Is Warhammer 40,000 still satire?

 For those that don't know, the Warhammer 40,000 setting was created by Games Workshop. It's a famously bleak space fantasy setting, summed up by the tag line, "In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only war." 

The setting was first described in Rogue Trader, an unusual RPG / war game hybrid. It describes an ancient galaxy dominated by a stagnant fascist state called the Imperium of Man. The Imperium is a profoundly evil institution, to the point of black comedy.  

It's a setting with no good guy faction. A universe with many demons and no angels. So, how do you market a product like that?

The Imperium is nominally led by the nameless Emperor, who has actually been in stasis, on the brink of death, for thousands of years. Maintaining him in this state requires human sacrifice, on a scale of thousands of people a day. 

Worship of the emperor is the state religion. Heresy is punishable by death. The Imperium has repeatedly wiped out whole planets to keep heresy from spreading.

The xenophobic Imperium is at constant war with other sentient species of the galaxy. It is directly responsible for exterminating multiple species.

Newborn citizens are carefully screened for signs of "mutation."  Those deemed too far from the standard are deemed subhuman. Subs are either sterilized and enslaved, or simply euthanized. 

This is a setting with literal demons, and they struggle to do more evil than the Imperium. 

In short, 40k makes other dystopias look optimistic. In Soylent Green, the cannibalism was a shocking reveal, but Imperial guardsmen know exactly what their rations are made of. 

There is a natural tendency, among both fans and GW writers, to shy away from that awfulness. To not gaze too long into the abyss.

The earliest takes on the Imperium made it very male dominated and Eurocentric, because this is a setting where the bad guys won. All that garbled Latin is there for a reason. This has been partially walked back, as GW has added more PoC and women in official material. There are some gay background characters here and there.

Sure, this annoys the worst part of the fan base, but isn't it missing the point to downplay the Imperium's fascism? 

More insidious is the tendency to downplay and apologize for the Imperium's evil deeds. Maybe those aliens were all super evil? Maybe the imperium only kills the really ugly babies? The rebellious humans always turn out to be puppy-kicking monsters in the end.

Inevitably, there comes the argument that Imperium's evil is justified. It's the only way for humanity to survive in a hostile galaxy. It's not the imperium that's bad, it's the universe.

This argument is constantly made in-universe by Imperial characters. It doesn't take much media literacy to realize that these characters aren't the most reliable of narrators.

You don't have to be a student of history to realize that this is a very common argument in real life. Every bloody-handed dictator in history has repeated this exact argument.

So why do so many fans believe this obvious lie? 

More importantly, if they fall for this lie in fiction, will they fall for it in real life? The answer seems to be yes. There's a reason that Warhammer has an alt-right problem. 

I have more thoughts on this topic. More posts to follow.