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Feb. 28, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:30:59
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This week, we're going to be talking about something that comes up in the online discourse seemingly every year, but actually tells us quite a bit about the way culture works in our society.
And that is, of course, Starship Troopers.
I want to begin with a review from Entertainment Weekly in 1997 of the movie entitled Starship Troopers relies on Nazi imagery by Benjamin Zwicky.
And I quote, Both movies are set in brutal police states.
Both make heroes out of fanatical stormtroopers.
And both portray their villains as the humanized vermin fit only for extermination.
The difference?
One is a Nazi propaganda film made in the 1930s.
The other is currently the number one film in the country.
What's great about this is to set the stage here, what we're discussing is a book by Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers, which was written not as a satire, but I believe was actually in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And he was writing in an America where he thought the values of patriotism and military service were on the decline.
And so he wrote this book encouraging a comeback of these values and It's important to note that the society he describes is not connected to race or anything that would consist of Nazism, certainly.
The big reveal at the end of the book is that the main character, Johnny Rico, is most likely Filipino, because there's a throwaway line at the end that his native language is Tagalog, which is a Filipino language.
And it's certainly not a totalitarian system.
Where the people who can vote, essentially, you have to do some sort of military service, and service guarantees citizenship, and then only the citizens can vote.
It's this global government, and this society, structured the way it is, is fighting a war against alien bugs.
This is why I laughed in the movie review, because it's not that these things are portrayed as subhuman vermin fit only for extermination, it's that they're literally subhuman vermin Yeah.
only for extermination because they're trying to wipe out humanity.
Yeah.
But that's what the basic thing of the movie is.
And then it follows, it's a typical kind of coming-of-age story where Johnny Rico goes
from spoiled recruit to essentially a man.
And then he sees combat.
And it's very serious.
The kind of combat it describes is actually very forward-looking.
looking. It's clearly quite a bit of research was done in terms of the
psychology of soldiers and how they fight and how they think and things like
that. It's not played for laughs. It's not a satire. But then, it was a 1997,
Paul Verhoeven, you probably know him from Starship Troopers, well Starship Troopers
obviously, but also from Robocop. He did this movie as a satire, as a deliberate
insult to the book. I think he actually said that he started to read the book
but couldn't finish it. And he decided that he was going to do this as a
as a deliberate insult to make fun of the ideas that were being put forward.
So in this film.
The ideas of patriotism and the ideas of sacrifice and the idea of a society where service is the highest ideal, these things are played for laughs.
And because he's trying to link this with fascism and Nazism, you really, things are coded now where we just sort of assume that if somebody's black, they're automatically the good guy.
They're the moral center of the film.
So you can, I guess this would go for Filipinos too.
So you can't have a Filipino protagonist because people are not going to believe that it's even possible for him to be the villain.
In fact, you'd probably get called racist if you tried to do that.
So what do they do?
They cast a bunch of good-looking white people as the heroes of the film, and we follow their adventures going around.
And a lot of the subtleties to the kind of combat they're fighting, a lot of the ideas about what combat would look like in the future, A lot of the philosophy that underlie the society, this is all just kind of thrown away.
Instead of this very complicated, sophisticated form of engaging the bugs, they just kind of run forward like idiots, firing these guns that don't seem to do very much and get torn apart.
And everybody is stupid.
Nobody really knows what's going on.
The entire society seems hopelessly Disconnected from what's actually at stake and very naive about the kind of enemy that they're fighting.
Structured with these propaganda films ending with the lines, would you like to know more?
So you understand from the beginning that this is obviously a satire and this is obviously something that's designed to mock everybody involved in this stuff and yet everybody loved it and everybody loved it straight and everybody loved it for what it was.
So this raises the question, is it Is it possible to fail at satire?
There's this whole debate of media literacy where the director clearly wants this to be a satire, and clearly wants you to hate these people, hate these ideas, and walk away saying, this is terrible, isn't it awful how people can get seduced by these ideas?
But if he does a really bad job, and if he doesn't actually show why these ideas are bad, and if in many ways he actually creates a more sanitized version of the society that's in the book, and you start thinking to yourself, hey, maybe this isn't such a bad idea, I'd say the fault's on him, not on the reader, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I love both Heinlein's novel, which was, it's a very fascinating novel because it was written in America that was 90% white.
And there's so many unbelievable passages, basically about a society that was crumbling and that there was a American-Russo alliance, American-Soviet alliance against the Chinese.
And there was this cataclysmic war.
And the veterans came back and society just basically broke down to the veterans instituted control.
And of course, I'm talking about the novel and they instituted a society where only veterans, those who served could have citizenship, could vote.
And there's a lot of discourse.
This is a book, Mr. Hood, that is read and the Marines still, the Marine Corps still reads this book.
It's a fantastic book.
And there've been a lot of ideas about adapting it.
You know, Verhoeven was pretty much one of the top directors.
in the late 80s. He did Robocop, which has some shocking violence in it. It's a hard film to watch
if you've never seen it. Then he did Total Recall. And in a different timeline, we're talking about
the movie that he wanted to make with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And that was a movie about the Crusades.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be one of the Knights of the Templar, who did a attack on, you know, who tried to, who did take Jerusalem.
And I think that in some different timeline, we're talking about that movie, because who knows what that would have done in terms of causing a major controversy.
That film was supposed to come out like 93, 94.
But he did, what was the movie he did with the girl from Saved by the Bell?
Showgirls, Triptease?
No, it was Showgirls, which really kind of ended him and certainly ended the careers of a lot of people involved in that.
I'm not sure what the target of that was, whether it was supposed to be satire or just to titillate, but everybody regards it as one of the worst films ever made.
And that was sort of the end of him.
Well, no, he actually made Search of Troopers after, which is fascinating.
So this movie was supposed to launch a franchise, and I think you and I have talked about this before, but there's an unbelievable made-for-TV documentary.
I remember, you and I are the same age, Entertainment Tonight used to be the zeitgeist. You would watch Entertainment Tonight to
find out what new movies were coming out that next quarter, that summer. They'd do profiles. And
I remember watching with my parents, the Sgt. Trooper one, where all of the soldiers are coming
out for the Battle of Klendathu, or maybe it's—oh, gosh.
It's one of the climactic scenes where I think maybe they go to do a retrieval and I was like, wow, this is going to be amazing.
I can't wait to see this.
And I remember seeing on an opening night and just being blown away.
It just, it spoke to me as no other piece of pop culture has, has, as has the book really.
And they did incorporate a lot of the key themes of the book, except for what you said, Mr. Hood, that is that in the book, They're not recruits.
You volunteer to be in the military.
You volunteer for service.
You're not recruited.
There's no draft.
You volunteer.
And in the movie, Johnny Rico, as you said, it's set in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It looks like whites are about 90% of the population.
Very good looking white people.
And in fact, the producer, the writer, Ed Neumeier, said in the documentary Death From Above, we wanted to make a movie where it was Melrose Place in space.
So they cast a bunch of pretty much no-name actors and actresses who, like you said, they fit a certain profile, a certain stereotype.
And it's far different than the Yeah, they did make some sequels where they actually have more non-whites, including some, you know, interracial relationships and stuff like that, but they never quite break away from the idea that this society is actually good.
And this is one of the things that's sort of interesting about it is there are no racial problems in the society, unlike in the book where men and women are in different branches.
In the film, they're actually serving in the same units.
They're even showering together, and sexual relationships just aren't a big deal.
This is just something that happens.
So, from a liberal point of view, it seems to have solved the problems of racism and sexism in a way that our society hasn't managed to do.
I mean, this is what I mean by, like, sanitizing it, and yet we still have to interpret it as Nazism and fascism, Simply because of the fact that it seems to work because of the fact that they have uniforms and these uniforms look cool because of the fact that They don't hate themselves and this this is what I think is the key to the whole thing is that what leftism has become is a Kind of inverse morality to what everything has been up to this point because all of morality all of what we consider traditional patriotism or civic virtue would be a
You are part of a society owe something to those who came before you and those who came after you.
It's good to be strong.
It's good to be growing in numbers and power and wealth.
It's good to be good-looking.
It's good to have nice looking buildings.
It's good to walk around a society that reinforces this idea of this is for you.
This is where you belong.
These people are tied to you in some way, but after the Second World War, there's this idea that well those things we have What some have called a negative foundation myth, where Satan is no longer the focus of evil.
I mean, nobody particularly cares about the devil or anything like that.
You could insult Jesus Christ all you want.
No one's going to do anything.
But Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, that's the focus of evil.
That's the thing that we have to worry about all the time.
He's hiding behind every bush.
He's in the inner heart of every single person.
And instead of this idea that We come from some, you know, divine source or divine ancestors, as would be in a traditional creation myth.
Instead, modern Western civilization comes out of evil.
Our foundation is Auschwitz.
We are inherently depraved.
This lies in the hearts of every single one of us.
And the war against Nazi Germany was not actually a war against Nazi Germany by Britain and France and the United States.
And the Soviet Union, it's actually a war against something that lies in the heart of every single one of us, which is why you have Holocaust museums in the United States and Britain, you know, allied powers.
But these museums aren't to say like, hey, thanks for saving us or to say, like, what a good job they did fighting.
It's to it's to say how evil everybody is and how this is still lurking everywhere.
And we need to be freaking out all the time.
What it is to be evil is the closer you get to this kind of movie version of Nazism or fascism.
And so therefore the idea of liking your own people, the idea of, I don't know, having a cool uniform, the idea of being in the military, the idea of caring about your own history or the future of your own people, these things are evil.
And so the farther you can get away from these things, the idea of prizing the out group over the in group, the idea of sacrificing for others, Because of the fact that it will make life worse for your in-group, the idea of not reproducing, you see this increasingly often, the idea of not reproducing because your seed in some sense is cursed and it's actually good not to inflict this on the world, that's actually a moral thing to do.
I mean, any other generation would call it treason, but like this is actually praised now.
Actually, real quick, Heinlein actually railed against You know, Heinlein's a fascinating figure because he basically wrote three novels that... And this was right after, and he was writing right after World War II, so... He was.
I mean, there's actually, there's a much more sane take from the people who actually lived through it and fought it.
Yeah, he served as a naval officer during World War II.
He actually, my grandfather knew him.
I won't go into details, but he was a very big proponent of Barry Goldwater.
Heinlein was a very big libertarian.
He also wrote The Moon is a Harse Mistress, which is pretty much a libertarian novel.
I think it's unreadable.
And he also wrote Stranger in a Strange Land.
And I think it's fascinating to think that his greatest contribution And I think it's a movie that's going to live on for a very long time, of course, is Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers.
But I mean, his novel is so good.
And there's a reason why both are so controversial.
I mean, his novel has been called fascist and, you know, he rails against communism.
And it is it's a novel that goes against natural rights.
He famously argues in one of the great lectures.
There's no such thing as natural rights.
Exactly, and I remember reading that, and I was like, this makes total, this is mind-blowing stuff.
This is one of the things, in the book, or in the Entertainment Weekly review, one of these reviews, they criticize Goebbels-like prose that violence is the supreme political authority, and it's like, but violence is the supreme political authority.
I mean, that's just true.
I mean, that's what it is.
Yeah.
And two quick thoughts.
We learned that violence is a supreme political authority over the summer of 2020 when the George Floyd riots happened and nothing was done.
Violence.
I mean, as Tucker Carlson said in one of his best monologues, I mean, violence works.
That's the takeaway.
Certain people are allowed to commit violence and they'll be rewarded for it.
Certain people are not allowed to do it and they'll be punished for it.
Speech is violence.
Violence is speech.
Yeah, and conversely, on that same thought, we've just seen Jon Stewart return to television.
And he railed against Tucker Carlson, who's over in Moscow, talking about how, hey, public transportation works over here.
And what did Jon Stewart say?
Well, you know, homeless people and vagrants and graffiti and trash and people peeing on public transportation here in the United States, that's just the price you have to pay for democracy.
Yeah, I think that's one of the big takeaways from the way things are structured now is no one is pretending anymore that Progressivism is going to lead to things like efficient public transportation or things that public goods that we all can enjoy or clean environment or high wages or any of these things.
It's we are not allowed to do good things.
We are not allowed to help you because to do so would be fascist.
So therefore we have to live in squalor.
We have to tolerate crime.
We have to tolerate ugliness.
We have to tolerate dysfunction because the alternative to that is fascism.
Leaving aside the fact that the people who actually fought the fascists wouldn't agree with any of this, and certainly if you look at the way those societies operated.
But again, the way history has been sort of rewritten is FDR's America and Churchill's Britain and de Gaulle's France, they were fascists too.
They just didn't know it.
It was What was Nazi Germany was just a more extreme version of what lies in the heart of all of us.
There's a book by I believe his name is R Reno called.
Death of strong gods and by the strong gods he means the gods of nationalism and patriotism and the sort of ideals that motivate people to to be strong to sacrifice to fight.
Instead now, and this is also true if you look at the way Christianity was, even in World War II.
For example, the term crusade already raises red flags.
For those of you at a certain age, you remember when George W. Bush briefly referred to the war on terrorism as a crusade and everybody went nuts because we were fighting Muslims, so therefore we can't say the word crusade.
Well, Dwight D. Eisenhower talked about a crusade.
That was what it was called, the Great Crusade.
That's what the war to liberate Europe was called.
Nobody had a problem with this.
Everybody thought this was a great idea.
Now, that by itself is fascist, is racist, is exclusionary.
And I think it has gotten to the point where things that are objectively good for a white population, regardless of how innocent they are, and regardless of how common sense they are, are coded as fascist, are coded as Nazi, and therefore must be opposed for that reason.
I want to read one other thing from this review here and this gets into the topic of media literacy because the reason this all came up is it started up again and it always does on X on Twitter.
This happens seemingly every year.
And then the leftists were going nuts saying that how terrible it is people like this movie and we're appreciating it on the surface because they didn't think that people got that it was a satire.
They somehow think we don't know this.
I want to quote from this review.
This is 1997.
Still, some wonder what kind of an impact Trooper's Nazi subtext will have on those who don't get the joke.
Like, say, action-craving teens who think Triumph of the Will is about a boy and his whale.
For them, isn't Troopers merely an ironic twist on Nazi propaganda, minus the ironic twist?
All those monstrual guys in black leather and boots, someone my age can't help but make the
association with Nazis," said Dr. Will Miller, Nick at Night's resident pop psychotherapist.
And to make them the good guys, that's a pretty creepy message for kids who don't have a knowledge
of Nazi propaganda film techniques. Here we see a couple things. One,
One, the idea that people are too stupid to get that it's satire.
Two, that the satire can't possibly fail.
That if people are appreciating it on the surface, that it's their fault for not getting it.
It's not the fault of the artist for screwing it up.
And three, the idea that you need some sort of academic training to educate people so they make sure they get the intended message.
Because if they don't get the intended message, they're doing it wrong, which seems to be the underlying premise of a lot of the discussion going on online.
Now, the funny thing about all of this, of course, is that literary criticism post, what, 1980, really comes out of Roland Barthes' 1977 essay, The Death of the Author, which posits that the author's intended meaning is itself a form of privilege, a form of classism, because the authors usually come from a higher socioeconomic status and whatever he's putting forward as the intended meaning of the text actually takes away from a liberated population's ability to assign their own meaning to the text.
And I want to quote from how he concludes his essay.
we are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant anti-phrasical recriminations
of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys.
We know that to give writing its future it is necessary to overthrow the myth.
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."
But as we have seen, a lot of the ideas of deconstructionism and a lot of the ideas of
even critical theory, you're not allowed to use that against the power structure now.
Because the whole thing with the power structure now is it still believes that it's in rebellion.
They still pretend that they're the plucky Star Wars rebels fighting the evil empire, even when they're the ones who have tenure, even when they're the ones who run the media, even when they're the ones who run the universities.
So when you use these kinds of ideas and say, well, at a university, I learned that actually I can assign my own meaning to a text or to a movie or even to an internet film or something like that, they say, no, that's not allowed.
That's not media literacy.
You have to take the intended meaning of this, and if you don't take the intended meaning of this, you're doing it wrong.
You know, it's fascinating because you have to go back to 97, you know, and I hate to keep taking us back to a time when movies, it was a far simpler time, you know, Entertainment Tonight, there were a couple magazines that would talk to you about the upcoming movies, Legitimately, Starship Troopers is a huge budget film, and I think it came out in the spring of 97.
A lot of excitement for it.
It was delayed, I believe, because they wanted to make it a summer film, but they realized it had that shock violence.
I mean, Mr. Hood, tell me the first time you saw it.
I mean, it was shocking.
The opening scene, they're on this invasion battle, and a guy gets cut in half by an insect.
It's shocking.
Yeah, well it starts off with defeat.
I mean it almost starts off you think that they'll just die and that's the end of it because you're being accompanied sort of by an embedded combat reporter and you're expecting them to just kind of mow through these bugs but instead they lose quickly and what's interesting about it is that I mean again this is one of the fundamental differences and this clearly was intended between the film and the book is In the book, there are these very loving descriptions of the kind of armor they wear, the weapons they use.
I mean, Starship Troopers is actually the pioneer for the concept of power armor, which is now sort of a sci-fi.
I mean, if you look at like Warhammer 40k or any of these types of things, it's pretty standard now.
The idea of having some sort of advanced armor being key to future warfare.
Well, he came up with that.
Yep.
And each one of these soldiers is essentially Almost like a combined arms unit in its own right, artillery, armor, and infantry.
And they do these kind of like bounding leaps where they do area denial.
Yeah.
And the combination of both ground and air force and all this stuff.
In the movie, they just run forward with these pop guns like morons and engage these giant beasts at like point blank range.
And of course they magically get torn apart.
It's obviously stupid when you look at, I mean, if you want to call it doctrine or something, but I think this is part of the thing that the, the director was really trying to get at is that the idea of sacrifice is inherently, and the idea of fighting is inherently stupid.
You're inherently fascist to do these things.
So it has to be done in a stupid way.
It's sort of like the straw man version of world war one where, Oh, well the generals were just dumb.
And they were just sending people in these human waves of tax.
And over the course of four years, they just never learned.
Nobody could understand that people getting mowed down.
So they never changed their tactics.
As if some amateur could just come in and be the next Napoleon because he knows because he's read Reddit.
And so he knows how military strategy works or something.
The idea of undermining these people as As stupid, as foolish, as incompetent, though, it gets screwed up within the movie itself because, you know, as we learned, Johnny Rico survives the initial thing.
The movie doesn't just end, which would be pretty funny if it did.
And you have this catastrophic attack, catastrophic defeat on the enemy planet.
And so what happens?
There's a big press conference and a big meeting and the Sky Marshal, who I guess is like the Commander-in-Chief, resigns in front of everyone.
And he gets replaced by another Sky Marshal who's like a fat black woman, who immediately,
so the commander takes full responsibility and resigns, which of course would never happen in our system.
Like nobody took responsibility for the catastrophic withdrawal in Afghanistan
where 13 people died.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs flatly refused to take responsibility.
Biden just muttered something and stumbled into a wall.
Nobody cared.
So already this quote unquote authoritarian political system
is more responsive and accountable than our system.
And then clearly they don't care about race because you got a black person in charge now clearly They don't care about sex.
He's got a woman in charge now.
And what does she do?
She says the previous strategy was all wrong So we're gonna undertake a different strategy now and everybody goes.
Okay, and then that's what they do the military obeys it but then we also see Criticism of this new strategy on TV news.
We even see, because the new strategy is that these bugs, again another sci-fi trope, they're commanded by these brain bugs that tell them what to think, sort of like Queen Anne or something like that.
And the idea is that they're going to capture these.
What's that?
It's like something out of Orson Scott Card's Inders game.
But it's also Independence Day.
It's also Battle for Los Angeles.
I mean, every time you see a bug invasion movie from the future, there's always some brain
bug that we have to kill because that's just how these things work apparently.
But it's true he says.
But the- It's totally true. I mean it is, that's how it would work.
But they go out and they say they got to find these things and you even see people on tv news mocking the idea of
One guy says he finds it offensive and everything else.
So like not only are there accountable leaders but you can actually debate the strategy and in this apparently totalitarian society openly say on TV news in front of everyone that the leaders are morons and are getting this all wrong.
So like what kind of totalitarian society is this?
We're like, the leaders are held accountable.
There's no racial supremacism.
There's no sex discrimination.
You can openly dissent with the leaders.
And furthermore, if you're a civilian, you don't have to do anything.
The only thing you don't get to do is vote.
That's a hell of a lot better than what we have now, if you ask me.
Yeah, and as the novel makes clear, taxes are at a record low.
Virtually crime does not existent.
I mean, one of the best portions of the novel is when they're talking about a soldier who went AWOL and he killed someone and then he's brought back and he's hanged because he disgraced the military.
You know, how dare you kill a child?
This is almost unheard of.
And somebody who was going to be a, you know, Part of the military, he disgraced their colors, and that then leads to one of the best parts of the novel, and that is the breakdown of what was an admirable society, and that is the democracy of the United States of America and the Anglosphere, which he says happens.
I mean, Heinlein said that was going to happen.
He just thought that America and Europe would unite with Russia against the Soviet, I'm sorry, against the Chinese threat, and that we'd lose a war and that the veterans would return home and then They basically take over, which I mean, to some extent, he was right, because Nixon did align the United States.
Well, it was actually the United States with China against the Soviets.
Correct.
But the idea of the Sino-Soviet split, I was pretty forward looking on his part.
And there are some very explicit comparisons in the book between the bugs and sort of a strawman idea of what Chinese communism would be like.
The idea of the human wave attacks.
The idea of having no individual identity.
But of course, it wasn't long after the Cultural Revolution, something which, by the way, even as people were starving to death and millions of people were dying, Mao was all the rage on American college campuses.
Not much has changed.
I mean, by the 60s, people had more or less given up on the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was too right-wing.
It was too hierarchical.
It was too conservative.
It was actually Mao Who is the new thing?
And it's precisely because everything was falling apart.
It's precisely because that it was so brutal and everybody was being killed.
It's precisely because it was so destructive that we know it's good.
Because the opposite of treasuring what you have is what's moral.
I mean, let's, this is the Washington Post and I was, it's very hard to get through this without laughing just because it's so unbelievably unhinged.
You know, and this is 1997, you have to remember, the people who rule us, this is how they think.
We're governed by neurotic psychopaths.
And Mr. Hood, if I could real quick stop you, because you started this by talking about Entertainment Weekly.
At the time, in 1997, that probably had a circulation of, I don't know, five, six million?
You have to understand how small the media was in concentration.
Yeah, you didn't have blogs, you didn't have People, you didn't have independent people doing movie criticism or something like that.
It was a centralized, it was a centralized silo when it came to the echo chamber.
Right.
And so when you have a coordinated series of pieces on something like this, it's because, It's not even like Central Command.
It's akin to what Joe Sobern talked about with his concept of the hive, where they all just think the same thing.
I mean, they're sort of pre-selected by educational and media institutions that the only people who are going to get these jobs are people who think this way.
And this is the thing is, when you see these people, when you read one thing, you know everything they've ever thought.
You know everything they've ever thought about every political issue of the last half century.
You know everything they're going to think for the next half century.
You know everything they've ever believed on art.
You know everything they've ever believed on life.
There's no reason to have a conversation with any of these people because you know them better than they know themselves.
Because there's just nothing there.
It's just scripts.
It's like one of these chat GBT things after they mutilate it by crippling its ability to make pattern recognition and value judgments.
And so it just kind of spits out these really obvious politically correct scripts at you.
I mean that's what these people are.
I mean, and again, if you think I'm exaggerating, here I quote.
This is the Washington Post.
Goose-stepping at the movies.
Starship Troopers and the Nazi Aesthetic by Stephen Hunter.
Silly me.
I thought the Nazis lost the war.
But here's the exceedingly strange new movie Starship Troopers commanding 22 million American dollars in its first weekend and certain to make gobsmore while secretly whispering, see Kyle.
The movie recounts the adventures of a platoon of mobile infantry sometime in the next century as it does battle with a race of arachnid nasties on the far planet of Klendathu.
It's an epic of bug-basting, a movie whose script appears to have been the instructions on a can of Raid, and in some profoundly disturbing way, it's Nazi to the core.
I don't mean to suggest that it's political propaganda in the literal sense, or that it advocates Nazism, but it's a film that presupposes it.
It's spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi.
It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination and is set in the Nazi universe.
And at this point I imagine he's just like screaming and pissing his pants or something.
It hails from what would be year 64 of the Thousand-Year Reich, a sanitized utopia of heroic, sexless young folk, sexless young folk, they're like hooking up with each other the whole movie, grandly aware of their role as defenders of the known reality and descended from the Nazi pioneer generation of the 1930s and 40s.
Of course, the great Fuhrer has gone to Valhalla, but it's possible that in a home in some mountain fastness, some shiny facsimile of Holy Burstgarten, the 97-year-old Heinrich Himmler stole daughters about.
And it goes on and this sort of thing.
There's nothing in the, I mean, this is one of the key takeaways here is there's nothing in the film about race.
And again, it seems to have solved the racial problem.
There's certainly nothing about Jews and they're not fighting a group of people that have been dehumanized.
They're fighting things that are not human.
That's kind of the idea.
They're fighting things that are a direct threat to humans.
Well, yeah, and they're also they're also fighting things.
I mean, this is one of the interesting things that kind of happened online.
This is sort of the 9-11 truth for Starship Troopers.
Early on in the film, there is a asteroid that is sent to Earth and it blows up Buenos Aires, where our hero is from.
So it kills his family, kills millions of people.
And of course, this leads to the famous line, I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all.
and there were people online speculating.
The only good bug is a dead bug.
The only good bug is a dead bug, that's right.
And there were people online speculating, well, the Federation actually blew up its own city
to justify the war against the bugs.
But then of course, somebody dug up some interview with Verhoeven where he was like,
no, of course the bugs sent the asteroids.
So like, we could dismiss this whole thing.
But this is my point, and this is kind of significant.
And I'll get into some of the tweets about this.
And we're not talking like furnished things.
These are things, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
The idea of fighting a totally alien enemy, something that you can't negotiate with,
something that is inherently hostile, something that is going to try to wipe out humanity,
this by itself makes it spiritually Nazi.
And in some weird esoteric way, You can see how he's getting at it, because if we define Nazism in this, where it has nothing to do with, like, what they actually wanted, or, you know, the idea of German expansionism, or something like that, but if we define it as putting in-group preference above all other considerations, and that's the ultimate evil, it follows that the ultimate good is out-group.
Yep.
And therefore, if you have, like, a snarling bug monster that wants to kill everyone, it's actually your moral duty To be killed by these things.
As a matter of fact, I mean, there were actually sequels made to these movies, and they tried to lay on the satire even more.
And in one, they actually... One of the leaders of the Federation basically gets brainwashed by one of these bugs, and essentially becomes sort of like a bug trader.
Now in this, of course, it's not because he like ideologically agrees with it, of course, but it's, you know, it's just...
More of a biological brainwashing type thing.
That's Scratchup Troopers and Marauders.
That's right.
Yeah.
Going back to the whole idea of this being a 9-11, you know, whatever you said, a conspiracy, whatever.
There's so many lines in the movie.
And again, I was wrong.
I want to clarify something.
This movie was supposed to come out in the summer of 1997.
It was delayed until November 7th, 1997.
I actually was getting ready to go see a football.
I actually had a football game.
I had a varsity game.
I was a freshman.
And I was on Varsity and I remember I convinced some friends to go see it on Thursday night at midnight.
And I remember being just blown away.
There are two movies that I watched in theaters that I realized should never have been made.
It was this movie.
I was very, again, I'm very young when I saw this and I knew I'm like, Oh my God, there's something about this that there's, this is gonna, There's something about this that underline it's not supposed to have been made.
And I knew that.
And the same thing, I had that same feeling almost a decade later when 300 came out.
Yeah, that was another one that definitely had the media going nuts.
Frank Miller, of course, is another one who He's not being satirical.
I mean, Frank Miller is definitely right of center, certainly.
And he, I mean, this is why his career kind of took a hit, is because he started openly expressing these things, and you're just kind of not allowed to do that, regardless of what you've done in the past.
Yeah, he wanted to write a Batman story where Batman goes and takes out Osama bin Laden, and he had to rewrite, because DC wouldn't give him the credits.
He, of course, wrote famously the most incredibly dark, fascistic take on Batman and Dark Knight Returns, where Batman famously says to Superman, we've always been the bad guys.
Don't you understand that?
That's what we are.
We're running against what the government wants to do.
And I think the whole concept of this movie being a conspiracy, like you said, the memes, it's so strange because the opening scene, it shows that the military has journalists embedded.
and they're documenting for all of humanity to watch this terrible mission where...
Yeah, it's a complete embarrassing debacle.
Yeah, and then there's also the great scene where throughout the whole movie, Johnny Rico,
Caspar Van Dien, a very blond-haired, blue-eyed looking...
He's the lead, Caspar Van Dien's character, Johnny Rico.
His father doesn't want him to join the military.
He's a financier.
He's somebody who, he doesn't care about the vote.
He just wants to make money.
He wants his son to go to Harvard, where apparently in the future there is no problem of, you know.
Affirmative action.
Yeah, exactly.
No campus for white men.
Yes, wasps still predominate Harvard in the future.
But the point is, he wants his son, upon graduating high school, he wants to go to Zegima Beach.
And Johnny Rico goes, I've always wanted to go there.
And then in one of the scenes, when they're talking about the aftermath of the attack on Buenos Aires, where, you know, millions are killed, he goes, Oh, gosh, you know, I always want to go to Zegima Beach.
And then one of the characters, I think it's actually the black guy, he goes, It's not there anymore.
So again, this whole idea, the bugs are trying to exterminate humanity, and it's this whole concept.
Early in the movie, it's set during high school, Mr. Hood, and they're learning about the biology of the arachnids and how they can produce.
They have no ego.
They don't care.
They're there to expand.
Well, this is one of the things that, I mean, this is actually one of the comments, and I'm going to read some of them in a bit.
One of the ones that I actually thought had a bit of validity that the leftists were saying, which is the admiring tone.
That the woman talking about the bugs has when she's saying, you know, they have no individuality.
They have no ego.
They're not afraid to do anything.
They follow orders and it's sort of implied.
Well, you know, we need to be like that if we're going to win this thing, but this is sort of the I mean, this is why I think Democrats or anarchists or communists or anybody who's ostensibly egalitarian is always deeply suspicious of the military as such because The whole point of the military is you're going to end up with hierarchy, just necessarily, and you're also going to end up with people whose job it is to basically just die, to sacrifice their lives for the well-being of others, and they don't get a say in the matter.
And if they try to mutiny or dissent from that, you shoot them.
It's always interesting and remarkably interesting, in fact, if you look at revolutionary armies, including the American Revolution, but also the early Red Army, some of the French revolutionary armies, they always want to do things at the beginning like elect their own officers.
They want to do things like getting rid of salutes.
They want to do things like getting rid of the ranks.
In the Spanish Civil War, famously, a lot of these anarchist units would be like, Having negotiations about whether they're going to obey orders or not.
So if some guy says, hey, you need to attack that flank immediately, they're like, well, we need to have a committee meeting and discuss like whether this is a good idea.
But of course, it always all that falls apart because the people who actually win are the ones who salute and charge up the hill.
And even if you lose one battle or two, ultimately unity of command and a specific purpose is going to triumph over chaos.
And this is why in any kind of External threat where society is fighting somebody from the outside.
It always ends up strengthening Conservative and even reactionary social forces because you have to have a move toward hierarchy You have to have a move toward command and unity of command specifically and clear lines of sovereignty It's all very well in our democracy our democracy capital O capital D where you don't really know who's in charge and You don't really know what bureaucrat is the one giving the order saying your house needs to be torn down because there's an endangered snail or something on your front lawn.
You don't really know who shuts down your business because you violated a civil rights law.
But in the military, you do have to know who's giving an order.
You do have to know who to hold responsible if something goes wrong.
There always has to be accountability.
These are kind of disturbing trends, I think, for a lot of leftists to sort of think was because they're sort of a, an existential challenge to their worldview.
I don't think, I mean, this is why I think the original communists were actually on to something when they said, well, communism can't ever work while there's a capitalist world.
Because as long as where you have to compete, as long as there's the possibility of military conflict, There's always going to be these sort of reactionary tendencies that we can't overcome because they're sort of inherent.
And so you literally have to just conquer the world before we can make this social experiment work.
I think that's actually true.
And that's also why even in communist societies, militaries tend to be, and even if they don't want them to be, militaries tend to be a bastion of reaction.
One of the most interesting things I've read is about the East German military.
Both after World War II, but then also very late in the game, 70s and 80s, where they had real problems because most of the guys who were joining the East German army, guys who had been raised their entire lives under communism and anti-Wehrmacht myths, were all sympathizers with World War II Germany.
And they all thought, all their heroes were like Rommel and guys like that.
And the communists had a heck of a time trying to purge these guys.
But how can you?
Because eventually you're just going to keep finding your way back to this stuff.
I mean, I think that's also one of the reasons why Heinlein's book is so unpopular in some quarters, because he basically says, yes, it will inevitably lead to these tendencies.
And that's a good thing.
And we need to spread it to the larger society.
No, I mean, again, Heinlein's novel, Social Troopers, is at its core, it's about duty to something greater than yourself.
And that For the perpetuation of society, for the perpetuation of society that works, for perpetuation of society that has seen the mistakes that were made in the past and has tried to put in place impediments to ensure that that never happens again.
I mean, that's the two most important lessons of searcher troopers are not, as you've adroitly noted, Mr. Hood, that he did talk about these exoskeletons that would guard and and keep the you know, the volunteers life safe as they're fighting for
humanity and these bug wars and stuff. But there are two great lessons where in high school,
the Johnny Rico character has a course in history and war philosophy. Yeah, we can get
into that. But then there's also another lecture where he's actually up for, he's basically an OCS,
he's going to be an officer, he's an officer. They have an even more in-depth conversation about
rights that is just extraordinary to read.
I mean, this is, this is high level.
Yeah, I mean, this is, this is better than what you, I mean, I say this as somebody at the, like, poll rank or whatever.
Oh, you don't admit illiteracy because you didn't go to school.
It's like, all right, well.
I've got a BA in this.
I've got a master's in this.
I mean, I've sat through more lectures on political theory than I think most people have ever can even conceive exist.
And you know, I read this stuff for fun because this is what I do.
And yeah, this, this stands up.
I mean, there hasn't really been a takedown of these sorts of things.
I mean, but there's also an interesting difference.
Well, let's get into the moral philosophy thing in a second, but real quick, a very significant difference is the scene with, there's a scene where one of the Rico's comrades, Asks why they're training with knives Because of course it's the future and you can use guns and you can use nuclear weapons and whatever else So why do we why even bother with this stuff?
Yeah at which point?
Yeah, at which point Sgt.
Zim takes in the film takes a knife and Throws it at the hand of the soldier pinning it against the wall And then says the enemy cannot push the button if you disable his hand and it's highly amusing for all concerned in the book The point is not, why are we training with knives?
The question is, why are we using these kinds of weapons when we have more effective weapons?
Why don't we just nuke things when they get in the way?
And frankly, at the time that the book was written, this was a much more realistic thing because There were serious debates in the United States about giving control and the authority to use them of tactical nuclear weapons to battlefield commanders.
You can find pictures in the 50s and the 60s of American soldiers with these absolutely hilarious looking guns that shoot nukes, essentially.
Guys who would not be that far away, and I don't think it would end very well for everyone concerned, but like this is how we roll.
This was something that happened.
And in the book, Sergeant Zim goes on this very learned, dare I say, discourse about the necessity of political leadership that alone determines how far a war should go.
And that the amount of force you use, I mean, it's something out of Clausewitz, really, the amount of force you use is tied to political objectives.
It's not just madness.
It's not just chaos.
It's not just blood for the blood God, because if you did that, You're not really waging war.
You're just murdering and you're just giving in to frenzy, but you're not actually accomplishing anything.
And the reason we do this in a civilized society, the reason why civilized societies have wars is because there are certain political objectives that can only be done through these sorts of methods.
And somebody has to say, it will go this far and no further, because if it goes any further, it's going to be counterproductive.
That's frankly over the head of people who would want to see this movie.
It's probably over the head of Verhoeven, so that's why they had to play this off for laughs.
One last point, and then we'll go into moral philosophy, but I want to read one of these tweets and this kind of gets to my idea of sort of the inverse morality we live under.
There's a picture of the brain bug, which is a rather disgusting looking thing.
It actually sucks the brain out But if one of the guys in the movie in a particularly horrifying scene and it leads to one of the most, again, this is not a line of dialogue in the book, but in the film there's an immortal line of dialogue where I think the the commander says in a hushed tone that they sucked his brains out.
But there's this disgusting thing, there's a picture of it, and somebody said, this is not a face I can relate to, sympathize for, even have a dialogue with.
This screams at me to kill it with fire.
Even if I didn't want to kill this thing, I want to be in orbit far away from this creature.
It's horrific and only a contrarian can argue against that.
And then, with more than 10,000 likes, somebody said, that's the point.
Your emotional disgust towards something you aren't familiar with is the xenophobic steed from which fascism proliferates.
This is a juvenile reinterpretation of an analysis that frankly might be too smart for you to understand.
I think this is absolutely true in the sense of this is what we talk about as anti-fascism, which is really the foundation of our whole moral and political order.
That's what it is.
If you have something that is beautiful, if you have something that is nice to look at, if you have something that's in group preference, if you have something that serves your self-interest or the self-interest of those around you and those you care about, that's why it's evil.
That's why it has to be opposed.
That's why it has to be destroyed.
Look at this guy even just today.
United States Air Force enlisted personnel, yeah, lit himself on fire.
And he screamed free Palestine and things like that.
And obviously, everybody listening to this is going to have their own opinions on the Israel-Palestinian thing.
But looking into some of the other stuff he had said, he had also posted things like, well, what would you be doing if apartheid was going on?
What would you be doing with segregation in the United States?
The answer is you're doing it now.
And he felt that he had to do these things, and he actually comes from, I guess, some sort of Quaker-type Christian denomination, where it's always this social justice thing and everything else.
Putting the outgroup first, because it's the outgroup, is the essence of the faith, and he's willing to go a lot farther on behalf of that than just about anyone.
I mean, to a certain extent, you have to step back and just say, okay, well, you can disagree with this guy's views, but what have you done?
I mean, are you going to let yourself on fire?
They have the white race.
Are you even going to donate like a hundred bucks?
I mean, if not, well, guess what?
Guys like this are going to be the ones in charge because if you have greater will, you win.
The idea, but I mean, this idea that you, people are naturally drawn to the in-group and this is something Jared Terrell talks about a lot.
The idea that let's, let's just say it, racism even is natural.
And in group preference is natural.
That is true.
It is natural.
This is why we get articles like your baby is racist and how terrible it is, but it is not in eradicable.
It is simply a fact that white liberals since the second term of Barack Obama.
Have a negative in-group preference toward other whites more than that.
It's not just that they think everybody's equal That's actually not true.
And this is polling data.
This isn't my opinion.
This is fact.
They believe whites are dumber than blacks They believe whites are more violent than blacks.
They believe whites are uniquely threatening and uniquely dangerous and deserve extra supervision and repression And it's, a lot of people could say, you know, well, it's a status thing and maybe they're trying to pull up the ladder behind them and whatever else, but I think a lot of it is deeply felt.
No, being hostile to your own in-group is actually the basis of morality.
It's sort of like a Christian heresy where you take away, it's just pathos without logos.
It's Christianity, like a very heretical, simplified version of Christian morality, but you strip the idea of God out.
And instead it's just sort of this self-sacrificial altruism where you glorify yourself by destroying yourself and everybody around you and somehow that leads to good things even though objectively it doesn't lead to good things and doesn't even lead to less suffering.
But that is I think what we're facing and I think that's why...
You know, what Reno talked about, and Peter Brimlow has talked about this too, he calls it Hitler's revenge.
He said that after the Second World War, the Allied powers came out so determined that Nazi's mid-fascism will never rise again, that they determined to destroy themselves.
And one of the most important tools to do that is mass immigration.
I think that is absolutely true.
And furthermore, I think the powerful interests that are trying to do this, I think they also are justifying it on the same grounds.
We have to do this to make sure World War II doesn't happen again.
You know, it's so fascinating about the whole concept of the brain bug and the way it looks.
I never thought about this until, you know, we were a couple of days away from Dune 2 coming out, which is going to be one of the big films of 2024.
And again, I know a lot of our listeners, you have to understand, guys, And girls, you have to pay attention to movies.
You have to understand that movies... Yes, the programming of the masses.
So important.
You have to understand that.
And in the early 1980s, we saw a, what I believe is a beautiful adaptation of Frank Herbert's, or is it Frank Herbert or Frank Herbert?
Sorry, I'm not sure the correct pronunciation.
It's a Herbert.
Okay.
So, you know, have you ever thought about how the brain bug looks like a guild navigator?
Yeah, I actually was thinking about that.
I mean, obviously it's kind of a touch and go because the way they're portrayed in the Dune films, and then also, you know, the Starship Troopers film, that's not really in the books.
It's not really described, but it is interesting that they seem to be drawing it from the same source.
The idea that it's almost like a mutated version of us, you know what I mean?
Sort of the brain bug, I mean if we wanted to have like a true, I mean this would be a fun project, a true esoteric right-wing media literate version of Starship Troopers is the brain bug is essentially the hostile liberal intelligentsia, particularly the alien elements of said intelligentsia.
No, I think that's, and I also think, you know, Mr. Hood, there's another fascinating aspect to the whole Starship Troopers concept.
There was really a trilogy of alien invasion films made from 96 to 97. And remember, Star Trek Troopers was
supposed to be a major film over the summer, but it was so violent. And again, the violence in the movie
is actually incredible. We haven't really touched on that because that's not something we're,
we're not talking about the morality or the ethics. We're trying to talk about the
morality and ethics of the actual film and what it's talking about, but what's actually on celluloid,
forgive me for mispronouncing that, there's some shocking violent scenes during the training.
There's a there's a guy from Iowa whose head gets blown off when Johnny Rico gets to be the platoon sergeant.
Yeah, because, I mean, this is why he gets whipped, too, by a black man, I believe, too.
Yeah, he does.
This is another one of those, we're clearly past race things, because presumably in this society, every once in a while, a black recruit screws up and gets whipped by a white guy.
Correct.
And nobody seems to have a particular problem with this.
Certainly not a white supremacist society, where a black guy whips a white guy, and furthermore, the white drill sergeant, who's kind of portrayed as the model soldier, comes up with a leather bit for Johnny Rico to, you know, to bite on while they're He actually says, I know.
He does that both in the novel and the movie.
it helps, which implies of course that he's screwed up in the past and he got whipped.
He actually says, I know. Yeah, yeah, that's right. He makes it explicit.
He does that both in the novel and the movie because in the novel, he's actually, it's,
he's such a great character and that Clancy Brown, I believe is the guy who plays that
character who was also famously the, um, Kurgan and the Highlander.
And he was the, he was the police officer in, oh God, what's that?
Shawshank Redemption?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shawshank Redemption.
He's the bad.
That's another, well, that's another, I mean, this is one of these things I don't want to keep.
Harping on this because I want to get in the moral philosophy, but I think this is really the key to one of the keys to understanding a lot of public culture to briefly look at Shawshank Redemption.
Who is the focus of evil?
It's the white Christian guy who always quotes the Bible.
And that's why we know that he's scum.
It's the corrupt police officer.
That's why we know he's terrible.
It's a bit dated.
Presumably, if they remade the movie now, the homosexual gang that tries to, you know, rape and torture the hero, that would just be written out, or maybe they'd be turned into the good guys.
Who are the good guys?
It's all the criminals.
The criminals are actually the moral center of the movie.
It's because they're criminals that they're better than us.
I mean, the main character, of course, we find out that he's not actually a criminal, and he's innocent victims, but certainly the people around him are still portrayed as better than the warden.
That's sort of the implied message that you get from everything.
I would call that like the default metaphysics, I guess, of our entire social structure.
That whatever was good in the past, whatever was good from sort of this strawman version of, I don't even know, 19th century European civilization, That is actually the focus of evil and the real diabolical genius of it is it allows, yeah, and it allows the people who are in charge to always portray themselves as eternally in rebellion.
They're still rebelling against Wasps from 1840.
They're still rebelling against reactionary white Christian ministers.
They're still rebelling against militarist generals from before World War One.
None of these people have any power.
None of these people even exist anymore.
And yet everybody's still going nuts.
I mean, we, we live in a society where people, they, they give little kids transgender propaganda at like age nine.
And yet, The smartest, the wealthiest, the most politically connected, the most educated, really, truly, honestly believe that we're two years away from the handmaid's tale and then being forced to walk around all day in a Christian theocracy.
None of this, and the thing is to remember is that This has been going on for a very long time.
I mean, when George W. Bush was president, there were forever these warnings about American theocracy, how it's Christo-fascism, how these types of things are all going to happen.
And a lot of it was in response to the fact that because we were attacked by self-identified Islamic jihadists, Therefore it actually, there was a certain, I mean after the attack this wasn't really true in the immediate aftermath, but it became true pretty quickly.
It was already true even the day after the attack.
I was in college at the time and already on campus there were protests the next day against American foreign policy, even though America hadn't even done anything yet in response.
It was already implied that because this was a foreign thing and because it was a threat, it is necessarily virtuous to champion these things.
I mean the greatest thing that ever happened for Islam in the United States was the September 11th attacks.
Everybody talks about how they had to deal with discrimination or something like that.
I'll tell you right now, if it wasn't for September 11th, you would have fewer Muslims in this country.
You'd have fewer programs in them.
You wouldn't have these programs at universities.
You wouldn't have special set-asides.
You wouldn't have special NGOs.
You wouldn't have people in the media looking out for their interests.
It was the greatest thing that ever happened to them.
Why?
Is Minneapolis a colony?
Is Louisville a colony?
None of these things.
You wouldn't have Muslims in Congress.
You wouldn't have any of these things.
The reason that people put it beyond criticism is because it was bad for America.
I think and I apologize I'm misquoting it because I love this quote and I've been looking for it forever but search engines are useless now and so it's hard to find but I believe Mark Stein wrote something to the effect that the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks were not a The precursor to a war against Islam by the West.
Instead, it was something akin to AIDS, what AIDS was for homosexuality, where it could have been interpreted as something that should be used to exclude these sorts of ideas and these sorts of movements from the West.
But actually, what it did is make it beyond criticism.
And actually, what it did is it meant that these things had to be put at the center.
of Western cultural life, which actually is true when you look at how that epidemic started and what the response to it was in the 1980s.
These sorts of things really underlie everything that's happening.
Katie Porter, who I think is a Democratic Congresswoman, I haven't checked the exact quote yet, but this is something I need to follow up with, where she apparently said pedophilia is not a crime, it's an identity.
And you could say, well, it's monstrous and whatever else.
And it's like, yeah, but it's because it's monstrous.
It's because it's the parade.
That's why it's good.
That's why they're better than you because you're a fascist.
You just don't know it.
You've got an authoritarian personality because you think it's good to be married and like your kids and try to take care of them and not live in filth all day.
But that's actually why you're scum.
The enlightened people know that if you champion these other things that are harmful, that proves your virtue.
There's a much there's a much broader debate to be had about what it is because Obviously when it comes to reveal preferences where these people actually choose to live where they send their kids to school Obviously they live like white nationalists, right?
I mean, what is white nationalism white nationalism is the radical idea that all white people should live the way white liberals want to but this is this is something so there are other things at work here, but I I don't think they're just hypocrites.
I don't think that this is like a cynical strategy.
People don't work that way.
I think they really believe what they're saying.
Now, the opposite to this entire moral worldview, I think, and I think this is where we should wrap up with it, but it's a great way to wrap up, is the History and Moral Philosophy course.
And that actually is pretty identical between the book and the film, wouldn't you say?
I would, but I want to get back to two things before we move to that, and that's just close out what I said.
There were two other alien invasion movies made in 96, 97.
Independence Day and Mars Attacks.
Independence Day, humanity is basically united by the reality that these aliens are coming.
They go from planet to planet, solar system to solar system, to take up the natural resources, to destroy whatever exists, and then move on to the next planet.
And there's a great scene where the president, Thomas Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, he is telekinetically united with an alien.
And he says, you know, can there be a peace between us?
And the alien replies, peace, no peace.
And then the president says, what is it you want us to do?
And the alien that they've captured, and they're trying to figure out what's going on, the alien says, die, die.
And I think that Little dialogue symbolizes exactly what both, you know, again, the civilizations and troopers, the arachnid versus the humans.
Again, the left is always going to.
Unite they're always going to galvanize. There are many there are many rights, but there's only one left exactly
They're always gonna unite behind the left and that's actually in a Harry Turtledove novel of the of a World War
two Got it. Only get too far into this but there's a there's a
there's a Harry Turtledove writes all these Yeah alternative history with left right about icon left
right and white before Martin Rojas may rest in peace died
We did a thing on Alternative History with Turtledove.
Now, Turtledove, of course, is a huge leftist.
He's evil.
Some, I think, American identity movement guy made some throwaway comment on Twitter back then about how he read books and he, you know, just flipped out and started kvetching and complaining about how no one should be allowed to read his books unless they agree with his politics.
But, you know, there is there's something to what he says and there's there's something to how, I mean, Sobern, I think, nailed it with this Hive metaphor.
They're always going to unite around these things because it is inherently a negative.
It's always easier to unite around who you hate than what you love and who you are.
And if you have an inverse morality, And you have an outgroup preference.
In many ways, it just sort of simplifies things.
I mean, one of the things that you always see, even in the pro-white sphere, is you always have these debates about, well, who is white?
What religion are we going to be?
Do we need to exclude the Christians?
Do we need to exclude the pagans?
Do we need to exclude the atheists?
Do we need to exclude people who support this political system or that political system?
And everybody goes nuts.
And the thing is, these are real issues and they're interesting debates to have.
And you can't tell people, well, just like ignore these things you believe.
But you have to understand that while we're talking about this stuff, the side that says, I hate whites, I hate Christians, I hate capitalists, I hate hierarchy.
And by the way, all these things are fundamentally the same.
They don't care about your ideological disputes and they don't care about your special identities.
They just know what they hate and that's why they are more united and that's why they win.
Yeah, and I think 100% I agree with that.
And another movie that came out in 96 was Tim Burton's Mars Attacks, which is a movie where God, it actually does do like what the left would wants us to do.
Yeah, no, acquiesce, surrender to this invasion, and watch as every civilization succumbs and is destroyed by an invasion that, again, it's clear this is what they're trying to do, and yet humanity still tries to negotiate.
There's a great scene where the President of the United States, played by Jack Nicholson, is trying, it gets on the phone and the French president
says, we've negotiated a peace, everything's great. And then all of a sudden he's like, no,
don't. We know what they're going to do.
And the aliens then end up killing everyone. And the French government, the only one in the United
States government who makes any sense, who understands the threat, is a white general
who says, they're coming to kill us.
We've got to nuke these people out of orbit.
They're coming to destroy us.
And then there's a black general who is very much reminiscent of Colin Powell, who says, we need to, we need to listen.
We need to, we need to placate and we need to negotiate.
This is going to all end well.
And it's a movie where it's, it's like this, this idea that there can be sympathy, there can be a coexistence.
It's like, no, like either you exist or you're destroyed.
And I think that's fundamentally, that's what the movie of Social Troopers actually gets, gets into.
It's that these young people, and I'm going back to the whole concept of a, again, if you're listening to this podcast, you're invested in Social Troopers.
I'm imploring all of you, go to YouTube.com, just simply type in this, Death From Above, Starship Troopers.
It's a documentary that was made in 1997.
It came out with the VHS and the DVD and the Laserdisc.
Yeah, I just said Laserdisc, Mr. Hood.
That definitely dates us.
But the point is, Verhoeven and Neumeier, again, Ed Neumeier was the guy who wrote the script.
He basically said that, hey, you know, we're making a movie.
And again, I'm not endorsing what I'm about to say.
This is what Ed Neumeier said.
Yeah, this is what they said.
This is what they said.
He basically says we made a movie where the Nazis won.
That's what Ed Neumeier says.
And all the other young... And apparently they created an anti-racist paradise.
Yeah, exactly.
No, and, you know, Verhoeven talks about, oh, you know, I grew up in, you know, I had the bombs... Nazi Germany... I had the P2 bombs going off and I'm trying to make this movie.
And yet at the same time, you're basically watching this movie where everything works.
Like society is not only improved for everybody, but This idea of merit, this idea of, and it goes for all races, everything has gotten better.
And it's like, it's basically Walt Disney's version of Tomorrowland where, you know, he promised at Epcot that humanity would come together and we'd unite.
And that's, yeah, and that's why it's evil.
It's very Muskian and, you know, and I use it, that's actually something we should turn into a, is that a verb or what was that?
Yeah, we'll get to that.
I mean, Musk, we'll see, we'll see how it plays out over the next year or two, I mean.
But my point is that, my point is that the director may have had Yeah.
own interpretation that you know, Leni Reifenstahl, yeah, here we are, okay, it's Trump to the will,
blah, blah, blah. But in reality, the producers, everybody else is making this movie. One of my
favorite actors is Michael Ironside. He, uh, Oh, he's great.
Yeah. Yeah. He plays, he plays, uh, he plays, is he the Lieutenant Colonel? He's actually, he's
the teacher and then he's also the commander.
Exactly.
So this is my segue to the history of moral philosophy.
And in the, he's also in Total Recall.
He plays, he's, he's in a number of great movies.
My point is, he's interviewed, he said, we made a very, he's interviewed in the documentary, Death from Above.
And he said, we made, we made a war movie.
And in essence, Sorcerer Troopers is a war movie.
But the question is, whose war is it?
And I think that it is a very right of center war.
It's a society that works in society that doesn't apologize for its own existence in the face of an alien society that, in our world, the left would side with as it tries to invade and destroy our what we are.
So, yeah, I mean, it's not.
You see this too.
I mean, this happens with every fantasy movie, you know, every time they say, Oh, here are like some snarling orcs that are like destroying and killing everyone.
And people are like, this just represents black people.
And it's like, you know what?
Like, I'm like, I'm a white nationalist.
I mean, like if some reporter shows up to the door and says like, are you all these things that they say you are?
I'm just going to be like, yes.
Like, it's all true.
I admit it.
I think it's great.
But let me, let me finish this point.
But even I, Wouldn't come up with this stuff half the time where they're like, you see these like snarling subhuman monsters and they're like, Oh, these are Jews.
These are blacks.
These are like, no, they're not.
Like sometimes an alien is just an alien.
Sometimes an orc is just an orc.
Like they're not meant to be anything else.
And especially in this one, it's remarkable because you have the ultimate straw manned enemy.
That you really can't feel bad about killing, and yet they can't help themselves.
Writing these giant essays about how it's actually best to sacrifice ourselves to them.
You see the same thing with the video game that's taken over everything now, which is Helldivers 2, where I think you're fighting, again, bugs, and I think like some sort of robotic thing.
And what is the debate?
The debate is like, oh, are people playing it for the wrong reason?
Are they unironically identifying with fascism?
We need to have like a new course in media literacy that's mandatory.
I mean, the obvious self-interest here is that if to properly interpret media, properly interpret movies, you need a media literacy course.
What does that do?
It transfers a lot of money and power to the type of people who teach these things.
But it also shows, going back to this idea of the death of the author, the reason that idea was promoted when it was is because it's a great tool to get rid of the classics.
It's a great tool to justify why you don't need to study Shakespeare anymore, or if you do, you can have interpretations that are the opposite of what he was trying to say.
Or, and this is true with the great novels, this is true with Greek and Roman writers, this is true with all this stuff.
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civilization has got to go, as Jesse Jackson said.
But now that they've done those things, and they've essentially established a new canon, you're not allowed to put your own spin on things.
You have to have The standard interpretation.
You have to have the stated interpretation even if they do a bad job selling it because this is the thing and as a number of people pointed out like why it doesn't work as satire.
You can't show a society that works.
You can't show a society of good-looking people just because people are naturally attracted to good-looking people and they're not going to listen to you when they say like no they're actually evil.
You can't have an utterly unsympathetic enemy.
You can't you can't Rush away the problems that we face in society now and say this evil totalitarian society is fascist when they seem to be more liberal and I'm thinking you know as a progressive might when it comes to race and sex and the only thing that they ultimately rely on is this idea that like well the uniforms look cool and that should remind you of Nazi Germany and therefore you should understand that all this stuff is bad and it's sort of like
I feel the whole left is sort of like raising the stakes over and over again, making things worse and worse and worse and worse, and saying, but you can't turn against this because the alternative is Nazism.
You have to put up with this because the alternative is Nazism.
Actually, Weimar Germany was great.
And if you say otherwise, you're a Nazi.
And at a certain point, I mean, you have to wonder, are people just going to be like, well, then I'm just going to get rid of this stuff.
I don't actually have to listen to you anymore.
I mean, this is, ultimately, that's sort of the premise of the whole History and Moral Philosophy course, wouldn't you say?
I mean, the whole idea is that it came out of conflict and war, and they set up this new system.
Why don't you describe, like, his lecture?
God, it's so fascinating to read, because, again, I'm listening to what you're talking about, and I feel like there's so much to unpack, because one of the most important things that you've started to talk about on Twitter is that the point of a system is what Forgive me for not being able to paraphrase it correctly.
The, the existence of a system is what the outcome, what am I wrong?
Like, um, the girl who just got killed by the illegal immigrant and.
No, it's the, uh, the purpose of the system is what it does.
Okay.
So one of the, one of the great lessons in chapter 12 of the novel, it's basically where Johnny Rico is having the opportunity to become an officer.
And the instructor asked the cadet for a reason, you know, not historical or theoretical, but practical for limiting the franchise to discharge veterans.
And they're going through, you know, incorrect explanations.
Um, you know, people are saying maybe veterans are higher quality beings, picked men, or they're more disciplined.
Johnny and the reader are then enlightened to the point where the instructor, the teacher who's blind, by the way, I should say, he's a veteran who's blind from his, um, From his time as an enlisted individual, he says this, quote, I handed you a question.
The practical reason for continuing our system of limited franchise is the same as the practical reason for continuing anything.
It works satisfactorily.
That's basically it.
That's the repeated emphasis on the fundamentals of sovereignty is that 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.
He may fail in wisdom.
He may lapse in civic virtue, but his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.
So basically, You know, they're taking this grim view of humanity and that the truth of sovereignty, where he then says, and this is actually echoed in the movie famously, he says, quote, To vote is to wield authority.
It's the supreme authority from which all other authority derives.
The franchise is force, naked and raw.
the power of the rods and the axe, the faces. Flee in terror, Democrats.
Quote, whether it is exerted by 10 or by 10 billion, political authority is force.
Yeah, in my libertarian days, we used to always call this the gun in the room, because every time a progressive would talk about some very noble sounding project, you know, we're going to Increase taxation to take care of the poor.
We're going to solve homelessness.
We're going to improve education.
The sentence that you have to add, which is at the end, is, and we're going to do it by putting a gun to your head.
Because if I don't pay for these things, you're going to kill me or you're going to throw me in jail.
That's how this actually works.
Political authority is force and when you are voting I mean this is why voting should be taken seriously and why it's such a deadly insult when you see people who have no stake in the system and really aren't Americans to begin with given a say and you're running your affairs is because what you're saying what voting is when you cut away all the nonsense is This group of people is saying we are putting our will behind a program backed by arms, backed by force.
And if you disagree with that, don't pay your taxes and see what happens to you.
That we are going to transfer wealth and resources to these people at the expense of these other people.
And we're going to do it with a gun.
And even if they are not willing to hold the gun, they want somebody else to do it.
This is sort of the same thing when you talk about something like gun control.
Nobody's saying, we're going to get rid of the guns.
They're saying, we're going to get rid of your guns, but other people with guns are going to be the ones to make you do that.
There's always going to be somebody holding that gun.
There's always going to be somebody who has the right to kill.
And the person who tells that person what to do and whether that person believes it That's what sovereignty and politics is all about.
It's about will it's about power.
It's about force And this is one of the things that a lot of liberals really objected to but to me, I mean, I think it's I Have this again, you know Kevin schizo theory time where I think that the more hypocritical and the more Divorced from reality a political theory is the more effective it is in some ways like if you tell people that Democracy doesn't require force unlike say monarchy Like people believe it because it's not right in somebody's face and because it's less honest somehow and more manipulative therefore more people like it and more people are willing to believe it and what's great about this lecture is he just kind of cuts through all that and I
Because it's a movie or because it's a book that a lot of young people read it has the impact of people being like oh, yeah That's actually obviously true.
I've just never thought about it before And the movie nails it, by the way.
I want to quote the movie here.
This is the high school scene where Michael Ironside's character, Gene Razchak, says this.
All right, let's sum up.
This year we explored the failure of democracy, how our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos.
We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since.
You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?
He then points his stub at somebody because he lost his arm sensibly in a battle of the bugs.
He says this.
You!
Why are only citizens allowed to vote?
Student responds, it's a reward.
Something the federation gives you for doing your federal service.
Gene Razchak, the teacher, says this.
He says, quote, no.
Something given has no value.
When you vote, you're exercising political authority.
You're using force.
And force, my friends, is violence.
The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
End quote.
Mr. Hood, I'd argue that that encapsulated pretty much both of the lessons of history and moral philosophy that are taught in the book.
That also makes more sense than the entire Enlightenment put together.
Like you can just burn all the Enlightenment books and just read that and you've gotten...
The greater understanding of how politics actually works.
And I would argue this is, you know, you're talking about, we're talking about a movie that came out in 1997 that scared to death the gatekeepers of pop culture.
And yeah, it's, we should be very thankful that Verhoeven, I mean, this is Steve Saylor's theory.
He was talking because of course he inserted himself into the, uh, the discourse, the capital D discourse surrounding this film.
And he said, Obviously what's really happening is that he's attracted to these kinds of images and these kinds of ideas, but the more conscious part of himself denies it.
So he just sort of accidentally smuggles, or subconsciously I guess, smuggles these ideas in.
and makes them attractive and creates a satire so bad and so counterproductive that most people walk away
saying this is great.
And sort of the only response to it is like, well, media literacy, you're not allowed to think that.
It's like, nope, sorry, death of the author.
I can say whatever I want.
I'm gonna assign my own meaning to what you say.
I guess my problem is when I saw the movie, I thought to myself, I want to live in that society.
And that's what everybody thinks.
I mean, aside for aside from asteroids come and blowing up our cities.
But one of the interesting things, though, I mean, this gets to the idea of an existential conflict.
There was a study during the Blitz World War Two, you know, the German bombing campaign against London.
And one of the things they found was that suicide rate and a number of other measures of social dysfunction actually plummeted.
Wallis was happening because people felt an existential danger.
They felt a tie with people around them.
They took care of each other a lot more after 9-11.
There were a lot of anecdotal.
I need to find the data on this.
I'm not sure whether you could even nail it down, but there were a lot of anecdotal reports and there were a lot of reports in just the mainstream media that I remember.
That crime had actually gone down significantly in the days after 9-11, because obviously, you know, the police and emergency response were pretty busy at the time.
If you were ever going to go on a crime spree, that would be the time to do it.
But people didn't.
And then, of course, you know, the president told us to go shopping and nothing actually changed and things just kind of went back to the way they were.
Nothing, you know, there was no effect of 9-11 other than more Muslims in the United States.
The idea of an existential conflict and a firm division between us and them, in some ways, I think it's just inherent to the human condition and it's what everybody wants.
And even the leftists who are warning against this is, you know, the very definition of fascism.
I mean, one of the great advantages of leftists is they're actually better at distinguishing between us and them.
Every once in a while, some braindead conservative will be like, they are moral relativists because they don't believe in logos.
It's like, you moron.
Like, any conflict in all of human history, I can tell you exactly who the leftists say is the good guy and who is the bad guy, and they're willing to do anything to destroy those bad guys.
Like, they have the strongest moral constitution of anybody.
Like, they're more fanatical about it than anybody else, too.
And they're less confused about, you know, friend-enemy, which is the heart of politics, as Carl Schmitt said, another person who Cut through the nonsense and describe politics very accurately, and that's why we're not allowed to talk about him, but I Think there is kind of a yearning for this where you see a society where people know who they are People they're not enslaved even in the film which is supposed to be a satire They clearly they seem to have more freedom than we do and I include freedom of speech and political freedom like they they're doing things in that film that you just couldn't get away with in the United States now and
And the government seems to have a pretty light hand aside from the fact that if you commit crime They beat you or they whip you or they kill you but even that if you wanted to Talk about mercy or what really constitutes compassion.
I mean certainly if somebody had a committed a petty crime and They were humiliated like paddled the way they are in Singapore or something like that or caned One could argue that's far more merciful than being thrown into a prison with the scum of the earth and having all sorts of terrible things happen to you for six months.
It would probably be better just to be caned and humiliated and you learn your lesson and nobody talks about it again.
I mean one of the other interesting things in the film is that when somebody is punished, because there are several times in both the book and the film when Rico is punished, I mean he is humiliated, it's in front of everyone, but then once it happens it's over.
Nobody talks about it.
He's not marked for life.
Nobody looks at him like he's a scumbag.
He did something wrong, and he was punished, and now it's over, and we go forward.
I mean, in many ways, that's more progressive than what we have now.
Yeah, because the whole idea is punishment must be unusual.
Yeah, that's one of the other things that he, in history and moral philosophy, one of the things that's said, and this is the idea of using force as punishment, he says, well, if you had a puppy, and the puppy poops on the floor, Do you beat the puppy?
And it's like, well, no, you're not just going to beat the puppy because like it doesn't do anything.
And you're not just going to like hit it randomly.
Cause we'll just get confused and hostile, but you rub its nose in it.
And then you might, you know, paddle it or whatever.
Cause you're trying to teach it like, Hey, you're not supposed to do this.
And animals have no moral sense of duty.
Right.
Right.
And, but it has to be something that is, I mean, this is sort of the problem when you have young children too, because you know, once they're at a certain age, If they do something, you can be like, listen, don't do this because, and you can explain it, but when they're like three, I mean, what are you going to do?
You can't, you can't give a history and moral philosophy lecture on like why you shouldn't do this, but you have to come up with something because that's in the nature of the profession, so to speak.
And this is something that is true of larger society.
I think every, I did not come up with this quote, but every society faces a new Chance of barbarism from every new generation because every new generation has to be civilized and For probably about three generations now Our society has failed that test and each generation is sort of coming out worse than the one before in terms of its disconnection With the larger society now at a certain point that may actually turn to our advantage Because if the society itself was rotten you actually want people who are disconnected from it and saying, you know we need a radical alternative and I would say we've gotten to that point and
But from a conservative point of view, certainly what we have now is society goes out of its way and extends a tremendous amount of power and resources to making sure that the criminals and the people who make life worse actually enjoy more rights and more freedoms and more help than normal law-abiding people.
Starship Troopers gives us a world where that is reversed.
You know, if what we have now is quote-unquote freedom in the John Stuart Leibovitz definition of it, that freedom is basically fascism for 98% of the population.
I mean, we live under a more authoritarian, repressive government than I think what a lot of people would call quote-unquote fascist.
But we're not free.
I mean, we're just not.
That's not how the system works.
But if then you look at this government, which I would not call it fascist, but you know, if we're going to use the straw man term that they're using, let's call the Federation fascist.
Well, the fascism seems to only apply to 2% of the population, basically the criminals and the ne'er-do-wells.
And for 98% of the population, everything seems to be fine.
And the government seems to have a very light touch.
And even if you want to join the military, what they do is they send out people to try to talk you out of it.
And say that it's a bad thing.
That's one of the big differences between the film and the movie, and I think this is a good place to close it, because it really shows the kind of morality that's being presented.
In the book, much like in the movie, there's the guy who talks to him as, you know, he carries terrible wounds from his time in service, and he's telling Rico not to do it.
He's trying to talk him out of it.
He's saying you're going to pay a cost for all these things, Yeah, especially because Rico wants to join the infantry and he's like, look, if you want to just vote, you don't have to be in the infantry.
There are lots of things you can do, which are much safer.
If you're in the infantry, you may end up like me, like all these terrible things are going to happen to you.
You have to be willing to accept that.
And Rico basically says like, yeah, because there's something in a young man that actually wants to test himself and actually wants to go through this.
In the film, Rico goes to sign up.
And a man who has no legs and a metal arm says, mobile infantry made me the man I am today.
And Rico kind of looks horrified for a second and it's played off for laughs because, hey, let's all laugh at the crippled veteran who's like proud of his military service.
And isn't it crazy how they're talking young people into saying this is a good thing?
I mean, to me, this is kind of a closing argument for why the film fails as satire, because one, You're mocking a guy who actually hasn't done anything wrong and is actually quite admirable.
And two, if they're trying to talk people, naive people, into joining the infantry, which is just a meat grinder for evil capitalists or whatever else, why would you put the guy out there that has all these wounds?
And you know, it's a self-contradicting message, but of course Verhoeven wanted to get the laugh line in.
He wanted to poke fun at this stuff.
He wanted to have his stupid little jokes, but the stupid little jokes undermine his whole message.
And that's really the entire story of Starship Troopers.
It's a satire that so fatally undermines itself that it actually ends up functioning as a compelling argument for the very values that it's trying to denounce.
Well, exactly, because it goes to the heart of the lesson where Rico is up for becoming an officer in the novel.
And the whole concept that Rico understands is cadet Rico is when he's asked what is necessary.
Uh, he's, he's asked what the necessary compliments of authority is.
And he says responsibility.
And then the instructor says this, Mr. Hood, if I could quote from the novel, he says, quote, Authority and responsibility must be equal, else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential.
To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster.
To hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.
The unlimited democracies of the 20th century were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority.
No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.
If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead, and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple."
End quote.
Doesn't that Quote from Heinlein in the 1950s, now where we are in 2024.
And that was in the 50s.
What would he say now?
I think that's a pretty good place to end it.
Thank you everyone for joining us.
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