Starship Troopers a film so cult its now a meme for democracy despite being a satire about fascism. Truly a great film.
I canvassed. I phonebanked. I guided everyone in my immediate circle to the best of my ability. The rest is out of my hands.
The thing about the starship troopers uniforms is that they look like the heads of penises... on purpose.
Now that I think about it, I thought the kid was a joke but maybe he actually was in the Federation military.
Well after the disasters of Klendathu the federation did conscript children.
The incompetence and desperation of the regime and military is so very well illustrated in this film with even complete fuckup like Rico getting promoted with his appointment of becoming Lt of the roughnecks despite being 21-22 fuckin years old (if that).
It looked like the Hitler youth when he gets his replacement for the assault into planet P. Their fricken children.
Although i hated the book. Its hands down the worst fucking book I've ever read (and I've read thousands of books, fuckin phone books even).
Its a great film in illustrating how everyone is expandable in a fascist regime, even their own children.
I think I read that they weren't actually conscripting children but they deliberately use kids to juxtapose young fresh faces against the battle hardened Rough Necks.
obviously it's both to the audience. pretty they meant they thought it was a joke in-universe.
Obviously we're having a discussion about it because it was obvious, right?
I agree that voting is better than not voting, but I don't think you've actually watched Starship Troopers. That's a GIF of a fascist military's propaganda campaign.
I've read the book too, it's fantastic, I highly recommend.
The author is weird and basically supports the idea that people have to serve in the military to get a vote though...
I posted a well know meme in the political memes comm, in an attempt to push people to vote out a fascist, using a parody of fascism. Whoops.
That's a misunderstanding. "Service" includes public service of any kind, teachers, social workers, nurses, etc. Contribute to the society /government function in any form, earn the vote. Thus the official name of the world government, United Citizen Federation.
Heinlein based it on the German mandatory service year... started by the Nazis.
So maybe not as big a misunderstanding as you'd hope.
And maybe a certain famous death of democracy court case had a deeper cut in there than I previously realized...
That's good, I support that idea. It's been a bit since I've read anything from him.
I'll have to reread
Yeah if you come out of any single Heinlein book thinking you understand his stances, you should probably read more Heinlein.
Excellent point honestly. He's written a lot of fun books
The best argument against "Heinlein unironically supports fascism" is the existence of Stranger in a Strange Land, published almost immediately after Starship Troopers. You can't read Stranger and possibly think the author is a full-throated authoritarian. He wrote books that took place in settings, and Troopers took place in a particular setting.
The only probably sincere authorial belief you can really take from it is the linking of full citizenship to some form of civic service. And I'm not sure I disagree completely with that, as a leftist, assuming that service encompasses tasks besides than turning foreigners into skeletons. I think there's a bit in there about paraplegics getting citizenship by subjecting themselves to pharmaceutical testing or something. That's civic service.
In fact, one book I read later than others was Job, which is by its premise mostly about adapting to new multiversal realities with different histories and sociopolitical landscapes, While a freak, Heinlein was broadly libertarian and pragmatic. But he did love to explore ideologies through his writing, and they feel more like conversations about the sociopolitical landscape of the setting than endorsements of them.
This is an excellent write up. Never thought he supported fascism. Love his boobs though. Good sci fi should test your expectations of "normal". And I think he does that spectacularly!
Heinlein wasn't "supporting" anything. His books look at different sorts of governments and societies. He's not a hippie for writing Stranger in a Strange Land either.
Of course not, that was in his libertarian polyamory phase. That is not a joke, that is part of why he wrote it.
I think the biggest thing people struggle with on Heinlein is that he was prolific and enduring enough that, like any reasonable human being, his opinions changed over time.
He literally wrote Starship Troopers because he was upset that America was suspending nuclear weapons testing. He wrote Stranger in a Strange Land after seeing that the US government might not be worth trusting 100% and realized that he really liked fucking other women besides his wife and figured what was good for the goose was good for the gander. He also made the Martians both socialist coded and demonstrably superior ethically to the hypercapitalist Earth government.
Neither is necessarily the entirety of his worldview as expressed by the characters but they didn't come from nowhere either, and he doesn't portray any of the systems as flawless.
For what it's worth, he ran for office in LA as a Democrat during the Great Depression and was generally pretty progressive. The reveal in the Starship Troopers that "Johnny Rico" was a Filipino officially named Juan Rico was a deliberately anti-racist message in the Civil Rights Era.
This was based on comments about his work, that I studied over a decade ago. Not a one off assumption based on an idea presented in his work.
The book was right-wing.
But the film was intentionally satirical, making a parody and mockery of fascism.
It's really obvious that it's imperialist propaganda. But maybe that even makes this post a bit better. Would you rather like Uncle Sam conscripting you as a "Call to Action" image?
Memes transcend the meaning of the original scene.
or it's just another lemmy user posting anti-voting propaganda.
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