disgruntled-foreign-patriarch:
Starship Troopers “discourse” be like “fascism is when there’s a military”
Now granted, you can make the argument that the government is authoritarian. At least in the movies. You have to have a permit to reproduce, you can’t vote unless you served in the military (I think that’s the same as the books) but you’d have to be arguing in pretty bad faith to call it fascism.
Where is the oppression? Where is the censorship? They have a whole televised debate with a guy who doesn’t even think the bugs exist when the government clearly wants to go to war. Hell after a few defeats the leader steps down and is replaced by somebody more qualified. What fascist dictator would ever give up power like that? Not to mention, wealth and industry are booming. Kids go to school, they learn extensively how the government works, and are told “hey, you can join, be a part of the decision makers, but first you have to do some really grueling work”.
Fascism is a collectivist ideology, and Heinlein once commented that he was so fiercely individualist, that he made Ayn Rand look like a socialist.
The book of starship troopers is 100% anti-fascist. The first big problem is, the person who wrote the movie never read the book. He flipped through the first couple of pages without paying much attention, was disgusted by what he imagined he saw there, and decided to write the movie script as a parody of a book that didn’t actually exist.
That’s why there’s a bunch of commonalities right at the start, but put in a completely different and much stupider context. Like, the army recruiter with three missing limbs, in the books he had been provided with top tier cybernetic replacements which he deliberately took off before he worked at the recruiting station (a position he was selected for specifically because of his injuries) because the people in charge of the military wanted to make sure that nobody could ever sign up without seeing the consequences first-hand. In the movies he was turned into a joke about how incompetent the soldiers were.
The second big problem is, half the people working on the movie didn’t know what they were doing was supposed to be a joke. So half the crew might have been trying to make a biting political satire, but the other half were trying to make a genuine, albeit silly, action schlock. The end result being that a lot of the time the film seems to be genuinely rooting for the corrupt, incompetent, psuedo-fascist bullshit it started out by trying to mock.
Also: the ‘can’t vote unless you serve in the military’ thing is movie only. The rule in the books was that you can’t vote or hold office unless you do something that puts the needs of others ahead of your own for at least two years. In the backstory, the current government was formed out of a rebellion led by military veterans who had been sent to die in pointless wars by politicians who had never done anything that didn’t enrich themselves at the expense of their people, so they made a rule that limits the political power of anybody who hasn’t learned to actually serve others. But in the vast majority of cases that service consists of working in some administrative position or a customer service role or something, not active combat. In fact the majority of applicants don’t qualify to join the military, because every single soldier in the books is a hyper-competent agent expected to be able to single-handedly take out a full squadron of enemy tanks (if anybody is stupid enough to send tanks at them).
Really important question: was Buenos Aires also destroyed in the book?
Yes? I believe it happens the same way, maybe a bit different
so it’s a case of Hollywood shitbags fucking up again?
In the book, Johnny Rico is actually from the Philippines, not Argentina.
Also in the book Johnnie is a nickname for Juan, and his native language is Tagalog, because Heinlein was heavily in favor of racial diversity and wanted to portray it as one of the strengths of the military he was writing about, in contrast to the communist Bugs being entirely homogenous.
But then in the movie they decided to make him blond and blue-eyed without the slightest trace of a filipino accent because reasons.
The bugs were also not quadrupeds/animalistic if I remember right. They far more humanoid looking and fully capable of dropping a rail gun shot at Earth.
(via lordascapelion)
