That great YouTuber Sargon of
Akkad has
announced that he is stopping his usual YouTube output to concentrate on other
projects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i467TvgI41s.
Personally I will miss his livestreams, "this Week in Stupid" and
"Thinkery". However he is not quitting altogether. He is taking a
break from his usual focus on news and current affairs, and then he is going to
produce more content of a different kind. He mentions his "Starship
Troopers video" and I'm curious to see what that is like, but I also thought
I would get in there first. This subject has come up a number of times over the
last few months so I decided to reread the book. I first read the book after
watching Paul Vehoeven's exceptional 1997 adaptation that I consider one of my
favourite films, see:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/.
As soon as I read the book I realized that the movie is not just an adaptation,
it is a spoof. The book is a science fiction novel by one of the greats of
sci-fi, Robert A Heinlein. It is set in our own universe seven hundred years in
the future in which there is an interplanetary war between the earth and some hostile
insectoid or arachnid beings that are occupying and destroying various planets
and they are heading for earth. The central character is a young man called Johnny
Rico who lives in what is today
Argentina.
He decides to fight in the war to defend the earth, so he joins the "Mobile
Infantry", a force whose job it is to land on the planets occupied by the
"bugs" and exterminate them. The style of warfare is similar to
marines in the real world, being sent into an enemy country from the sea or air.
The landing spacecraft are even called "boats". The Mobile Infantry
is equipped with futuristic military technology such as powered exoskeletons,
something that has been invented recently for real, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hkCcoenLW4.
Also they have hand-portable nuclear weapons and dogs with enhanced
intelligence. These dogs can even talk; and this concept comes up in some of Heinlein's
other stories. The organizational details of the Mobile Infantry and other
armed forces are thoroughly described as is Johnny's training course and the
culture of this futuristic military. It is full of anecdotes about life on
board spaceships or at training camps. This was probably inspired by Robert
Heinlein's own service in the US Navy and his enrolment at the Annapolis US
Naval Academy. It is slightly reminiscent of my own much shorter and less
successful military career. Johnny's parents are initially opposed to his
choice of career and try to talk him out of it, but eventually they support him
and his father even joins up too. His mother is killed when the aliens attack the
earth. In the end, the Mobile Infantry assaults the "bugs'" home planet
and is almost completely wiped out, but later on Johnny and his comrades
capture a "queen brain" arachnid that is said to be the intelligence
behind the species. Interspersed with scenes of Johnny's adult career are
flashbacks to a time when he was at school and particularly classes by a Mr
Dubois, a teacher he loved who inspired him to join the Mobile Infantry. The plot
of the film is slightly different with two of the minor characters playing bigger
roles and the combining of Mr Dubois and Johnny's commanding officer Lieutenant
Rasczak.
When
Starship Troopers
was published in 1959 it polarized readers and critics alike. Some long-time
fans of Heinlein's other works feel confused by its themes, including myself.
It is primarily a philosophical novel and has been accused of being fascist
propaganda. It promotes military service as the grandest, most glamorous and
glorious calling a young man can achieve. It would qualify as what I call
"the military religion". At the same time it is strangely thin on deep
political discourse. It is even anti-political in some ways. It makes it clear
that the role of a military man is not to think about politics, but to accept
that he serves a noble cause; in other words, the state is always right, and
that violence is inevitable and necessary in that service. His job is simply to
deliver the violence. The problem with that attitude is that if he thoughtlessly
accepts that the state is noble then if the state happens
not to be noble he will fail to understand that. He will then become
what Henry Kissinger called a "dumb stupid animal to be used as a tool in
foreign policy." However the narrative of
Starship Troopers does not address this conundrum. Each chapter of
the book begins with a famous quote by a real famous person and one of them is
extraordinarily ironic. It is one of the most famous things said by Thomas
Jefferson, a founding father of the
United
States of America and its third president:
"
Sometimes the tree of liberty has
to be watered by the blood of patriots." However there is no place for
patriots in the world of
Starship
Troopers. All nations states have been absorbed into the "Terran
Federation", a one-world government that strangely has the same name as
the New World Order in
Blakes 7, see:
https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2013/09/blakes-7-remake.html.
Oddly enough it began in
Aberdeen, Scotland;
I don't know why the author chose that place. There is no description in the
book about any national rebellion against the Terran Federation, perhaps
because the world is full of passive remoaners, but maybe also because all nationalist
opposition has been brutally crushed. It is to this political entity that
Johnny Rico and his fellow soldiers dedicate their lives without question. Their
society is divided into two classes, "citizens" and "civilians".
Citizens are veterans, people who have served the Terran Federation in the
armed forces; they are entitled to vote and hold political office. Civilians
are those who have not served in the military. It doesn't matter what your job
is as a civilian. You could be a fireman or ambulance man... or a hospital
porter of course!... who saves lives; you are considered inferior to a citizen,
even if that citizen had a really cushy billet in some administration corps
back on earth and never even had to suffer their boots being scuffed. The ethics of this system is never questioned. It is odd because
the bugs in the story are like real insects, they are socially organized into
different physical forms and it is as if humanity is going the same way. In a
few more millennia humans may be like the Eloi and Morlocks of HG Wells'
The Time Machine. There are passages in
the book about the importance of spanking children and capital punishment;
these are both a common part of life in the setting of
Starship Troopers. At the end of the story Johnny is commissioned
as an officer and there is a scene describing the various starships he has flown
on. One of them is called "Vercingetorix" which is so contradictory
it makes me wonder what Heinlein is really trying to say. Vercingetorix was a
king of the Gauls in the first century BC in what is today
France.
He tried to stop his country being taken over by that real Terran Federation of
the past, the Illuminati-occupied
Roman Empire. He is
very similar to Boudica. Vercingetorix would be outraged at the concept of the
Terran Federation and would be on the frontline of an armed insurgence to stop
it. Therefore I can't help wondering if
Starship
Troopers is actually a satire, a far more subtle one than the film of it,
but a satire nonetheless. Firstly it is because some of it is so kitschy and
excessive, but also because of Robert Heinlein's other books. I have read four
of his novels and all the other three are very different in theme and tone.
Friday especially is totally unlike
Starship Troopers. This could be because
it was written in 1982, twenty-three years after
Starship Troopers. Heinlein could have changed his views as he matured,
as people do.
Starship Troopers is
definitely not a book I enjoyed. Compared to Heinlein's other works it is ignorant,
amateurish and shallow. The author is right that conflict is inevitable, and
sometimes that conflict ends up as violent when dealing with an intractable and
unreasonable opponent. There is a true place for great warriors in the world. There
is such a thing as a war with a just cause, such as the aforementioned Boudica
and Vercingetorix rebellions; but what is noble about being an armoured pawn
for a world dictatorship that you cannot question through action, voice or
thought?
