frogbear
Quote: I guess you missed the whole 'good guy' aspect. Space Marines are depicted as the heroes of the Imperium.
1) Being a good guy does not rely on you having a name that says "I'm a good guy". Heroes can choose scary names for the same reason villains do.
2) Being the hero of the most evil regime in history doesn't mean that you, looked at by a neutral observer, will be a good guy. Coming up with a sufficiently neutral historical example is tricky, so I will leave it to your imagination.
Plenty of Space Marine chapters are portrayed unheroically (by our standards, at least) if you look. The White Scars commit massacres, the Blood Angels occasionally eat civilians, the Ultramarines put all children on their home world into barracks (and may expose infants), the Imperial Fists routinely torture themselves, the Dark Angels cheerfully pull out of combat zones to pursue a private agenda, the Iron Hands routinely wipe out whole populations for the infractions of a few, the Black Templars are religious zealots who purify all kinds of things in all kinds of unpleasant ways, and the Marines Malevolent bomb refugee camps to get the Orks inside. All chapters, as a requirement of their existence, force mental and physical trauma upon adolescents unable to consent to it. And that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Space Marines are on the side of humanity. That is a very different thing from being heroes, or good. Some Space Marine chapters are nicer than others - but the ones who aren't nice can be very unpleasant indeed.
I guess my question is what made you think Space Marines were nice and heroic in the first place, or interested in giving that impression?
Quote: It is yet to be clarrified, depending on what continent you chose to live, who the good guys really are in real life situations. That is because it is real life and not a book. Hence I will stand by my statement above. 
While not as morally complicated as real life, 40K is (generally speaking) more morally complicated than most fictional worlds because every single side and group can convincingly be portrayed as evil. Your ability to forgive them depends entirely on your affection for the concept of the ends justifying the means.
The whole point of 40K is that the good guys are not compartmentalized for your convenience, might not exist in the first place, and if they do exit are a minority who still do horrible things and are probably declining. Grim darkness of the far future where there is only war, and all that.
GlynG
Quote: Personally I think the west has to top any real life evil rankings, but I'm not sure there are much in the way of good guys. People still living less destructive lives more in tune with nature like jungle tribesmen are the closest I would say.
An anecdote about the Indians of North America.
When Samuel de Champlain first landed in N.A, he met a nice bunch of natives called the Huron, who were having a war with their neighbours, the Iroquois. He had dinner with the Huron, who mentioned they were wandering down the river to have a battle. Champlain, being a gentleman, volunteered to go with. He took his gun. When the Iroquois champions marched out of the battle line (pre-gun Indian warfare was very different), Champlain leveled his gun, blew one away, and changed the face of history.
This cost the French their empire in North America before it even existed (there were a lot of Iroquois). But more importantly it (and the way the Iroquois later virtually annihilated the Huron) demonstrate a principle of history that so often seems to be forgotten: a lot of people are Cads without the help of Europeans. They have wars, they kill each other, and they exploit natural resources. Large chunks of fur trade history are the fur traders trying to get the Indians to stop killing each other over the rights to fur trade areas and use that energy trapping more fur.
Unless your sole measure for evil is how much damage one does to the ecology of the planet, claiming that western society is the most evil ever seems questionable.
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Can you do the Badab War too? 