Horus loyalist or traitor??????

[sicarius2424]

hey people just wanted to see what your thoughts are on Horus if you have read the horus heresy book series no imperial or chaos nonsense how do you feel about him from your pespective

[wittdooley]

Ugh...he's fairly obviously a traitor...as he turns against the Imperium and orchestrates the deaths of thousands of his former brothers.....

[Emperorsmercy]

yes, im afraid there isnt really any question, he's a baddun and no mistake.

[Lord Inquisitor]

I repeat what I said in your other thread and say that he is selfish and a traitor.

[RogueGarou]

I have to play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Yes, Horus cast aside his oaths of fealty and loyalty to his brothers, his father, his lord, and his empire. Yes, he committed many evil deeds. Yet those deeds are the same actions taken by the Imperium he betrayed. Horus was given a series of visions, purportedly of the past and future which led him to believe that the man he revered above all others, his father, had betrayed him and the very ideals Horus and the Emperor had fought, killed, and bled for over the course of countless hours and fields of battle.

He was given a partial view of a dystopian future so far removed from what he strived to build. A future wherein the Emperor was elevated to godhood. A future where he was not even remembered, not honored for his feats and sacrifices. A bleak parody of the golden age of enlightenment the Great Crusade was fought to attain. A future where humanity was crushed under the weight of a bureaucracy on an unimaginable scale. He was a warrior king fighting to elevate humanity to a pre-eminent position in the galaxy. Instead he was given a glimpse of a future where politicians with soft, ink-stained hands perpetrated the stagnation of a totalitarian religion held all of humanity under its thumb. The achievements of mankind are toppled down and there is little hope of ever attaining the level of technological progress they had fought to recover after the Dark Age of Technology. It is a future where unworthy men who had never stepped onto the field of honor presided over the deaths of billions without pause, without notice.

Horus acted as expected when given this imperfect intelligence. He railed against his father. He rebelled against this distorted vision of the glorious future of humanity. He was a warrior king, wise but a man of action first. He acted. Decisively. But ultimately impetuously and without gathering more information. His choler bested his logic and he acted impulsively. He never knew that he acted on data which was complete in its absence of certain facts. It was the future but only if he made the decision he was manipulated into making. Only if he acted as he did would all of this come to pass. Once he had learned this and made the decision to go to war with his father, battling his brothers was an easy choice. But even then, he did not want his brothers dead. Not at the beginning nor before the Heresy. That would come later. As with many evil deeds it began not with aspirations of great malice but with acts intended to be for the greatest good. As the old saying goes, the road home to hell is paved with good intentions.

In short, yeah, Horus was a traitor of the gravest order. All who gathered under his banner were traitors. After the lessons of the Heresy, the Imperium learned how to deal with traitors, heretics, xenos, and their ilk. They learned how to achieve the very thing Horus was working to avoid both before and after he first turned traitor.

[Schnitzel]

Its rather tragic if you think about it, the visions of the "future" Horus was shown to turn him are from the future he created. Had he never turned against his father, the future could have been a grand golden age of enlightenment.

[sangrail777]

Yeah really tragic.
Traitor in all the worst ways he coulda been.

[King Wibble]

He was a traitor, no doubt about it due to his betrayal. It is possible to argue that he was fighting for Imperial Truth of no gods, etc, however he worships the gods of chaos so therefore cannot be championing that.

[Shadow Queen]

heresy means freedom so with my $0.02 he wanted to break away.

[Kanaellars]

It was a very tragic fall.

Was he a traitor? Yes.

Was he decieved? Yes.