Starship Troopers

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?

See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2015/09/911-fourteen-years-on.html.

And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2018/07/arbeia.html.

And: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2015/12/celtic-mirror.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2012/02/non-military-memorials.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/07/army-on-standby-for-brexit.html.