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Oct. 18, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:20:02
The Politics of Starship Troopers

The libertarian paradise. Sources and reading list: https://www.minds.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/blog/the-politics-of-starship-troopers-899788292908392448 #Heinlein #StarshipTroopers

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Starship Troopers.
It underperformed at the box office, got mixed reviews at best, left an awkward and confused feeling for many of the viewers who saw it.
And it was awesome!
Starship Troopers won, which is a fucking instant classic.
It is a 9 to 10 out of 10 for me.
It's the 20th anniversary of one of my favorite films of all time, Starship Troopers.
When I saw it blew my mind, it's kind of funny to think that it was that big of a deal, but I had the poster on my wall and everything.
I was all about Starship Troopers for like a year.
And I do think it's a fantastic film.
And if you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend watching it.
And maybe it's time for a rewatch as well.
People can't decide if there's an aggressive message to this movie or not.
Where we were also fighting with the book.
Because the book of Robert Heinlein, one of the at that time important science fiction writers, is militaristic and fascist.
So it was like telling one story is these guys are great and wonderful here is heroes.
And the other story was, by the way, they're fascist.
The bugs are never shown any sort of humanity in the movie.
They're just mindless monsters.
So at the end, when he's like, it's afraid.
It's like, well, of course it's afraid.
It's just defending its territory.
The society of Starship Troopers is completely dependent on war to function.
And therefore, they need an enemy to function.
And it's not just fascism.
There's a lot of other things that it's satirizing in them.
Fascism took over without anyone realizing that they're fascist.
Yeah, like a few people, including like Red Letter and stuff, they said it's like opposite Star Trek.
Instead of socialism, they went with fascism.
It's basically a parody that got misunderstood, and it still misunderstood what he was trying to parody.
So are we back at the source material?
I'd never seen anything like this.
It's so confusing.
I doubt anyone here would recognize civic virtue if it reached up and bit you in the ass.
So are all your favorite movie critics actually secret fascists?
The answer is yes.
All of these content creators are Nazis.
It starts by watching one review of Starship Troopers and ends by watching a review of Triumph of the Will.
Did you enjoy any of their content?
Then you too are a fascist.
After all, I'm not a fascist is exactly what a fascist would say.
Hell, there are even still Starship Troopers panels at conventions where the actors and their presumably pro-fascist audience reminisce about the film.
I wasn't Johnny Rico before.
I did Starship Troopers, but there isn't a day that goes by that somebody doesn't at the gas station and somebody will go, Rico!
So let's grab our dog whistles and take a look at everyone's favorite Nazi LARP fest.
It's so weird, it's so confusing.
I am, of course, just kidding.
If you look around the internet, you can easily find many modern interpretations of fascism, Nazism, and they use Mussolini and Hitler memes, adopting the symbols of the fasia and the swastika, respectively.
You don't see them using Starship Troopers memes.
It is, in fact, the Jordan Peterson fans using these, and I shall explain why in unnecessary and pedantic detail, because this is a topic I particularly enjoy.
So settle in as we travel back 500 years in order to figure out how we are even going to approach examining this topic.
Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has.
Use that freedom.
In the late Middle Ages, Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world were burdened with a preponderance of young noblemen who were destined for greatness.
To serve this demographic, a particular genre of literature emerged called specula principum in poorly pronounced Latin or Mirrors for Princes in English.
These were, broadly speaking, self-help books for aspiring rulers on how to rule.
In Europe, these books drew from classical Greek and Roman authors filtered through the lens of contemporary Christian theologians to instruct any would-be princes on Christian morals.
An example of this is Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus, published in 1516.
The purpose was to teach the prince right from wrong in statecraft and instruct them in contemporary moral standards as to how things should be in a proper Christian realm.
In 1532, a work by a Florentine diplomat was posthumously published, Il Principe, the Sovereign, more commonly mistranslated into English as the Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
The Prince was the most controversial addition to the genre, as Machiavelli was not, like previous authors, a Christian idealist.
Machiavelli was a political realist, and although also a Christian, divorced his political analysis from the moral instruction that had previously dominated works by other authors, and this enshrined Machiavelli as the father of political science.
It, of course, also incensed the Catholic Church and various Christian nations into banning the prince for centuries to come due to Machiavelli's blunt description of political reality for a medieval leader and the necessary though immoral actions one must occasionally take to maintain such an immoral system.
Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.
Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good and use that knowledge or refrain from using it as necessity requires.
And now we make the remarkable jump to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek.
Strange connection, I know, but Star Trek is commonly mistaken as some kind of socialist or communist utopia, and this is far from accurate.
Where Marx envisaged socialism to be the collective ownership of the means of production and communism to be a stateless, classless, propertyless, borderless society, Roddenberry's Star Trek Federation is a vision of a post-scarcity liberal order, complete with the state, the Federation, that imposes law and order, a military with a formal hierarchy, and defined borders against other states.
Private property is commonplace.
Kirk's family owned a farm.
Sisko's family owned a restaurant.
Picard's family owned a vineyard.
Quark owned a bar.
Star Trek isn't the communist utopia.
It's a liberal utopia for the moral idealist.
We're a strange combination.
We're about half animal and we're about half God, in my opinion.
The human being has got his toes in the mud and his heart and soul high in the heavens.
But that the mud is important.
It is the mud between our toes that allows us to dance.
And we must be all of those things.
In Star Trek, it is the propertyless, classless monomind, that is the Borg, that represents communism, not the Federation.
The flip side of this coin is Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Heinlein described a highly meritocratic liberal order, like Star Trek, based on a federation with an accountable hierarchy, a rule of law, and military borders and private property.
Although it's worth stressing that in both universes, Earth is a world state, and border states by other alien races.
The difference between Heinlein and Roddenberry is that where Roddenberry was a soft-hearted idealist, Heinlein was a hard-hearted realist.
And so Heinlein's interpretation of such a future is stern and unflinching in its application.
instead of Roddenberry's sensitive and moralistic interpretation.
I'd expect anyone in this unit to do the same for me.
A surprisingly large amount of literature has been written about science fiction author Robert Heinlein.
Because not only was he a popular pulp science fiction writer, he was an intellectual and active politician.
While Heinlein's political views shifted towards the libertarian right during the course of his career, in his early political life, he was a left-wing anti-communist liberal.
As such, he had a firm commitment to individualism that reflects in all of his work.
He was an active Democrat and took part in the End Poverty in California movement and even campaigned for socialist candidate Upton Sinclair's failed bid for the governor of California in 1934.
In 1938, Heinlein made his own unsuccessful bid for a seat in the California State Assembly.
He became a published author in 1939 after being discharged from the Navy with pulmonary tuberculosis.
Heinlein wrote fiction to pay the bills and after failing as a politician used his fiction to promote his politics.
Starship Troopers is less a science fiction novel than it is a vehicle for Heinlein's political vision, in the same way as Atlas Shrugged is for Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism.
Heinlein's liberal beliefs permeate the entire novel.
For example, at the beginning of each chapter, Heinlein begins with a quotation from authors such as Thomas Paine, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill.
He does not cite Giovanni Gentili, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Goebbels.
Heinlein held liberal views on race and sexuality.
He was a child of segregation and became an anti-racist activist.
Much of his work focused around a single world government, and so naturally the characters in his stories would come from different racial backgrounds.
In Starship Troopers, for example, Johnny Rico is actually Juan Rico, a Filipino man.
And of course, in the film, he's from Buenos Aires.
Oh, Johnny, it's us.
Buenos Aires has been wiped off the Earth.
At the end of another of Heinlein's books, For Us the Living, there is a detailed explanation of Heinlein's political opinions by Dr. Robert James of Culver City, California.
Apparently, something of a scholar on Heinlein, given his encyclopedic knowledge of Heinlein's life and personality, I was unable to track down any further information on Dr. James.
But according to him, Heinlein famously had a dual life.
In public, he and his wife were the perfect polite couple.
In private, they entertained an open marriage and were both known to be promiscuous.
Heinlein's desire to promote the liberal idea of a separation of public and private life is a running theme throughout his entire corpus and doubtless intertwines with the way he led his own life.
And although his views became more right-wing as he grew older, James describes them as consistently libertarian.
Rico, what's the moral difference, if any, between a civilian and a citizen?
Only the 1959 book written by Robert Heinlein is actually canon in the Starship Troopers universe.
The Paul Vehoeven movie is famously meant to be a satirical send-up of fascism, and the subsequent movies, Hero of the Federation, Marauder, Invasion, and Traitor of Mars, were all poorly received and broadly failed to understand the source material, with the possible exception of Traitor of Mars, and undoubtedly fail to qualify on popularity alone.
Look at that!
Five percent, ladies and gentlemen!
Big numbers!
In the ways in which the films are accurate to Heinlein's philosophy in the novel, I will use examples from the films.
Where there are any obvious contradictions, I will note how the films differ and why.
Although it's worth noting that the most important difference, and one that will permeate this entire analysis, is the character of Radczek.
In the novel, he does exist in a minor supporting role, but the character you are familiar with is called Dubois.
I'll use Radchek to describe both of these characters for convenience.
In the Starship Troopers universe, at an unspecified point in the near future, from the perspective of 1959, the mass social democracies in which we live today gradually became technocracies and eventually succumbed to the entropic forces of self-indulgence and government handouts.
Chaos, in the form of clockwork orange-style gangs of ultra-violent youths, terrorized frightened citizens until society collapsed and groups of veterans of the war against the Chinese take control and restore order.
From this chaos, a politically realist liberal order arose in the form of the Terran Federation.
Servicemen are not brighter than civilians.
In many cases, civilians are much more intelligent.
That was the sliver of justification underlying the attempted coup d'etat just before the Treaty of New Delhi.
The so-called revolt of the scientists.
Let the intelligent elite run things, and you'll have a utopia.
It fell flat on its foolish face, of course, because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue.
Its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility.
After the revolt of the scientists, their centrally planned, technocratic society led to the destruction of the family, social order, and personal responsibility.
A prediction that Heinlein was completely incorrect about, and something that we certainly aren't seeing in modern times.
The Federation is a replacement for the failed democracies of the 20th century.
It is a constitutional republic with a restricted suffrage that places strong emphasis on civic virtue, which broadly falls in line with Roman ideals, and this is presumably deliberate on Heinlein's part.
Where in the film, Carmen is asked about the city fathers of Hiroshima.
I wonder what the city fathers of Hiroshima would say about that.
In the book, she is asked about the city fathers of Carthage.
They probably wouldn't say anything.
Hiroshima was destroyed.
The philosophy Heinlein is establishing is essentially a modern interpretation of Roman republicanism, and this springs from Heinlein's liberal beliefs combined with his political realism.
All people are civilians until they make the conscious decision to become citizens, which requires a grueling two-year service.
Anyone can choose to become a citizen at any time, and the service does not always need to be in the military.
In universe, however, the Federation and the Arachnids are just two among many interstellar political actors who are often at war with one another, and military service is an option that must exist.
In the Federation, Heinlein is basically enshrining into the political process the distinction between a public and private life.
The civilians are private entities, so they work in the private sector, don't vote or hold office, but that doesn't mean they don't have opinions on politics and enjoy constitutionally protected freedoms such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.
As described by a major in the novel, the Federation is still another system, and our system works quite well.
Many complain, but none rebel.
Personal freedom for all is greatest in history.
Laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits.
Crime is at its lowest ebb.
Why?
Not because our voters are smarter than other people.
We've disposed of that argument.
Under our system, every voter and office holder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.
And that is the one practical difference.
He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue, but his average performance is enormously better than that of any class of rulers in history.
This is the Terran oath that Heinlein wrote for each cadet enrolling in federal service.
I, being of legal age and my own free will, without coercion, promise, or inducement of any sort, after having been duly advised and warned of the meaning and consequences of this oath, do now enroll in the federal service of the Terran Federation for a term of not less than two years and as much longer as may be required by the needs of the service.
I swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the Federation against all enemies on and off terror, to protect and defend the constitutional liberties of all citizens and lawful residents of the Federation, its associated states and territories, to perform on or off terror such duties of any lawful nature that are assigned to me by lawful direct or delegated authority,
and to obey all lawful orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Terran service and of all officers or delegated persons placed over me, and to require such obedience from all members of the service or other persons or non-human beings lawfully placed under my orders and,
on being honourably discharged at the completion of my full term of active service or upon being placed on inactive retired status after having completed such full term, to carry out all duties and obligations and to enjoy all privileges of Federation citizenship,
including but not limited to the duty, obligation and privilege of exercising sovereign franchise for the rest of my natural life unless stripped of honour by a verdict finally sustained of court of my sovereign peers.
The serving citizen is employed by the Federation, who, after the term of service, can return to private life as a citizen with the right to vote and run for office.
As a child, each person must attend a mandatory course that almost every school offers called History and Moral Philosophy, the course in which Johnny Rico is instructed by Radchek, who expounds Heinlein's ideas on philosophy at length in sections of the book.
This course has no examination to pass and functionally serves primarily as a method for Heinlein to explain his political views in no uncertain terms.
Rico's father believed that Ranchek was brainwashing his son into federal service, but Rico describes it in reverse, saying that Radchek had a snotty, superior manner.
He acted as if none of us was really good enough to volunteer for service.
There should be a law against using a school as a recruiting station.
No, Radczak doesn't do that at all.
He sort of discourages you.
Heinlein clearly had a burning hatred of communism and rebukes it as often as he can, for example, by deconstructing Marxist theory from Radczek's mouth.
Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous.
All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart.
It remains a mud pie.
Value zero.
By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value.
An untalented cook can turn a wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess.
Value zero.
Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.
These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value, the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives, and to illustrate the truth of the common sense definition as measured in terms of use.
Heinlein goes on to describe Karl Marx as the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, a neurotic, unscientific, illogical, pompous fraud.
The Starship Troopers universe is essentially a libertarian power fantasy in which society has greatly expanded to dwarf the size of the state, which in this case is the Federation, the world state, a unique legal incorporation operating as a constitutional republic and run with the kind of hyper-efficiency usually associated with the military to ensure minimal burden of taxation on the public.
Citizenship is not necessary for a prosperous life.
In the book, Rico's father calls citizenship a meaningless vanity and instead wants him to study business at Harvard with the expectation that Rico would become a businessman.
The peace, wealth, and stability of Earth is why Rico's father openly opposes federal service, describing it as parasitism, pure and simple, a functionless organ, utterly obsolete, living on the taxpayers, a decidedly expensive way for inferior people who otherwise would be unemployed to live at the public expense for a term of years, then give themselves airs for the rest of their lives.
Rico's family is wealthy, and we are told that they have not sullied themselves with politics for over a hundred years, and his father is planning an instella vacation as an incentive to push Rico towards business instead of following his own personal goals towards service.
How about a trip to the Outer Rings, Zegama Beach, huh?
I've always wanted to go there.
Good.
Starship Troopers is what a bourgeois liberal society would look like if people took their citizenship seriously.
The very purpose of citizenship in Heinlein's Federation is to earn the sovereign franchise, the right to vote and take part directly in political life.
It is democratic in form and function.
The only particular difference between Heinlein's democracy and modern democracy is the question of suffrage.
In Heinlein's democracy, suffrage is restricted until a civilian chooses to endure the ordeal of becoming a citizen.
The franchise is not inherited as a birthright, it is earned.
Although Heinlein is very clear about the constitutional right of every civilian to have the opportunity to become a citizen, everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship.
As one fleet sergeant describes, most people are not fit for elite military service in the mobile infantry.
We've had to think up a list of dirty, nasty, dangerous jobs that will have them run home with their tails between their legs and their terms uncompleted.
Or make them remember for the rest of their lives that their citizenship is valuable because they paid a high price for it.
So in order to demand their right to citizenship, when Rico is examined by civilian doctors, one explains to him that if you came in here in a wheelchair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match.
The only way you can fail is by having the psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.
The civilian doctor repudiates citizenship as a nominal political privilege that most aren't competent enough to use.
After giving his oath, Johnny Rico comments that it made me realize I was no longer a civilian, with my shirt tail out and nothing on my mind.
There is no compulsion to serve the state, and none of the civilians act like there is.
The civilian is not under the authority of the Terran Federation beyond the law, and serving the required two years to earn the vote is voluntary.
In fact, participation in federal service requires informed, indeed, persistent consent, and in fact, remarkable willpower, as we see as a constant theme throughout the films and book in the various social and systemic attempts to get the civilian to quit!
You sign from Front 48!
You grab your gear!
You take a stone down!
Wash out lane!
There are no punishments or penalties for quitting other than you may not apply to become a citizen again and must forever remain a civilian.
Do you get me?
You can leave at any time and you are, in fact, encouraged to do so.
So why does the franchise have to be earned?
It's a reward.
What the Federation gives you for doing federal service.
No.
No.
Something given has no value.
Heinlein answers this question through Radczek during a history and moral philosophy lecture.
There is an old song which asserts that the best things in life are free.
Not true.
Utterly false.
This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the 20th century.
Those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe they could simply vote for whatever they wanted and get it.
Without toil, without sweat, without tears.
Nothing of value is free.
Even the breath of life is purchased at birth through only gasping effort and pain.
In Heinlein's view, to make the citizens aware of the value of the citizenship is to instill within them a deep sense of civic virtue.
For your citizenship to matter, you must earn it, and that you earn it imbues it with scarcity, which gives it value.
Naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor.
The contrary opinion that violence never solves anything is wishful thinking at its worst.
People who forget that always pay.
In the novel, Heinlein is describing nothing that falls outside of the current modern theoretical understanding of the democratic state.
However, Heinlein is frequently criticized for promoting a social Darwinist view of society as a struggle for survival based on military strength.
One of the negative lessons it's commonly claimed that Rico has repeatedly taught is that violence can be an effective method for settling conflict.
So let's have a frank talk about violence by describing things as they are, as Machiavelli might, instead of describing things as we should prefer them, as Erasmus might have done.
Whether we like it or not, violence is a part of the human experience.
What's more is that, often, you enjoy it, at least vicariously, which is definitely one of the reasons you loved Starship Troopers.
This is simply reality, and Heinlein's blunt handling of that fact is not to be mistaken as a moral endorsement.
There is a distinction to be made between warranted and unwarranted violence.
There are all nationalities in ISIS, he said then.
Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Saudis.
Underlining one reason ISIS might now be exposing its own people.
Recruitment.
The inherent message to disaffected Muslims everywhere.
Come join us.
Lots are.
They were trying to show that this was almost a united nation of jihadis.
This was jihadis that were carrying out these beheadings from different places around the world.
Sometimes it can be warranted to initiate violence, necessary even, and the standards by which we make such judgments are not objective and never will be.
So we as a society have to negotiate between ourselves what we consider to be fair and reasonable.
Warranted violence could cover a large range of forms.
Violence in self-defense, violence to enforce the law, or violence by consent, for example in contact sports or sexual gratification, all dependent on the context in which they are used.
Unwarranted forms of violence would naturally include things like unlawful imprisonment, random attacks, all the way up to genocide.
Consensual violence can make you feel good, even if you're on the receiving end of it, and not necessarily in a sexual way.
Losing a boxing match might still leave one with a sense of achievement and proud of the bruises.
Every single person watching this video will have been subject to violence at some point in their lives, both involuntarily and voluntarily.
From the earliest ages when one toddler pushes another, we discover that humans have power, the capacity to use force to alter the world around us in order to suit our intentions.
For us to then live peaceably with one another, we must have the rule of law, a common and enforced understanding of the appropriate way to deal with one another fairly.
The alternative is, of course, for one group to have the power to enforce a one-sided view of what is appropriate, which is the path to tyranny and oppression.
Liberal democracies work so well because of the way in which they manage power, and hold it to account using democracy.
We elect our rulers through the sovereign franchise.
The fraction of total political power each citizen wields is divided equally between them all in the form of their vote.
This allows us to create a practical and functional prohibition on political violence without any party feeling unjustly aggrieved.
No man can justify initiating force because of his lack of raw power, because when the final arbitration of force is to be made, we are all just citizens.
One man with one vote.
There is no fairer system that we can use to create a peaceful society that actually functions in the real world, leaving us with no other option but to talk to one another to solve our problems like civilized people.
In the film adaptation, this is laid down by Radchik via pithy, straight-talking political realism, laying out a theory of the state that is drawn directly from early Enlightenment thinking.
Radchik is positively channeling Thomas Hobbes' 12 Principles of Sovereign Right when he says, Look, when you vote, you are exercising political authority.
You're using force.
And force, my friends, is violence.
The supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.
This is a correct statement and is, in fact, the theory on which all of our modern liberal democracies are founded.
For good or for ill, force is, without a doubt, the final method of resolution for any conflict.
There is no method beyond it.
If there were, we would have no choice but to invest the state with a monopoly on that too, so we don't use it arbitrarily against one another.
We select a sovereign government of representatives with the right to impose the rule of law, decide war and peace, and regulate society.
If these powers must exist, and most people agree that they must, then they must be held directly accountable to the body politic, which they are, making the purpose of the state to protect the constitutional rights of citizens from both foreigners and one another.
This is how both a modern liberal democracy conducts itself under universal suffrage and how Heinlein's Federation conducts itself under restricted suffrage.
It is a fair and prosperous society because the voters control the state.
All disputes can be dealt with legally, and no man is the judge of his own grievance.
But do you understand it?
Do you believe it?
I believe the reason that people assume Heinlein is promoting violence is because of the framing of his statements.
If one frames himself as an agent of the state, a citizen, one must have an opinion on the operation of the state.
The state is invested with the power to use force, and if it is to be run by citizens, the citizens must be able to have these conversations to decide the most ethical way of taking action, or else it will be unable to take any action at all.
There is no point in pretending that this is not the reality of living in a democratic state in order to appear virtuous.
Either you will be taken by surprise by something you assumed wouldn't happen, or you will be revealed as a hypocrite when your actions contradict your professed moral standards.
It might sound noble to say that violence is never justified, but it isn't true.
And both the novel and the movie are, of course, set during a war.
Violence is inevitably going to be a common theme, and the focus of the story will naturally be on the mobile infantry.
I need a corporal.
You're it until you're dead, or till I find somebody better.
The first film adaptation shows the mobile infantry as a fairly modern-looking military operation, with slightly more advanced gears and tactics.
Heinlein's conception of the mobile infantry was one of the earliest examples of power armor in fiction.
The main redeeming characteristic of the movie sequels is the more accurate portrayal of the MI as a tiny, ultra-elite corps of power armor-wearing, jump-jet-using platforms of death that are individually dropped into a battlefield from orbit, hence the name the mobile infantry.
Boot camp is made as hard as possible and on purpose, and unlike the films, the military camp is unisex, with no women.
The purpose of which is to make the cadet as fit and able as possible, as to be fair to his comrades and the cadet.
This is presented in the spirit of a stern father, who knows that the world is tough and wants to prepare his children accordingly.
The drill sergeants are not presented as capricious and cruel, but as men grimly doing what must be done to ensure the cadet is at their very best for the good of the team and ultimately themselves.
As evidenced in the numerous propaganda shorts throughout the film, the mobile infantry are recruited and not conscripted.
Though disciplinarian in the model of the Roman Republic, service is voluntary and punishment is carried out publicly and without question, although not without compassion.
I doubt on this, son.
It helps.
I know.
However, there is no doubt that you chose this, you broke the rules, and you accept the punishment.
As a logical continuation of framing the citizen as the agent of the state, the philosophy of the mobile infantry follows directly from Karl von Klausewitz.
War is the continuation of politics by other means.
As Drill Sergeant Zim informs us, War is not violence and killing.
Pure and simple.
War is controlled violence for a purpose.
The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force.
The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him, but to make him do what you want him to do.
Not killing, but controlled and purposeful violence.
The state is legitimate because it is accountable.
Leaders are elected through democratic means and any person can become a citizen.
When the state makes a decision, it is the representative, legitimate decision of a free political body, and every citizen has a moral duty to ensure these decisions are carried out.
This is Heinlein's civic conception of the state, which should come as no surprise given Heinlein's own political leanings as an individualist liberal and a Democrat.
Heinlein was also clearly very sentimental towards the soldier, as a man and a warrior, and conceived the mobile infantry to be like a new family that someone chose.
He seems to have felt a particular affection for the stolid infantryman.
We are the boys who go to a particular place at a shower, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die.
We are the bloody infantry, the doeboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person.
We've been doing it with changes in weapons, but very little change in our trade, at least since the time of 5,000 years ago when the Futzluggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry uncle.
Join the mobile infantry and save the world.
Service guarantees citizenship.
Verhoeven thought he made a film about fascism and attempted to create a satirical look at a futuristic fascist society.
The problem with Verhoven's representation of this futuristic fascist society is that it doesn't actually contain any fascism.
Fascism is a collection of political movements that grew out of the European socialist movements in the early 20th century.
The fascists scorned international socialism as a failure.
Mussolini called international class-based socialism a dead doctrine and one that would lead to the destruction of all mankind, according to Adolf Hitler.
Fascism was a new kind of right-wing socialism that emerged based on nationalism.
In the doctrine of fascism, Mussolini explains that the 20th century was to be the century of the state.
For fascism, the state is absolute.
Individuals and groups, relative.
Individuals and groups are admissible insofar as they come within the state.
Instead of directing the game and guiding the material and moral progress of the community, the liberal state restricts its activities to recording results.
The fascist state is wide awake and has a will of its own.
For this reason, it can be described as ethical.
The state, as conceived and realized by fascism, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, judicial, and economic organization of the nation.
An organization which, in its origin and growth, is a manifestation of the spirit.
Fascism in Italy differed from Nazism in Germany primarily on the opinion on race.
Where Hitler believed in the German people as a political ethnic collective and built a state around that conception, Mussolini felt the delirium of race was just a feeling, not a reality, and put the primary focus on the state itself.
Italian fascism was less focused on ethnic hatred than Nazism, but ethnic purges happened nonetheless.
Where fascists venerated and deified the state, the Nazis deified the race.
The state is not only the present, it is also the past and above all, the future.
Transcending the individual's brief spell of life, the state stands for the imminent conscience of the nation.
However, they functioned in a similar way to both each other and the international socialists, creating brutally authoritarian, utterly corrupt regimes that seized control of the economy, enriched the party members, persecuted their opponents, suppressed information, and tyrannized the people they claimed they were trying to help.
While they might have looked at one another as infidels following heretical doctrines, their methods were the same, and they both had the same core opponent, liberalism.
If liberalism spells individualism, fascism spells government.
By the fascist and socialist contention, liberalism's bourgeois society and capitalist economy had created terrible inequality, crushing poverty, and the cultural listlessness of the early 20th century in continental Europe.
Both the socialists and the fascists agreed that liberalism had failed in its promise to help mankind, and something had to change.
Where the socialists wanted collective ownership of the means of production, meaning the abolition of private property, the fascists instead opted for what Mussolini described as the totalitarian state.
As Hitler put it, Why bother with such half-measures when I have far more important matters in hand, such as the people themselves?
Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories?
We socialize human beings.
In Italy and Germany, fascists were ready to ally with what they considered to be soft, liberal or conservative centrism in order to combat the international socialist left.
But the fascists themselves loathed liberalism, flouted its tenets, and scorned its adherents.
Both Italian and German fascism violated the rule of law with brutal paramilitary gangs, known as black shirts and brown shirts respectively, to attack and sometimes murder political opponents, owing their loyalty to the party leader alone.
By normalizing violence in the political realm, the fascists overwhelmed those who spoke out against them, but could do nothing to stop them, as the fascists would simply cry, we don't care.
Mussolini seized power off the march on Rome and eventually was declared the Duke of the Italian Social Republic, a position in which he remained until the Axis lost the Second World War.
Hitler attempted something similar with his Beer Hall Putsch, but failed and spent years in prison where he would rightmine Kampf.
He subsequently took over Germany via the ballot box after years of brutal street fighting with socialists during the decay of the Weimar Republic.
As Mussolini details in the political and social doctrine of fascism, the purpose of a fascist state was to provide moral and spiritual guidance as a custodian and transmitter of the spirit of the people.
As the state transcended the individual's lifetime, it became effectively some kind of deity, and then it created human generations in turn, protecting them, feeding them, and educating them into a consciousness of their mission while providing them with a unifying goal.
This goal is the ever-increasing perfection of the state itself, conquering art, science, and mathematics, with the state leading men up out of primitive existence into a new golden age.
And of course, when we say the state, we mean the one-party dictatorship that puts all of society under the personal control of the glorious leader.
The motive for war was essentially the same with both Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's Nazism, to out-compete other states to prove the greatness of their own.
Both fascism and Nazism created justifications for war with their neighbors and pursued them vigorously.
Fascist irredentism sought to reform the Roman Empire, putting Greece, Africa and the Middle East in Mussolini's sights, whereas Hitler believed in people of the same blood belonging to the same Reich, facilitating the annexing of Austria and German-inhabited parts of Czechoslovakia and the doctrine of Leibensraum, pushed German expansion to the east.
As contemporary communist economist Gunther Reiman described it, under fascism, corruption was a liberating force because the procedure of the fascist state was for the state to take complete control of every aspect of society, and this is a plan that was put into motion in both Italy and Germany.
The economy was centralized, and around this swiftly formed a vast bureaucratic structure that regulated the distribution of raw materials, controlled directly by the party.
Private property would be seized arbitrarily and given to party members.
All media was censored and allowed only to print that which was beneficial to the party.
The fascist regime retained control through a draconian secret police force that terrorized its own citizens, using extraordinary renditions, public beatings, murders, or enslavement in work camps for anyone who dissented.
The purpose of fascism was to turn the sovereign state into the master of the slave society.
This year we explored the failure of democracy, where the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.
talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.
Heinlein's philosophy is the direct reverse of fascism, a sovereign society that keeps a state in chains of law.
Heinlein projected a military dictatorship that emerges from classical liberal democracies after they collapse due to a lack of personal responsibility.
This dictatorship creates the Terran Federation, a democratic constitutional government with suffrage restricted to those who earn it, with the opportunity to earn citizenship being open to all.
The plans of Hitler and Mussolini are the opposite of Heinlein's visions of the future.
Where fascism sought to create a party which entirely governs a nation, the Terran Federation is microscopic and has a free market economy outside of the state's explicit control.
We are given descriptions of a bourgeois capitalist paradise, Buenos Aires in the movie and Vancouver in the book.
I stood around and gawked at beautiful buildings, at display windows filled with all manner of unnecessary things, and not a weapon among them, and at all those people running around or even strolling, doing exactly as they pleased, and no two of them dressed alike.
Fascist regimes were also notoriously corrupt, but the closest we see to corruption in Starship Troopers is when Rico hands in his resignation before the destruction of Buenos Aires.
Is this your signature, Rico?
Sir, you say that's sir.
Doesn't look like it to me.
Rico doesn't even have to bribe them to let him stay.
They break the regulations for sentimental reasons.
Fascism describes itself as totalitarian and places war as the highest virtue of mankind in order to bring out his noblest nature through heroism.
Heinlein's state places the expression of the Terran constitution as the highest value, with service in the state as the legitimate means to gain and exercise political power.
The Terran Federation does not require war to exist, although as a state it is undoubtedly going to engage in wars, as would anyone necessary to protect itself.
Where fascism is all-inclusive, forcing its population to be wards of the state from the cradle to the grave, the Terran Federation is exclusive, and this exclusivity causes the state to shrink in proportion to society.
The focus of responsibility in fascism is the state and so everything must flow from it.
In the Terran Federation, the focus of responsibility is on the citizen.
Heinlein's sky marshals are not fascist dictators.
They are not invested with absolute power and are demonstrated to be held accountable for their failures.
For example, the defeat at Klendathu.
We can compare this to the destruction of the German Sixth Army by the Russians at Stalingrad.
Adolf Hitler was not forced to step down for his failure.
Fascism was openly imperialistic, but it's not possible to compare the doctrines of fascist irredentism or the Nazi interest in Labensram with the Mormon colonists.
Mormon extremists disregarded federal warnings and established Port Joe Smith, deep inside the Arachnid quarantine zone.
Too late, they realized that Dantana had already been chosen by other colonists, arachnids.
Would you like to know more?
The Terran Federation didn't send the Mormon colonists, and it's implied that they went on their own without knowing there were bugs on the planet, and against the advice of the Federation, as the planet fell within an exclusion zone.
These contradictions refute any claim that Starship Troopers, the novel of the films, portray a fascist society.
You don't approve.
Well, too bad.
We're in this for the species, boys and girls.
It's simple numbers.
They have more.
every day I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths.
However, that is not to say that both fascists and Heinlein were not able to see the same problem, even if their methods for addressing the problem were at odds.
Both Heinlein's Federation and the fascist regimes of the 20th century agreed on the following.
The failure of liberal democracy.
Fascism and Starship Troopers Federation both came about because of the failure of liberal democracy to prevent violence from proliferating throughout society.
The difference is that in the real world case of fascism, the violence was driven by the fascists themselves, in conflict with equally violent factions such as socialists.
In Heinlein's universe, this social violence came about due to delinquent gangs.
In the real world, fascism was the cause of the failure.
In Heinlein's world, the Federation was the solution to it.
However, both believed that 20th century liberal democracy would not be the future.
Fascists rejected democracy in principle as an affront to nature.
Heinlein believed that it would fail due to a creeping system of poor incentives, a collapse in moral standards, and a lack of attention to duty, all brought about by social scientists.
Any planet that symbolizes anger, war, and rampant male sexuality deserves to be blown up.
A lot of ideas in there.
You've really done your homework.
The greater good.
Both Heinlein and Mussolini believed that the citizens should serve the whole above themselves.
The difference is that, where Mussolini believed that all should be in service to the state and at the whim of the representative of the people, in Starship Troopers, they are acting in service to a constitution, under which every human on earth enjoys the same rights.
Heinlein believed the citizen acting in the interest of others would demonstrate he was not acting for himself and help prevent corruption.
If one wanted to act in their own interests, one would enter the private sector.
Militarism.
Fascism's heroic aspirations required an enemy to demonize to justify conflict and expansion, making militarism a key pillar of fascist ideology.
Heinlein's Federation does not have this pillar and is not actually a militaristic state, even though it may appear to be from what we see.
The focus in the novel and the film are on the military because the novel is set during a war.
In this way, it is no different to any modern state, fascist or democratic, except Heinlein's proposed military is essentially only made up of the special forces.
The training is essentially the same, but with Heinlein's universe containing more violence because of the improved medical technology and Romanesque ethos.
They are training to become elite soldiers.
What were you expecting?
A daycare center?
Woke on Marxism.
Both philosophies repudiate Marxism in the harshest terms.
Heinlein demonstrating its wrongness through argument, where Hitler believed it was the racial ideology of the Jews, and Mussolini described it as a religion, which incidentally is also what fascism is, with the status of God.
So...
I only have one rule.
Everyone fights, no one quits.
No.
Heinlein's theory of the state is consistent with liberal theory, but how it would end up working out is anyone's guess.
It could be that Heinlein struck on the perfect method of creating a ruling class of hardcore libertarians, or perhaps there's some flaw in his theory that would result in something utterly untoward happening.
Heinlein thought we would need stronger emphasis on personal responsibility, because he believed that we were not born with a moral sense, but we acquire one, through being well raised and disciplined by a loving family.
And 20th century democracies became degenerate and failed to instill discipline in younger generations, which caused them to run out of control.
Man has no moral instinct.
He is not born with a moral sense.
You were not born with it.
I was not.
And a puppy has none.
We acquire moral sense.
What do we do through training and experience and hard sweat of mind?
These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I and they had no chance to acquire any.
Their experience did not permit it.
What is moral sense?
It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive.
The instinct to survive is human nature itself.
And every aspect of our personalities derives from it.
Anything that conflicts with the survival instincts acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual, and thereby fails to show up in future generations.
This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable.
It is the single eternal impedive controlling everything we do.
To Heinlein, the basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to the group that self-interest has to the individual.
Also, he believed that man had no natural rights whatsoever, and the only rights he has are those he gives himself.
Heinlein believed that there is no right to life, as nature clearly does not believe.
There is no right to liberty, as it must be continually fought for.
And the pursuit of happiness is neither a right nor a liberty, but a state of mind that no tyrant can remove, no matter how wretched one's condition.
In Heinlein's universe, social workers and child psychologists created the feral, murderous gangs of kids roaming the street as a consequence of a society that glorified the mythology of rights and lost track of duties.
One of the things you could do for young people that no one's doing is to talk to them about responsibility.
Because everyone talks to young people about rights.
It's like, we need our rights.
It's like, oh God, how many rights do you need?
You know, really?
Like, you have more privileges than any people who've ever lived anywhere.
Well, it's so dull to hear that.
It's so dull.
It's so pathetic and what would you call it?
It's so demeaning that you have to be protected and have your rights.
It's like I said, there's a huge marketplace for responsibility.
That's what you want to talk to young people about.
It's like, get your arc together and do something worthwhile with your life.
Fascism is the belief that all life is a communal Darwinian struggle for primacy between discrete cultural or racial groups, which creates the fascist need for war.
The Federation holds no such ideology, instead being primarily concerned about accountability and the rule of law, focusing on values like citizen rule and personal responsibility.
These values do not require a war to maintain.
In the film and in the book, we are just looking at the army.
And the army just happens to be going to war because Starship Troopers is a war story.
And the humans aren't even the aggressor.
But we'll get to that later.
Citizen rule.
making a better tomorrow.
No, it's a democratic movie with a fascist paint job.
Heinlein's political ideas are not fascist in ethos, execution, or consequence.
Not that director Paul Verhoeven understood that, as in his own words, he believed Starship Troopers to be the representation of a fascist state.
Here, now, is Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers.
And this is Ed Neumeier, the writer of Starship Troopers, who said that maybe it's saying that war inevitably makes fascists of us all.
Then, of course, he says that the best guess that the filmmakers didn't think about anything like that at all, because they were only concerned about special effects.
But I can tell you that the movie is in fact, in our opinion, stating that war makes fascist of us all.
That's true.
That was the theme.
And this opening was modelled on the Why We Fight films of World War II.
In fact, this whole movie is modelled on propaganda films made during World War II.
Yeah, they're propaganda films from the American propaganda films.
And of course, there's also clearly a disguised statement about propaganda films of the Turkreich.
Probably because Verhoeven is quite far left in his own political beliefs and apparently mistook militarism for fascism and apparently mistook having an army for militarism.
But more importantly, he didn't even read the book.
The director of Starship Troopers did not even read the book that the movie was supposed to be based on.
Someone else read it and wrote the script for him.
He meant to create a satirical movie as an apparently dire warning about the dangers of fascism and instead produced a wildly popular cult film that still has fan conventions to this day.
We can only assume that either millions of people are latent fascists or Verhoeven failed to include any actual fascism in his movie.
I won't quit.
I'm telling you, you will.
You're not going back.
You're going on vacation.
Verhoeven was, in fact, so lazy and incompetent in his understanding of fascism that he gave us a liberal utopia.
I am not going on vacation.
I want to be a citizen.
After all, in the Starship Troopers movie, where is the oppression?
It's my decision.
I made it.
You walk out that door, you are cut off, young man.
You understand me?
All right, that's it.
You are cut off!
We don't see a dictator ruling over seas of starving serfs, like in Mad Max.
We see a wealthy capitalist society that appears to essentially be run like the United States, just with suffrage being earned by two years' service.
The actual laws of the Federation are moderately authoritarian by modern standards, but the Federation operates under the rule of law and these laws can and are changed according to society's expectations.
The Starship Troopers universe, as portrayed by Verhoeven, not only does not demonstrate fascism, it demonstrates the opposite of fascism, as Mussolini put it.
Everything within the state.
Nothing outside the state.
Nothing against the state.
Where the Federation says service guarantees citizenship, fascism would say, citizenship guarantees service.
And by saying service guarantees citizenship, Verhoeven accidentally coined an incredible recruiting tool for liberal ideology.
In the Federation, all forces within the system work against the individual to encourage them to voluntarily leave the system.
Under a fascist regime, all forces work against the individual to prevent them from leaving.
I think it is entirely probable that Verhoeven mistook the conviction with which Heinlein's moral ideas were laid out for fascism, as it was done in the context of a war from the perspective of a soldier.
The civilians are not tyrannized by the state.
They are left alone by it for the most part.
The state has little interaction with them until they become citizens and enter into federal service, which is very much like joining the military in modern democracies.
Everyone's doing their part, are you?
One of the most memorable aspects of the Paul Verhoeven film adaptation were the regular propaganda reels.
These are, of course, flashy, futuristic, and promote how Verhoeven imagines a fascist veneer over a modern news network.
Verhoeven leverages this intention in many of his propaganda clips and various small touches throughout the film.
But this seems to be just an aesthetic choice.
If we actually examine the content of the propaganda reels, they're not all that fascist.
As far as we are shown, the propaganda reels actually never mislead the viewer.
We know there was a meteor that hit Buenos Aires because Rico was on the phone to his parents who lived there when it happened.
We know that there was an invasion by the Federation on Clendathu and that they were defeated with massive casualties because again, Rico was there when it happened.
He was part of the live footage.
We know the Federation captured a brain bug and the propaganda reels shows us federal scientists probing its secrets because again, Rico was there.
Nothing in the propaganda reels is incongruous with what is actually happening.
Media transparency is yet another point at which the Federation veers wildly from a fascist regime.
Fascist regimes conducted mass censorship of the media, and pro-regime propaganda was opaque and totalizing in order to never show weakness.
I tell it, the Italians of America, who are working to make America great.
You won't recall Hitler resigning from his position as Fuhrer after Stalingrad due to public outrage created by the media.
Fascist propaganda was always positive, portraying the leader and his forces as mighty warriors, fighting and defeating a terrible foe, even when the Nazi high command has to acknowledge heroic sacrifices being made by their men on the Eastern Front.
When the Federation suffers the defeat at Klendathu, the news was broadcast openly in a propaganda reel.
We are shown the full, gruesome effect of the defeat, with colossal numbers attached.
Instead of making excuses, Sky Marshal Deans accepts responsibility for the defeat and resigns.
To fight the bug, we must understand the bug.
We can ill afford another Klendathu.
A fascist regime would never announce casualties as the Federation's propaganda does, because showing the true horror of war is usually the quickest way to end it, which the US learned in Vietnam.
As media scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1975, Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America, not the battlefields of Vietnam.
Even Walter Cronkite believed that there should be censorship of the media during times of war, but with recordings for posterity.
But a live press feed from the front lines of an invasion?
That is incredible level of media transparency.
Monday democracies occasionally embedded journalists with their militaries while on campaign but do not provide an unfiltered live stream to the television set at home We also see diversity of thought in the propaganda reels
We are shown an argument between what appears to be basically the Federation version of a social justice warrior and a lady who is trying to get through his armor of offense to point out that reality demands we explain why the Federation is losing the war against the Arachnids.
Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive.
A fascist regime would likely not show any kind of counter-argument to the glorious leader's own narrative.
This is the justification for the inspirational ending of the propaganda reels.
The human race is fighting an existential war with an enemy who has done tremendous damage already and doesn't seem inclined to stop.
Of course the Federation is going to keep fighting.
The war isn't over.
All we've really seen on a tactical level is the mobile infantry training, the Klendathu defeat, then the feint by military intelligence in order to capture a brain bug so the Federation might do to them what they've been doing to us.
They sucked his brains out.
The war is still in its early stages, and instead of the pointless sequels we've got, what should have been produced is the conclusion to the war.
What happened next?
Do the humans win?
Are we even able to establish a method of communication with the Arachnids?
Can we make them engage in diplomacy?
Or do we have to fight to the bitter end?
One day, someone like me is gonna kill you in your whole fucking race.
Speaking specifically to Verhoeven's film adaptation, The Federation did nothing wrong.
Some say the bugs were provoked by the intrusion of humans into their natural habitat, that a live and let-live policy is preferable to war with the bugs.
The Arachnids launched a surprise war against the Terran Federation with the apparent intention of wiping out humanity.
But for some reason, the common view is that the humans started the war against the bugs.
Let me tell you something.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill them all!
I believe this comes presumably from the deliberate arrangement of news clips in the movie.
The first clip shown is from a year after the war has been started by the bugs, confusing the timeline of events for the viewer and making it easy only to remember a few salient points.
Humans are invading Clendathu.
Bugs kill Mormon colonists who shouldn't have been where they were.
Bugs launch meteor at Earth, which means the humans started it, therefore the bugs are acting in self-defense.
But the attack on Clendathu is a direct consequence of the destruction of Buenos Aires.
It's just a flash forward at the beginning of the movie.
The correct sequence of events is Johnny Rico joins the mobile infantry, the massacre of the Mormon colonists, the meteor strike, we're going to war, then the counter-attack on Klendathu, which was ultimately a defeat for the Federation.
The Federation seems to have had no diplomatic contact with the bugs that we, via Carl, are aware of.
Johnny, I'm sorry it had to be your unit on P.
That mission had a very low survival probability.
The bugs laid a trap for us, didn't they?
Elegant proof of intelligence, isn't it?
Military intelligence seems to be just as in the dark as everyone else.
The bugs are Heinlein's example of a perfect communist species, which Heinlein uses as a pejorative.
The bugs have a predictable hive hierarchy.
Worker drones support and maintain a breeding class of queens and brain bugs, all protected by an army of warrior drones.
The bug civilization as a whole is intelligent and territorial, as detailed in the book.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that they acted purely from instinct like termites or ants.
Their actions were as intelligent as ours.
Stupid races don't build spaceships.
And were much better coordinated.
It takes a minimum of a year to train a private to fight and to mesh his fighting in with his mates.
A bug warrior is hatched, able to do this.
The bugs can fling spore into space to colonize other planets, and the Federation has labelled an area of space around bug territory as a quarantine zone.
Ignoring this, the Mormon extremists decided to settle on one of those planets which, unknown to them, had previously been colonized by the bugs.
Take the example of the arachnidly evolved insect society.
The bugs are an intelligent and rational race.
We are shown throughout the film that while the individual drones might not win any Nobel Prizes, the bugs are fighting a successful defensive war that sees them defeat the humans multiple times, leading the humans to deduce that there must be a class of brain bug controlling their grand strategy, and there was.
And it's a giant brain that sucks out other brains, presumably to ingest their knowledge.
Given the strategic prowess of the bugs, it seems that the brain bugs have intelligence at least proximal to that of humans and have emotions, as Carl demonstrates.
It's afraid!
When people say something like, well, the humans provoke them by entering into their habitat, they are assuming that the bugs are merely mindless animals that act on instinct and are not capable of moral decision-making.
And maybe they're right.
Since we know the bugs are intelligent, as we are told many times, the reason for their hyper-aggressive defensive reaction must be due to an incompatible moral system to the human beings.
Rather than informing the Mormon extremists that this planet was actually inhabited and at least delivering a demand that they leave, the bugs instead massacred them all without mercy.
And if this wasn't enough, the bugs then began launching meteor attacks on an unprepared and unsuspecting Earth, with the first attack wiping out nearly 10 million people and destroying a major city.
The Federation does not even have control over the Mormon colonists' actions.
Not only did the bugs begin the war by massacring hundreds of people by surprise, and then go on to massacre millions more once again by surprise, causing the humans to go to war with the bugs with whom they were previously not at war.
The moral fault is with the bugs.
As massacring millions of people without warning was deliberate and shows that the bugs put zero moral value on a single human life, let alone millions of them.
Any other species of creature might begin a territorial dispute with a warning, but instead, the bugs respond with total war.
You don't approve.
Well, too bad.
We're in this for the species, boys and girls.
It's simple numbers.
They have more.
And every day I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths.
Bug society shows zero conception of what humans would call morality, because in arachnid society, there is no individuality.
Each bug is specialized to serve a singular purpose to support the whole, without whom none of the rest could function.
The bugs have no particular distinction between each bug and its own class.
Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one MI, it was a net victory for the bugs.
We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adopted to it by evolution.
The bug commissars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we care about expending ammo.
The bugs, as we are told, do not have an ego, at least the drones and warriors don't.
No one bug can exist outside of the whole, and therefore bug morality is entirely collective because it does not hold the concept of the individual bug as a moral entity.
There is no I, therefore there is no possible crime against I by definition.
It's not that the individual bugs are worthless, it's that all worth is measured against the whole.
The death of a hundred thousand bugs is nothing compared to the teeming masses that still exist.
The death of a few hundred colonists or even a few million civilians is absolutely nothing compared to the billions of humans that exist.
The arachnids cannot understand a society where there is disharmony of thought, a separating of personal interests from racial interests.
They must see the human race as a political entity that is trying to encroach on a planet already claimed by the arachnid race.
So the bugs are only capable of seeing each individual human as a political intrusion.
The mind of a bug is unable to understand the value of a human life in the same way you fail to understand the value of a skin cell when you scratch.
You don't care if a few hundred thousand skin cells on the surface layer of your skin are damaged or destroyed as long as the itch stops.
The existence of those individual cells meant nothing to you as the existence of individual humans means nothing to the bugs.
It is probably not that they will not be reasoned with.
It is most likely that they cannot be reasoned with.
The bugs are smart, but they have a very specific worldview that apparently renders them unable to acknowledge the rights of human beings.
There does not seem to be any possibility of the Terran Federation and the Arachnids coexisting, and the Arachnids have already used genocidal force on the humans.
If we recall back to Sergeant Zim's war is making the enemy do what you want them to do, the only thing the arachnids have communicated to the humans is that they want the humans to die.
And apparently they will devour as many brains as necessary in order to figure out how that can be done.
The arachnid race is an existential threat to mankind and the survival of humanity creates an imperative that demands they must be subdued.
We must meet the threat with our valor, our blood, indeed with our very lives, to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always.
The Terran Federation did absolutely nothing wrong.
If you're wondering, why do I want this unironically?
The answer is because Starship Troopers is a manifesto for Jordan Peterson's utopia.
This is not an accident.
Heinlein envisaged that the welfare state would continually weaken the bonds of duty that kept society functioning, leading to a lack of personal responsibility that would eventually see liberal democracies collapse into anarchy.
Jordan Peterson, for anyone who isn't aware, is a Canadian professor of psychology who thinks personal responsibility and individual action is profoundly important to defeat the dragon of chaos.
I don't think that people have talked to young people about responsibility in any real sense.
Not and been on their side at the same time for like 50 years.
And that's just too long because most people find the meaning in their life through responsibility.
Isn't it fair to say though that some people through no fault of their own have tough lives and that no matter how much personal responsibility they take, that that won't change?
So for example, you and I, we've had a lot of good fortune in our lives.
We've been born to, you know, reasonably affluent, peaceful countries.
You know, I have a job that I have worked hard at, but I've had lots of luck.
You have written a book and done a series of lectures that have become embraced around the world.
Some people don't get lucky breaks out.
That's for sure.
Some people just die and horribly.
Yeah, life's rough, no doubt about it.
And if good luck comes your way, then you should be grateful for it.
And if happiness manages to manifest itself, you should be grateful for that too.
But how do you give a personal responsibility message while taking account that for some people it's harder to take personal responsibility and the deck is stacked against them?
Well, I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree because life is very difficult and we all die.
So, but people, some people do have it harder than others.
And all of us have it very hard at some times in our lives.
It's like, well, what's the alternative?
You take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse.
It's not like it's fair.
I know perfectly well that people have brutal lives.
I've been a psychotherapist for 20 years.
I've seen things you can't imagine.
Horror shows that you can't fathom.
And people who have been hurt in so many ways, so many dimensions.
It's like bitter?
Should they be bitter?
Should they be resentful?
Should they become violent?
These things don't help.
They have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden.
And it's responsibility, not guilt.
You know, it's not necessarily their fault.
That's not the point.
It appeals to the best in you.
It tells you that you are the highest moral authority in your life and you should act like it.
You know right from wrong and you should, through right action, demonstrate this to others.
The philosophy Heinlein was trying to transmit was one of personal empowerment and self-improvement, limited government and noble self-sacrifice, which are essentially the ideas that Jordan Peterson is trying to put across.
You have a complicated job and you try to help the careers of the people around you.
You try to solve tough problems and aid suffering and do all of that.
It's like it's weight.
It's responsibility, but there's glory in it.
There's real glory in it.
There's deep meaning in it.
And young people are starving for that because no one ever tells them that.
It's like, you're way more than you think.
Man, stand up.
Do something difficult.
Do something difficult and heroic, right?
Burst out of your bonds.
It's like, that's a good message.
The reason people keep mistaking Starship Troopers as fascist is that Heinlein writes liberalism as Hitler writes Nazism.
Fascist doctrines are supremely assertive, and Heinlein wrote with a level of moral conviction that has echoes of Mussolini and Hitler in its certitude, if not its content.
Heinlein considered his work to be a moral science, that there was an objective right and wrong, and Heinlein's republicanism sounds as confident and assertive as any fascist work as described through the vehicle of Radczek.
Something given has no value.
Look, when you vote, you are exercising political authority.
You're using force.
And force, my friends, is violence.
The supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.
Every word correct.
We are simply not used to having liberal democracies reimagined in such a powerful way, and the result is seductive.
Why wouldn't it be better for us to emerge from our passive democracies with an empowered and meritorious ruling class that actually deserves its position by virtues of determination and merit being the most significant factor in one's success?
This kind of Petersonian, can-do, self-empowered attitude infuses Heinlein's liberalism with the moral force of fascism.
And I think it is on that basis the confusion comes.
A constitutional meritocratic republic run by citizens for the benefit of civilians is probably the best kind of state it is possible to create in order to protect personal freedom.
The Terran Federation is a form of liberal utopia.
It is a celebration of the moral good that is swearing an oath to a constitution to pledge oneself to defend people's rights.
It has meaning because it puts you in voluntary service to your fellow man for the common good.
A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life.
A civilian does not.
The exact words of the text.
But do you understand it?
Do you believe it?
You don't love Starship Troopers because you were a secret fascist.
You love Starship Troopers because you think that when the fascists come and you are called upon, you will pick up a rifle and do your duty like you know you should.
Whether you are actually brave enough to do it or not is a different question, but in your heart, you know it would be the right thing to do.
If there were to be an existential threat to your friends, family, and country, you should indeed be ready to defend them.
And Heinlein created the Starship Troopers universe the way it is to present you with this real and pressing dilemma.
The Western Way is the best way mankind has yet devised to create peaceful, prosperous societies.
Nowhere in the world, at any point in history, has man lived lives of such tranquility, abundance, and freedom than under a liberal democracy.
Heinlein believed that protecting such an order from outside forces and its own internal weaknesses wasn't just advisable, it was a moral imperative.
I wonder if the modern-day fascination with Starship Troopers isn't some subconscious understanding that society as a whole is becoming too lax.
In the same way, Jordan Peterson's message resonates with young people struggling for meaning in the world.
Like Peterson, Starship Troopers presents a sense of meaning as to why one might actually consider joining an institution and really earning their own citizenship by going out and building the world that they want to see, one virtuous action at a time.
We need you all.
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