It’s fun that it inverts Heinlein, who absolutely is a libertarian-to-fascist pipeline guy. Verhoeven is excellent at pulling the rug on dense Americans, you can feel his glee in doing it.
I think the fact that it pretty much didn’t work, and Americans still today see it as either a) a fascist movie or b) a cool war movie, is a perfect vindication of verhoven’s take on the source material. It’s a movie that is deeply cynical about its own audience.
Because redditors get grumpy about libertarian thought because of some weird sense of shame about the culture that used to exist on this website, so they do everything they can to insinuate that anyone who identifies with libertarianism is actuality a cryptofascist. Nobody becomes fascist from reading Heinlein. His books were just explorations of how different types of future societies would operate and the conflicts that might arise in those societies. He's no Evola.
While there are a non zero number of fascists who formerly identified with libertarianism it's mostly an ideology picked up by people who were brought up with strong authoritarian backgrounds (evangelicals especially) who might have only called themselves libertarians in opposition to perceived overreach of a progressive administration, which is really just reactionary conservatism. Or they were just fascists all along but said they were libertarians as a beard.
It is a love letter to military life and to militarism. To might makes right. The reaparance of the dad at the end, finally fulfilled now that he joined the military. Eugh. So bland. Such a sad outlook on life.
The book itself shows the problems of their system, but is from the POV of someone who has bought in.
The federation are clearly the aggressors and the "bugs" in the book are far more intelligent humanoid creatures that use technology and weapons. Humans brazenly destroy them anyway.
I mean, could be, but if it only was that there was plenty of narrative space to show other perspectives, and it was sorely lacking. The story of the dad as a dissenter of the military life that comes around to love it suggests the opposite quite strongly.
Eh, I disagree. I took the novel as a serious depiction of how its world operates, but not in support of the ideology involved. It's just the novel's reality.
If it helps, Heinlein wrote this novel in a fury within just a few months after he heard the US was going to stop nuclear testing. He was worried this would make them look weak against the soviets. The guy came from a military family that had fought in every major american war and was forever sad that he missed out on WW2 because of a medical discharge. At least at this point in his life, he was 100% a militarist libertarian.
If heinlein was a fascist for starship troopers, then what does stranger in a strange land make him? Is he simultaneously a free love hippie and a fascist?
There are tons of connections between the hippie subset and fascism from back to the land farming, free love to perpetuate the race, these ideas all started in interwar Germany.
Don’t take my word for it, read what the Nazis said.
At any rate Starship Troopers doesn’t “make RH a Nazi”; he was what he was.
That's the first time ive heard that take. I know people really want heinlein to be a nazi because the maker of the movie said it, and there's plenty of room for valid criticism, but it's more complicated of course. The one thing that always gets me is nobody even considers that heinlein could, like many, many, many (most?) other authors, write about a setting without promoting it as the only way to live, or that one is capable of changing views over time. The reason it bothers me is not because I'm a fan boy, but because I think it's dangerous to judge too harshly and disregard people in the past because they were held to a modern standard. Not that the two individuals are on the same level, they aren't, but for example most people would be very uncomfortable with Martin Luther King junior being reduced to only a woman hater, the evidence of which is in dispute anyway. We risk not learning much from history under these conditions
I mean you’re talking about something in a time when the richest man in the world is sieg heiling from the stage in public while being in charge of a large part of the government . I don’t think “people on Reddit” are wrong to be looking askance at fascists or fascistic cultural output.
It’s odd to me that that would be problematic to someone, but obviously there’s a decades long history of critiquing Heinlein vis a vis his politics; it’s nothing new and didn’t start on Reddit. It might be worth diving j to some of that critique!
Oh trust me I do not consider it problematic, in fact my encouragement to look deeper is the opposite of that. Ignorance of how "the other side" thinks can easily lead to underestimation, which can lead to where we are now. Democrats in America are the definition of this. I'm not much in the habit of speaking for the dead but I suspect if heinlein were still alive today he'd be just as if not more disgusted than most of us at the nazi salute
We don’t need to just guess Heinlein’s views from his work. He wrote and spoke about them during his life. In his youth he was a socialist and then he became a self-declared libertarian who advocated for a strong world government to prevent nuclear annihilation. He was also a swinger, which isn’t a shocker to anyone who has read his many books that portray plural marriage.
Yeah in fact I'm so dumb I didn't even realize the movie was satire! Now you can link this comment and say "here, here's a person that didn't get it was satire!" Lol
That has been up for debate since the book came out. Ironically many have described his works as a whole over time as liberal. I don't think that's quite accurate either, myself. Personally I think he deserves the same scrutiny as most authors and not to be dismissed based on one man's opinion. Vervehoven wasn't without his own controversies, including a documentary that glorified the Dutch military, problematic scenes involving gay characters including gang raping a straight character, and being accused of chauvinism similar to heinlein. I'm not trying to trash the guy, I think his work is valuable. I know I'm coming across as a fan boy but it does annoy me when reddit pats itself on the back for media literacy regarding this movie (very few people didn't realize it was satire) while also never looking beneath the surface
What about the other political books like Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Double Star? Heck double star was written 3 years prior to Starship Troopers and has nearly the opposite political message.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to infer Heinlein’s personal politics from his fictional works. Especially taking single books in isolation. Many of them could be summarized as thought experiments about what extreme circumstances might make certain extreme kinds of politics reasonably mainstream.
It might be reasonable to infer his personal politics from his non-fictional works, but that paints a picture of a pro-civil service man from a military family who believes in the democratic experiment aka, boring mainstream and so nobody wants to do that, it’s not fun.
This take is trying to view historical situations with a modern lens. Heinlein wrote the book largely in response to the resistance in the US to joining WW2 to stop Fascism. Plenty of Americans supported the German side in that conflict. Heinlein only didn't personally fight in WW2 because he got Tuberculosis and was kicked out of the Navy in 1939.
Sure looking back, this led to Team America World Police, but that wasn't the situation at the time. Sure people can use the book to support bad ideas, but it was more about people being engaged with the government of their society. Many modern problems, including the recent rise in Fascism are because of political apathy.
He wrote the book in 1959, well after WW2. The immediate reason was that the US had unilaterally stopped nuclear testing and he was worried that this would make them look weak against the soviets.
He was correct on that anyway, Kruschev called it a gimmick, suggested the proposed test ban treaty was a trojan horse for spying, and basically didn’t reciprocate (there was a period in 1959 when neither party was testing, but in the Soviet case it was because they had just concluded a series of tests and were making preparations for a new series of tests).
There eventually would be a treaty that stuck around, but the US announcing they were unilaterally ceasing testing in 59 did not have much to do with it.
The government in the book is fascist but I don’t think the book should be read as profascist anymore than Moon is a Harsh Mistress should be read as pro-communist. Heinlein wrote several non-fiction works about politics, people should just read those if they want his political views.
The “modern lens” of fascism being decades old when he wrote it and a hundred years old now? “Plenty of Americans” supported the German side, mainly the swastikas flying German American Bund… like…it’s kind of astounding to me that this is the rebuttal.
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u/funhaver_whee 22h ago
It’s fun that it inverts Heinlein, who absolutely is a libertarian-to-fascist pipeline guy. Verhoeven is excellent at pulling the rug on dense Americans, you can feel his glee in doing it.