You miss my point. I said that
GK, as you argue them, would be physically impossible to keep. Not awkward, not ineffective, but as in literally impossible. We know how harsly they recruit, with what, one in a million of those promising enough to even be considered surviving? If they need to be kept secret and die so fast, they would be extinct due to simply running out of
GK, nothing else. It does not matter if they sacrifice
billions or whatever to try to keep them, the
GK still won't grow on trees.
Err, what? Did you somehow miss the entire point of the setting, that the Imperium is stupid in pretty much every possible way? This isn't just some random bit of fluff trivia, it's the fundamental defining attribute of the Imperium. It's an obscene combination of unimaginable cruelty and appalling ignorance, and yet this obscenity is the only hope for humanity surviving a few more miserable days before its inevitable end. Likewise for propaganda, even the authors of the fiction you're talking about openly state that 40k's fluff is full of exaggerated myths, propaganda, etc. We see the universe primarily through the eyes of the Imperium, and that means we also see the Imperium's blatant distortion of the truth.
Again you miss the point. I was referring to the fact that you justified your own view of Space Marines (Which it is fine that you keep, by the way, even
GW themselves say that cherrypicking is what we're pretty much supposed to do) with the Imperium being stupid and using them for propaganda. Propaganda is irrelevant at this point, they could just as well lie about anything to the people for a much cheaper cost. Stupidity? Okay, a ten Guardsmen can
barely match a couple of Gretchin in combat ability. Why do they keep the Guardsmen? Because they are stupid! Propaganda maaaaaaaaaaaate!
...Stupidity is a bad argument. The Imperium is not optimal in its actions, for sure. But it is not nearly as stupid as you assume. The entire setting is built on the rule of cool. Are titans a smart thing to build if we could
IRL? Certainly not! But they work in
40K, because of the rule of cool. Same thing with a lot of things (Leman Russ, even Space Marines.). You have to factor this in. It would not work for us. But it works for them. They keep them, where we would not. Ergo, the Imperium is certainly not perfect, but it could have been doing far far worse.
Unless you have an oppressive theocracy that will gladly dedicate entire planets (with billions of people) to a life of misery so that they can keep a single chapter of their sacred warrior monks around, simply because that is what god said to do. This is not the real world where failure and inefficiency are properly dealt with. If god says to have space marines, then there will be space marines no matter how much of a spectacular waste of resources they are.
I don't know man, the Ultramar system seems to be thriving despite being dedicated to supporting the single most famous Space Marine chapter. 'Misery' is not the impression I got. You'd think the Ultramarines themselves, or at the very least the Salamanders who seem the most reasonable of the bunch, would have pointed out their own ineffectivity, if they did not have the
RoC backing them up. The Space Wolves also seem to be doing fine despite living on a Death World with little resources.
It's a source, and as "official" as anything in 40k's blatantly contradictory canon. My point is that the source makes absurd claims about the purity of space marines that directly contradict well-established elements of the fluff. Space marines can not be simultaneously immune to doubt simply because they are space marines and able to fall to the lure of chaos. It's kind of like the idiotic GK fluff where even basic GK are absolutely 100% immune to chaos corruption, and a few pages later there are special super-elite GK that are even more immune to chaos corruption. It just doesn't make sense.
It makes as much sense as you make of it. You are free to interpret it as doubt in faith and dismiss it as stupid, but to me it seems more likely to be doubt in the
power of the Emperor. The Space Marines were created as 'grandchildren' of the Emperor, they 'carry a fraction of the Emperor himself in their geneseed' as it says, so they do not doubt that. Even the Chaos Marines acknowledge that the Emperor has power, even if they see it as false and merely attached to a corpse. Guardsmen who have never had that attachement thus have a grain of doubt that they can't quite get rid of.
Except they can't. Look at the numbers involved and the absurdity is obvious. Space marines simply can't make a difference because there aren't enough of them. When you have battles involving millions of troops on each side a handful of space marines aren't going to have any meaningful effect on the final outcome. Wars are won by logistics and consistent success on the battlefield, not by a squad of heroes fighting one small skirmish.
And of course even if a space marine force manages to win the war on one planet they have failed to win thousands of other wars happening at the same time because there just aren't enough marines to be everywhere at once. Their net effect on the 40k universe is pretty much nonexistent in practical terms. In fact, their greatest contribution to the Imperium is probably the fact that those thousands of other wars will have the morale boost of knowing that every minute the IG and PDF hold off the inevitable end is one more minute for a miracle to happen and the space marines to arrive.
It depends. You justify it with stupidity, I could just as easily justify it with their power. Rule of cool, taking down the enemy leader and thus shattering their army, presenting an unbreakable concentration of force that saps their morale... The setting practically showers us with justification for their presence. Besides, some of the
BL books seem a little too detailed to be propaganda, honestly (And I doubt Dead Sky, Black Sun would make very good propaganda anyway).
Mine is also supported by the fluff, once you realize that most of the fluff is seen through the eyes of the Imperium and subject to its biases and deliberate distortion of the truth.
How good that I said that some of the fluff supports your point of view as well then? Calm down, I am not attacking you, only arguing. And yes, the Imperium does have its bias... But there are many things like Horus Rising and False Gods that try to make us empathise with the villains. (Whether they succeed or fail is another topic, though, one that I won't dig into here. But they certainly try!) I doubt that the Imperium would release propaganda that try to make the reader sympathise with Horus. You can call the Imperium stupid, but they can't be that stupid.
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