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 Crimson wrote:
Yes, some aliens are hostile. Yes, some aliens posses the technology to threaten humans. Sometimes the same aliens possess both of these traits. But it is completely implausible that all would, or even the majority. And of course even against hostile sapients genocide is still wrong. This is exactly where Tau show how wrong the Imperium is. Thy have managed to coexist with other intelligent species and even incorporated them into their society.

*Subjugated other species. I had to help you there.

And "Racist" only applies to humans. Aliens are not human.

Or real, as far as we know. You're using some pretty hostile language here, my dude. You might wanna calm down.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

*Subjugated other species.

Which is still preferable to genocide.

And "Racist" only applies to humans. Aliens are not human.

That's what you're gonna go with? Yeah, in a world where sapient, technology using non-humans exist, it absolutely applies. Imperium is racist towards aliens on an insane degree. That they're willing to mass genocide sapient being makes them irredeemably evil. It is really bizarre that I even need to point this out.

There is an assumption dogging this discussion that people’s thoughts about the 40k setting are some kind of cipher for their thoughts about real life. This is not only disproportionate, considering this is a forum about toy soldiers, but also potentially offensive in the extreme. Please give that some thought as we continue and try to avoid it. Thanks!

So everyone here knows that 40k is a dark joke but don’t forget that the punchline is humans are the worst monsters, not what’s “out there.”

That doesn’t make the xenos the “good guys,” however. The overwhelming evil of the Imperium, by IRL standards, doesn’t rehabilitate the Necrons or Tyranids; or the Tau, necessarily, for that matter.


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 Crimson wrote:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
*Subjugated other species.

Which is still preferable to genocide.

Well, by whose standards?

Is humane genocide preferable to inhumane genocide?

I’m not sure that the Tau practice any form of genocide.

But it seems clear to me that in terms of Imperial culture, annihilation would be preferable to subjugation by xenos.

That must be why no humans have ever joined the tau. /s

So, sure, maybe some humans would rather die than suffer subjugation, but clearly others really wouldn’t. The tau will just kill/imprison the dissenters and subjugate the rest. It’s still better than unconditional extermination.

You don't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs..

Omlette being empire building and few eggs being some planets that just refuse to give up and are strategicly vital and have to be exterminated if they cannot be subjugated..

I think some backwater planet would care little who its planetary overlord is as long as they get to keep doing their thing.

 Crimson wrote:
Which is still preferable to genocide.

Sure, if you're a coward and unwilling to fight.

Dandelion wrote:
So, sure, maybe some humans would rather die than suffer subjugation, but clearly others really wouldn’t. The tau will just kill/imprison the dissenters and subjugate the rest. It’s still better than unconditional extermination.

From the Imperial perspective, subjugation and extermination amount to the same thing. The Imperial mindset takes into account that some portion of human individuals prefer subjugation to execution. When other, loyalist humans are doing the subjugating, such self-preservation is generally an acceptable character flaw. When we’re talking subjugation by daemons or xenos, however, now we’re in the realm of heresy. Being a heretic means forfeiting one’s place in Imperial society, betraying the Emperor, and turning one’s back on humanity. The kind of people who would tolerate xenos subjugation are, from an Imperial POV, non-people. If such people were the only survivors of a Tau incursion, for example, it would be equivalent to there being no survivors.

The Imperium is endlessly paranoid. And the fact that Tau make room for other species as their vassals triggers that paranoia pretty hard. Obviously, the reverse is not true: there is precisely zero room for non-humans in the Imperium and even mutated humans are viewed with great suspicion (if not plain outright hatred) as a general rule. So we aren’t going to ever get to see how doctrinally pure Tau would view Tau willing to assimilate to Imperial values. But we can see that the Tau are pretty paranoid about Tau who lose confidence in the monolithic value system propagated and administered by the Ethereal caste.

 Crimson wrote:
That's what you're gonna go with? Yeah, in a world where sapient, technology using non-humans exist, it absolutely applies. Imperium is racist towards aliens on an insane degree. That they're willing to mass genocide sapient being makes them irredeemably evil. It is really bizarre that I even need to point this out.

It's like you think they wouldn't eagerly do the same to us, if they were in the same predicament.

And they have, too. Remember that human life is as worthless to the xenos as theirs are to humankind.

A lot of people tend to forget the power of beliefs and how deep they run.

Your entire life, you've been told that X species is the most evil and horrible things, and that they will lie and deceive you and turn you into a slave and eat you (and it doesn't help that some xenos actually WILL do that).

And suddenly when they show up, this person is gonna say... "well hold on, maybe this totally alien creature that just shot all of the military guys is actually on our side and we should give him a chance".

A lot of folks don’t take the word “alien” very seriously, after so much Star Wars and Star Trek.

@manchu
In absolute terms, the goal of life is to keep living. There is no room for morality here, it is simple survival.
Offering to any individual the chance at submission over death is always better than simply killing them. If they refuse to submit, they die, but the ones who want to live get to live. I’m sure the turncoats don’t care about how the imperium views them anyway, they survived and that’s all that matters.

Dandelion wrote:
There is no room for morality here, it is simple survival.

If there is no room for morality then what does “better” mean in this sentence:

Offering to any individual the chance at submission over death is always better than simply killing them.

I’m sure the turncoats don’t care about how the imperium views them anyway

You’re probably right but we aren’t considering how heretics view the Imperium but rather how the Imperium views heretics. Point being, from the normative perspective, humans who tolerate having xenos overlords don’t even count as humans.

I think we should go ahead and acknowledge that when we talk about humans in the 40k setting, we aren’t talking about the same kind of people as IRL humans. Humanity in 40k is as culturally distinct from us as xenos are from them.

The goal of life may be to live, but in order for life to continue, sometimes the individual (or individuals) must lay down their lives for the survival of the rest. It's why the destruction of individual planets, to the Imperium, is "justified". If allowed to continue to survive, they could threaten the rest of humanity. They aren't going to destroy billions of people just for gaks and giggles; there has to be a good reason for it. Even the least moral person is going to weigh the costs and benefits of such an act, even if only in terms of "how does this benefit me".

Which is honestly not that different from the Tau. The Tau don't save worlds, or extend an offer to join them, out of some kind of compassion or "this is the right thing to do" feeling. It all boils down to the same cost vs benefit analysis. And, for the Ethereals, expanding their empire and keeping the populace docile and happy is worth risking their soldiers' lives for.

In the end, the Tau aren't any more moral than the Imperium. They just have different priorities which cause them to take actions in a different way. Everything about their culture demonstrates this "what's best for the Empire is all we care about" mentality.

As for death vs subjugation, a big part of that boils down to resources. The Imperium doesn't even possess the means to keep it's own people happy and docile, so subjugating another race would be quite impossible (even if they wanted to). The Tau have fewer logistical constraints (both in resources and via their use of AI to take care of things), so keeping a formally hostile group placated is certainly easier for them. If their Empire was the same size as the Imperium... well, who knows if they'd be able to keep it up. They may very well start killing off dissenters and possible hostiles, simply because it's "better" than decades or centuries of fighting.

 Manchu wrote:

Dandelion wrote:
There is no room for morality here, it is simple survival.

If there is no room for morality then what does “better” mean in this sentence:

Offering to any individual the chance at submission over death is always better than simply killing them.

It is better for achieving the goal of life: survival.

As for your other point, no, we are not concerned with how the imperium views things. We are looking at them from an external perspective. I don’t even consider the imperium to be capable of having views, only individuals within it do, and those views are varied and diverse. You need only to look at the Blackstone Fortress game to see imperial humans and Xenos interacting peacefully to see that the official imperial policies are generally ignored when the individual disagrees.
That said I’m not too interested in delving into the subjectivity of morality so I’m gonna bow out and paint stuff instead.

Dandelion wrote:
It is better for achieving the goal of life: survival.

... but so what? In relation to the topic, I mean.

As for your other point, no, we are not concerned with how the imperium views things.

We certainly are. We need to understand perspective to understand motivation, which in turn is a key to understanding morality.

This discussion makes me think, it could be fun to run a roleplaying session where the players are Imperial subjects being processed through a Tau reeducation center for assimilation into gue’vesa. Maybe some PCs would be eager to adapt while others would resist.


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 flandarz wrote:
The Tau have fewer logistical constraints (both in resources and via their use of AI to take care of things), so keeping a formally hostile group placated is certainly easier for them. If their Empire was the same size as the Imperium... well, who knows if they'd be able to keep it up. They may very well start killing off dissenters and possible hostiles, simply because it's "better" than decades or centuries of fighting.

I think it has been mentioned ITT already but the Tau do inspire us reflect on what the ancient antecedants of the Imperium must have been like, humanity as a nascent starfaring race.

 Manchu wrote:
There is an assumption dogging this discussion that people’s thoughts about the 40k setting are some kind of cipher for their thoughts about real life. This is not only disproportionate, considering this is a forum about toy soldiers, but also potentially offensive in the extreme. Please give that some thought as we continue and try to avoid it. Thanks!

Yeah Manchu, but after all the very real-world political opinion that Adeptus Doritos gave us on Marx (hard to pretend it's about Tau...), we have this:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Which is still preferable to genocide.

Sure, if you're a coward and unwilling to fight.

Which really, really sound like a real-world opinion too!
Adeptus Doritos is welcome to correct me if it is not.

 Manchu wrote:

Dandelion wrote:
So, sure, maybe some humans would rather die than suffer subjugation, but clearly others really wouldn’t. The tau will just kill/imprison the dissenters and subjugate the rest. It’s still better than unconditional extermination.

From the Imperial perspective, subjugation and extermination amount to the same thing. The Imperial mindset takes into account that some portion of human individuals prefer subjugation to execution. When other, loyalist humans are doing the subjugating, such self-preservation is generally an acceptable character flaw. When we’re talking subjugation by daemons or xenos, however, now we’re in the realm of heresy. Being a heretic means forfeiting one’s place in Imperial society, betraying the Emperor, and turning one’s back on humanity. The kind of people who would tolerate xenos subjugation are, from an Imperial POV, non-people. If such people were the only survivors of a Tau incursion, for example, it would be equivalent to there being no survivors.

The Imperium is endlessly paranoid. And the fact that Tau make room for other species as their vassals triggers that paranoia pretty hard. Obviously, the reverse is not true: there is precisely zero room for non-humans in the Imperium and even mutated humans are viewed with great suspicion (if not plain outright hatred) as a general rule. So we aren’t going to ever get to see how doctrinally pure Tau would view Tau willing to assimilate to Imperial values. But we can see that the Tau are pretty paranoid about Tau who lose confidence in the monolithic value system propagated and administered by the Ethereal caste.

This is actually True. When the Imperium fought agaisnt Gue'vesa , they did with such hate, one they didn't even had for the Tau. Tau were just another hostile xeno species, but Gue'vesa were the worst kind of traitor.

Thats actually one of the reasons why Tau normally evacuates humans from the outher worlds to inner worlds, to protect them from Imperial retaliation. Other times they use tau afilliated humans as suicide bombers agaisnt Imperial Worlds but eeeh... thats war. You do some good things, you do some bad thigs.
The problem is how fast people in this kind of discussions puts an absolutist label on a race based in SOME bad things or SOME good things they do. They are only good or bad. When if we did apply that measure to any country in our world, all would come out as evil because nearly every modern country, even ones like Spain, USA, France, etc... do a TON of despicable things we only know many decades after they happened.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

It's like you think they wouldn't eagerly do the same to us, if they were in the same predicament.

Some of them wouldn't. Most probably. Tau wouldn't, even the Eldar who have little concern for human life didn't actually exterminate the humans when they could have. If anything, Imperium's insane genocidal policies will increase the alien hostility. If you know that the Imperium will exterminate you anyway, then the only way to survive is to hit them so hard that they can't do that. Even though 'bend the knee or die' would obviously still be pretty damn evil approach, at least it would give the aliens a way to survive and in turn incentivise them to surrender rather than fight to the last breath as they literally have nothing to lose.

And they have, too. Remember that human life is as worthless to the xenos as theirs are to humankind.

Thank you, Imperial propaganda bot.

A lot of people tend to forget the power of beliefs and how deep they run.

Your entire life, you've been told that X species is the most evil and horrible things, and that they will lie and deceive you and turn you into a slave and eat you (and it doesn't help that some xenos actually WILL do that).

And suddenly when they show up, this person is gonna say... "well hold on, maybe this totally alien creature that just shot all of the military guys is actually on our side and we should give him a chance".

Yes, I get that. I get why Imperium is how it is, I get why its people behave how they do. Knowing why they are evil doesn't make them not evil. And whilst I understand how people in the setting buy into the propaganda, I don't understand why you do.

 Galas wrote:
When if we did apply that measure to any country in our world, all would come out as evil because nearly every modern country, even ones like Spain, USA, France, etc... do a TON of despicable things we only know many decades after they happened.

Heh. Fun fact: one act of evil from France got a space marine chapter named after it.

Ultimately in discussion like this we can only comment on what people say. So if they are not willing or able to differentiate between their own morals and fictional fascist propaganda, it becomes quite difficult to respond to them without it possibly seeming that their actual moral character is being critiqued as well.

And ultimately this whole thread is about the moral comparison between the Imperium and the Tau Empire. By necessity we will be using our own real morals to judge that, thus they will be part of the discussion.