Warhammers and Sickles, Part 3: Throwing the Toys Out of the Cot

"I'm not offended! The fact that I'm constantly yelling profanities at strangers on the internet is entirely incidental!"

The right-wing backlash to calls for representation in popular culture are typical enough, and by now, well-documented. At this point, like woke brands and K-Pop, they’re practically staples of our modern moment.

The 2014 saga of reactionary harassment known as GamerGate saw a sea of digitally obsessed white boys lose the last dregs of their collective sanity in an uproar that spanned hundreds of outrage videos and countless death threats, mostly targeting women who mustered the courage to call a spade a spade. In other words, representation de facto matters: and not just to so-called “woke libs.” Clearly, demanding that women, people of colour, trans people and people with disabilities be depicted in less reductive and astonishingly harmful ways struck a nerve among the more privileged echelons of the gaming community. Merely raising the criticism launched them into spasms of sadistic neurosis. The buttons of button-pressers were certainly pressed. Deeply humiliating displays of anger, scathing vitriol, promises of violence, pseudo-intellectual posturing of the crudest and most disingenuous kind – all about made-up people in made-up worlds doing made-up things for made-up reasons.

That’s probably not as immediately important as, say, abolishing ICE in the US, transitioning from fossil fuels or generally ensuring a functional welfare system so that people aren’t forced to choose between the labour force and complete destitution. But it is important for other reasons. For one thing, it generates, legitimises and reinforces assumptions about a range of things: who matters in a society, who are the rightful recipients of extreme violence and under what conditions extreme violence is worthy of praise. And it’s often those assumptions which prevent us from achieving the reforms I mentioned above.

It’s worth repeating that exclusion is always a contrivance. It takes extraordinary effort to pretend people don’t exist. (Certainly more effort than making your 5+ Invulnerable Save.) The real world is bountifully diverse in every direction, and only consistent campaigns of ignorance and prejudice can create stories which somehow purge the world of its innate vibrancy, leaving a bland plateau of social uniformity.

It’s also less fun. One of the creative arts’ great wonders is its insistence upon exploring the complexity of life in ways that entertain and inspire. When our imaginative projects actively reduce the scope of the world, we feel cheated, claustrophobic, even insulted. I delight in the interaction of characters from different cultures, even opposing ones, as it deepens our emotional connection to their story. We feel compelled to listen more closely to their experiences, and our intimacy with the story-world grows. More technological wonder, more anthropological peculiarity, more physiological marvel: we want to be dazzled by diversity, not bludgeoned over the head by a cranky nun who things dancing is for the devil.

To play 40k is to be flooded with implicit assumptions which indeed contrive to reduce the world from a majestic mystery to a narrow nob. We are subjected to a barrage of foul imagery: cishet white male soldiers killing people who don't look like them, live like them, believe in the same god or hail from the same ancestors as them, in order to conserve the purity of their race and culture, as a heroic deed because it protects the future of their people (and their people only). We are obliged to think of gender in static, binary, cisnormative terms, where men are stronger, bolder, more numerous and more important.

The various cultures of the 41st millennium are portrayed as intractably locked into endless military competition, as if launching armies at one another is the result of cultural difference, and not in fact the result of ruling classes endeavouring to expand their power. We are expected to infer that societies can only be organised into rigid, patriarchal, ethnically homogenous hierarchies; to assume that white men are the only humans that matter, that they are constantly under threat, and that the solution is colonising every territory we discover.

In case it’s not yet obvious: this isn’t a description of the future. It’s literally the present: wars for profit framed as incompatible cultures vying for superiority; systemic white supremacy; brutal xenophobia; all-consuming patriarchy; industrial ecocide; the rise of authoritarianism and the obliteration of democratic institutions; the blatant disregard for ordinary working people; an obsession with physical and mental prowess to the denigration of people with disabilities; etc., etc., etc...

Want another sandwich before we move on?

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"If you force me to critically reflect on the consequences of my actions, I'll call you names, attempt to publicly humiliate you by sharing your personal information and promise to torture you in highly specific and degrading ways, because that's what reasonable, compassionate people do when they're considering the opinions of others who believe in the wellbeing of their fellow members of society. Also, I'm always right."

"Well... you're certainly not Left."

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But I Wanna!

Look I get it. I don't want to dislike the things I like. Having hobbies that enchant me with vibrant artwork, immersive stories and absorbing gameplay is a great addition to my life.

If someone came along and told me there was something innately reactionary about, I don't know, playing the piano, I'd probably feel a little defensive at first, because I don't want to feel like my intelligence is being insulted, my moral integrity is being doubted or my identity is being associated with Mike fucking Pence.

As such, criticisms such as mine are usually met with a mix of reactions, some of which warrant more attention than others. But we’re egalitarians here: let’s charge through the lot!

1. “You Don’t Have to Be the Imperium.”

God, that’s a relief.

People defending 40k say this to assure us that fascism is an option, not compulsory. This misses the point.

Sure, I know I’m not personally being coerced into identifying with the space-fascists. But we are expected to sympathise with them, to see them as heroic and righteous. Most of the source material casts humankind as noble warriors defending the dwindling remnants of a once-glorious white ethno-state, since fallen from grace. We may not like the grim realities of the Imperium, but we’re certainly encouraged to see it as, at the very least, necessary in the face of the odds, inevitable given our (supposedly) selfish human nature, and even laudable given the hostile forces encroaching on every border.

The space-fascists, whether you choose to play as their factions or not, are continually enshrined as acceptable, admirable and, in some way, on our side, regardless of whether we consciously elect to be on theirs. Moreover, the other factions on offer aren’t any less authoritarian, sadistic and corrupt. Even the Tau Empire (the blue definitely-not-Chinese frog people I mentioned earlier) operate along fixed traditional hierarchies, apparently exclusively male, which direct their expansion over an ever-swelling colonial dominion. So whichever way the dice roll in 40k, you’re telling the far-right they’re A-OK.

2. “No One Actually Believes that the Imperium is Good.”

I like this. It seems to be getting at something about representations that's actually true: we can show someone to be 'good' or 'bad'.

But it runs into two problems. Firstly, as I’ll elaborate shortly, 40k is not a satire. The Imperium is portrayed as heroic, not to expose it as self-righteously villainous, but to excuse and justify its indefensible brutality. It's propaganda. It needn’t be, and some people have argued that it used to be the former, but has slowly devolved over time as the franchise has grown. (I’d actually be interested in seeing this properly researched and argued, if anyone’s interested.)

But the real issue here is the question of conscious belief. We live in an age where white supremacists conceal their ideologies in ironic humour online, because on some level, they’re aware that their sincere beliefs are merely (and quite obviously) ahistorical conspiratorial fear-mongering for opportunistic megalomaniacs. They are easily ridiculed by the public, and so they hide behind an armour of edgy memes. Well-meaning layfolk are seduced by ostensibly plausible ideas couched in darkly funny commentary, a process which, unfortunately, doesn’t end in a laugh.

Stochastic terrorism is a sociological term for the process whereby ordinary people are gradually, deliberately or accidentally, brought to hold hateful, fearful political beliefs, which over time, drive them to see the targets of their fears as appropriate recipients of violence. In other words, normal folks like us can under circumstances be persuaded to become murderers - and not by accident. This isn't a slippery slope argument: it's a well-studied, empirical phenomenon.

Consciousness isn't like a well-lit page of writing, where all the words are clearly readable and always true. It's more like a mysterious fog, in which we catch glimpses of attitudes and desires, sometimes only after having acted out in a way we will later live to regret. Regardless of what we explicitly declare to others or acknowledge in ourselves, what we believe to be true is informed by so many factors that we can't be expected to be aware of. When and where you grew up, in what political circumstances, with what kind of family, religion, race, gender, sex, sexuality, personality, class, disabilities, access to literacy and telecommunications, and even your language, all contribute to the way we interpret the world. This is itself an extremely difficult psychological, anthropological, sociological and epistemological problem (i.e. Why do I believe the things I do?). Suffice it to say: we don't really know for certain why we think we know the things we think we know. You know?

So it doesn't matter if after playing 40k for ten years, you don't consciously believe that the Imperium is in fact benevolent, when someone asks you for your opinion. But you may be more likely to ignore the next US coup in Latin America, because you're used to thinking of war as inevitable, that somehow might makes right, or that brown people are perhaps better off being 'guided' by the white man, whose burden it is to rule.

3. “Stop Making Everything Political.”

This is the most common reaction, right after the knee-jerk “No, you’re wrong." It’s almost as unhelpful.

Imagine someone saying, “I think what we’re doing is in some ways potentially quite harmful,” and another person replies, “Why are you so boring?”

For this response to work, you’d have to believe that all politics means is something to the effect of ‘Being Annoying’. By fabricating a conflict where one doesn’t actually exist, you are making Just a Normal Something into a Political Something. You think you’re observing and articulating an opinion about already existing political dimensions to our lives, but you’re actually imbuing it with political qualities that it didn’t previously have all on your own.

Wow! It’s worth pausing on what an extraordinary idea this actually is. Imagine humans were like little gods who could go around transforming Normal Things into Political Things simply by squabbling. The Politics of Pettiness! It’s no wonder the people who typically make this sort of argument are those who tend either to live in relative material security where struggling with the status quo is cushioned by inherited wealth or hard-won upward mobility, or merely lack exposure to thinking at a structural level by being denied sufficient critical education.

This isn’t just out of touch; it’s full-throttle bonkers. Amazingly, politics is not simply being a spiteful brat who goes about throwing a fuss because they just happen to be attention-seeking ninnies. (If only!) In a fairly simple but functional sense, politics is the web of contestations that arise from individuals and groups struggling to influence the world enough to satisfy their wants and needs, which sometimes contradict each other. Noticing the normalisation or glorification of cruel worldviews while reading a book, watching a film or playing a game is political in the sense that you gain an idea of how one group is trying to legitimise the prospect (or reality) of violence towards another group in order to advance their own interests over the other’s.

Note, this isn’t necessarily about good or evil intentions. (At least, not yet.) It’s about people with desires, who do things with what means are at their disposal to quench their thirst for whatever it is they want. If you’re a worker being exploited by your boss, a woman being harassed by your boyfriend, an aboriginal person being repelled from your ancestral home by colonial invaders or a queer child being bullied by straight meat-heads, you’re going to fight back, because it is in your interests to resist oppression.

On the other hand, if you already exercise power over others (i.e. if you’re the boss, boyfriend, invader or meat-head), then you’re likely to use it to acquire more power, because it satisfies your material want for even more security and the psychological validation of your own status. Suffice it to say, politics can happen at many levels – between individuals or groups, institutionally or systemically – but it’s always more than just someone with a chip on their shoulder. (Hence socialism, feminism, anti-racism and queer solidarity are examples of political movements, and ‘irritationism’ is not.)

4. “It May Be Fascist, But It’s Not Intended to Be.”

People are obsessed with their good intentions. Can we get over this now? I’m starting to feel like I’m in kindergarten.

Why should the (presumed) intentions of 40k’s creators determine the overall meaning of their fictional universe as a whole? Let’s explore.

That’s right. It’s literature time. (I’ve always wanted to say that.)

Here’s the thing: an author’s intention doesn’t determine the meaning of a text. It literally can’t. When was the last time you asked Walt Disney what he meant by Mickey and Minnie Mouse? What did Chris Nolan say from the other side of the hot tub when you asked about the deeper philosophy of Memento? Oh, that didn’t actually happen? Exactly.

Of course not. We never ask authors to tell us what to think. We make our minds up for ourselves. When you watch a film, play a game, read a book or even just see an advertisement pasted to a lamppost, you – the viewer, gamer, reader – determine the meaning. First by observing certain stylistic elements – textual qualities, cinematic choices or gameplay mechanics – and second by building a reasonable interpretation based on your observations. That’s how meaning is made. You’re doing it all on your own all the time, with no one else’s intentions involved. You look at a thing, and you interpret it, based on your fullest experience of language, culture, your psychology, your imagination, your identity, your lived experience in the world, your ideology and worldview, the research you’ve read, basic common sense and the many other ingredients to our consciousness we struggle to name.

You’re doing the interpreting, every time – not Disney, not Nolan. And because we (as audiences) share our interpretations when we talk to each other or publish our opinions online, and because our behaviours demonstrate our interpretations, we’re all actually interpreting cultural products together, in our own, somewhat disorderly fashion, all the time. Interpretation and cultural production are coterminous cycles of the same organic continuum: create, interpret, repeat. Criticism – and culture in general – is a team game.

Intentions, however, never even enter the equation. Firstly, most people who’ve ever created anything are now dead. (What are their intentions? Nothing, they’re dead.) What were their intentions when they were writing that poem or directing that film or sculpting that statue before they died? Who knows? If they wrote down a manifesto or an expository essay to accompany their artwork, perhaps they explicitly explained their intentions for us. But this explanation, you’ll notice, is itself also just a text. Because it’s written down, in language, to be read. And reading requires interpretation. Which means you still have to interpret it for yourself. Which you do automatically anyway. You not only can’t have other people interpret things for you, you already don’t by default. So why do we appeal to authors’ intentions at all? (* shrugs *)

Regardless, the upshot is significant. Even living authors (and filmmakers and other artists) can never communicate their intentions to us without putting their intentions first into another text, be it in response to an interviewer on television or a letter to the press. Creators’ intentions do not affect how audiences interpret their creations at all. And that’s even if we believe that creators can know their own intentions in the first place, which, based on our understanding of psychoanalysis and the complexity of the unconscious, may not even be the case. Intentions, therefore, are both impossible to communicate outside of texts, which always require interpretation to be intelligible at all, and are largely unknowable to even artists themselves.

Far from being an academic quibble, this fact of intention being a red herring is central to debates about politics and culture. People who play Warhammer 40’000, for example, often defend the franchise on the basis that its creators have ‘no fascistic intentions’. In other words, they suggest, it’s okay that 40k seems fascist, because the people who made it aren’t actually fascists. But if what I’ve argued about intentions is true – that they’re a) largely inscrutable and b) even when communicated, interpreted as texts in themselves anyway – then the desires and motivations of Games Workshop designers really don’t matter.

I don’t care what the lead writers and developers think or feel. I can (and inevitably do) determine for myself, and with the help of other critics and commentators in the community, what it is that the products they produce do in our culture. It is plainly irrelevant whether 40k’s fans and creators themselves hold fascistic beliefs or not, though it is likely that at least some do. (See here, here and here.) What truly matters is how real people actually engage with the real games, the real hobby and the real books.

5. “But It’s Just Imaginary.”

People like to pretend playing pretend means nothing. You hear this whenever people refer to reading or gaming as escapist. It's as if we think there's literally a separate world between the pages of a book which one frequents to avoid the challenges and drudgery of 'the real world.'

How confusing. No doubt people watch series to procrastinate, but the real world is with us when the episode is made, and certainly when it is watched. That's why time passes, and you get stiff from sitting too long, or develop postural pains from slouching over your keyboard. What some call escape is merely to shift one's focus from one area of life to another.

Fiction, far from being merely fanciful entertainment divorced from reality, is a very real mental technology which allows us to explore very real questions with a mixture of conceptual, perceptual and imaginative tools. It enables us to structure our experiences, emotions and theories in ways that make comprehensible the rather overwhelming amount of information spinning our heads. It's a mode of thought: of empathising and reasoning and considering possibilities outside the scope of our immediate lives. And it's a lot realer than you think.

Fiction and fact are curiously similar. For example, you can find less factualness in a New York Times article or some Breitbart screed than you can in the metaphorical force of a poem about war propaganda. Often, actually. So is the journalism fictive? Is the poem truthful? One reasonable way to resolve this is to accept that truth-telling is an activity people undertake through various means: sometimes by building arguments using evidence, sometimes by positing series of imaginary experiences which nonetheless convey something we all feel to be profoundly honest.

Good fiction is built on facts about the world, like human emotion, the corrupting effects of power, or the yearning for justice, to say nothing of the countless ways we simulate reality in written descriptions or computer generated animations. Likewise, many facts are arrived at through processes of observation and debate, which are later revealed to be mistaken for having relied on faulty results, statistical methods which distorted the data, incoherent theoretical frameworks or simply unfounded implicit assumptions. In other words, facts are regularly revealed to be false.

Facts aren't simple nuggets of truth hidden like easter eggs for scientists to recover, and fiction isn't simply a splurge of faleshoods intended to mislead, or merely amuse. Whatever the slippery relationship between fact and fiction, this much should be clear: critical literacy is crucial for our sanity and our society. We need to learn to read texts carefully and consciously. Continuous reflection, review, discourse and research stimulate a seething cultural vitality, which, at the very least, is one of the necessary ingredients to intepreting this strange world we've found ourselves needing to survive - and protect.

6. “But It’s a Satire.”

Still think this is just about fun? It’s just a game? No one actually takes this tabletop pastime seriously enough to think that humankind ought to emulate the vile antics of Warhammer 40’000. After all, this is (arguably) a dystopia: it is intended (we assume) to epitomise a collection of contemporary society’s most egregious horrors for the sake of arousing a critical awareness of our present.

Would that it were. For if it were the case that 40k is a satire aimed at awakening cultural consciousness, we would expect to see in the franchise’s myriad product ranges at least some of the narrative strategies that have come to distinguish dystopian science-fiction. Most importantly, what separates dystopian satire from blazing reactionary propaganda is that in fiction with emancipatory commitments, the injustices inherent to the setting are the primary source of conflict. They are regarded as the problem to be solved. Protagonists disrupt the dogmas of the prevailing social orders and rise up to topple tyrannous regimes (hence: The Empire in Star Wars and, more precisely, the government in V for Vendetta).

In films like The Matrix, Snowpiercer and Hunger Games, the central conflict is that of ordinary people becoming aware of the forms of ubiquitous and insidious social control governing their lives, and the difficult journey of learning to resist. Other more personal dystopias, like Children of Men, Mad Max, I Am Legend, Bladerunner 2049 and Gamer focus less on overhauling a brutal system than on summoning the spiritual courage to resist one’s own daily oppression. These two iterations of the struggle against dystopia – Us v. the System, and Me v. the System – have become so popular that it’s difficult to imagine how Games Workshop might have managed to produce a dystopia so devoid of critical self-awareness. Even B-grade action films like Equilibrium, In Time and Code 8, young adult series like Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, or Disney kids’ films like WALL-E, all successfully take up the hero’s mantle and oppose the dystopian conditions they present from a story either personal, collective or both.

The stories of 40k, however, do neither. Games Workshop’s heroes are those who uncritically pledge their loyalty to any of the many (many, many) fascist regimes depicted throughout their product lines – but predominantly the central good-guy faction, the Imperium of (only white) Man. Rather than critique injustice, it’s as if the creators of 40k were attempting to conceive of a future in which the protagonists are the exemplary case studies for the famous study of the Nazi regime Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Murder.

Satire guides our attention to the wrongs of the present by deploying them as conflicts to be overcome. Propaganda mystifies the wrongs of the present by depicting them as inevitable, necessary and even desirable. When you watch an imperial space marine destroy any one of the many alien factions opposing him (and it’s always him), you're expected to gawk in awe: how powerful, fearless and dignified. It is assumed that we will marvel at their skill and prowess in battle, fixated on the spectacle of destruction and superhuman might, not at the horror of cultivating eight-year-old boys and systematically traumatising them into becoming soulless mass murderers in an endless race-war.

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But I Really, Really Wanna

There are, of course, stronger defences of 40k than the ones above, and these I sincerely appreciate.

First of all, we'd be wise complicate our understanding of 40k's role in the lives of its fans. From my own experience, many are themselves bullied in others areas of life, which - while not necessarily structurally predetermined by the mechanisms of the status quo - certainly cause lasting pain. People of all social identities suffer in all sorts of ways, and I'm not interested in shaming geeks (like myself) for taking pleasure in nerdy activities. The more the merrier, I reckon.

It's also worth noting that this defence does not respond to any of the criticisms I've explained so far. But it does help us to understand the predicament. Games can be problematic (as all things invariably are) but still serve a relatively positive role in people's lives.

To this we might ask: 'Whose lives improve, and at what cost to whom?' But this too does not aim to minimise the real sanctuary provided by creative and strategically invigorating pastimes like 40k. We can have compassion for people harassed by their peers, and find sanctuary in imaginative crafts, as well as victims of hate crimes and all those oppressed by the systems we inhabit. This isn't about moralising and finger-pointing. It's about observing the real harm engendered by our culture and collectively finding pathways to greater harmony - together.

Secondly (and although I suspect this is an increasingly unpopular perspective), arts and entertainment are not reducible to their political impacts. Certainly, scrutinising the ideological implications and institutional function of cultural creations is a worthy practice, but no creation is exhausted by these properties. I can't think of a single work of literature, music or otherwise, which does not face a range of serious and enlightening criticisms, be that for forms of ignorance inherent to their content, or the usual simplifications culture offers in its representations, so often unable to render its subject matter in full historical or political detail. Like everything else, culture isn't perfect, and doesn't need to be. There's plenty of room for loving with our thinking caps on, analysing and inspecting the objects of our pleasure and wonder to appreciate and participate in culture responsibly.

So if the solution isn't to shame geeks or liquidate Games Workshop, that leaves only one question: What in the Emperor's name should we do?

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Warhammers and Sickles

• Preface: Violence and Imagination Beyond the Culture War

• Part One: Critics, Comrades and Cancelling the Culture

• Part Two: Toys of Terror and Fascist Fun

• Part Four: A Call to Arts for Anti-fascist Imaginologues (Friday, 19 September 2020)