The Imperium is the EU: a mostly loose federation of varied individual states that exists to enshrine a few very specific rules or principles in its members, and despite the brutal, racist, authoritarian, and inequitable structures of its component states it’s continuously threatened by outbreaks of even worse and even more Fascist movements internally. That’s right, the Imperium are libs.

The difference is the Imperium comes down extremely hard on those even-more-Fascist movements since they do things like intentionally spread virulent plagues or turn societies into autocannibalistic bloodbaths and it makes literal daemons manifest to wreck shit up, instead of just clutching pearls while working with the little uwu smol bean nazis and antivaxxers.

It really is a funny consequence of the setting’s creators really pulling their punches and not understanding scale that the Imperium comes across as less evil than real institutions they’re supposed to be satirizing and it’s “there is only war” setting is much more peaceful than the real world. Like their literal death cult religion has nothing on Evangelicals, and their whole paranoia and brutal suppression shit is targeted at and done in response to these arch-reactionary might-makes-right cultists that line up exactly with real-world reactionary movements whether that’s the RFK style anti-vaxxer nurglites, silicon valley libertines, the segment of vulgar fascists who are just out to self-actualize through random acts of violence to feel like big strong manly warriors, and the entire political consultant class as a whole. Like it’s barely a joke to say the Imperium is more moderate on how to deal with those sorts of destructive reactionaries than a lot of people here are, because the Imperium are still fucking libs.

To put it another way, the Imperium are cartoon villains who formed in the crucible of the darker-and-edgier pop culture movement of the 80s and 90s, as written by people who don’t really get that real world powers are even bigger and more awful cartoon villains underneath their human masks. So they do the silly bad guy stuff but it’s all too sterile, and it lacks the real anger and fear and depravity of real world reactionaries who also do all the silly cartoon bad guy stuff but even more so.