27 December 2006 Blog Home : December 2006 : Permalink
...But Heinlein’s military sci-fi, particularly the book that practically invented the genre, “Starship Troopers,” has not aged well, to put it mildly.
First published in 1959, when America’s misadventure in Korea was over and its intervention in Vietnam was hardly a twinkle in John F. Kennedy’s eye, “Starship Troopers” tells of the education of a naïve young man who enlists in a futuristic infantry unit. Raised by his father to believe that the practice of war is obsolete, the immature soldier — and, by extension, the reader — is instructed through a series of deep space combat missions that war is not only unavoidable, it is vital and even noble. While peace, Heinlein writes, is merely “a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties,” war is what wins man his so-called unalienable rights and secures his liberty. The practice of war is as natural as voting; both are fundamental applications of force, “naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.”
From here the book starts to get a little scary. Frame it as a cautionary tale if it helps you sleep better, but to a contemporary reader it is almost impossible to interpret the novel as anything other than an endorsement of fascism, from an era when the f-word wasn’t just a pejorative suffix to be attached to any philosophy you disagreed with. Taken literally — and there is no indication that Heinlein meant otherwise — “Starship Troopers” might be the least enticing recruitment tool since “Billy Budd.”
Mr Scalzi reports in a follow up post that many people have leapt into the fray about Heinlein and another linking to where Brad DeLong makes some interesting observations. Despite the fact that I think that claiming that Heinlein is a fascist is evidence of a lack of reading comprehension, I'm not going to do the ritual defense - Spider Robinson did it well 25 years ago - but I am going to use the Heinlein canard as a basis on which to ask what, exactly, is meant by Fascism? and why do, primarily, lefties get their undies in a twist when reading Starship troopers and other works of that sort?Johnny Rico's story: How a young, naive upper-class twit gets transformed into the human equivalent of a Bug warrior--someone who will fight bravely and fiercely without regard for his own probability of survival in the interest not of liberty, utopia, or justice, but of the biological expansion of the human race.
It seems to me that this is to fundamentally misunderstand the military and hence to be particularly common on the left. Firstly I'm not in the least bit convinced that Johnny is fighting for human expansion. He is fighting, rather, for human survival. It may be that humanity needs to expand to survive (certainly I am not alone in believing that humanity stands a better chane of survival if it has more than one planet where it can live) but the point about the bugs in Starship Troopers(SST) is that they are a race that is expanding and threatening humanity.The historians and moral philosophers: the military of Sergeant Zim and Colonel DuBois, who seem to me to be, well, fascist in the technical sense of the term. The German philosopher Ernst Nolte's classic Fascism in Its Epoch (and he should know: he's a somewhat creepy character himself) set out four key characteristics of fascism:
The sympathetically-drawn teachers in the military preach the first three of these at great length in the novel, and otherwise remind me of dear little Ellen May Ngwethu (from The Cassini Division).
Here is where I begin to wonder if I'm reading the same book. I don't see any mention what so ever of point 1. Au contraire the point of the government in SST is than anyone shall have the opportunity to serve in the military and achieve the right to vote or rule. The sins (or virtues) of the fathers are most emphatically not visited on the sons (or daughters) in this world. Point 2 I grant in part: depending on what you consider as rights, the government in SST may indeed reject a large number of rights. Point 3 is utter bollocks. Individuals have no duties to the state at all unless they decide they wish to vote and hence enter the military.The authorial persona, the narrative voice, who adopts the same point of view as do the historians and moral philosophers, and adds on the fourth of Nolte's key characteristics of fascism--the strong fear of Marxist communism, and an eagerness to use its very own weapons (suspension of parliamentary democracy, mass propaganda, rallies, street violence, and so forth) to combat communism. Consider the fear of the Bugs as a mighty adversary ("we were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution" (p. 152)). Consider the invented historical background of the novel, in which the twentieth-century United States collapsed because of its excessive solicitude for individual rights and its worship of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was replaced by the "veterans' government" that made no claim to derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Thus the authorial persona is "fascist"--where "fascism" is not just an insult, but is a descriptive label for a certain viewpoint that has been tragically common in twentieth-century politics.
This is even worse. The statement that the narrator adops Nolte's point 4 is not flat out wrong. In SST there clearly is a parliamentary democracy of some sort, what there isn't is a universal franchise. Critically, unlike any limited franchise democracy in human history, anyone can become a voter simply by serving a term in the military. Neither Fascist nor Communist regimes have any real parliamentary democracies. There may possibly be propaganda, although if what is being referred to is the teaching of "History and Moral Philosophy" then it is clearly very ineffective propaganda that does not require the student to memorize it. There are no rallies as far as can be ascertained and while things may have changed we are told specifically that the first veteran groups formed to prevent random disorder so it seems unlikely that they would inflict it.Robert Heinlein, who wrote Starship Troopers at the same stage in his career where he also wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and A Stranger in a Strange Land.
I'm not sure I understand what point he is trying to make here. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is libertarian capitalist, Stranger is more socially libertarian than political. Neither is fascist nor resembles SST. I assume what he means is that, whether or not SST is fascist, Heinlein clearly wasn't. I agree with the conclusion.