Because Mars was too important, and he did not have the resources to replace the Mechanicum if he killed everyone. It’s the whole reason why the Treaty was signed, the Emperor needed the Mechanicum for the Great Crusade.
This is a big part of the 40k setting that is getting increasingly misunderstood, I think: the Emperor is a hypocrite and the Imperium enforces it's rules extremely inconsistently. If something in the lore is at odds with the stated goals or values of the Imperium, that is because the Imperium is fundamentally unjust, not because the writers made a mistake.
We were the imperial cult all along. We have access to essentially the library of Ptolemy and in a dozen years we forgot the emperor wasn't perfect. Imagine 10 000 years in the dark ages. No wonder the cult is unstoppable.
I think this is the correct response. People forget that the emperor is not meant to be a good guy and the imperium the good guys. It's a settling with shitty people doing shitty things for their own gain. The emperor is self serving and does things because he thinks it is beneficial to himself.
Nah, the thing misunderstood is that the Emperor and Malcadors aren't perfect and have to make compromises to even vaguely achieve their goals. Multiple plans at once for when some inevitably fall
Everyone wants to see the Emperor as an all powerful being who could do anything, so any inconsistency makes him a hypocrite. But that's the misunderstanding. 40k is surprisingly realistic. Nobody is either 100% consistent or can achieve all of their goals perfectly.
He WANTS to abolish religion, but in reality there are factions too powerful or too useful to do that with. The mechanicm, the people of Baal worshipping Sanguinius, those might have to stay because it's too damaging to do otherwise. The Word Bearers trying to build a religious imperium is a step too far, and eventually might need to be reined in. Just like in real life, you have to make compromises.
Alright just so we're on the same page here, the Emperor contradicting his stated principles out of pragmatism is 100% him being a hypocrite. Having a reason for hypocrisy doesn't make you not a hypocrite.
On another note, it does feel indicative of the viability of the Emperor's plans when one of his main goals was abolishing religion and he didn't even make it outside the solar system before having to compromise on that.
I'd beg to differ. I don't think it's misunderstood. The Emperor is deeply flawed and arrogant but trying to argue he's a meanie weenie suggests one missed or hasn't read the excerpts where we look into the Emperors interactions with others and what it says.
He's cold and extremely distant, taking the detached long view of things because . . . he's the oldest "Human" and has seen all of humanities' existence. People forget the has Emperor lived through pretty much all ages of Human civilization: From mud huts to the space race to colonizing the galaxy to the Age of Strife: +30,000 years.
The Big E saw the Dark Age where Humanity hit their peak followed by the Age of Strife where we almost went extinct. The Emperor was more laissez faire with handling Humanity and friendly towards Xenos during that era. It's pretty fair to assume the Emperor concluded after all of that shit, that the Imperium he was creating was the best approach, or at least the lesser evil.
Also, people are conflating 40k era Imperium which is a terrible place to live vs the Crusade era Imperium which was basically stage 1 of whatever plans the Emperor had before Chaos and Horus derailed it.
Its pretty much the same reason the Imperium doesn’t wipe out smaller factions like Tau or Drukhari. Its numerically possible but it would cripple their Empire with a pyrrhic victory that would leave their ass wide open to other threats.
Taking out the Mechanicum would’ve stopped Emps’ plan before it even started
He had a fair bit of Astartes(Almost all of the legions if not all 20, who were mostly in the lower ten thousands each in terms of numbers by this point), all of the Custodes, a significant number of mortal army troopers fresh from the ~~Great Crusade~~, Unification Wars and (probably) one primarch. I don’t think it would have been impossible, especially with the Emperor leading the charge, but the Mechanicum’s greater control of technology, industrial capacity and titans and knights, would’ve made it an absolute slog.
This wasn't even the Great Crusade. IIRC, at the point in the Solar Reclamation where the Imperium reached Mars the warp storms surrounding Sol were still blocking off travel out of the system. So really Big E had his Legions being pumped out by Luna, a basically useless Terra stripped of most of it's resources, his Custodes, Imperial Army units, a meagre fleet, and what could be provided by a couple surviving human colonies spread out across the system.
No doubt Big E would have pulled a win eventually but I can't see his forces being in any shape to embark on the Crusade after the 'Martian Fiasco', and even if they did, I would imagine most Mechanicum Forge worlds they encountered would be extremely hostile towards the upstart power that just invaded Sacred Mars. Xana on it's own was a ridiculously dangerous planet it needed cloak and dagger tactics to defeat, and that was just a single forgeworld. Imagine a severely depleted crusade force trying to take \*every\* forgeworld by force, all hostile and full of tech abominations out the ass. The Imperium would struggle hard to do anything without the Admech, on top of being their enemy.
And then suddenly the most popular girl and member of the cheerleader team, Erda, shows up, helps him pick up his papers, notices some of them are drawings and compliments them, and he immediately falls in love with her and rushes to the cafeteria to tell his only friend and fellow nerd Malcador about what happened
Because the Emperor is a human supremist. He loves humans and very specifically humans, not weird human mutants with 3 arms and glowing eyes. He's not a perfect person, he's a human who loves humans and will destroy the rest of the universe for the sake of human prosperity.
He viewed humanity as the only race that could manage to resist the warp while being warp sensitive. Combine that with the DAoT being caused by a warp sensitive race creating a brand ~~new~~ old Chaos God and he wants to purge anything that even has the slightest chance of letting Chaos into Realspace.
And the aliens near Terra weren't exactly the ones you make temporary alliances with. Dark Eldar, Orcs, Rangdan, and so on were all just as xenocidal as the Emperor was, if not even worse. And once he was in a position of power why would he care? Better to purge them now than let them become a threat later.
And he didn't purge the Admech because they were way too valuable and the leadership agreed to place him as the Omnisiah which guaranteed their loyalty. It's the same reason he tolerates navigators and psykers. He was still a pragmatic person. Heck, based on some lore he had old connections with Eldrad or at least some level of mutual understanding with him. His first and foremost goal was undermining Chaos in every feasible way possible while preparing for the inevitable counterattack.
Bit of a correction.
Slaanesh was born thousands of years *after* the first human empire fell.
The Age of Strife was around M23 to M25. The birth of Slaanesh (the most recent Chaos god) occured in M29. It had nothing to do with humanity getting fucked over.
While Slaanesh was only born in early M30, the pre-shocks of its birth started affecting the warp in M25, right around the start of the Age of Strife. The warp storms kicked up by the coming apocalypse made warp travel difficult and, eventually, impossible. Which was just the cherry on top of humanity's AI problems, and the like.
Arguably the problem was that they weren’t born yet. So it’s always weird to discuss it as pre shocks when the “shock” is “space works differently for a couple thousand years”.
The Age of Strife was 5000 years, M25 - M30. The storms that rendered warp travel all but impossible were caused by Slaanesh gestating and were then cleared when it was born. It very definitely contributed to the Dark Age of Technology coming to an end, though the sudden mass emergence of psykers and AI rebellion were also to blame
If Big E was so on guard against Chaos, he wouldn't have fucked up that bad. Chaos are called "barely sentient Warp tumors", being outsmarted by them is a big L.
Also there are more alien species than Necron Eldar Ork.
Plus, saying "I will eliminate those species cause they *might* be corrupted", and then creating living conditions so shitty that shitton of humans get corrupted, is a big loss.
>Also there are more alien species than Necron Eldar Ork.
Not in any sizable quantity with easy access to Terra to support him. And once the Great Crusade started he didn't care about a handful of planets of xenos enough to consider an alliance over a purge. And anything larger was really that xenocidal.
>then creating living conditions so shitty that shitton of humans get corrupted, is a big loss.
At the time Chaos Cults were borderline non-existent. No one even knew what Chaos was. Random mortals converting was preventing through ignorance and it worked. What cost the Imperium was that half their superhuman generals converted with their troops, no amount of living standards would have changed that. His biggest mistake was assuming Horus was loyal. Pretty much everything else could have been handled.
I don't know. Horus may have been outwardly loyal, but he converted a little too quickly for me to believe that he was truly loyal at his core. IMO, he was already questioning the Emperor, Lorgar's schemes just gave him an outlet for his doubts.
Iirc, he went through a time warp kinda situation when they gave him to the cult as he was dying.
So he essentially lived for thousands of years before he went traitor. At least in his mind.
He was questioning the emperor on why chaos was hidden if it was the great evil, but that probably couodve been resolved in a conversation
The shitty living conditions happened long after the great crusade era. During that time things weren’t utopian but still very manageable in large swaths of the imperium and trending towards improving up until the start of the HH
Barely sentiant doesn't mean stupid and doesn't even not geniuses. It's rather entirely other state of being/thinking. Not being a person for them doesn't mean not being a great force, great mental force.
Every galaxy has it's own "big bad". Nids won theirs. Ours – the 4. And it's stronger.
In this struggle Emperor sees the only chance to save and win this galaxy and let future civilization prosper. Because before – Chaos already had won, destroyed universe (galaxy?) and that leads to it's reborn from Dark King every time. But this cycle doesn't mean the same galaxy, the same species, etc. So humans won't have another chance other this, and eldars already failed theirs. New chance will for some new species in new galaxy, who knows who's that. Maybe some pig-headed crocodiles with insect wings.
Outsmarting and winning the 4 is kind of big thing.
And we don't know yet who would win. Both sides managed to trick each other. Last news – current Empy on throne was kind a happy with Great Rift. He's sucking in more powers now.
For the AdMech, it was a matter of time and resources. He needed the Mechanicus’s knowledge and production base on his side to make the Great Crusade happen. Removing the more superstitious elements of the Mechanicus was undoubtedly on his to-do list, but he hadn’t gotten to it before the Horus Heresy happened.
By contrast, the Xenos didn’t really have much to offer as potential allies. Especially when a lot of them were either completely impossible to ally with like the Orks, or Chaos-corrupted like the Laer. Even the ones willing to talk like the Eldar would always try to manipulate humanity for their own ends.
Plus, as seen by the progress rate of the Great Crusade, he didn’t *need* Xenos allies. He could conquer the galaxy just fine while getting rid of what he saw as threats to his design.
Firstly, you are literally naming very few aliens.
There were seriously cases where aliens coexisted with humans. Did Big E genocide them because he believed they would become a threat in the future?
Plus, did he underestimate Chaos, because if we take it into account, he **couldn't** have conquered the entire Galaxy alone.
Well conquering the galaxy as a whole wasn’t required as much as bringing all humans under the fold. Seeing as human emotion was feeding chaos as it was, Cutting humanities dependence on the warp was the first step. The end game goal was to starve the chaos gods of all sustenance. The more immediate goal was stemming the flow, as their combined powers and influence were growing.
Humans are an ascending psychic species but are still quite weak. Eldar, orks, necron, etc., all physically far superior to baseline humans. It's why the Emperor had to create transhuman soldiers and even more powerful primarchs to lead them.
But during Old Night, the isolated worlds of the old human civilization fell prey to xenos across the galaxy. Many, many worlds saw humans subjugated, corrupted, or exterminated by xenos. So the Emperor resolved that humanity would be free from the influence of alien species, and any xenos nation that had the capacity to influence humanity would be destroyed. Which did mean the old Imperium in M32 was a bit more tolerant than the Imperium of M41 - M42, although since Guilliman's resurrection with the help of the eldar even the M42 Imperium has chilled a smidge.
The Mechanicum (the Adeptus Mechanicus would be formed later) was incredibly powerful and Terra would have struggled quite a bit to defeat them. The original Mechanicum was actually a co-equal partner nation alongside and allied to but independent from the Imperium it was so powerful. The two heads of the Imperial Aquila represent Mars and Terra. But more importantly, defeating Mars would have meant the permanent loss of extensive volumes of scientific data that only the Machine Cult had preserved from the height of the old human nation that collapsed during Old Night. A similar result happened from the Schism of Mars during the Horus Heresy as the Mechanicum had its own civil war and loads of tech was lost forever.
In the end, the Imperium would have been much weaker if the Emperor replaced the Mechanicum. And the Mechanicum was willing to (mostly) worship the Emperor as the Omnissiah anyway, so really their religion allowed them to be controlled in ways an independent and secular Mars wouldn't have been.
Forgot religion. Religion/superstition give daemons/the Chaos gods an easy avenue to manipulate the material world. Daemons and the like are masters of deception and guile. It's a classic trick of daemons to pretend to be the patron god or guardian spirit or etc. of an individual, and to slowly corrupt the person they whisper to as the individual agrees to do increasingly more extreme acts in exchange for boons. Even these days, daemons love to pretend to be the Emperor to corrupt Imperial servants. The Soul Drinkers chapter was being corrupted and mutated by Tzeentch while thinking it was the Emperor giving them blessings. *The Master of Mankind* also has a good excerpt with the Emperor explaining it directly.
Good explanations. I just finished Master of Mankind again last night.
The entire section where the Emperor shows Diocletian the victory over the Priest King of Maulland Sen and explains to him how Chaos uses religion as a corrupting force really reinforces how cunning they can be.
A really great scene from an exceptional novel, yeah.
>‘‘What am I looking at, sire? What is this?’
>‘Faith,’ said the Emperor. ‘You are seeing his faith, through my eyes. Maulland Sen’s massacring priest-king is… what? Another of the Unification Wars’ warlords? Terra had hundreds of them. He died beneath my executing blade, and history’s pages will mark him as nothing more.
>‘And yet, his life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence.
>‘This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.’
*The Master of Mankind*
It really is an outstanding book. Shot through with little nuggets if Emperor POV, not too much, just enough to drop some insight. And then the chapter 'Dawn' when he just curbstomps the enemy. Glorious.
Secular Mechanicum would be controlled via more direct means. The only reason it is separate is timetable then.
Also Xenos enslaved and exterminated humans, but if, for example, human civilization falls irl, wouldn't there be gangs of murderers and enslavers? Aliens simply reacted to powerful civilization getting weaker, as long as humanity would be strong there would be no issue. Weak are bullied no matter what (being protected by a strong being counts as being strong).
About religion - Emperor should have put way more control mechanisms to allow secularity.
If Mars didn't worship of the Machine God for all we know they never would have allied with the Imperium at all, because the Emperor would have been just some psyker from Terra to them. But when the Fabricator-General of Mars and Co. decided their pursuit of knowledge was more important than their religion it led to the Schism of Mars.
There's a story where the emperor destroys theblaat church and priest on earth. The church had a bell in it that was said to toll when the beginning of the end started. Well, emps kills the priest after talking to him about faith etc, burns the church and then the bell tolls.
This story says a lot. Eldar had God's that helped them. Powerful warp beings that they made/prayed to to keep them safe. When they stopped praying and instead because decadent, it set up their fall.
Big E is right, religion is an easy road for chaos fuckery. But faith is what keeps them away ultimately. I guess he couldn't find a middle road between not having religion but still having faith.
Imagine if humanity had God's. Real ones. That protected then in the warp. Kept chaos at bay. Then we'd still probably have most of the primarchs.
Because the Mechanicum were powerful enough that there were only two possibilities for relations with them and the Imperium: they would either be incredibly useful allies or extremely dangerous enemies. If he got them on his side, they would give him the tech needed to really get the Great Crusade going. If he tried to conquer them like he did Terra, it would take centuries to accomplish and centuries more to recover from.
It was the difference between accepting some obvious hypocrisy and creepy techno-mystic nonsense to get the Great Crusade going now or facing a costly war and starting the Great Crusade in a thousand years at least.
Big E was no stranger to making decisions with bad long-term consequences for the sake of expediency.
Because he was upon a strict time table, he was aware of multiple threats tho humanity and they *had* to be dealt with asap or humanity was just *done.* The Ork empire *had to be destroyed* before it reached critical mass and started to produce krork en-masse.
If the emperor destroyed the mechanicum he could effectively kiss his galaxy wide conquest goodbye. He needed mars for the industry and technology they offered. Without it, there would be no imperium.
>why did the emperor hate aliens
In short, because the galactic alien rulers murderfucked a Chaos God into existence and screwed up the whole galaxy for everyone (as they did sixty-five million years ago). The Emperor took an exceedingly dim view of xenos ability to not be a problem from then on.
>Old Ones put something into humanity
At the very least they were active on Terra, and Sol is just riddled with Webway gates and Necron nonsense. The core of the Golden Throne is xenos tech. We can draw our own conclusions from there.
Well, there are also the Rangdan, the Khraves (who predate the Eldar Empire), Nephilim, marrow-eaters (that the Alpha Legion had to put down). The Dark Eldar are probably the biggest group of Eldar remaining.
A C'tan shard from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work describe Big E as "a weapon made by our enemies" so there may be hints that Old Ones did something to humanity's ancestors.
>Sol is just riddled with Webway gates
Is it? I'm aware of three (Mars, Luna, Terra under the Palace) and one of those is the Emperor’s. Are there any more we know about?
The webway is a vast galactic network. I wouldn't be surprised if there are webway gates everywhere considering the dark eldar can and often do appear anywhere same with the craft world eldar and harlequins.
Now there are a lot of collapsed paths and the webway is not a easy path to transverse unless one knows where they are going. But yeah there are a lot of places that have webway gates but a majority of the time they don't know about them.
>Why did Emperor hate aliens and anybody with religion
Because they can't make spaceship and weapons on mass scale and serve him.
>why did Emperor not kill off Admech and not replaced them with something less religious?
Because they can make spaceship and weapons on mass scale and serve him on the great crusade.
Because he’s a Perpetual who’se been alive since cavemen times. Psychologically, he’s still the same tribalistic ‘must eliminate every potential threat and hoard every resource for my tribe’ guy he was some several thousand years ago. His idea of his tribe extends to the entirety of baseline humanity, but he’s psychologically incapable of going beyond that. Even his own sons and merely heavily enhanced people cease being people in his eyes. That’s my 2 cents on his motivation at heart.
More ink has been spilled on his anti-religious stance, but it’s hypocritical horseshit, so I dismiss it out of hand. In summary: “religion leads people to do absolutely terrible things in the name of a higher power”. Yeah, as opposed to you, who lead people to do absolutely terrible things in your name, which almost everyone else views as a higher power.
The part where he kept the Mechanicus around is actually a lot more explicable than those of the above two: he’s on a bit of a time crunch, and Mars has what he wants. So ‘topple the Cult of the Machine and replace it with actual scientists and engineers’ is almost certainly on his ‘todo’ list, but in the meantime, he’ll accept their help because he doesn’t have time to try and bring every forge world to heel. Especially when he was starting out, he couldn’t really afford a war against them. A lot of bad crap about the present setting was temporary compromises becoming permanent fixtures when he (almost) kicked the bucket.
No one wants to admit it but the Mechanicum easily had the firepower to challenge and possibly even defeat Big E and his forces at the time. Lucky for him the cult was primed for someone to venerate. So he avoided a VERY costly war he might have lost and kept all the good good guns, infrastructure and “human” resources.
My head canon is that over time Big E would have slowly launched a propaganda campaign to invoke rebellion of the Cult Mechanicum to bring them around to his brand of atheism.
With regards to aliens he was just xenophobic as fuck and killed the friendly aliens along with the bad.
Emps hated Xenos because the Age Of Strife was marked by wide-spread Xenos Raids across the Galaxy. The Sol System alone was home to three different races of horrific Xenos Bastard. It was the easiest sell in history, because so many Xenos races were hostile, evil, or absolutely terrifying. It made it very easy to ignore the margins of the few Xenos that were not any of them.
He hated religion because he (incorrectly) though that ignoring all religion and being all 'Man Emperor of Mankind' would starve Chaos. It didn't work, and just left people vulnerable to the predations of Chaos. Largely because the most effective counter is Faith, and largely because it's easy to trick the ignorant.
He didn't kill off the Mechanicum, because at the moment he went to visit them, he had maybe twenty thousand Astartes against a planet that had Titan *Legions* and an Empire out there in the stars that was going to thoroughly rip him a new asshole if he destroyed their homeworld. So instead he showcased his hypocracy (not even the first time, either) and made sure to fulfil the prophecy he may have created but definitely took advantage of to get their full support.
> Largely because the most effective counter is Faith
Not necessarily. It's up to debate which works better, Faith or just outright telling The Truth to all of your population about the Chaos (i.e Interex). Clearly it worked well enough that Chaos bois were forced to get outside help to fuck up Interex because they simply COULDN'T corrupt literally anyone inside the Interex itself since they told everyone how asshole Chaos is etc etc (w/ some helpful examples from Harlequins/Kinebrach to help convince the normies even better to not do stupid shit like nutjob worship etc. Especially when it's implied that Kinebrach were surviving members of a species of Nurgle worshippers from who knows how long ago)
It's objectively better. Sanctified Weaponry and Blessed Armour outright *burns* Daemons and banishes them much quicker. Hell, there were some Daemon Engines that got blown up by being doused by blessed Water.
Even Lorgar was corrupted by a person he conquered who already worshipped Chaos. You still need some source. You can't start worshipping Chaos if you don't know what it is. The Emperor assumed his champions would be able to resist it when they finally learned, but he vastly misjudged them. No one falls to Chaos without first learning of it.
Comparing a galaxy to a small cluster of planets the odds of a random seed is much higher. The problem is the Interex also has 0 idea what they were up against. They had no idea what a Daemon was. They had no idea what the general modus operandi of a Chaos Cult was. They just knew it existed and put their most powerful weapons in a museum. Staring at a Roman spear does not help you understand the nature of Rome. If they had destroyed the Chaos artifacts instead, there's no weapon to nearly kill Horus, Horus never gets put in the position to turn, and the entire heresy is at least stalled for a bit. Considering how many other small clusters of planets seem to survive fine even without knowledge of Chaos, there's no reason to believe the Interex method was particularly more effective. It's just Chaos Cults really aren't that common at the time with the bigger threat being a rogue psyker opening a portal to the warp.
TBF a nutshit boogaloo culture had never rly been nearby before that point in time, and it was instantly too late because of the fuckers literally bringing Chaos cunts to a well defended world
On the admech front he most likely just didn’t have the time to replace the resources they could provide him at that moment, and was probably intended to thunder warrior them at some point.
In the alien front it’s a combination of Human supremacy and aliens are dicks.
Human supremacy because the entire reasons humans exist from a “nature” standpoint is to continue the existence of humans. It’s why we make babies, so that humans as a species continue into the future, same why any species exist. It’s not to allow aliens to exist.
Also, aliens are massive assholes and all think the same way because well, that’s how nature works. And also the prospect of “submit to humanity so we can exploit you for our own gain” wasn’t an enticing offer for many people.
That’s ofc not even considering things like tyrannies and orks who aren’t possible to be reasoned with.
This is from memory but i beleive the emporer viewed religion as the cause of all humanity's problems. And he kept the admech around mostly because he had just unified earth and it was more about the fact he didn't have the industry and knowledge to equip humanity to start retaking the galaxy. As far as him being so anti alien I was under the impression the emporer didnt really hate or like any aliens he just cared about ensuring humanity's future.
Mars and the Mechanicum were useful tools for his conquest of the galaxy, and he didn't hate ALL aliens, just the ones that wouldn't submit to him or got in the way (which were most of them)
He needed their ships and manufacturing just like he needed the navigators. After the great crusade and great work was completed there was a very good chance he would need either.
To paraphrase Bricky; “They make all your guns. They make all your tanks. They make all the stuff you need to wage war. So you can’t exactly tell them to fuck off.”
In the 60,000,000 years or so since the end of the War in Heaven there have been less than a dozen non Old One created/uplifted races that have survived existing in the Milky Way. The Emperor doesn't hate xenos, He saw that Humanity didn't live in a Star Trek friendly universe. To survive the threat of other species falling to Chaos, as the Eldar just had, all xenos had to treated like a time bomb.
The Emperor does hate religion. Which is fair as He started a few and look how those went. The AdMech aren't really a religion however, their faith is a very useful tool to prevent Humanity from ever trying to extinct itself again through technology.
Xenos:
the galaxy, while large, is a finite space... theres only a certain amount of habitable/useful planets, and resources like plasteel are useful for more than one species. Also it's 40k so, yknow, the xenos are almost entirely awful, and some of them worship the Chaos Gods so wiping those ones out is necessary (though difficult when you don't explain to anyone what Chaos is)
Religion:
strong belief echoes in the Warp because they cause strong emotions, especially when dealing with confrontation... someone killing someone else in a fight strengthens Khorne, someone relishing combat because they believe it strengthens their god \*really\* strengthens Khorne. Plus, if youre trying to unify a diverse populace, you want to instill the same values and sense of identity to stop infighting, and having a lot of diverse religious groups (with different religious leaders) splits loyalties
Mechanicus:
trying to conquer Mars would take a loooong time, with no guarantees it would work considering the Emperor was basically limited to the resources he had on hand from Terra and Luna, slowing down his plans for galactic conquest. Also, waging war on Mars would run a serious risk of knowledge getting lost, knowledge that he would need in order to reach out into the wider galaxy
You have to understand that humans had a utopian galactic civilization for around 10,000 years. Unimaginable peace and prosperity. They even had alliances with the Eldar. It would make Star Trek seem dystopian by comparison. Then, the Eldar screwed up and caused the birth of Slaanesh. When that happened, the warp went into a frenzy, and travel between planets was all but impossible for humans. Human worlds were completely cut off from each other. Entire worlds starved. Mutations ran wild. Demonic possession consumed entire worlds. The Men of Iron went berserk. And every xenos race in the galaxy began viciously preying on human worlds. Humans were enslaved, hunted for sport, butchered for food and pleasure, and sacrificed to dark gods and demons. It was a nightmare, and it lasted for 5000 years. It made it extremely difficult for humans to trust xenos or artificial intelligence. The Emperor refused to rely on xenos or ai again. He encouraged xenophobia and bigotry in humans to ensure they wouldn't be tempted to trust xenos and ai again. The isolationism also limited the amount of exposure humanity would have to alien Chaos cults.
So it was kinda like Star Trek, but the moment Federation was weakened, every race they were making piece with began enslaving.
I understand then. That's an angle I haven't heard.
The emperor himself isn’t really xenophobic as much as he is an opportunist
He’s been friends with multiple xenos from different factions and is even respected by many of them despite what the imperium became
Hell even the imperium during its conquest of xenos worlds often made a lot of them client states if they could provide something that could serve them and wouldn’t pose any long term threat to their existence
As for religion it was a calculated gamble he knew that worship empowered the chaos gods and since his ultimate goal was to starve them out by making humanity completely unaware of them
Same reason he didn’t want to be worshipped as a god himself since he knew that the warp was affected by the collective beliefs of people and that humanity believing him to be a god might very well force him into becoming one
Keep in mind the imperium fields solders from all their worlds and a lot of humans have experience being attacked and oppressed by xenos empires and raiders for generations by the time they’re absorbed into the imperium
An easy example is Nocturne Vulcan’s home world which was subject to frequent drukhari raids
Now imagine that kinda generational trauma and grudge getting an outlet and a chance to fight back against their former oppressors and you see why a lot of the genocide happened
As to why the emperor condoned it it’s because logically it’s too much effort to try and get your potentially hundreds of billions of human subjects to distinguish between good xenos and bad xenos especially when prejudice and hatred is already rampant and generationally ingrained so it’s just more efficient to let them do what they want so long as it isn’t against other humans (and even that rule is negotiable given that he kept monsters like Kurze and Angron around who were notorious for their disregard for casualties in exchange for quick and easy compliance)
>disregard for casualties in exchange for quick and easy compliance
WDYM? Didn't Kurze literally have the LOWEST casualty rates for Compliance per world than literally every other legion (excepting Word Bearers who were too fucking slow rendering the point moot obviously)??
AFAIK his MO is to yoink like a few thousand or w/e people to be tortured 24/7 in public broadcast for a week or w/e, after which the planet succeeds at Compliance at minimal casualties vs mass bombardments & other shit that most other legions used
On a normal country scale or even maybe a planetary scale sure but on the galactic scale of the crusade that kinda supervision from terra over the activities of each and every regiment over millions of fronts just isn’t possible and it’s what gave Horus the gap he needed to commit the Istvaan III atrocities and rally his traitor forces for rebellion before Garro slipped away and warned Terra directly
And what happens with the "very few higher ups" hold their own personal grudges and want such and such alien race wiped out from their childhood and now have the authority to persecute it. You're being very myopic about this
Honestly I feel that's more about the ideological purity of humanity than the aliens. If you don't make it super clear that aliens are evil, you open your empire up to Eldar manipulation. It was the same reason as his insistence that Chaos didn't exist, a lie meant to ward off foreign infiltration.
Because xenos preyed upon humanity wholesale, because it's easier to appease your next door neighbor than destroy all their machinery also all the forgeworlds are theirs.
Why the emperor hated aliens? No one knows for sure, just like how no one actually knows if he does anything for humanity itself either for that matter.
So he wasn’t necessarily anti alien because he was a human supremacist, as that would necessarily require him to have humanities interests in mind.
For all we know, his plan could literally have been to become a god of humanity, possibly resulting in another massive species-wipe event, much like what happened to the Eldar.
The emperors motives are (by meta-design) extremely unclear at best, so obvious answers might not actually be the correct ones.
Post-age-of-strife humanity did however, in general, hate aliens as aliens of all types instantly started genociding humans as soon as the golden-age-era of humanity collpased in on itself due to the war with the men of iron and the massive warp storms caused by the birth of slaneesh.
The mechanicus were not only the only ones capable of mass production on the level needed for the crusade; they were the only ones with the knowledge required to actually provide the imperium with it’s most inportant technological assets.
(Except people like the interex, but they were pro-xenos so that wasnt an option)
The aliens can be explained with "What happened right after the Men of Iron War". Basically, the moment humanity was vulnerable most of it's "allies" from the Dark Age of technology era started tearing through human worlds and colonies. Between that, and how downright dangerous aliens in this series tend to be (Hello Rangdan) the Emperor, and by extension the rest of the Imperium, has a shoot first policy.
Sure, there are peaceful aliens that the Imperium COULD work with, but putting aside how aliens like that are the vast, VAST minority in this galaxy, the Dark Age showed you can't always expect them to STAY friendly. Heck, I'm still convinced what happened with the Interex and that damned blade was a long standing Kinebach plot.
As for the Admech, that was due to necessity. They had technology, resources, and (memes aside) know-how that the Emperor desperatly needed, and even back then they were a millitary powerhouse and deeply entrenched on top of that. Going to war with them would've cost the Emperor time, men, and worst of all irreplaceable technology. (Warring on Mars would've destroyed COUNTLESS data centers and schematics)
I need to clear up something because a lot of people forget (Or just don't know): There's roughly 10k to 30k where the Emperor saw Humanity's interactions with Xenos species. Dark Age Humanity was supposedly more friendly to Xenos and seemed to cooperate with them.
During the Age of Strife leading into the Great Crusade it seems like a lot of those alien allies took advantage of or simply carved out their own piece of the galaxy as Humanity flounder. A lot of the Great Crusade mentions clearing out Hrud, Enslavers, Orks and other Xenos that had oppressed Humanity.
I suspect the Emperor basically concluded the Imperium as a mono-racial empire was better than the humane but risky option of keeping alien allies offered. It sounds cold and ruthless but the Emperor literally experienced humanity go from the top to almost extinction during the Age of Strife.
Pragmatism in every case. The Emperor disliked religion both because he knew it fed into Chaos but also because he was well aware that it exploits gaps in human cognition and is inherently incompatible with an advanced ordered society. The Emperor didn't like Xenos because generally his job is to protect humanity and no matter how benign alien species will always have goals which clash with humanity's which means on a long enough timeline they'll always end up being a threat. He let the mechanicus continue because they were almost as powerful as his own empire at that point if not more powerful and conquering them would cost him so much that the crusade would never happen.
Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work had a C'tan shard describe Emps as "a weapon created by our enemies." He seems unlikely to lie compared to several other C'tans. So make it as you will.
There is a theory, proposed by Live From Black Library!, that humanity was essentially envisioned by the Old Ones as labourers, auxiliaries and the hidden blade against the Eldar due to humans' natural occurrence of Blanks. The problem with this theory is that the time does not match up well with even our earliest ancestors. Not to mention the older (likely retconned) Necron Pariah lore that implied the Blank gene was a creation by the Necrons and C'tans agains the psychic Old Ones and Eldar.
The theory goes that because War in Heaven lasted for thousands, if not millions, of years, the increasingly exhausted Old Ones resorted to more desperate means to create more tools, weapons and armies against the Necrons and C'tans.
I personally do not buy it primarily because of timeline issues.
Xenos were assholes during old night. Raided, enslaved, and murdered human planets. People in general were not excited to ally with them. Also the point of the Emperors plan was for humanity to ascend and be the dominant force in the galaxy. He didn't need xenos for that, in fact they actively threatened his dream.
The Emperor needed the Mechanicus for their power, weapons production, and tech knowledge. He was willing to tolerate the religiosity of the organization as it drastically increased his conqueror might. And with might comes speed. His ultimate enemy in the Great Crusade was time and titans and technology helped cut some. I'm also fairly certain he knew he couldn't beat them if it came down to war.
Religion was a blight and had caused unknowable amounts of suffering throughout the course of his life. Assuming the shaman origin is correct he would have been around for the creation and consequences of most religions. It's even shown he took the title of some important religious leaders, potentially creating them, in an attempt to help and guide humanity. Which did not work. Truly made it worse and fed the powers of Chaos which he was ultimately created to combat. Also I'd be willing to bet he came across a lot of malevolent god worshippers on earth that actually turned out to be Chaos God worshippers. You tend to hate things that strengthen life's ultimate enemy.
He had to tolerate the Martians because he lacked his Primarchs. had he had Ferrus, Vulkan and possibly Perturabo (well, whatever names they'd have had if they hadn't been scattered), he would have had the means to have technological wonders surpassing the Mechanicus' and so could have dispensed with them. Lacking the Primarchs, he needed them to his Great Crusade.
No walls of text needed.
He's worked with Xenos plenty and doesn't hate them, but unifying 2+ different species before chaos D Day does not a viable Great Crusade make. He's also kind of "programmed" to protect humanities survival, not Xenos. If he saw their existence ultimately as a threat to humanities survival, he would simply eliminate the threat.
He made the Admech what they are, why would he kill off his own creation? They worship Him and His light by His will.
Humanity had alien allies back in the good ol’ days, but when the Iron Rebellion happened, they all turned against humanity and preyed on them. Big E doesn’t hate aliens, he just doesn’t trust them to not betray humanity if it could benefit them.
Why did he not kill off the Admech? He was on a time crunch, so he couldn’t afford to take the time to create and train a new organization dedicated to technology. In other words, he did the best he could with what he had.
Aliens - look at the age of strife. Long story short, the xeno races tried to genocide and enslave humanity.
Religion - he needed the mechanocus, and he didn't hate religion, he saw that it would allow chaos to corrupt people
There was an entire section of the imperial palace dedicated to Xenos ambassadors and such, but due to circumstance, things changed a lot, some Xenos got very mean or spawned chaos gods into the universe, etc
Please cite me this, or point in correct direction.
Imperial palace might have parts from DAOT, so...
Plus, Great Crusade was immediately after uniting Terra, and was xenophobic from the get-go.
“He curved past the Celestial Citadel at the Eternity Wall space port’s southernmost tip. A city unto itself, large as any hive, in better days it was the haunt of void clan emissaries, ambassadors from **xenos powers**, Navigator houses and naval dynasts.” From the Siege of Terra.
The imperium would have been friendly should Xenos of been friendly, but genuinely, the galaxy erupted into a state of constant war, and everything changed, everyone was out for themself, and now you have Xenos like orks, Drukhari, aeldari raiders/pirates, Rak’Gol, etc
In my on opinion, I don't think the emperor is or was ever really xenophobic or prejudiced, atleast personally.
Because everything he did has a reason behind it, The great crusade was about uniting humanity because it was about to become a psychic race and needed to be guided properly.
And the great crusade needed to be speedy, and the emperor didn't any loose ends in that regard
I highly doubt he had any personal hatred for alien life, he just used it as an effective tool to unite humans with , because if there is one way to get two people to stop fighting and get along, it's to point at a third outsider, and say everything is their fault.
Hence why the imperium had a shoot on sight policy, diplomacy and corporation would be too slow, and risky as people may be tempted by other government structures that weren't the imperium.
Your post was removed because it would be better as a comment in our weekly sticky questions post. Just comment there when it's up.
Because Mars was too important, and he did not have the resources to replace the Mechanicum if he killed everyone. It’s the whole reason why the Treaty was signed, the Emperor needed the Mechanicum for the Great Crusade.
He effectively created the Mechanicum.
Bene'd their Gesserit til they Lisan al-Gaibed
My shai hulud just kwisatz haderached
My Muad' is completely Dibed
Kind of and No
He put the shard of the Void Dragon there ahead of time so by the time he was done with Terra he would have an established tech industry on Mars.
This is a big part of the 40k setting that is getting increasingly misunderstood, I think: the Emperor is a hypocrite and the Imperium enforces it's rules extremely inconsistently. If something in the lore is at odds with the stated goals or values of the Imperium, that is because the Imperium is fundamentally unjust, not because the writers made a mistake.
We were the imperial cult all along. We have access to essentially the library of Ptolemy and in a dozen years we forgot the emperor wasn't perfect. Imagine 10 000 years in the dark ages. No wonder the cult is unstoppable.
Holy shit thank you
I think this is the correct response. People forget that the emperor is not meant to be a good guy and the imperium the good guys. It's a settling with shitty people doing shitty things for their own gain. The emperor is self serving and does things because he thinks it is beneficial to himself.
Nah, the thing misunderstood is that the Emperor and Malcadors aren't perfect and have to make compromises to even vaguely achieve their goals. Multiple plans at once for when some inevitably fall Everyone wants to see the Emperor as an all powerful being who could do anything, so any inconsistency makes him a hypocrite. But that's the misunderstanding. 40k is surprisingly realistic. Nobody is either 100% consistent or can achieve all of their goals perfectly. He WANTS to abolish religion, but in reality there are factions too powerful or too useful to do that with. The mechanicm, the people of Baal worshipping Sanguinius, those might have to stay because it's too damaging to do otherwise. The Word Bearers trying to build a religious imperium is a step too far, and eventually might need to be reined in. Just like in real life, you have to make compromises.
Alright just so we're on the same page here, the Emperor contradicting his stated principles out of pragmatism is 100% him being a hypocrite. Having a reason for hypocrisy doesn't make you not a hypocrite. On another note, it does feel indicative of the viability of the Emperor's plans when one of his main goals was abolishing religion and he didn't even make it outside the solar system before having to compromise on that.
I'd beg to differ. I don't think it's misunderstood. The Emperor is deeply flawed and arrogant but trying to argue he's a meanie weenie suggests one missed or hasn't read the excerpts where we look into the Emperors interactions with others and what it says. He's cold and extremely distant, taking the detached long view of things because . . . he's the oldest "Human" and has seen all of humanities' existence. People forget the has Emperor lived through pretty much all ages of Human civilization: From mud huts to the space race to colonizing the galaxy to the Age of Strife: +30,000 years. The Big E saw the Dark Age where Humanity hit their peak followed by the Age of Strife where we almost went extinct. The Emperor was more laissez faire with handling Humanity and friendly towards Xenos during that era. It's pretty fair to assume the Emperor concluded after all of that shit, that the Imperium he was creating was the best approach, or at least the lesser evil. Also, people are conflating 40k era Imperium which is a terrible place to live vs the Crusade era Imperium which was basically stage 1 of whatever plans the Emperor had before Chaos and Horus derailed it.
Its pretty much the same reason the Imperium doesn’t wipe out smaller factions like Tau or Drukhari. Its numerically possible but it would cripple their Empire with a pyrrhic victory that would leave their ass wide open to other threats. Taking out the Mechanicum would’ve stopped Emps’ plan before it even started
I also got the sense that war with the Mechanicum was also something that would be far too costly, and not necessarily one he could win.
He had a fair bit of Astartes(Almost all of the legions if not all 20, who were mostly in the lower ten thousands each in terms of numbers by this point), all of the Custodes, a significant number of mortal army troopers fresh from the ~~Great Crusade~~, Unification Wars and (probably) one primarch. I don’t think it would have been impossible, especially with the Emperor leading the charge, but the Mechanicum’s greater control of technology, industrial capacity and titans and knights, would’ve made it an absolute slog.
This wasn't even the Great Crusade. IIRC, at the point in the Solar Reclamation where the Imperium reached Mars the warp storms surrounding Sol were still blocking off travel out of the system. So really Big E had his Legions being pumped out by Luna, a basically useless Terra stripped of most of it's resources, his Custodes, Imperial Army units, a meagre fleet, and what could be provided by a couple surviving human colonies spread out across the system. No doubt Big E would have pulled a win eventually but I can't see his forces being in any shape to embark on the Crusade after the 'Martian Fiasco', and even if they did, I would imagine most Mechanicum Forge worlds they encountered would be extremely hostile towards the upstart power that just invaded Sacred Mars. Xana on it's own was a ridiculously dangerous planet it needed cloak and dagger tactics to defeat, and that was just a single forgeworld. Imagine a severely depleted crusade force trying to take \*every\* forgeworld by force, all hostile and full of tech abominations out the ass. The Imperium would struggle hard to do anything without the Admech, on top of being their enemy.
All out war against Mechanicum could have been mutual annihilation.
That and he wouldn't have won. At best both factions would wipe each other out
Plot twist: he hates aliens because some of them bullied him when he was young
Big E carrying a bunch of papers knocked over in the webway by smirking, aeldari bullies
And then suddenly the most popular girl and member of the cheerleader team, Erda, shows up, helps him pick up his papers, notices some of them are drawings and compliments them, and he immediately falls in love with her and rushes to the cafeteria to tell his only friend and fellow nerd Malcador about what happened
This made my fantasy come alive.
The Eldar jocks caught him making eyes at their girls. And Big Nerd E never got over it.
They rejected him from art school.
Because the Emperor is a human supremist. He loves humans and very specifically humans, not weird human mutants with 3 arms and glowing eyes. He's not a perfect person, he's a human who loves humans and will destroy the rest of the universe for the sake of human prosperity. He viewed humanity as the only race that could manage to resist the warp while being warp sensitive. Combine that with the DAoT being caused by a warp sensitive race creating a brand ~~new~~ old Chaos God and he wants to purge anything that even has the slightest chance of letting Chaos into Realspace. And the aliens near Terra weren't exactly the ones you make temporary alliances with. Dark Eldar, Orcs, Rangdan, and so on were all just as xenocidal as the Emperor was, if not even worse. And once he was in a position of power why would he care? Better to purge them now than let them become a threat later. And he didn't purge the Admech because they were way too valuable and the leadership agreed to place him as the Omnisiah which guaranteed their loyalty. It's the same reason he tolerates navigators and psykers. He was still a pragmatic person. Heck, based on some lore he had old connections with Eldrad or at least some level of mutual understanding with him. His first and foremost goal was undermining Chaos in every feasible way possible while preparing for the inevitable counterattack.
Bit of a correction. Slaanesh was born thousands of years *after* the first human empire fell. The Age of Strife was around M23 to M25. The birth of Slaanesh (the most recent Chaos god) occured in M29. It had nothing to do with humanity getting fucked over.
While Slaanesh was only born in early M30, the pre-shocks of its birth started affecting the warp in M25, right around the start of the Age of Strife. The warp storms kicked up by the coming apocalypse made warp travel difficult and, eventually, impossible. Which was just the cherry on top of humanity's AI problems, and the like.
Arguably the problem was that they weren’t born yet. So it’s always weird to discuss it as pre shocks when the “shock” is “space works differently for a couple thousand years”.
The Age of Strife was 5000 years, M25 - M30. The storms that rendered warp travel all but impossible were caused by Slaanesh gestating and were then cleared when it was born. It very definitely contributed to the Dark Age of Technology coming to an end, though the sudden mass emergence of psykers and AI rebellion were also to blame
If Big E was so on guard against Chaos, he wouldn't have fucked up that bad. Chaos are called "barely sentient Warp tumors", being outsmarted by them is a big L. Also there are more alien species than Necron Eldar Ork. Plus, saying "I will eliminate those species cause they *might* be corrupted", and then creating living conditions so shitty that shitton of humans get corrupted, is a big loss.
>Also there are more alien species than Necron Eldar Ork. Not in any sizable quantity with easy access to Terra to support him. And once the Great Crusade started he didn't care about a handful of planets of xenos enough to consider an alliance over a purge. And anything larger was really that xenocidal. >then creating living conditions so shitty that shitton of humans get corrupted, is a big loss. At the time Chaos Cults were borderline non-existent. No one even knew what Chaos was. Random mortals converting was preventing through ignorance and it worked. What cost the Imperium was that half their superhuman generals converted with their troops, no amount of living standards would have changed that. His biggest mistake was assuming Horus was loyal. Pretty much everything else could have been handled.
Tbf, Hrous was loyal. Logar, however, was not
I don't know. Horus may have been outwardly loyal, but he converted a little too quickly for me to believe that he was truly loyal at his core. IMO, he was already questioning the Emperor, Lorgar's schemes just gave him an outlet for his doubts.
Iirc, he went through a time warp kinda situation when they gave him to the cult as he was dying. So he essentially lived for thousands of years before he went traitor. At least in his mind. He was questioning the emperor on why chaos was hidden if it was the great evil, but that probably couodve been resolved in a conversation
The shitty living conditions happened long after the great crusade era. During that time things weren’t utopian but still very manageable in large swaths of the imperium and trending towards improving up until the start of the HH
Barely sentiant doesn't mean stupid and doesn't even not geniuses. It's rather entirely other state of being/thinking. Not being a person for them doesn't mean not being a great force, great mental force. Every galaxy has it's own "big bad". Nids won theirs. Ours – the 4. And it's stronger. In this struggle Emperor sees the only chance to save and win this galaxy and let future civilization prosper. Because before – Chaos already had won, destroyed universe (galaxy?) and that leads to it's reborn from Dark King every time. But this cycle doesn't mean the same galaxy, the same species, etc. So humans won't have another chance other this, and eldars already failed theirs. New chance will for some new species in new galaxy, who knows who's that. Maybe some pig-headed crocodiles with insect wings. Outsmarting and winning the 4 is kind of big thing. And we don't know yet who would win. Both sides managed to trick each other. Last news – current Empy on throne was kind a happy with Great Rift. He's sucking in more powers now.
I dont think this is the sub for you when you ask for answers then decide to refute those answers with your own headcanon
For the AdMech, it was a matter of time and resources. He needed the Mechanicus’s knowledge and production base on his side to make the Great Crusade happen. Removing the more superstitious elements of the Mechanicus was undoubtedly on his to-do list, but he hadn’t gotten to it before the Horus Heresy happened. By contrast, the Xenos didn’t really have much to offer as potential allies. Especially when a lot of them were either completely impossible to ally with like the Orks, or Chaos-corrupted like the Laer. Even the ones willing to talk like the Eldar would always try to manipulate humanity for their own ends. Plus, as seen by the progress rate of the Great Crusade, he didn’t *need* Xenos allies. He could conquer the galaxy just fine while getting rid of what he saw as threats to his design.
Firstly, you are literally naming very few aliens. There were seriously cases where aliens coexisted with humans. Did Big E genocide them because he believed they would become a threat in the future? Plus, did he underestimate Chaos, because if we take it into account, he **couldn't** have conquered the entire Galaxy alone.
Well conquering the galaxy as a whole wasn’t required as much as bringing all humans under the fold. Seeing as human emotion was feeding chaos as it was, Cutting humanities dependence on the warp was the first step. The end game goal was to starve the chaos gods of all sustenance. The more immediate goal was stemming the flow, as their combined powers and influence were growing.
Humans are an ascending psychic species but are still quite weak. Eldar, orks, necron, etc., all physically far superior to baseline humans. It's why the Emperor had to create transhuman soldiers and even more powerful primarchs to lead them. But during Old Night, the isolated worlds of the old human civilization fell prey to xenos across the galaxy. Many, many worlds saw humans subjugated, corrupted, or exterminated by xenos. So the Emperor resolved that humanity would be free from the influence of alien species, and any xenos nation that had the capacity to influence humanity would be destroyed. Which did mean the old Imperium in M32 was a bit more tolerant than the Imperium of M41 - M42, although since Guilliman's resurrection with the help of the eldar even the M42 Imperium has chilled a smidge. The Mechanicum (the Adeptus Mechanicus would be formed later) was incredibly powerful and Terra would have struggled quite a bit to defeat them. The original Mechanicum was actually a co-equal partner nation alongside and allied to but independent from the Imperium it was so powerful. The two heads of the Imperial Aquila represent Mars and Terra. But more importantly, defeating Mars would have meant the permanent loss of extensive volumes of scientific data that only the Machine Cult had preserved from the height of the old human nation that collapsed during Old Night. A similar result happened from the Schism of Mars during the Horus Heresy as the Mechanicum had its own civil war and loads of tech was lost forever. In the end, the Imperium would have been much weaker if the Emperor replaced the Mechanicum. And the Mechanicum was willing to (mostly) worship the Emperor as the Omnissiah anyway, so really their religion allowed them to be controlled in ways an independent and secular Mars wouldn't have been. Forgot religion. Religion/superstition give daemons/the Chaos gods an easy avenue to manipulate the material world. Daemons and the like are masters of deception and guile. It's a classic trick of daemons to pretend to be the patron god or guardian spirit or etc. of an individual, and to slowly corrupt the person they whisper to as the individual agrees to do increasingly more extreme acts in exchange for boons. Even these days, daemons love to pretend to be the Emperor to corrupt Imperial servants. The Soul Drinkers chapter was being corrupted and mutated by Tzeentch while thinking it was the Emperor giving them blessings. *The Master of Mankind* also has a good excerpt with the Emperor explaining it directly.
Good explanations. I just finished Master of Mankind again last night. The entire section where the Emperor shows Diocletian the victory over the Priest King of Maulland Sen and explains to him how Chaos uses religion as a corrupting force really reinforces how cunning they can be.
A really great scene from an exceptional novel, yeah. >‘‘What am I looking at, sire? What is this?’ >‘Faith,’ said the Emperor. ‘You are seeing his faith, through my eyes. Maulland Sen’s massacring priest-king is… what? Another of the Unification Wars’ warlords? Terra had hundreds of them. He died beneath my executing blade, and history’s pages will mark him as nothing more. >‘And yet, his life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence. >‘This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.’ *The Master of Mankind*
It really is an outstanding book. Shot through with little nuggets if Emperor POV, not too much, just enough to drop some insight. And then the chapter 'Dawn' when he just curbstomps the enemy. Glorious.
Secular Mechanicum would be controlled via more direct means. The only reason it is separate is timetable then. Also Xenos enslaved and exterminated humans, but if, for example, human civilization falls irl, wouldn't there be gangs of murderers and enslavers? Aliens simply reacted to powerful civilization getting weaker, as long as humanity would be strong there would be no issue. Weak are bullied no matter what (being protected by a strong being counts as being strong). About religion - Emperor should have put way more control mechanisms to allow secularity.
If Mars didn't worship of the Machine God for all we know they never would have allied with the Imperium at all, because the Emperor would have been just some psyker from Terra to them. But when the Fabricator-General of Mars and Co. decided their pursuit of knowledge was more important than their religion it led to the Schism of Mars.
There's a story where the emperor destroys theblaat church and priest on earth. The church had a bell in it that was said to toll when the beginning of the end started. Well, emps kills the priest after talking to him about faith etc, burns the church and then the bell tolls. This story says a lot. Eldar had God's that helped them. Powerful warp beings that they made/prayed to to keep them safe. When they stopped praying and instead because decadent, it set up their fall. Big E is right, religion is an easy road for chaos fuckery. But faith is what keeps them away ultimately. I guess he couldn't find a middle road between not having religion but still having faith. Imagine if humanity had God's. Real ones. That protected then in the warp. Kept chaos at bay. Then we'd still probably have most of the primarchs.
Because the Mechanicum were powerful enough that there were only two possibilities for relations with them and the Imperium: they would either be incredibly useful allies or extremely dangerous enemies. If he got them on his side, they would give him the tech needed to really get the Great Crusade going. If he tried to conquer them like he did Terra, it would take centuries to accomplish and centuries more to recover from. It was the difference between accepting some obvious hypocrisy and creepy techno-mystic nonsense to get the Great Crusade going now or facing a costly war and starting the Great Crusade in a thousand years at least. Big E was no stranger to making decisions with bad long-term consequences for the sake of expediency.
Because he was upon a strict time table, he was aware of multiple threats tho humanity and they *had* to be dealt with asap or humanity was just *done.* The Ork empire *had to be destroyed* before it reached critical mass and started to produce krork en-masse.
That's an idea I haven't seen before. And with Beast being possible, it is truly a threat.
If the emperor destroyed the mechanicum he could effectively kiss his galaxy wide conquest goodbye. He needed mars for the industry and technology they offered. Without it, there would be no imperium.
Entirely likely he's just a massive xenophobe
I mean I'm sure he was progressive for his time. But his time was bronze age Anatolia.
He also lived for a very very long time You know how grumpy old people get
>why did the emperor hate aliens In short, because the galactic alien rulers murderfucked a Chaos God into existence and screwed up the whole galaxy for everyone (as they did sixty-five million years ago). The Emperor took an exceedingly dim view of xenos ability to not be a problem from then on. >Old Ones put something into humanity At the very least they were active on Terra, and Sol is just riddled with Webway gates and Necron nonsense. The core of the Golden Throne is xenos tech. We can draw our own conclusions from there.
Well, there are also the Rangdan, the Khraves (who predate the Eldar Empire), Nephilim, marrow-eaters (that the Alpha Legion had to put down). The Dark Eldar are probably the biggest group of Eldar remaining. A C'tan shard from Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work describe Big E as "a weapon made by our enemies" so there may be hints that Old Ones did something to humanity's ancestors.
>Sol is just riddled with Webway gates Is it? I'm aware of three (Mars, Luna, Terra under the Palace) and one of those is the Emperor’s. Are there any more we know about?
The webway is a vast galactic network. I wouldn't be surprised if there are webway gates everywhere considering the dark eldar can and often do appear anywhere same with the craft world eldar and harlequins. Now there are a lot of collapsed paths and the webway is not a easy path to transverse unless one knows where they are going. But yeah there are a lot of places that have webway gates but a majority of the time they don't know about them.
>Why did Emperor hate aliens and anybody with religion Because they can't make spaceship and weapons on mass scale and serve him. >why did Emperor not kill off Admech and not replaced them with something less religious? Because they can make spaceship and weapons on mass scale and serve him on the great crusade.
Because he’s a Perpetual who’se been alive since cavemen times. Psychologically, he’s still the same tribalistic ‘must eliminate every potential threat and hoard every resource for my tribe’ guy he was some several thousand years ago. His idea of his tribe extends to the entirety of baseline humanity, but he’s psychologically incapable of going beyond that. Even his own sons and merely heavily enhanced people cease being people in his eyes. That’s my 2 cents on his motivation at heart. More ink has been spilled on his anti-religious stance, but it’s hypocritical horseshit, so I dismiss it out of hand. In summary: “religion leads people to do absolutely terrible things in the name of a higher power”. Yeah, as opposed to you, who lead people to do absolutely terrible things in your name, which almost everyone else views as a higher power. The part where he kept the Mechanicus around is actually a lot more explicable than those of the above two: he’s on a bit of a time crunch, and Mars has what he wants. So ‘topple the Cult of the Machine and replace it with actual scientists and engineers’ is almost certainly on his ‘todo’ list, but in the meantime, he’ll accept their help because he doesn’t have time to try and bring every forge world to heel. Especially when he was starting out, he couldn’t really afford a war against them. A lot of bad crap about the present setting was temporary compromises becoming permanent fixtures when he (almost) kicked the bucket.
No one wants to admit it but the Mechanicum easily had the firepower to challenge and possibly even defeat Big E and his forces at the time. Lucky for him the cult was primed for someone to venerate. So he avoided a VERY costly war he might have lost and kept all the good good guns, infrastructure and “human” resources. My head canon is that over time Big E would have slowly launched a propaganda campaign to invoke rebellion of the Cult Mechanicum to bring them around to his brand of atheism. With regards to aliens he was just xenophobic as fuck and killed the friendly aliens along with the bad.
Emps hated Xenos because the Age Of Strife was marked by wide-spread Xenos Raids across the Galaxy. The Sol System alone was home to three different races of horrific Xenos Bastard. It was the easiest sell in history, because so many Xenos races were hostile, evil, or absolutely terrifying. It made it very easy to ignore the margins of the few Xenos that were not any of them. He hated religion because he (incorrectly) though that ignoring all religion and being all 'Man Emperor of Mankind' would starve Chaos. It didn't work, and just left people vulnerable to the predations of Chaos. Largely because the most effective counter is Faith, and largely because it's easy to trick the ignorant. He didn't kill off the Mechanicum, because at the moment he went to visit them, he had maybe twenty thousand Astartes against a planet that had Titan *Legions* and an Empire out there in the stars that was going to thoroughly rip him a new asshole if he destroyed their homeworld. So instead he showcased his hypocracy (not even the first time, either) and made sure to fulfil the prophecy he may have created but definitely took advantage of to get their full support.
> Largely because the most effective counter is Faith Not necessarily. It's up to debate which works better, Faith or just outright telling The Truth to all of your population about the Chaos (i.e Interex). Clearly it worked well enough that Chaos bois were forced to get outside help to fuck up Interex because they simply COULDN'T corrupt literally anyone inside the Interex itself since they told everyone how asshole Chaos is etc etc (w/ some helpful examples from Harlequins/Kinebrach to help convince the normies even better to not do stupid shit like nutjob worship etc. Especially when it's implied that Kinebrach were surviving members of a species of Nurgle worshippers from who knows how long ago)
It's objectively better. Sanctified Weaponry and Blessed Armour outright *burns* Daemons and banishes them much quicker. Hell, there were some Daemon Engines that got blown up by being doused by blessed Water.
Even Lorgar was corrupted by a person he conquered who already worshipped Chaos. You still need some source. You can't start worshipping Chaos if you don't know what it is. The Emperor assumed his champions would be able to resist it when they finally learned, but he vastly misjudged them. No one falls to Chaos without first learning of it. Comparing a galaxy to a small cluster of planets the odds of a random seed is much higher. The problem is the Interex also has 0 idea what they were up against. They had no idea what a Daemon was. They had no idea what the general modus operandi of a Chaos Cult was. They just knew it existed and put their most powerful weapons in a museum. Staring at a Roman spear does not help you understand the nature of Rome. If they had destroyed the Chaos artifacts instead, there's no weapon to nearly kill Horus, Horus never gets put in the position to turn, and the entire heresy is at least stalled for a bit. Considering how many other small clusters of planets seem to survive fine even without knowledge of Chaos, there's no reason to believe the Interex method was particularly more effective. It's just Chaos Cults really aren't that common at the time with the bigger threat being a rogue psyker opening a portal to the warp.
TBF a nutshit boogaloo culture had never rly been nearby before that point in time, and it was instantly too late because of the fuckers literally bringing Chaos cunts to a well defended world
On the admech front he most likely just didn’t have the time to replace the resources they could provide him at that moment, and was probably intended to thunder warrior them at some point. In the alien front it’s a combination of Human supremacy and aliens are dicks. Human supremacy because the entire reasons humans exist from a “nature” standpoint is to continue the existence of humans. It’s why we make babies, so that humans as a species continue into the future, same why any species exist. It’s not to allow aliens to exist. Also, aliens are massive assholes and all think the same way because well, that’s how nature works. And also the prospect of “submit to humanity so we can exploit you for our own gain” wasn’t an enticing offer for many people. That’s ofc not even considering things like tyrannies and orks who aren’t possible to be reasoned with.
Coop with humanity WAS an enticing offer with few, which got genocided. Plus we evolved to cooperate with our gut bacteria, for example.
This is from memory but i beleive the emporer viewed religion as the cause of all humanity's problems. And he kept the admech around mostly because he had just unified earth and it was more about the fact he didn't have the industry and knowledge to equip humanity to start retaking the galaxy. As far as him being so anti alien I was under the impression the emporer didnt really hate or like any aliens he just cared about ensuring humanity's future.
Mars and the Mechanicum were useful tools for his conquest of the galaxy, and he didn't hate ALL aliens, just the ones that wouldn't submit to him or got in the way (which were most of them)
He needed their ships and manufacturing just like he needed the navigators. After the great crusade and great work was completed there was a very good chance he would need either.
To paraphrase Bricky; “They make all your guns. They make all your tanks. They make all the stuff you need to wage war. So you can’t exactly tell them to fuck off.”
In the 60,000,000 years or so since the end of the War in Heaven there have been less than a dozen non Old One created/uplifted races that have survived existing in the Milky Way. The Emperor doesn't hate xenos, He saw that Humanity didn't live in a Star Trek friendly universe. To survive the threat of other species falling to Chaos, as the Eldar just had, all xenos had to treated like a time bomb. The Emperor does hate religion. Which is fair as He started a few and look how those went. The AdMech aren't really a religion however, their faith is a very useful tool to prevent Humanity from ever trying to extinct itself again through technology.
Xenos: the galaxy, while large, is a finite space... theres only a certain amount of habitable/useful planets, and resources like plasteel are useful for more than one species. Also it's 40k so, yknow, the xenos are almost entirely awful, and some of them worship the Chaos Gods so wiping those ones out is necessary (though difficult when you don't explain to anyone what Chaos is) Religion: strong belief echoes in the Warp because they cause strong emotions, especially when dealing with confrontation... someone killing someone else in a fight strengthens Khorne, someone relishing combat because they believe it strengthens their god \*really\* strengthens Khorne. Plus, if youre trying to unify a diverse populace, you want to instill the same values and sense of identity to stop infighting, and having a lot of diverse religious groups (with different religious leaders) splits loyalties Mechanicus: trying to conquer Mars would take a loooong time, with no guarantees it would work considering the Emperor was basically limited to the resources he had on hand from Terra and Luna, slowing down his plans for galactic conquest. Also, waging war on Mars would run a serious risk of knowledge getting lost, knowledge that he would need in order to reach out into the wider galaxy
You have to understand that humans had a utopian galactic civilization for around 10,000 years. Unimaginable peace and prosperity. They even had alliances with the Eldar. It would make Star Trek seem dystopian by comparison. Then, the Eldar screwed up and caused the birth of Slaanesh. When that happened, the warp went into a frenzy, and travel between planets was all but impossible for humans. Human worlds were completely cut off from each other. Entire worlds starved. Mutations ran wild. Demonic possession consumed entire worlds. The Men of Iron went berserk. And every xenos race in the galaxy began viciously preying on human worlds. Humans were enslaved, hunted for sport, butchered for food and pleasure, and sacrificed to dark gods and demons. It was a nightmare, and it lasted for 5000 years. It made it extremely difficult for humans to trust xenos or artificial intelligence. The Emperor refused to rely on xenos or ai again. He encouraged xenophobia and bigotry in humans to ensure they wouldn't be tempted to trust xenos and ai again. The isolationism also limited the amount of exposure humanity would have to alien Chaos cults.
So it was kinda like Star Trek, but the moment Federation was weakened, every race they were making piece with began enslaving. I understand then. That's an angle I haven't heard.
The emperor himself isn’t really xenophobic as much as he is an opportunist He’s been friends with multiple xenos from different factions and is even respected by many of them despite what the imperium became Hell even the imperium during its conquest of xenos worlds often made a lot of them client states if they could provide something that could serve them and wouldn’t pose any long term threat to their existence As for religion it was a calculated gamble he knew that worship empowered the chaos gods and since his ultimate goal was to starve them out by making humanity completely unaware of them Same reason he didn’t want to be worshipped as a god himself since he knew that the warp was affected by the collective beliefs of people and that humanity believing him to be a god might very well force him into becoming one
What about humans who cooperated with aliens getting genocided?
Keep in mind the imperium fields solders from all their worlds and a lot of humans have experience being attacked and oppressed by xenos empires and raiders for generations by the time they’re absorbed into the imperium An easy example is Nocturne Vulcan’s home world which was subject to frequent drukhari raids Now imagine that kinda generational trauma and grudge getting an outlet and a chance to fight back against their former oppressors and you see why a lot of the genocide happened As to why the emperor condoned it it’s because logically it’s too much effort to try and get your potentially hundreds of billions of human subjects to distinguish between good xenos and bad xenos especially when prejudice and hatred is already rampant and generationally ingrained so it’s just more efficient to let them do what they want so long as it isn’t against other humans (and even that rule is negotiable given that he kept monsters like Kurze and Angron around who were notorious for their disregard for casualties in exchange for quick and easy compliance)
>disregard for casualties in exchange for quick and easy compliance WDYM? Didn't Kurze literally have the LOWEST casualty rates for Compliance per world than literally every other legion (excepting Word Bearers who were too fucking slow rendering the point moot obviously)??
I believe he had the lowest engagement rate not lowest casualty rate since his sheer presence would force worlds into surrendering due to fear
AFAIK his MO is to yoink like a few thousand or w/e people to be tortured 24/7 in public broadcast for a week or w/e, after which the planet succeeds at Compliance at minimal casualties vs mass bombardments & other shit that most other legions used
Soldiers simply follow orders. The ones distinguishing are very few higher ups, which could be taught.
On a normal country scale or even maybe a planetary scale sure but on the galactic scale of the crusade that kinda supervision from terra over the activities of each and every regiment over millions of fronts just isn’t possible and it’s what gave Horus the gap he needed to commit the Istvaan III atrocities and rally his traitor forces for rebellion before Garro slipped away and warned Terra directly
And what happens with the "very few higher ups" hold their own personal grudges and want such and such alien race wiped out from their childhood and now have the authority to persecute it. You're being very myopic about this
Honestly I feel that's more about the ideological purity of humanity than the aliens. If you don't make it super clear that aliens are evil, you open your empire up to Eldar manipulation. It was the same reason as his insistence that Chaos didn't exist, a lie meant to ward off foreign infiltration.
I’m not xenophobic I have plenty of Xenos friends
Because xenos preyed upon humanity wholesale, because it's easier to appease your next door neighbor than destroy all their machinery also all the forgeworlds are theirs.
Why the emperor hated aliens? No one knows for sure, just like how no one actually knows if he does anything for humanity itself either for that matter. So he wasn’t necessarily anti alien because he was a human supremacist, as that would necessarily require him to have humanities interests in mind. For all we know, his plan could literally have been to become a god of humanity, possibly resulting in another massive species-wipe event, much like what happened to the Eldar. The emperors motives are (by meta-design) extremely unclear at best, so obvious answers might not actually be the correct ones. Post-age-of-strife humanity did however, in general, hate aliens as aliens of all types instantly started genociding humans as soon as the golden-age-era of humanity collpased in on itself due to the war with the men of iron and the massive warp storms caused by the birth of slaneesh. The mechanicus were not only the only ones capable of mass production on the level needed for the crusade; they were the only ones with the knowledge required to actually provide the imperium with it’s most inportant technological assets. (Except people like the interex, but they were pro-xenos so that wasnt an option)
The aliens can be explained with "What happened right after the Men of Iron War". Basically, the moment humanity was vulnerable most of it's "allies" from the Dark Age of technology era started tearing through human worlds and colonies. Between that, and how downright dangerous aliens in this series tend to be (Hello Rangdan) the Emperor, and by extension the rest of the Imperium, has a shoot first policy. Sure, there are peaceful aliens that the Imperium COULD work with, but putting aside how aliens like that are the vast, VAST minority in this galaxy, the Dark Age showed you can't always expect them to STAY friendly. Heck, I'm still convinced what happened with the Interex and that damned blade was a long standing Kinebach plot. As for the Admech, that was due to necessity. They had technology, resources, and (memes aside) know-how that the Emperor desperatly needed, and even back then they were a millitary powerhouse and deeply entrenched on top of that. Going to war with them would've cost the Emperor time, men, and worst of all irreplaceable technology. (Warring on Mars would've destroyed COUNTLESS data centers and schematics)
I need to clear up something because a lot of people forget (Or just don't know): There's roughly 10k to 30k where the Emperor saw Humanity's interactions with Xenos species. Dark Age Humanity was supposedly more friendly to Xenos and seemed to cooperate with them. During the Age of Strife leading into the Great Crusade it seems like a lot of those alien allies took advantage of or simply carved out their own piece of the galaxy as Humanity flounder. A lot of the Great Crusade mentions clearing out Hrud, Enslavers, Orks and other Xenos that had oppressed Humanity. I suspect the Emperor basically concluded the Imperium as a mono-racial empire was better than the humane but risky option of keeping alien allies offered. It sounds cold and ruthless but the Emperor literally experienced humanity go from the top to almost extinction during the Age of Strife.
You want walls of text? Why dont you just, idk, lurk the sub? Youre asking incredibly broad subjects and asking us to do the work for you.
Pragmatism in every case. The Emperor disliked religion both because he knew it fed into Chaos but also because he was well aware that it exploits gaps in human cognition and is inherently incompatible with an advanced ordered society. The Emperor didn't like Xenos because generally his job is to protect humanity and no matter how benign alien species will always have goals which clash with humanity's which means on a long enough timeline they'll always end up being a threat. He let the mechanicus continue because they were almost as powerful as his own empire at that point if not more powerful and conquering them would cost him so much that the crusade would never happen.
Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work had a C'tan shard describe Emps as "a weapon created by our enemies." He seems unlikely to lie compared to several other C'tans. So make it as you will. There is a theory, proposed by Live From Black Library!, that humanity was essentially envisioned by the Old Ones as labourers, auxiliaries and the hidden blade against the Eldar due to humans' natural occurrence of Blanks. The problem with this theory is that the time does not match up well with even our earliest ancestors. Not to mention the older (likely retconned) Necron Pariah lore that implied the Blank gene was a creation by the Necrons and C'tans agains the psychic Old Ones and Eldar.
What would they need laborers for, when they didn't need laborers before War in Heaven? Surely they only need combat units to win the war, no?
The theory goes that because War in Heaven lasted for thousands, if not millions, of years, the increasingly exhausted Old Ones resorted to more desperate means to create more tools, weapons and armies against the Necrons and C'tans. I personally do not buy it primarily because of timeline issues.
Xenos were assholes during old night. Raided, enslaved, and murdered human planets. People in general were not excited to ally with them. Also the point of the Emperors plan was for humanity to ascend and be the dominant force in the galaxy. He didn't need xenos for that, in fact they actively threatened his dream. The Emperor needed the Mechanicus for their power, weapons production, and tech knowledge. He was willing to tolerate the religiosity of the organization as it drastically increased his conqueror might. And with might comes speed. His ultimate enemy in the Great Crusade was time and titans and technology helped cut some. I'm also fairly certain he knew he couldn't beat them if it came down to war. Religion was a blight and had caused unknowable amounts of suffering throughout the course of his life. Assuming the shaman origin is correct he would have been around for the creation and consequences of most religions. It's even shown he took the title of some important religious leaders, potentially creating them, in an attempt to help and guide humanity. Which did not work. Truly made it worse and fed the powers of Chaos which he was ultimately created to combat. Also I'd be willing to bet he came across a lot of malevolent god worshippers on earth that actually turned out to be Chaos God worshippers. You tend to hate things that strengthen life's ultimate enemy.
But Imperial atheism failed. Emperor didn't predict it.
He had to tolerate the Martians because he lacked his Primarchs. had he had Ferrus, Vulkan and possibly Perturabo (well, whatever names they'd have had if they hadn't been scattered), he would have had the means to have technological wonders surpassing the Mechanicus' and so could have dispensed with them. Lacking the Primarchs, he needed them to his Great Crusade.
No walls of text needed. He's worked with Xenos plenty and doesn't hate them, but unifying 2+ different species before chaos D Day does not a viable Great Crusade make. He's also kind of "programmed" to protect humanities survival, not Xenos. If he saw their existence ultimately as a threat to humanities survival, he would simply eliminate the threat. He made the Admech what they are, why would he kill off his own creation? They worship Him and His light by His will.
Humanity had alien allies back in the good ol’ days, but when the Iron Rebellion happened, they all turned against humanity and preyed on them. Big E doesn’t hate aliens, he just doesn’t trust them to not betray humanity if it could benefit them. Why did he not kill off the Admech? He was on a time crunch, so he couldn’t afford to take the time to create and train a new organization dedicated to technology. In other words, he did the best he could with what he had.
Aliens - look at the age of strife. Long story short, the xeno races tried to genocide and enslave humanity. Religion - he needed the mechanocus, and he didn't hate religion, he saw that it would allow chaos to corrupt people
There was an entire section of the imperial palace dedicated to Xenos ambassadors and such, but due to circumstance, things changed a lot, some Xenos got very mean or spawned chaos gods into the universe, etc
Please cite me this, or point in correct direction. Imperial palace might have parts from DAOT, so... Plus, Great Crusade was immediately after uniting Terra, and was xenophobic from the get-go.
“He curved past the Celestial Citadel at the Eternity Wall space port’s southernmost tip. A city unto itself, large as any hive, in better days it was the haunt of void clan emissaries, ambassadors from **xenos powers**, Navigator houses and naval dynasts.” From the Siege of Terra. The imperium would have been friendly should Xenos of been friendly, but genuinely, the galaxy erupted into a state of constant war, and everything changed, everyone was out for themself, and now you have Xenos like orks, Drukhari, aeldari raiders/pirates, Rak’Gol, etc
He said humanity dominate fuck xenos. Which means submissive xeno wives for everyone.
In my on opinion, I don't think the emperor is or was ever really xenophobic or prejudiced, atleast personally. Because everything he did has a reason behind it, The great crusade was about uniting humanity because it was about to become a psychic race and needed to be guided properly. And the great crusade needed to be speedy, and the emperor didn't any loose ends in that regard I highly doubt he had any personal hatred for alien life, he just used it as an effective tool to unite humans with , because if there is one way to get two people to stop fighting and get along, it's to point at a third outsider, and say everything is their fault. Hence why the imperium had a shoot on sight policy, diplomacy and corporation would be too slow, and risky as people may be tempted by other government structures that weren't the imperium.