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Feb. 17, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
34:41
RE： Wisecrack's Starship Troopers： How to Make Fascism SEXY
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I've been watching the YouTube channel Wisecrack for years and I really like it and I find Jared's takes on most subjects that he covers to be really sound and very informative and for the past few weeks he's been talking a lot about fascism and so when I saw the video Starship Troopers how to make fascism sexy I inwardly groaned and then clicked on it.
For reference in this video I'm going to use a previous video that I've done called The Politics of Starship Troopers.
All of the sources and answers that may not be fully explored in this video will be present in that one.
When it first came out audiences mostly took it at face value as a cheesy but enjoyable space romp.
Since then scholars have pointed out that the film offers a heaping helping of fascist imagery and ideology.
While it is true that it gives you fascist imagery because of Paul Verhoeven not understanding it either, it doesn't give you much in the way of fascist ideology, as Jared actually points out quite a lot during the video, but we'll get to that shortly.
So today we're going to explore what makes Starship Troopers one of the most surprisingly complex takes on fascism in cinema.
I suppose what I would say it is, if it can be considered to be a take on fascism, is that there are decent and credible alternatives to fascism when disaster strikes.
That's what I think Heinlein was trying to describe and what Paul Verhoeven accidentally ended up displaying.
In the near future, the world is run by the United Citizen Federation, which grants full citizenship and voting rights only to those who volunteer for military service.
I'm doing my part too.
People who don't serve remain civilians.
The military of the Federation is effectively just the special forces of a modern nation, and they are treated as such.
They are the elite of the elite, and only the best are chosen, and they have futuristic power armor and rockets and all this sort of stuff.
In the film, it wasn't displayed that way.
But in the book, there are many other methods of achieving citizenship.
They're just all quite grueling.
Fresh out of high school, varsity athlete Johnny Rico defies his well-to-do parents and enlists in federal service to earn citizenship.
Doesn't sound terribly fascist.
Sounds like the fascists would be in control of the corporations and that the father would probably be a party man or someone at least favorable to the fascists' regime because the fascist regime would be dominating industry like a giant parasite.
But instead, it looks like Johnny's father is a free and wealthy businessman who can openly dissent, as you later point out in this video, against the apparent fascist regime.
In fact, socially, it seems that joining the Federation isn't the cool thing to do, and not what his parents would like him to do.
So Johnny is exercising his choice in the face of social norms.
Would Johnny and the other people who joined the Federation be considered marginalized?
When an asteroid from the distant planet of Klendathu destroys Johnny's hometown of Buenos Aires, he enthusiastically takes part in the resulting war of extermination against the planet's bug-like inhabitants, the Arachnids.
And that's it.
That's all we really say about the tremendous loss of life caused by the bugs.
Out of nowhere, unexpectedly, and out of the control of the Federation.
The colonists who went to the planet that turned out to be occupied by bugs weren't under the control of the Federation.
They were free to move there.
They weren't sent there by the Federation.
It was in fact against the advice that the Federation put out, but the Federation was not able to stop them because it didn't have that kind of authority over them.
Not very fascist.
But the bugs respond with total war, destroying a major city and, again, hometown, no, major city, 8 million people dead.
And the bugs repeatedly send meteor attacks in order to destroy more cities, and they don't seem to want to communicate to try and arrange a peace.
Although we know by the end of the film that they have the kind of intelligence that we can at least make perceptions of and understand in some way.
We could tell the brain bug was afraid.
We can tell that they've been employing military tactics in order to defeat the humans because the humans are losing the war.
They are the ones suffering disproportionate casualties.
As Carl points out, it's a numbers game and they have more.
As far as we are shown in the lore of the movie, the humans are losing an existential war.
And the thing is, I'm not even sure if actual genocide, like the extinguishing of the bug civilization entirely, is the goal of the Federation.
I think that is a fair and achievable goal if the bugs are not prepared to try and make peace.
Starship Troopers is packed with references to the fascist ideologies of the 20th century.
Now, on a superficial level, the film draws connections between these political movements and the United Citizen Federation with blatant visual cues.
The Federation emblem, for instance, bears resemblance to the Nazi Reichsadler, while the dress uniforms of the mobile infantry, fleet, and in particular, games in theory, call to mind those worn by the various branches of the Wormacht.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Paul Verhoeven, for making people think that somehow a democratic, accountable, constitutional order is comparable to fascism?
Thanks very much.
I mean, what we just saw in Jared's clip selection there was a Senate with an elected leader and soldiers who had joined a volunteer army, as in that's how we do things right now.
And we don't consider ourselves to be fascists, do we?
On a deeper level, the ideology espoused by authority figures within the Federation shares key components with basic fascist political philosophy.
Well, then this is going to be pretty broad, isn't it?
And to be honest with you, it's probably going to share basic tenets with fundamental enlightenment philosophy and understanding of the state, isn't it?
If you listen closely, you'll notice that Johnny's mentors tend to be social Darwinists.
They love to reduce the war between Earth and Klandathu to a competition between species, with the fitter race and society destined to control the galaxy.
Heinlein was trying to make the bugs seem like communism, but honestly, I think he got it wrong.
I don't think that the bugs actually do represent communism because of the hierarchical nature of their society.
The bugs actually really represent fascism.
This is the ideal fascist civilization.
It's the entire race.
All of it is working in perfect harmony for the greater goal of bug civilization spreading across the planet.
That is an amazingly fascist vision, and the humans have to deal with that in the universe.
I don't think that the humans saying that they are necessarily the superior species is anything more than trying to keep the morale up.
Like we, the human race, are now pitted against an aggressive bug race that seems to operate in the perfect Nazi manner, and we now have to try and say that what we do is better than what they do.
And as far as I'm concerned, the humans having a constitutional democratic order is way better than what the bugs do.
The humans didn't declare war on the bugs either.
The bugs were the aggressors.
Even if the humans had strayed into their territory, launching attacks on their home planet seems a little disproportionate.
It really seems to me that the bugs are the genocidal ones here.
I mean, what do they even want?
As his biology teacher puts it, this archaic sandbeagle is superior in many ways.
It reproduces in vast numbers, has no ego, has no fear, doesn't know about death, and so is the perfect Gelsman member of society.
Yeah, that makes the bugs sound pretty Nazi-like.
But also, would a fascist regime really have teachers that openly said, the Jew is superior to the Aryan in every way?
Even Lieutenant Ratchak's battle cry brings it all back to survival of the fittest.
Come on, you hate!
You want to live forever!
I've got to admit, I've never actually read On the Origin of the Species, but I severely doubt Darwin wrote that in there.
I mean, it seems a little unfair to cherry-pick this out, because, I mean, in the context of what's happening, they're about to be besieged by hundreds of thousands of bugs, and they're all about to die heroically, fighting for their lives as the bugs overwhelm and chop them to pieces.
But I mean, I guess it might be a commentary on the Darwinist nature of it.
Of course, at the core of the Federation ideology is the belief that the right to exercise political power is not given at birth.
Just like us, we don't think that the right to exercise political power is given at birth.
We think you have to wait 18 years to get it.
You have to survive that long before you were given any kind of political power.
I mean, like, what you're showing here is a pledge of allegiance to a constitution, and you're trying to paint this as if this is fascism.
But earned through the willingness and ability to inflict violence onto others.
Yes, that is literally the job of the citizen.
And that's why in ancient republics, it was the citizens that voted and the citizens that fought.
The people who defend what you have are the ones with the franchise.
And these days, you defend what you have by paying your taxes, which funds an army, which is why every pacifist is a hypocrite.
Their life would not exist were it not for their ability as citizens to provide force.
Like it or lump it.
That's what it is.
And that's why people have such a hard time understanding Heinlein, because he was just a political realist, as you can tell by the rhetoric that comes out of Radczek's mouth.
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.
And don't you forget it, because force is the final deciding factor.
There is nothing beyond that.
German fascists, inspired by the pro-military writings of World War I veterans such as Ernst Junger, held a similar view.
Literally anything that we can consider to be a state would require an ideology that would hold a similar view.
Going back to Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, the head of state commands the army.
Because ultimately, a moral appeal cannot compel a physical force.
The guy in charge has to be the one who is strong enough to corral the rest into line.
Otherwise, they start getting ideas above their station.
And that applies for every form of governing structure that has existed up until this point.
But because we are busy trying to associate Starship Troopers with fascism, we're going to have to hear the opinions of some fascists on the matter.
Junger's Storm of Steel, a memoir about his formative experiences as a soldier during World War I, was one text in a massive wave of German literature from the time that valorized veterans above all other members of society and portrayed war as a kick-ass way to develop as a man, have fun adventures, and experience friendship and camaraderie.
So the opposite of what is portrayed in the movie Starship Troopers.
I mean, Rico's dad said he shouldn't join the military.
He said that his teacher should be fired for trying to get him into the military.
And Rico says, no, he tries to dissuade you as well.
In fact, it seems that all forces in the law of the universe are a negative force on you becoming a citizen and joining the military.
They seem to be dissuading you at every point, giving you every opportunity to take the path of least resistance and quit.
They are not saying that joining the military is great any more than the propaganda reels which are like join the army today, which again, we have now.
In his analysis of Starship Troopers, historian Brian E. Krim points out that these novels emphasize the transformative experience of war and the inherent right of veterans to lead.
Younger's personal Odyssey mirrors Johnny Rico's journey from a clueless teenager to the new man the fascist movement revered.
Again, name a civilization that didn't have some kind of tradition by which young men were taught that going to war would change them.
And I think it would be highly irresponsible to tell young men, by the way, if you go to war, you'll come back exactly the same, because let's be honest, you won't.
It's a very difficult job.
It requires a great amount of personal sacrifice.
And there is a reason that we honor our veterans, because they are the ones who do it on our behalf.
The fascist new man, the physically capable and emotionally hard human that Hitler, Mussolini, and other fascists hope to make the new societal norm, is able to deal out violence on behalf of a state without feelings of guilt or remorse.
Well, in the universe of Starship Troopers, there is just no way that the fascist new man could become the norm.
I mean, veterans just could never become the norm in the universe of starship troopers, because the Federation itself is such a tiny organization, and there are billions of people on the planet who just don't join the Federation.
But I find the bit about feelings of guilt and remorse particularly interesting, because I don't think that we do want to instill our soldiers with feelings of guilt and remorse for having to defend our countries.
I don't think that's wise.
Now, I'm not saying that that means our soldiers should be free to gun down civilians and come home with a smile, obviously.
But I mean, I don't think we should make them feel bad for engaging the enemy on the battlefield.
I don't think there's any need for guilt and shame and remorse for doing that.
I think that the problem will come from just the psychological damage of having seen dead bodies and being under such danger and having lost so many friends.
I think that's going to be the real problem.
I don't think we should try and give them feelings of guilt and remorse on top of that.
In fact, I think we should do everything we can to make them understand that, no, you did what was necessary for our civilization to exist.
That's praiseworthy.
You know, as long as you did it in the accountable way that we expect.
And it's important to know that both in the movie and the book, the Federation are shown to have a remarkably strict set of rules for conduct in the military.
I mean, Rico does get flogged for accidentally getting one of his subordinates killed.
What more are we asking of these people?
But the thing is, we aren't even dealing with them fighting another human civilization.
We're dealing with them fighting an alien civilization that doesn't look like them, doesn't seem to show empathy towards them, and seems to want to eradicate the human race.
What kind of shame or remorse would one feel in a situation like that?
Johnny and his friends either demonstrate this ability from the outset or develop it through their exposure to war.
Honestly, I think this is an unrealistic standard.
I don't know how much empathy one can really expect from people towards a murderous, fascist space bug that's intent on wiping out the human race.
I don't see why I should be excessively empathetic to that entity any more than a mosquito or something like this.
What's more, the Federation motivates its population to take part in the war by abandoning logic and appealing to passions and emotions, and in particular, a very specific variety of hatred.
In other words, by taking a fascist approach to political persuasion.
I mean, I guess it is something the fascists did, but it's also something the Allies did, isn't it?
So what are we saying?
That it was just fascists fighting fascists in World War II.
As historian Alexander de Grand notes, at its core, fascism is an appreciation of the irrational forces in modern society and a glorification of instinct and violence in political life.
Okay, but that's not what Starship Troopers is.
Starship Troopers is about the willingness and self-sacrifice to defend a constitutional order.
It's a way of motivating the individual to preserve the civilization that birthed them with a very realistic understanding that this is going to require self-sacrifice.
And such anti-intellectualism is a prominent part of the Federation mindset.
No, it's not.
It's not featured in the film, probably because Paul Verhoeven didn't read the book, but in the book, Johnny Rico has to do academic work as part of his training to join the mobile infantry.
He has to do like maths homework and all this sort of all these other studies.
They spend, we even get a breakdown of his day.
They spend the morning doing physical exercise and the afternoon doing intellectual studies.
This is just not a true statement.
I'm sorry, Jared.
When Mr. Rico insists that Johnny go to college rather than volunteer for military service, the film frames him as a fool worthy of his son's scorn.
A coward standing in the way of his chance to serve.
You're going to Harvard and that's the end of it.
Yes, the emphasis on the purpose of citizenship is to serve the common good.
That is correct.
Likewise, when any debate around the war effort is brought up, it's immediately shut down by sloganeering and emotional appeals.
You mean just like we do in democratic societies?
So that this isn't necessarily a feature of fascism.
This is probably a feature of humans.
But I have to say, I think it's important that the debate is happening, even if it's being shut down with sloganeering.
Because I don't think a fascist regime would have that debate, do you?
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.
Let me tell you something.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill them all!
I mean, I realize that's supposed to sound fascist, but I think that if a bug nuke came out of the sky and vaporized 8 million people, including my entire family, like they did to his, I don't think I'd be very forgiving.
Federation propaganda describing the Arachnids.
Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive.
And these soldiers' attitudes towards them are similar to Nazi depictions of Jews circa World War II.
Come on.
Come on, that's that's silly, isn't it, Jared?
Come on, that's really silly.
I mean, for starters, the guy saying that the bug that thinks is offensive is not the Federation propagandist.
He is the opposing position.
The woman who is making the primary argument that they must have thinking bugs, she is the one presenting the Federation position.
I mean, the Federation is trying to capture a brain bug.
That's her idea.
And this guy is dissenting from that in the most childish and SJW-ish way possible.
But you really can't make a comparison between the bugs and the Jews, because the Jews were German citizens.
They were members of German society.
They weren't a foreign nation that had declared war on Germany.
Or at least, I mean, that's in my understanding of it.
From the Nazi conception of it, that is, I guess, kind of what they thought of it as.
A foreign nation that was living on Germans as a parasitic nation.
But even then, that's nothing like what the Federation is dealing with with the bugs.
And even then, I'm not even sure if the Federation propaganda is even demonizing the bugs.
It just seems to be describing them.
We see the bugs do everything that the Federation tells us the bugs will do.
And we see it, in fact, much worse.
And the Federation doesn't pull their punches in showing us the damage that the bugs do to people and the war effort in general.
Designed as they were to bypass reason and stoke feelings of hatred in the viewer.
The only good bug is a dead bug.
Yeah, but that's just war propaganda.
Every civilization does that.
The fact that the arachnids resemble something as inhuman and universally disliked as Earth insects makes the impulse to hate them and in the process identify with the fascist cause that much more appealing.
I love the way that you just describe it as the fascist cause, Jared.
It's not the fascist cause.
The cause is the preservation of the human race.
The method by which you think it's being done is fascist, but the system of fascism doesn't appear to be under any threat.
I mean, Heinlein says in the book, and I'm pretty sure they say it in the film, that there's never been a revolt against the Federation, because effectively there would be nothing to revolt against.
If you wanted power, you would just become a citizen.
Federation soldiers, or anti-Arachnites, if you will.
Why would we?
Anti-Arachnites.
As in, soldiers are anti-the things that they are employed to kill.
So, I mean, it just seems pointless.
Like, there could be a revolution.
A bunch of jihadis could burst into a city and start gunning people down, and the Federation's, they'd be the anti-jihadis.
Why not just call them the positive Federation soldiers?
Because that seems to be the charitable way of describing them.
And, I mean, like, soldiers are anti-the things that they're fighting.
Well, I guess so.
I guess they are.
It's just a weird way of trying to characterize them.
I don't really understand why.
As if there's some kind of moral equivalence between the Federation and the Arachnids.
So being pro-Federation, anti-Arachnid, is just as valid as being pro-Arachnid and anti-Federation.
Willingly forgo the typical objects of passion so they can spend more time doing what they love best, hating bugs.
I don't agree with that characterization at all.
I think the shower scene where they're talking to one another and saying why they joined up shows you why the people are doing what they're doing.
They're killing bugs because they have to.
They're killing bugs because that's what their job is, and they have to do it.
And it's their job because the bugs are attacking Earth.
But, you know, they wanted to join up to become, you know, a career and they wanted to have babies and all of these other individual reasons that they joined up.
It's not that they just love killing bugs.
Following the debacle on Klendathu, Sky Marshal Deans voluntarily resigns his post as leader of the Federation so that a more effective general, a better bug killer, can take his place.
Oh, come on.
Come on.
That's the least fascist sounding thing in the world.
After a catastrophic military defeat, the chief of command steps down and accepts responsibility for that defeat, and someone else who won't lead the army to defeat is chosen in their place, at least hypothetically.
They think they won't end up being defeated, and they think they might have a plan to defeat the bugs.
The people who declared war on humanity.
I mean, and I say people because I don't even know why.
The alien race that declared war on humanity.
And we are supposed to treat the humans as if they are in the moral wrong here, as if there is some moral deficiency because they have an accountable process by which someone who fucks up and gets hundreds of thousands of people killed is removed in favor of someone who won't fuck up and get hundreds of thousands of people killed.
And that is, this is a moral conundrum.
There is something wrong with them wanting to be more efficient and win the war quickly.
That is insane.
The only good war is a fast war.
And when you get right down to it, the soldiers and mobile infantry don't seem all that broken up about Buenos Aires.
If anything, they come across as weirdly happy to be in the middle of a war zone.
Mm-hmm.
Sarcher would tell you that they are less angry at the bugs and more eager for the chance to indulge their hatred by exercising violence, even hungry for it.
Here's a bunch of MI kids that look like they could eat bugs for lunch.
Yum, yum, yum.
Yeah, a bunch of tough talk from military recruits who had their possessions and whole families wiped off the map.
Everyone they knew wiped off the map.
Okay, I guess they shouldn't have been talking in such a tough talk way.
It just wasn't sensitive enough.
What makes Starship Troopers unique is that it presents members of a fascist military force as the good guys.
I love this.
The film isn't being objective enough.
It's not.
And also, we're assuming these guys are fascists, obviously.
Jared hasn't proven this.
He's actually demonstrated the opposite of fascism.
But we're going to assume that these fascists, people who've declared to be fascists, aren't even the good guys because we're not giving the murderous genocidal bugs a fair shake.
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
It's a story about the human race going to war with an alien race.
What a surprise.
It has a bias towards the humans.
Verhovan does this for a specific reason.
As he himself stated in an interview, I tried to seduce the audience into joining Starship Troopers Society, but then ask, what are you really joining up for?
Constitutional citizenship.
You make it abundantly clear in your own movie, and it's demonstrably clear from the book.
So I mean, that's what?
I guess not being a pussy as well.
I think that this really just comes from weak left-wing men looking at something that isn't weakness and saying, well, that's fascism.
In other words, Starship Troopers is more than just a straight-up action click and more than just a typical spoof.
It's an attempt to make us think and feel like fascists.
If you're not okay with the destruction of the human race, you're essentially a fascist.
And to make us think very hard about how we were seduced into that mindset.
Alien bombardment, millions dead.
And we still didn't become fascists.
Because they had an accountable democratic structure in place to be able to field an army against the alien race that seems to be trying to wipe us out.
By rooting for Johnny and Dizzy to get together, we find ourselves rooting against the arachnids because they threaten the consummation of that sweet, sweet teenage horniness.
I just can't get over the content of what he's saying, juxtaposed with the image of an arachnid warrior killing her before she can escape.
The thing is, how exactly would we even form an emotional bond with one of the bugs anyway?
They don't have personalities from what we can see.
They seem to be essentially pre-programmed biological robots to fulfill a certain social function and never go outside of that.
We're not shown any individuality between any of the bugs whatsoever.
There doesn't seem to be any particular difference between any individual bug and other members of its particular social caste.
So what's the point of trying to say that there's some way of empathizing with a bug?
It seems that you can't do that.
The only ones that seem to have that capacity would be the brain bugs, and I really don't think that they see themselves as being separate from the other bugs that they command in any way that would be functionally different to the way that your own brain views the rest of its body.
We may even join the main character in hating the bugs because we can't bear the thought of these pretty humans not getting their rocks off together.
This seems like somewhat of a stretch given how we're presented with many more reasons to hate the bugs and many better reasons than simply their preventing two teenagers from having sex.
Verhoven presents the Federation as something you might actually want to be a part of.
This society appears to have achieved racial and gender equality.
There's no visible poverty, and medicine is advanced to the point where life-threatening injuries can be repaired in a few days.
What you're saying is, it's a society that seems to have overcome what we would consider to be oppression.
People don't seem to be oppressed.
They, in fact, seem to be free.
Doesn't sound very fascist, does it?
A la Ernst Junger, the film also offers universal human wants as part of the fascist package.
Join the Federation, we're told, and you'll have fulfillment, adventure, and friends for life.
Maybe that's not really just a fascist thing if, again, we think that that's something that we do.
That's something our armed forces do.
That's a way that they appeal to people to join them.
And I'm sure that we don't consider ourselves to be fascists.
Hell, the UCF even appears to allow free speech, up to and including open dissent among the civilian population.
There should be a law against using a school as a recruiting station.
Hardly what you would expect from a fascist dictatorship.
Hmm.
It doesn't sound very fascist at all, does it?
With all these shiny things to look at, it becomes pretty easy to forget that this whole enterprise is founded on an ideology we like to think ourselves immune to.
Naked forces resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor.
That's not an ideology, that's an observation.
Force, unfortunately, for our, I suppose, more gentler sides, is something that every human has to be aware exists because they manage it in their daily lives.
Everything they do requires force to some degree, and it's a management of someone's force that makes society what it is.
And we happen to have solved that by instilling the authority to use force on one another into a sovereign entity that we hold accountable through democracy, and we make sure that it rules fairly through the use of laws, and we make sure that the sovereign itself is within the rule of law.
And thus far, in all of human history, these have produced the safest, happiest, and healthiest, and most tolerant human civilizations to have ever existed.
And that is what is represented in Starship Troopers.
By itself, all that might be enough to get an audience unwittingly cheering on the march of an expansionist fascist regime.
It's not.
I mean, the Federation literally said, don't go and live on these planets.
They've got bugs on them and the bugs will kill you.
That was the Federation's position.
The regime's position.
You know, the democratic, elected, and accountable regime that we see in operation during the film.
That's their position.
Don't go over there.
That's the expansionist position of the Federation.
The film also accomplishes what those original propaganda pieces were designed to achieve.
Something philosopher Paul Virilio referred to as cinematic derealization.
This refers to making an audience immune to the horrors of war by turning it into entertainment.
He claims that when filmmakers used their craft to make attacks unreal, industrial warfare ceased to be that huge funeral apparatus denounced by moralists and eventually became the greatest mystification of all, an apparatus of deception.
Yeah, but that's not what Starship Troopers does.
It shows unbelievable amounts of bodies.
Like many war movies, Starship Troopers accomplishes derealization through exaggeration.
Everything from machine guns to body counts is inflated, made so absurdly big and over the top that it's difficult to grasp as real.
This disconnect between the reality of the death caused by war and the story we're told is what allows the film to act as an apparatus of deception.
It numbs us, piling the body so high that we can't truly process what's happening or understand it as a threat.
I'd say this was a good point if Jared didn't go on to contradict himself a few minutes later in this video.
The film's usual derealization of conflict gives way to a temporary hyper-realization as we see individual humans we've come to care about torn to pieces and dragged screaming away from their friends.
Yeah, that's not really a derealization.
I mean, I like the way you compartmentalize it were saying, well, I mean, usually they do this, but except for the parts where they don't do this.
I mean, you know, when we see Johnny Rico getting his legs stabbed through, man, that did not look pleasant.
When Dizzy's getting stabbed up, when any of them are getting chopped up, it doesn't look pleasant.
The damage done to the bodies when you see them going into the Mormon camp or the Mormon fort, it's brutal.
It's absolutely brutal.
All without fully stopping to analyze what it is we're doing when we align ourselves with people who, by their own admission, fully intend to carry out a genocide.
Well, let's assume that they will fully intend to carry out the genocide.
We have to.
We are not really emotionally capable of identifying with the bugs because they don't really show us anything until the very end when it's afraid.
But I mean, the bugs don't seem to be interested in having any kind of emotional connection with us.
Because it's got to be a two-way street.
Should we be cheering on the bugs as they kill millions of women and children as well as men in their attempt to wipe out the human race?
Look at the other side.
What are we supposed to empathize with here?
The people who are attacked or the attackers.
The film doesn't push us in any particular way.
Instead, it seduces us with the repeated question: would you like to know more?
Would you like to know more?
Would you like to know more?
If Verhoven's done his job, the answer is, yes, sir!
And that really speaks to the fundamental essence of why Starship Troopers is not a fascist movie, because Starship Troopers is putting you in command.
It's giving you the choice.
You are the decision maker.
It is treating you as a sovereign individual and saying, here is a system that is fair and accountable and democratic, and saying you can act within this system if you want, but it's going to be tough.
Because at the end of the day, weakness is not a virtue.
It is not virtuous to be unable to defend oneself.
It is not virtuous to side with the aggressor.
It is not virtuous to fail to defend yourself or other people after you have lost everything.
However, it is virtuous to volunteer to defend people from aggressors, which is why we end up siding with the humans in Starship Troopers.
Like I said, I'm actually a really big fan of Wisecrack, so I wasn't...
I'm not trying to say that Jared is bad at his job or anything like that.
I think he just has a very poor take and interpretation of Starship Troopers because Verhoeven had a very poor interpretation of the book that he didn't even read.
So I don't blame Jared for being misinformed in this one.
Really, it's kind of a consequence of Verhoeven's work on the movie.
This was something that I just kind of jumped at because I saw it and thought, oh, God, no.
So I'll leave links in the description, of course.
And also, this is the last day of me selling merch on the merch store for now.
So I'm going to leave a link in the description to that if you'd like to check it out.
So by Monday or Tuesday, I'll announce a winner.
And thanks to everyone who took part.
And I'd just like to thank everyone who bought something because honestly, it's your support of me like that that means that I never have to do a corporate sponsorship and I really don't want to have to do a corporate sponsorship.
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