lost the war, he would have been declared a war criminal, and US bomber pilots would have been tried inmuch the same way as the Nazis at Nuremburg. The logic of Nuremburg suggests the Allied pilots should have refused the mission to fire-bomb Tokyo. Had the Allies lost the war, the action – along with the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – would have been deemed excessive. As they won, it was arguably justified. A NEED-TO-KNOWBASIS There is a tension at the heart of military power structures that creates an arbitrary division between commanders and soldiers in order for the war machine to function. If each soldier has access to all the information and is expected to act independently, it would be hard to fight a coherent battle. The argument is made in 40k that many traitor Space Marines had little choice in their fall to Chaos, as they knew little about the distant Emperor, and their trust lay in the bureaucracy around them, overtaking any individual sense of right and wrong. This is akin to the case of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, tried for war crimes in the 1960s. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt argues Eichmann was not motivated by fanaticism or sociopathic tendencies, but rather was left unable to think from another perspective and see that what he was doing was wrong. While his guilt is beyond doubt, it raises questions about whether any single soldier can ever be truly responsible in light of orders from higher up the chain of command. THEWAR ON TERROR In 40k, atrocities carried out in the name of the greater good are explained by the response “These are inhuman times.” This is essentially the same argument used by the United States to justify the War on Terror, the operation of Guantanamo Bay – where the normal rule of law is suspended and prisoners are interred without trial and subject to torture – and the use of drone strikes in countries deemed ‘unwilling or unable’ to deal with terror suspects. The US and its allies are acting within the bounds of international legal precedent, but arguably in a non-legal manner, suspending the normal rule of law and transforming criminals into military enemies: applying a logic of war to what would normally be a matter for the courts. They argue their actions are necessary in order to avoid potential catastrophe and an even greater loss of life, the power to suspend law out of necessity akin to that wielded by Space Marines and Inquisitors in 40k, enacting the ‘permanent state of emergency’ to kill heretics without censure. There are many parallels between the heretics and present-day terrorists. The issue is that, often, each individual heretic does not pose a great threat on a case-by-case basis, and may have committed no crime. Rather, the danger lies in their potential threat at some point in the future. The concept of heretics in 40k long pre-dates 9/11 and the US government’sWar on Terror, but the parallelsmean it can be difficult to tell the two apart. One is a grimdark dystopia of perpetual war where heretics are killed for something they may never do, the other a world in which the US and its allies use drones to execute terror suspects in distant lands. In aworld of black ops, drone strikes and the never-endingWar on Terror, the 40k universe has never been so relevant. Dr Mike Ryder is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Marketing, whose interdisciplinary research explores a range of different areas, including robotics, AI, consumption, ethics and war. Conscripts FromBirth: War and Soldiery in the GrimDarkness of the Far Future, by Mike Ryder, is published in Fantastika Journal. m.ryder@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 33
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