>>18924065You don't seem the understand the setting. The Emperor's unification wars only start after the Earth is nearly rendered entirely uninhabitable, and humanity is on the brink of destruction at the galactic level. The reason ordinary people support him early on is that they were starving, or under constant threat of being killed by techno-barbarians before he came along and wiped them out. He also knows that he's on a timer to:
a) Beat back the orks currently massing/growing back to form the Beast's WAGH (which peak crusading 30k humanity almost lost against anyway)
b) Fill the galactic power vacuum left by the Slaanesh warp storms before something else does/will (and the Crusade wipes out tonnes of alien species)
c) Do his webway shenanigans to once and for all cut of Humanity from the threat of Chaos corruption, which he can't do while galactic navigations requires travelling through their domain. Once the webway is opened, you can put blackstone pylons everywhere and cut Chaos off from the Milky Way, and never have to worry about them again.
All of which is completely undone by Chaos's own scheming, because you can't out-jew the Uber-Jew tzeentch.
He made a gambit and it failed, and its the *tragedy* of that failure that drives the core of the setting. But had the Emperor done nothing, Chaos would have won by default, or some other species would have.
The entire point of the setting is that the Emperor is 100% justified in everything he does, however horrifying it is, because the alternative is guaranteed to be worse. It's pure utilitarianism to support Giga-Hitler Autocratic Dictatorship, when everything else has failed, and nothing else is going to work.
