MART ALL MARS ALL MARTIAL OR MORTAL KOMBAT - A MORALIDADE DO LEÃO É DIFERENTE DA DO CORDEIRO - ISIL OR ISIS OR OSIRIS THE COGS IN THE KILLING MACHINE GOING NUTS AND DIE FOR GOODSAKE OR FOR GODSAKE BUT NOT FOR SAKE ....BANZAI ...TORA TORA TORA ..ROBERT ANSON HEILEIN - O IRAK AGUENTA AGUENTA OR THE KURDISTAN HAVE A NEW KAPITAL IN KIRKUK?

First,  the contents of this tale are loudly and unapologetically pro-military in their essence.

 Starship Troopers: Fascist manifesto or the most deadpan satire ever written?

Either way it is necessary to work out what is wrong with the society portrayed in the novel and also where the faults in the moral "logic" presented lie. First up - brainwashing: all societies to some extent attempt to "instill their values" in (i.e. brainwash) their youth but setting up History and Moral Philosophy lessons in schools is a clear step too far. (A bit like Citizenship classes or flag worship.)

Second: The axiom: It's harder to argue with the logic than the premise - if the axioms are false any logical results derived from them may also be false. In this case the axioms appear to be: No statement of morality that goes against natural law is valid. Survival of the fittest is a natural law. Hence humans have no moral obligation to any other species.
I prefer: One's moral standards are not tested until they conflict with self interest or indifference. No species or individual has intrinsic moral superiority over another. This means humans are morally responsible to every other species - an opposite conclusion.



The quasi-fascist hints arise in bits such as accusing 20th century democracy of "decadence" (76), anti-intellectualism (93), neo-spenserian eugenicism (but with an underlying erroneous understanding of evolutionary theory--see 123-24--where evolution represents absolute progress rather than relative progress), neo-spenglerianism regarding how humanity appears to have reached its "ultimate peak"(126), a mysticism that falsely distinguishes "a producing-consuming economic animal" from "a man" (136), a general militarism (which, following Mr. Vagts, is distinct from military doctrine & ethos), positive presentation of Bavarian Freikorps/Beer Hall Putschism (142-43), belligerence as both genetic & moral (147), and of course the virulent anti-communism.

As to that last, we are treated to some perfectly predictable mccarthyist claptrap: "Mr. Dubois had said, 'Of course the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart'" (75). (The sentiment represents both a misstatement of the origin of the labor theory of value as well as a misunderstanding of what the theory asserts--but what more might be expected from an arriere garde philistine?)

On the other hand, however, the novel presents the arachnid enemies as a positive example of some sort of communism: "We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo" (121). Passing over the evopsych bullshit about evolutionary adaption to an economics, the sentiment is also casually racist, insofar as it expresses the normal cold war psychopathy regarding Asian communist military doctrine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to state that the Koreans and Vietnamese and Chinese and Laotians and Cambodians and Indonesians and other Asian states whose millions were killed by the United States did in fact care about their soldiers quite a bit, but realized, following the same military ethos rightly admired by Heinlein, that some sacrifices are necessary in order to achieve the political ends decided by the state, such as maintenance of some sort of independence or beating back an invader that might reasonably, if wrongly, be expected to annihilate the resisting population. The hypocrisy and myopia are astounding, even if the presentation is sufficiently artful and ambiguous to make it worth discussing.

All that said, and as much as it pains me to admit it, this one just cooks along, despite all of the johngaltism and embedded rightwing propaganda.

Recommended for orphans from dead outfits, swivel chair hussars, and hydrocephalic gorillas
 It's a scary book, in the way that some political fiction is scary - 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon - but I just can't quite figure out if Heinlein was serious or satirical. It's an interesting excercise to compare and contrast Heinlein's "democracy" with the society of the ancient Spartan state

He replied with a wink sonny boy, haven't you heard of the motto - first obey, then complain ? and that settled it. 
Abandoning a life of comforts and being with loved ones, a lot of these men and women stand guard for nation states who take them for granted and whose deaths in relative peace time are just a single column news buried deep in the papers.... I had all these on mind when I read the first two chapters of this book and from then on things went downhill !

Somewhere in the future, the world is an amalgamation of nations forming something called the Terran Republic, which relies substantially on the military as a form of maintaining peace and diplomatic relations. Beyond a point, the threat arises from somewhere beyond the galaxy in the form of bugs (very similar to the Xenomorph from Alien(s) but far more advanced in intellect) and it then becomes an either us or them scenario. To speak of the story line is to speak of Juan Rico who travels from being a recruit to a Lieutanant by the time we finish the tale.
 let's get the old debate out of the way: Was Heinlein deliberately describing a 
Fascist OR ISLAMIST OR SOVIETIC society in positive terms? Yes. 
 in which a teacher, praising the system in which only veterans have the right to vote, says the following: 
"To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives - such as mine to make your lives miserable once a day. _Force_ if you will! - the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Axe." That was probably intentionally written to go over the heads of the less-educated among his readers: for those of you who still don't get it, go look up the word "fasces" on wikipedia before continuing to read this review.

Now that we've gotten that settled once and for all, let's consider _why_ Heinlein, who leaned heavily toward an extreme libertarian position politically, wrote a book that glamorizes FANATIC'S , that even dupes his fans into supporting it theoretically. 
I believe it was Heinlein's intention to prove how easy it was to get democratic citizens to fall for the trap of longing for a seemingly ordered society, to dehumanize "the enemy" (as "Bugs" as easily as "Krauts" or "Gooks"), and to conflate patriotism with self-destructive stupidity. This book does this, precisely by tricking its readers into being unwitting fascists. He deliberately avoids all the ugliness and problems of a fascist society and presents it exactly as it would be presented through propaganda - as perfect and nearly Utopian, in no way threatened by its own weaknesses, but only by hostile, subhuman forces which must be beaten through force. Heinlein understood the appeal of fascism nto least because he was himself capable of falling into the trap, and therefore knew exactly how to lay it for others.

I admit to coming to this book through the Verhoeven film-version, which relied heavily upon fascist imagery to make the same point somewhat more clumsily. As a result, I was a bit annoyed by the technically improbable device of "powered space armor" which many fans of the book see as central. Tying this in with the fascist theme, however, it was typical of fascist military propaganda to make the individual soldier appear as an unstoppable, hyper-masculinized killing machine, and that is what the powered armor achieves. In spite of their considerable individual capacity to destroy, however, Heinlein makes sure that the soldiers are cogs in a larger killing machine, incapable of truly independent thought or action (and happy to be so).

One interesting facet of this book is the indeterminacy of the main character's racial heritage - Heinlein's point here appears to be that fascism need not be "racist" in traditional human terms, so long as there is some "other" (the "Bugs") to hate. He is from Buenos Aires, has the Spanish-European sounding name of "Rico" but notes that his "native language" is Tagalog, which would make him appear to be of Filippino origin. Samuel R. Delaney claims in the appendix to "Triton" to have found a description that demonstrates that Rico is black, although this writer has never identified the passage of which he speaks. 
A black Filippino Brazilian would indeed seem "multicultural" by current standards, to say nothing of the standards of the 1950s, and this approach is indeed bold in its implication that a more ordered society could solve the "race problem" to a point where race is simply invisible - no one comments on the narrator's racial appearance in any context, not even the narrator himself.

The price of freedom is dictatorship, as Jello Biafra once commented