skeletal robots modelled on ancient Egyptian aesthetics, including hieroglyphics and pharaoh-style head-dress. They don’t have skin, so they can’t be white. (Although we may want to ponder why one of actual humanity’s most accomplished civilisations, which also just happens to have been populated by ethnically diverse blacks, is the one race which is represented as skinless zombies… and is also voiced by Brits in the video game.)

Then come the Orks: the archetypal Tolkienian “green-skins”, oafish barbarians who organise into “primitive” “tribes”, always depicted in mobs of raging hooligans who – and this is actually canon – sprout from free-floating spores to overrun worlds in global displays of savagery. In associated video games, their voice actors yell constantly in accents eerily resembling what can only be described as someone with the direst of throat infections and an IQ of 30 trying to impersonate working-class Northern Englanders.

Lastly, are the blue-skinned Tau: the technologically superior “upstart race” of diminutive collectivists from “the Eastern fringe”, voice acted so as to emulate a nebulous Southeast Asian caricature. Seriously? Come on! Games Workshop, you literally made them fly around in giant robot suits. Just admit you are petrified of the scary Orientals, what with their Gundam anime and Maoist revolutions. (I mean, I’m down for that.)

In short, despite having colonised most of the galaxy, the humans of 40k are, almost without exception, Caucasian, including many of the aliens (except those with blue skin, green skin, no skin and bug-dinosaur-it-doesn’t-matter skin).

Which brings us to gender. For the most part, 40k has only one. There are some token women here and there – the odd anonymous model in some chap’s Astra Militarum army, a few heroes in the novels, and an all-female faction called the Adepta Sororitas (inspired, it would seem, by the lesser known avant garde pornography we might call “Catholic BDSM”) – but for the most part, it’s the manliest sausage fest you’ve ever seen. T

he cringe is only intensified by the bizarre explanations given for the obvious sex segregation. For example, the reason only men can become Space Marines, a.k.a. the Adeptus Astartes (i.e. the aforementioned Übermensch), is that the gene-seed (the make-believe sciencey stuff that gives you two hearts, four lungs and the power to spit acid) is derived from the Emperor’s genetic material, and therefore is sex-specific. (This is the equivalent of saying: “Hey, I’m not a bigot for imagining this deeply discriminatory thing! The reason it’s sexist is because of this other bigoted thing that I also imagined!”).

To make matters worse, 40k’s primary big baddies – the Dark Gods – include among them Slaanesh, the god of lust and sensory pleasure. Its associated colours are pink and purples, its demon kin are (frequently topless) “daemonettes”, and its followers are typically described as intersex. Sexual pleasure is profane; gender fluidity is, once more, literally demonised. Every other daemon and character in the entire game is represented as exclusively male with about as much sex appeal as the phrase, “Roll a d6.”

These atrocities unfold over a theatre of normalised apocalypse. Colossal machines of war decimate biomes into smoking wastelands, littered with the wreckages of crashed planes, artillery reduced to debris and corpses by the pile. Munitions factories rise on the horizons of purged planets, and life is razed on world after world, as the armies of the 41st millennium destroy one another for our lucrative amusement. The environmental crisis: perfectly distilled at galactic proportions.

In case it’s not yet clear, this is cut-and-paste fascism: a fanatical cult of white supremacist, cisnormative patriarchs worshipping a divine supreme leader who oversees an imitation 14th century monoculture, locked into endless imperial expansion and genocide, with unwavering support of every government and corporation. The total absence of democracy goes unnoticed by the game’s many fictional characters, nor its players in our world. The invocation of quasi-European mythical symbolism and superstitions buries the gamer in anti-histories and whimsical idealism.

Nonhumans are exterminated, insurrection is crushed, and a literal inquisition hunts ‘witches’ (see: people suspected to be consorting with nonhumans and insurrectionists). Planets are regularly colonised to fuel the Imperial war machine, or simply obliterated. Anyone who contradicts this abominable status quo in thought or deed is classified as a ‘rogue’, ‘renegade’, ‘traitor’, ‘witch’ or ‘heretic’, and promptly purged, instances of which make up almost every book, comic and game published in the 40k line over the past three decades.

Toys Don't Make Me Fascist!

"Trump v. Biden 2020." (Berniiiii-hiii-hiiiiiiiie! * weeps *)

Obviously not. Like I said, I'm a fan of 40k, and I'm an anarchist.

As strawmen go, this one’s not all bad. But then again, that’s the point: nothing is all bad. (Nor all good.) See, that wasn’t that hard to say? Wow, it’s amazing how maturely we all behave when we feel like we’re in this together.

Of course playing Warhammer 40’000 certainly doesn’t make you a fascist with fascist beliefs and fascist behaviours. (Not on its own, at least.) I’m arguing something more modest and more important: that 40k is a part of culture, and culture changes the way we think and feel, very subtly, about all sorts of things. Over time, we may feel more accommodating towards other toxic thoughts and toxic feelings, because we’ve spent so much time practising those toxic thoughts and toxic feelings in environments that made it safe for us to do so repeatedly.

The case of 40k doesn’t apply to everyone. All my mates are lefties and we played the warped shit out of this game. But it at least applies to some of us. Since it would be shockingly arrogant to presume that we (the noble protagonists) won’t be like them (the lowly NPCs of the universe of my imaginary projections), that we are somehow the exceptional few who are all-knowing and magically self-aware, then we should all commit to a pinch of reflection on how we engage with the culture around us. Because culture is not always our friend.

Don't believe me, though. Peek outside your window and get a whiff of those noxious fumes: the global rise of far-right movements is stinking up the mainstream with ahistorical genocide apologia. And Games Workshop's making a killing. Now I'm not saying correllation equals causation, but I am observing that anti-democratic governments run by macho oligarchs and white supremacists from Latin America to Russia, the Philippines to Europe, and the USA to India, all the way down to the Charlottesville riots and GamerGate, seem to be speaking exactly the same language as Games Workshop's multi-million-pound far-future toy-range.

It matters little whether Terrence the fifty-three-year-old sales consultant who likes to play with big-boy toys at his local hobby shop in Nottingham feels just a wee uncomfortable seeing a gay couple kissing or a woman in burqa. Likewise is it of small import whether Matthew, the scrawny, specky adolescent kid who freezes up in proximity to The Opposite Sex, has a good chuckle at cousin Douglas’s Evil Jew impression from time to time. Regrettable and deplorable, these certainly are. Dangerous, even. But what matters more than pointing at individuals and yelling, “Gross! Bad!” is building that alternative together.

A war over hearts and minds begins with all the antidotes to paranoia, repression and chauvinism: empathy, imagination and solidarity. We can’t control what people believe, and fortunately for us, we don’t even need to. (And I’m pretty sure we don’t, and shouldn’t, want to.) But we can call out bigots by calling them in to a movement, to community. We can oppose hatred by creating inclusive spaces for shared experiences. (This, by the way, is a strategy I like to call ‘Communist Koombaya’, and it pwns all the n00bs.)

And that starts with uprooting the safe spaces where fascism festers and replacing them with powerful networks of honesty and kindness. Books, movies, TV shows, comic books, video games: these aren’t just playgrounds for What If? They’re melting pots for all our fears and hopes, our desires and our flaws. The cultural artefacts of our time are some of the most important means by which we communicate and legitimate ideas and behaviours. The symbols we paint onto our toy tanks structure our imagination; the character arcs of space marines crystallise our values into images of horrific violence perpetrated against The Other.

It is through storytelling that we confront possibilities. We can explore them or erase them, propose or reject them, condone or condemn, celebrate or criticise all the options for how to think and feel and love and fight, and ultimately organise our collective way of life. And while stories can sculpt our minds, disposing us to accept prejudiced perspectives, excuse forms of violence or dismiss uncomfortable realities, they can just as easily be toolkits for forging openness, compassion and courage.

The fact is that violence in storytelling – in books, films, games or any other medium – does not necessarily predispose us to violent behaviour ourselves. Nor is there any evidence suggesting that playing a tabletop game of miniature warfare contributes to ultra-nationalist inclinations. In fact, it is ultra-nationalist inclinations that give rise to tabletop games like 40k: the way we play echoes the way we think. Thought and action are culture’s chicken and the egg. Which came first? Probably neither, probably both. They’re clearly both important. So let’s become more self-aware in case we’re inadvertently participating in systems of domination.

We may want to take stock for a moment. Here, in 40k, is an expensive game about super-powered quasi-European white people (mostly men) in which All Others are the enemy to be exterminated. This game just so happens to be played largely by affluent white men (from boomers to post-millennials) with plenty of recreational time on their hands. This game also just so happens to be most played in predominantly white European nations and North America, whose industrial hegemony was built upon the enslavement of colonised brown peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America, to say nothing of the associated resource theft, cultural eradication, impoverishment, torture, humiliation, exploitation and enduring structural exclusion indigenous peoples have experienced.

And the billion-dollar corporation which manufactures these gaming products is growing rapidly, at the same time as democracies are collapsing all over the world and corporations, who are able to manipulate a society’s governance, are centralising into monstrous megacorporations which monopolise, among other things, the way we imagine ourselves, the world and our future by dominating the entertainment industry. This same world, where trans and nonbinary people are erased, excluded and assaulted, where the white-majority global north maintains a financial stranglehold on the economies of the black- and brown-majority global south, where women provide the bulk of all labour and the short-end of the payroll stick, and mass extinction is accelerating with every passing hour.

To pretend that there is no link between the forms of culture with which we engage and the political institutions, historical legacies and social struggles around us is simply childish. No one suggests 40k is the cause of fascism. But it may be a symptom, and a symptom that makes violent masculinity, anti-democratic institutions, genocidal racism and ecological destruction more palatable, more acceptable and even enjoyable to an audience already desensitised to all of those exact crises, which are presently unfolding all around us.

Of course, 40k’s not just a litany of disturbing dog-whistles for the alt-right. It’s also an enthralling pastime for those who can afford it, and we should all enjoy ourselves while playing pretend together more often. But it’s not only a game either. It’s not just an isolated interaction between disembodied individual and decontexualised commodity, somewhere in the vacuum of space. It’s a real game in a real culture, made and played by real people, in a very peculiar historical moment, where we are fighting a very real struggle with one another over what kind of society we should live in if we don’t want to drown, burn and choke on poisonous air. So we should probably have our fun a little more consciously than we currently are – and maybe change it into something better.

Notes

On the GamerGate Saga:

For an overview, see the summaries on Wikipedia, Rational Wiki and SJWiki. (Ditto mainstream coverage in The Guardian, The Washington Post and Forbes.)
For Jacobin Magazine's explorations of gaming, geek culture and politics, see: 'On Geek Culture', 'The Substance of Geek Culture', 'Revenge of the Nerds' and 'We Can Win Gamers Over to Socialism'.
For related video exposes, see YouTuber Shaun's 'Feminism - WHY YOU NEED IT! - A Response to Chris Ray Gun' and 'TL;DR - TL;DR Doesn't Understand Anita Sarkeesian', and fellow YouTuber hbomberguy's 'Thunderf00t VS. FemiNAZI Ghostbusters: A Measured Response'.

On the Alt-Right:

For an overview, see VICE's Charlottesville-related reports here, here and here.
For Jacobin Magazine's discussions of key alt-right figures like Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Lana Lotfkeff, all their billionaire funders, and their ostensibly contradictory collaborations with Israeli occupation, despite their flagrant antisemitism.
For a video analysis on the discursive tactics and organising strategy of the alt-right, see YouTubers such as Innuendo Studios' series 'The Alt-Right Playbook' and 'Why Are You So Angry?', and Shaun's 'Charlottesville: The True Alt-Right'.
As an exemplary case study, see the discussions of alt-right gaming YouTuber PewDiePie by The Young Turks, hbomberguy, Vaush and Kat Blaque.

The Rise of Games Workshop:

Current status in the global market.
Reports in Bell of Lost Souls, Retail Gazette (2017 and 2018), BBC. Independent, Nottingham Post and The Telegraph.
Even in the face of the pandemic, Games Workshop absorbs the wrath of the market like a Plague Marine lurching across the wastes.