Starship Troopers and the Malleability of Memory
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- Опубліковано 13 лип 2023
- Several people have mentioned to me that the book has other ways besides military service to earn citizenship. I did not remember that being the case, so I read it again. What follows is an exploration of what the text actually says and a brief look at the unreliability of memory without once saying "Mandella Effect".
UPDATE: Some time back it came to my attention that the source of the confusion is Expanded Universe, a collection of essays and short stories from Heinlein himself and from conversations with the author. Heinlein contradicts himself on the matter. For a detailed analysis I recommend the following essay, which covers it in depth. www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft...
I always took the "terranizing Venus" line as to mean there was something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers but shittier and involving more near slave labor. Involved in civilian civil and environmental engineering/infrastructure but still under the DOD umbrella.
I always pictured it as a WPA type group but more dangerous or boring.
Essentially the same thing. Only difference is which body of the government is in charge of it.
It almost looks like the Federation military has 3 branches. Army, Navy, and drudges that get called in to do whatever the State needs on the support end. Like a militarized WPA, or the German Reichsarbeitsdienst.
I actually think that Heinlein was thinking more of the CCC. We forget that many of the CCC jobs were very hard and dangerous. People keep thinking that he was allowing bureaucrats to be service, this would undermine the idea in the book.
There's certainly some suggestion of that. Though by having it all done through the military, it's less like the Civilian Conservation Corps and more like the Reich Labor Service, a straight-up uniformed service structured along military lines.
This is the only critique of Starship Trooprrs that actually makes reasonable sense to me.
Full declaration. I am a retired soldier. I have read Starship Troopers a few times & I am due to read it again shortly. It is one of my favourite books by my favourite author, Heinlein. What I took away from it was that Citizenship was absolutely for post military service. The Federation started with discharged soldiers in Scotland deciding that they had, had enough & got a grip of things. The reason why only former soldiers got the vote & this was better, was because soldiers had instilled in them that there was something more important than themselves. The implication being that they wouldn't vote for someone offering tax cuts by borrowing money from their grandchildren.
That last sentence, is it from Heinlein?
Because it's usually "free" stuff that government gives out that gets future generations indebted.
@@GrimFaceHuntertax cuts require governments to borrow money, meaning they take on debt. That’s part of the reason why the US debt is so large.
@@baneofbanes No they don't. You can increase revenue with lower rates.
That happened with Reagan's tax cuts.
@@GrimFaceHunter no it’s not. The government isn’t a business, it’s not a profitable enterprise.
@@baneofbanes It did. Reagan spent it on military.
"A distinction that makes no difference" sorta thing. You take the oath, you show up for assignment, and then you go where you are told do go and do what you are told to do for the duration of your service. Military service in everything but name.
My academic roots compel me to talk at length about distinctions that make no difference. It's probably an acquired character flaw.
Accept for the shooting, killing, and dying part. And the fact that those who are not in the military and in an active war can quit without notice at any time.
So... it's really not like the military.
It's more like any job you have to do whether for pay or so the school won't burn down or so your crops don't die, or so you will get your degree, or get the graduate assistant position, and so on.
@@macmcleod1188 Actually, even the military can resign at anytime except during active combat. For the M.I., that can be right before you enter the drop capsule. While not explicitly stated in the novel, someone in the non military service might be restricted from resigning during an actual life threatening emergencies.
@@robertlehnert4148 yes, that was my meaning
@@feralhistorianitvwk fun tho
Hello. You, I respect, so I'll engage. I first read Star Ship Troopers when I was sixteen or seventeen. ( I'm now 66. ) Heinlein had many things to say in that book.
His main argument however was, in a society where elections are held, the vote is the greatest authority the individual can exert over society. He then goes on
to say, in any just system, there must be some mechanism in place to balance authority with responsibility. If you have authority with no responsibility, you have
a despot. If you have responsibility with no authority, you have a scapegoat. In order to bring the two into balance, he proposed that anyone wanting to vote first
be required to show/prove/demonstrate they are willing/able to place the welfare of society above their own personal interest. The method he devised was they
be required to serve 2 years of PUBLIC ( Not Just Military ) service with special characteristics. Those were, any unpleasant task with a statistically observable
amount of personal risk involved. i.e. cleaning bedpans in a leprosarium or collecting and disposing of used syringes in an HIV ward. Performing such a task for
2 years would earn you the right to vote. At time stamp 1:27, the words you seem to overlook were " he said scornfully" . He was not satisfied Johnny's careful
answer because it was incomplete. There was much more than just "defense" and " safety" involved, which is why its about so much more than military service.
Its about CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY which is a much broader concept.
I am very sensitive to misinterpretations of SST because, at my then tender age, when you read the first book of the DUNE ( at the time ) Trilogy, then follow that
with SST, you start thinking HARD about the military and its place in society. I was very upset with verhooven's disrespectful lampooning of SST. The fool never
even read the book. He read only the first chapter or two, tossed the book then created that abortion. ( People today cry about what is sometimes done to their
favorite IP, its not a new phenomenon ).
Before I convince you that I'm totally on board with Heinlein's ideas, I need to point out that Heinlein was a libertarian. ( and radically more so as he aged ) The
problem I have with many libertarian ideas is although they may sound great at first exposure, they often leave an itch in my mind that is similar to having food
stuck between your teeth and trying to get it out with your tongue. The actual problem with H's proposal is it's a voter qualification test. Such tests have
historically been used to disenfranchise whichever group is out of favor at the time. Or in other words, it's the Perfect People Problem. Any society that could
make it work wouldn't need it and any society that needed it couldn't make it work. The problems people have with SST are other than what's often expressed.
You are wrong, it wasn't about military service. It was Public Service, a much broader concept. Verhooven was wrong. Heinlein wasn't a fascist ( whatever that
is ) . He was a libertarian striving towards higher ideals in a doomed effort.
Thank you for your time.
Good post and I completely agree with your assessment of Heinlein’s main argument from a philosophical standpoint and I suspect that if he were actually talking about a real proposal he probably would suggest non-military alternatives. But in the book, they aren’t there. Every form of service is under the military umbrella, based on what the recruiting sergeant says, the bit with the merchant marine sailors in Seattle, and everything we read from Mr. Dubois’ civics class.
We all extrapolate from the text. In my case, I think that Heinlein put in all those “make-work” jobs to keep unfit recruits busy as a commentary on the bloat and politicization of the military, a military increasing its role in society while damaging its ability to do its real job of fighting wars efficiently. The message is clear to me, but it’s only implied in the text. Just as the text implies public service, but what it actually says at every instance is military service.
It’s sort of the Bible problem. We can read it as metaphor or read it literally and come up with very different conclusions. In this case, I’m focused on what’s in the text itself. But at some point I plan to a do a more broadly philosophical take on Starship Troopers, Forever War, and a few others and I welcome your input on the non-military public service aspects of Starships Troopers from that standpoint. As Patton once said, if everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
@@feralhistorian Thank you for responding. Heinlein wrote SST either shortly after or towards the end of the Korean War. ( I forget when the K war ended. the book was published in 1959. ) He had definite ideas about how the war should have been fought. One of the rules for enlistment I found interesting was for military enrollment, the term of service was two years or one war which ever came LAST. Heinlein saw this as reasonable because he had definite ideas about how wars should be fought . He was a rabid anti-communist who saw " Reds Under the Bed" and would have understood nothing less than stamping out the "Red Menace" with maximum effort. ( the reality of many wars that drag on indeterminately, end inconclusively, and leave haunting legacies down the years was something he couldn't consider in his libertarian purity. ) The point is, under his proposal, the two years of non-military public service could be seen as preferable since you knew when it should end.
I look forward to future essays you may put out on the military scifi works you've mentioned. Until then, thank you.
I was ten years behind you. Was assigned three of the Juvie Heinleins during 4th and 5th grade at a small school run by a libertarian. Transferred to public school. The public junior high school I attended had tons of Heinlein, as did the local public library.
When I was looking for schools for my kids in early 2000s, I checked their libraries during visits. Classical schools, expensive private, Christian--none of them had a single volume of Heinlein. Fifteen years later, I don't even want to know.
I must say that I respect the time and effort you put into this, thank you. I had a similar feeling when reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, that of having something unpleasant stuck.
The book appealed to me when I read it, as I was a rather devoted communist at the time, but since then I have realised how horrifically utopian it all was.
@@H.J.Fleischmann Heinlein can have that effect. I remember reading in his future history his description of a photovoltaic power source and
thinking if its that easy, why hasn't anyone done it yet. ( I still believe that TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE is, with all of it's flaws, one of the best
science fiction books ever written, and STRANGER in a STRANGE LAND was the book that turned me into a confirmed scifi fan. )
I remember how Heinlein in the book made a point about how all MI are combat personnel. Their cooks make combat jumps, their chaplain too.
I thought the federal military would have tons of civilian employees paid a wage to do non-combat jobs.
Heinlein was the Daddy. I am currently re reading my library and I am up to him. Currently, The Number of the Beast fills my evenings and looking forward to re-reading Star Ship Troopers. The book is great. The film is US Marines in space. Running around in each others pockets. The exact opposite of Cap Troopers who fight alone, as portrayed in the book.
My one remaining quibble is that Heinlein repeatedly (and off the top of my head, universally) used the word "enroll" rather than "enlist" for the action of signing up to a term of service, which has different connotations and strikes me as a deliberate choice. But it's also possible Heinlein wasn't entirely clear himself about the workings of the system he was describing.
You are correct, Heinlein uses "enroll" rather than enlist. There's even a line referring to an "oath of enrollment" which makes it sound like an enlistment to me.
I don't know off hand how common word usage in that case may have shifted from the 1950s when Heinlein wrote it to today, but that's something to look into.
@@feralhistorian Don't know if this helps, but my dad (Korean Vet) used the word "enlisted."
I wonder if it has anything to do with conscription. Enrollment has more connotations of a voluntary choice. Enlistment was, if I recall correctly, used to describe both voluntary and conscripted personnel joining the military. One of the themes of the book I think is often overlooked today is the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the service.
@@cynbartek9324 That's consistent with how I've always seen it used. Sometimes Heinlein was just a little odd.
@@benjackson1454 Good point. And now I regret not talking about the purely volunteer nature of it, there are some interesting implications there.
Great job getting to the bottom of it. Always good to see someone break the UA-cam no-no of filling a screen with a block of text.
Sometimes that's what it takes to get it done.
I wonder if some Heinlein fans confused some of the Juvenile Heinlein books' elements with that key element of Starship Troopers. There was one called Citizen of the Galaxy, and both Space Cadet and Starman Jones had plot elements similar that might have led readers to think Troopers was in the same fictional "juvie" universe, so they subconsciously assumed the restriction to military service for citizenship wasn't absolute.
As for Star Wars false memories, I picked up at 7-11, while it was still in theaters, the Star Wars comic book. Having seen the film, I was quite confused because the Biggs scenes are in the comic. That could be another source for some of the false but strong memories of having seen the Biggs scenes. (The comic book used the same perspective and framing of many of the movie's scenes.) In a twist, I saw it a few more times and had the comic book, so I was on the other side of it--telling my friends there was a friend of Luke who should have been in the movie!
And anyone who has read this far and is less than 50 years old or so, don't believe the claim that Lucas had already written, or at least sketched out, 9, 6, 3, or even 2 of the films and just decided to start with #4.
Very persuasive evidence to the contrary exists in the fact that respected sci fi author Alan Dean Foster was hired to write a sequel to Star Wars to cash in on the fever.
1000s of us were stunned sitting in the theater when the sequel of course not only didnt have the same title but in fact was nothing like the official sequel book we had purchased.
"Splinter of the Mind's Eye" in case anyone wants to check it out (and no longer trust Lucas' version of the past, unfortunately)
I've always thought that the Terran Federation as per Heinlein was an adaptation of the Spartan model of representative government and citizenship. For Sparta, military service was the foundation of good citizenship, and was accepted as such by Spartan society. Heinlein made the necessary changes for a futuristic space traveling civilization, but to me the story made it clear. Only military veterans or those who had performed similar service could become citizens and be entrusted with the voting franchise.
It's worth pointing out that you're describing an ideal Sparta that never existed (but most Spartans seemed to believe existed a couplethree generations ago.) They justified Spartan citizens being entirely supported by the state because it meant that they could devote themselves to the study and practice of war; it turns out that the trauma of their upbringing (murder, starvation, sexual violence) tended to produce dysfunctional individuals rather than dedicated soldiers.
The Spartans' utterly unjustified reputation is a personal bugaboo, I'm afraid. They were a pointlessly cruel people, even by the standards of ancient Greece.
It's just a democracy with franchise limited to those who volunteer to serve everyone else for a couple years. And very few get the military slots. And they have to wait the longest to get the right to vote.
It's like not being able to vote until 21 even tho you could be drafted at 18.
That's not how Sparta worked at all.
There was nothing "representative" about it. It was a strict hereditary aristocracy with positions of power controlled by specific elite families and not open to anyone else under any circumstances.
As in most states in Greece at the time, "citizenship" was actually an elite status held by only a small percentage of the populace (the 10% in Attica was unusually large, though I don't know the number for Sparta/Lakedaimonia offhand), so it's important not to confuse it with either the modern version of the concept or Heinlein's imaginary version. The "Spartan citizenry" was more akin to the British "peerage" than to what citizenship means in modern republics.
They did restrict membership in certain military units (famously the "hoplite" heavy infantry formations) to members of these aristocratic families, both for logistical reasons (such as the expensive equipment required, and the leisure time to spend drilling) and because these special upper-class units generally received more attention in artists' and historians' portrayals of battles.
So more like "citizenship guarantees service" than vice versa, but not even, since commoners still fought, just in less prestigious roles.
Plus there was a whole social class of people who were literally owned as slaves by the state, and they had a "festival" that was sort of like the Purge movies, where teenagers from the rich families ran around murdering slaves to prove they were ready to join the army.
Overall, it was a bizarre, psychotic dystopian society, and I frankly don't understand why so many modern people are so desperate to romanticize it. Zack Snyder movies are no substitute for taking a real history class.
@boobah5643 What you said is true, although the Spartans would have said differently, naturally! It's the Spartan ideal that Heinlein wanted to explore, or at least the version of the ideal that was taught in classrooms across the English-speaking world. And stripped of period inconveniences like helots, communal living, and a lack of comfortable furniture, it's something that could work. If the people of Earth could accept it, and in the novel, they did.
Biggs was in the Star Wars Storybook and original Marvel Comics adaptation. We all had those or a friend who did, so like a lot of other urban legends it morphed into a false memory
If I'd seen your comment, mine wouldn't have been so long. Exactly right.
He's in the deleted scenes with lukes friends.
Nice museum - should have spent more time near the B-52; the better bomber. Been a long time since I've been to that museum.
Heinlein said that there were non-military paths to citizenship, and that it was mentioned in the books more than once. Should the stated opinions or the text be considered the only truth?
Considering the stated opinion makes a claim about the book that isn't true? The book is inherently the only truth.
You forgot to mention the mention of the merchant marine lobbying to be included as a path to citizenship. It was brought up right after Rico graduated his training and got a weekend pass in town. Also many of the jobs specifically mentioned were those that would in our world fall under DARPA, a civilian agency, for example testing extreme cold weather gear in Antarctica. While ultimately yes you could argue to lump all the painful, scary, designed to make you want to quit, drudge work to be 'military' it would be as accurate as trying to claim that an intern under the president is military because both jobs suck.
The problem with memory is that it’s not like a digital computer. Whenever we remember our brains recreate the event. The story becomes blurred and new bits get added in. That’s why word of mouth storytelling evolves over generations. Each retelling is a new version of the story. The same with our minds being shaped by our mood, current circumstances and how we’ve all changed since the incident occurred.
I began reading the novel about 20 years ago. Didn't finish it. I did have the opportunity around that time (what forum I can't recall) to ask Mrs. Heinlein what Robert's favorite meal had been. She replied pancakes with maple syrup and link sausages.
Virginia Heinlein was a fascinating woman.
A mighty source of shade
Aluminum overcast.
I think of Heinlein as a man going through different phases, which reflects in his different books.
Sometimes he is the sort of libertarian who is very protective of his particular freedoms.
Doesn’t seem like you are hurting for material, but as long as you’re covering one Heinlein book, may I recommend another: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. One of his very best, and one of my favorites.
I need to read it again to do it justice, but yes.
Just finished listening to Forever War, currently on the sequel. Looking forward to your video on that!
Pictures of the Biggs Darklighter scenes were in a picture book I has as a child. I looked on and off for years for that scene in Star Wars, convinced I had somehow overlooked it in previous viewings.
He's in deleted scenes here on UA-cam. But he wasn't in the original movie in '78.
@@macmcleod1188 77
Biggs and Co are in the novelization from 77.
Good video. Very interested to hear your additional thoughts on The Forever War, as I consider it a vastly more interesting and plausible scenario.
An odd thing about the book to me is Heinlein's insistence on a *large* military. I mean he never specifically says that it's large, but logically, given the system he establishes, it has to be. Which is really kind of odd for a man of his generation. Traditionally Americans have not wanted, nor tolerated a large standing army in peacetime. Prior to the Civil War, the army was only about 16,000 people. During the war it swelled to about a million (union) soldiers, but by 1866 there were only about 90,000, and by 1867 there were only about 20,000. By the 1890s it was back down to 16,000 or so. It swelled to about 100,000 between the Spanish war and WW1, with half overseas at any given time. This was the world Heinlein was born into. It swelled to 2.5 million in WW1, but then dropped to a couple hundred thousand by 1920, and hovered in the mid-200,000s until World War 2.
Granted the book wasn't written until considerably after WW2, but after the war ended there was a *lot* of dissatisfaction at there not being a larger reduction of forces, and many people believed (As they had in the previous century) that a large standing army was contrary to "The American Way."
Obviously things change, and we settled rather uncomfortably into our role as The Bastion and Arsenal of Democracy, but it's just interesting to me that he was so gung-ho on not just a military, but a fetishized version of a military.
I had a friend who was a marine in Korea and Vietnam, and lost a leg in the latter. . He was a big SF geek - as am I - from way back, and one time when I asked him about Starship Troopers he became *extremely* agitated about - this is the exact quote - "Some overcompensating navy guy who washed out and missed the biggest war in history having the gal to tell Marines how to live and die." He considered the entire book to be essentially armchair quarterbacking by a guy who missed his chance, and couldn't get over it. And the part of his (several) rants that I think is most relevant is that it's a very *dry* analytical view of the military, and combat, which in no way matches the reality of war. He also objected - as a career military guy who's career was cut short - to the concept of pushing government and military so close together.
"The reason our country has been stable as long as it has is because the Military supports the government, but does not have any power over the government. In Heinlein's Republic, that relationship is completely impossible."
Based on many of your other episodes, you may get a kick out of the Jupiter Ascending - Bureaucracy Scene
Absolutely the best scene in that movie.
I seem to recall that the idea that military service was not the only path to citizenship was something Heinlein argued in a letter. I read the book in high school and certainly I came out of it with the very clear understanding that military service was the only path to citizenship, and I found Heinlein's after the fact argument entirely unconvincing.
Maybe it was in Grumbles from the Grave?
Todays video brought to you by the letter "B." For B-1 and B-52 bomber. Two very different air frames tasked with the same mission.
I read the book, and I didn't remember any alternative paths to citizenship, either.
Biggs Darklighter got done dirty. He should have been the hero of Yavin 4.
Let me join in here. Perhaps this started as a misapprension on someone part about what military service is. For most non-veterans the military is just the combat arms and/or serving in combat. Of course veterans of the Combat Arms get citizenship but so do the veterans of combat support, combat service support and auxillery service (think CCC, or Army Corp or Engineers). While they are not directly in combat they still do dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.
While I wasn't aware at the time of this video, it turns out that the source of confusion is an essay based on things Heinlein himself said 20+ years later. It's part of the Expanded Universes collection. Basically he says that "service" in Starship Troopers isn't solely military, but he misremembers his own book.
For more detail, I recommend James Gifford's essay on the matter, which covers all the points.
www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
No it wasn't, but there was the part about the merchant sailors looking to get the right to it. While in the novel it's to show that the qualities of a citizen in Heinlein's world is not just the ability to withstand hardship, it did give me the impression that some other venues must have existed for the merchant sailors to even think they had a chance and that more that one means must have existed for them to conclude hardship is the qualifier, as all other civil services must all share this common trait.
I lived in Northern Michigan for a few years and knew a couple merchant sailors. Those guys seemed to think of themselves as a quasi-military group in a lot of ways (and Coast Guard will argue it fiercely) I always assumed that's what Heinlein was drawing on with that scene.
@@feralhistorian In WWII, over 9500 Merchant Marine sailors lost their life. Mathematically, a higher percentage of merchant marine sailors were killed in combat during WWII than US Navy personnel. That's why they are salty. Hauling cargo in U-boat infested waters isn't military, but there is no doubt it's bloody dangerous.
Doesnt that museum have a silo exhibit?
The Minuteman Museum is about an hour's drive from there, three different sites actually with the silo a few miles away from the launch control site.
I recommend the tour of the launch control bunker if you're ever in the area. Have to book it months in advance though.
Reminds me of the Roman Republic.
Sorta I guess.
Nice
I can answer the basis of headcanon question on the spot.
Word of God from Heinlein in an interview. I know Word of God is contentious as is all other topics relating to the Death of the Author principle but from Heinlein's own conception of the World it was true to him.
Where it gets fuzzy is that Heinlein said it 20+ years later. The quote is:
"In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal civil service.”
Only it's not stated flatly or more than once in the text, quite the contrary. Which could lead to a long discussion about perceptions, intent, and if it's a retcon when the original author does it.
I strongly disagree, but I respect you for including the quotes for context. To me, it seems the federal military is too much an elite, exclusive thing (lampshaded in the scene leading into the discussion of canine units) to have this massive body of functional-idiots under arms, its branches overflowing with manpower. Fact is, that the military is restated many times to be very exclusive, I think precisely because they're concerned about the point you highlighted: people will see the non combat, and as I see it the outright non-military, roles on offer and say "obviously, these are designed to be as unpleasant as possible. I'll keep my personal comfort in exchange for risking my life for a couple years and coming back okay." So, military applications get loaded up with this sort of young 'shamming' soldier that must be aggressively weeded out by a high bar for standards in the forces themselves before enlistment, then a harsh basic training encouraging drop outs, and so on. The obvious loophole being accounted for is a time that must have existed for this society without an existential bug threat, no wars to fight, and so on- wherein anyone with two brain cells to rub together hopes to gain a "combat" role so they can enjoy a relatively carefree military service period rather than backbreaking labor or whatever else is on offer.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but if the military is so damn exclusionary yet the government must take anyone willing to enlist for civil service, there must be public works projects. The man counting caterpillar fuzz, or the terranizing of Venus, I'm not sure I can see these as being militarized endeavors. I don't even think these would require authoritarian jackboots to ensure compliance from the workers- if a worker or fuzz-counter decided they didn't want to do it anymore, all it'd take would be a man armed with a radio to call for a transport to take them home- no questions asked- but without any franchise. That's the purpose of a volunteer corps like this. It makes it different from militarized slave labor corps found in modern military penal units or dirty 30's regimes. No need to threaten and compel means that you don't need a harsh set of pass-fail rules outside of OSHA like workplace safety. Its a job any foreman could perform; not working? Okay, you're out.
I think the conscript army was standard in huge parts of Europe, not just the totalitarian states. The argument for increasing democratization could be that if you trust all these people with a gun, you eventually need to trust them with the vote.
It is a bit harder to use the army as a elite force against the population when the population is the army. Like what could the French command do in '17, tell the cops to arrest an army corps.
Forever war?!?!? Wow, there's going to be some shit in there that will not have aged well! (Re-read it a few years ago... and, man! Look out, Orson Scott Card!!! lol.)
Has somebody recently sent UK prime minister Rishi Sunak a copy of this book?
I always assumed it was like 99% military service. to the 1% for all the other options.
And it wouldn't be civil service jobs. It would be massive cultural revolutions like the guy who invented faster than like travel, Would have gotten citizenship
Military service is the quickest path to citizenship? Perhaps two years putting ordnance on target is worth more than 10 years digging ditches? You can't be color blind and drive a ship, but you can do other jobs that do not require that skill set.
Who knows, but at the base, they want people that give a dam about the world they live in, and since the VETERANS won, and established the law, they wanted it more than whoever went up against them.
Don't forget that one armed invalid left his parts elsewhere so YOU did not become bug food!
Disabled Veteran if you please.
Personally, I think "Service guarantees Citizenship" is a good idea. At minimum people should have to prove they actually know what/who they are voting for, "vote blue no matter who", shows the death of civics within the U.S. Or "your voting against your interests", we are supposed to be voting for the constituency we are part of, no our own personal desires. Democracy is highly overrated, i just can't think of a form of government that is better
I think real life military juntas outside of the Heinlein fantasy are clown shows who focus on preserving the privileges of the army.
I think a big part of it is that it's entierly left in the subtext of the book, and the movie is just satire.
Which is honestly one of reason it's hard to take these videos seriously when you keep clipping and quoting the movie.
I read the book only once, and it was years ago, but I thought the text presented something like a hierarchy within federal service, but I can't remember if that was just social construct or actually established law.
It's problematic eitherway, but the book was supposed to be both philosophical and problematic. Where the movie took the worst elements of the book and weaponized them into cringy political satire, that some folks still manage not to get.
There's an essay by James Gifford that covers the whole Federal Service in Starship Troopers (the book exclusively) topic better than I did, which can be read here, www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
The short of it being that the book is explicit about it being military service, with no other options, but then Heinlein himself contradicted that 30 years later, leading to the ongoing argument.
@@feralhistorian Gotcha, thanks for the recommendation!
Editing after reading said article: That is a great breakdown of the different arguments and the context which supports them. Either are resonible, but as a military brat some of the terminology and the way I remember the subjects being discussed early in the book still leads me to agree with the notion that Heinlein intended the idea that both military and civilian, federal service to be paths towards voting. He just may not have communicated that particularly well or clearly.
Honestly the whole book presents a world so entierly federalized that the distinction between civilian and military seems to have significantly faded away? I don't remember any discussion of the kind of roles that the states play in either society or government being even discussed, and that would make this discussion even more complicated.
I liked the pure sci fi-military doctrine of jump infantry. The steel gorillas of the book with a dispersion of one MI per a few hundred meters.
Like a platoon of bouncing steel gorillas comes your way tossing nuclear grenades all over.
@@feralhistorianI think the book makes a point that everyone in the MI are combat staff. He explains how cooks and chaplains join combat jumps.
There might be ranks of civilian employees doing the grunt labour of the federal forces, paid but not on path to citizenship.
Starship Troopers is a bit like Atlas Shrugged. A work of fiction that tries to impart incoherent moral lessons onto the reader. Unfortunately, many people read these in their formative years and took these works of fiction as gospel on how to design a society.
I think the problem really is that the basic concept being conveyed gets tangled up with story specifics. For example, for someone to read Starship Troopers in their teens and internalize the idea of putting veterans in charge of society as the moral lesson is . . . face-palm inducing incoherent. But the broader concept of a society degrading if its big decisions are made by people who don't have a direct stake is a lesson a lot of people seem never to have learned.
@@feralhistorian
Thanks for the reply. Love your channel!
I agree. I've just had too many pseudo-philosophical arguments based on SST or Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter) where the conclusions seem superficial and without regard for how these proposed systems would fare among people that don't always have the best intentions.
Cheers from Denmark!
I think Heinlein was a man going through phase after phase of different ideas. Some of them not entirely coherent.
One more starship troopers same Philippines sing national anthem after Philippines Patriotic Pledge or Patriotic Oath of the Philippines u can see UA-cam. Only missing law allowed vote only people add value to society 😉
It's Heinlein's theory that the civilians' human and civil rights are permanently protected(meaning you're taking my rights over my dead body type scenario) except to the right to vote because you have to think responsibly to vote for the long term issues and not emotional sentimentality short term issues and the citizens will defend these human and civil rights to the bitter end🤓
starship troopers explained sargon of akkad only thing don't agree meaning force only way . Forces are action. Action can vote, speak own ideas, if ideas violence moral values u my not thanking part and more
One of the more interesting things to me about Starship Troopers, is the fact that the world its set in, is one where Germany won World War II. Notice all the military titles like 'Sky Marshal', and the fact that Rico, and everyone around him in Brazil, is white.
That's the film, not the book. As a fan of the book, those differences to me were obvious signs that the underrated film was intended as a clever commentary. (Heinlein's Rico was Juan Rico, I think Filipino, but nor certain)
I mean even today, there are quite amount of white people in South America.
In the novel Rico is Filipino. His native language is Tagalog. He's not from Buenos Aries. When Buenos Aries is hit, he feels bad, but has no personal connection. It's only later that he gets a letter from his Aunt telling him that his mother was visiting there when the asteroid hit.