When I see a meme like this, I always ask myself whether I read the same novels as the meme creator.
Every single Warhammer book so far (and I have read a metric shitton of them, with a good measure of short stories and novellas.) has made it abundantly clear to me what a horrible, inhumane shitshow the Imperium of Man is. Whether it's the Ultramarines Sergeant siccing the Imperial Guard on far superior Orks just to buy time, or the complete dehumanisation of the Deathkorps of Krieg, or the SoB Canoness who sees recovering relics as her priority and will walk over a lot of dead bodies to do it. Be it the description of a life on a factory world, the meaningless deaths of Astartes to hold one measly hill, the sheer monstrosity of the existence of Servitors or the god complex of the Inquisition or the Iron Hands sacrificing an entire Hive City to create a distraction while hunting down a Demon Prince (ah, Julius! Sweet, tragic Captain Kaesoron).
And the fact that the story is often told from the brainwashed perspective of the inhabitants of this dystopia does not relativise the horror, but on the contrary makes it even more present and horrifying in its cognitive dissonance.
For me, the comparison to Kafka always comes to mind. Anyone who has read ‘The Trial’ knows the view from below of a beaurocratic machine that eats people and is not questioned by any of its victims. It stands absolutely above everything and can and will break the individual.
For me, one thing is absolutely clear in every Warhammer novel: the future sucks camel dong. For everyone. And there are no good guys. On any side.
The glorification with which the Imperium of Man surrounds itself becomes painfully clear to me in the wonderful irony of its iconography: the omnipresent gilded Memento Mori.
This absolute devaluation of human life screams out at you from every line and I think the authors could only have used moustaches and monocles to make it clearer that the Imperium are most definitely not the good guys.
(As a Chaos connoisseur, however, I must add: My side is no better. Not one bit. Just a different flavour. A particularly nice piece of text full of irony here is the Lucius short story, in which the cruelty of a factory world is juxtaposed with the cruelty of Chaos and in the end everyone just loses again).
So, after a giant wall of text: No, I don't think GW/BL does a bad job showcasing the inhuman idocy of the Imperium of Man. They may not add "and they are the bad guys" to every character, but for me the horror of watching all the cruelty through eyes of people, who are so deep into this horror, that they can't even dream of a better world, is even more immediate.
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