There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp) progressive who was then subsequently harassed, but their head-scratching reading of Helldivers 2 as a “non-political” game is worth examining.
The only thing that makes sense is that these players have the shallowest of surface-level readings of the game. You are a patriotic soldier serving Super Earth. You must kill bugs and evil robots trying to hurt your brothers-in-arms and innocent citizens. There are no storylines to insert progressive causes into, everyone wears helmets so no “forced diversity.” Therefore, no politics.
Of course, this is…wildly off the mark, as Helldivers 2 is about the most blatantly obvious satire of militaristic fascism since the film that inspired it, Starship Troopers.
Couple points:
Verhoeven didn’t even read the source material. Starship Troopers (the book), is only fascist if you assume that anyone that’s pro-military is fascist. Heinlein was a very unlikely fascist, given that he was largely libertarian. The point of the book was that people needed to be directly, personally invested in a society for it to function; the bugs were a plot device that he used to flesh out his social concepts. It was closer to utopian than fascist.
Secondly, Lucas directly based Star Wars off Kurosawa Akira’s “The Hidden Fortress”. Ideas about the rebels and the empire might have been echoing US imperialism in Vietnam, but the overarching narrative structure owes a lot to Kurosawa. Ben Kenobi, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, C3PO and R2-D2 are very clearly present in the Kurosawa film. It’s a fun movie, if not terribly deep or meaningful compared to Kurosawa’s later films, and I would def. recommend it.
In the book, the military is literally in the middle of genocide and killing unarmed families in civilian villages.
The book makes it a lot less handwaveable by giving the clendathu a much more pronounced civilization ane culture
Meanwhile the movie literally has a scene with one of the bugs mutilating a cow, and it’s made up as poking fun at fascist propaganda, but it’s also designed, advertently or not, to propagandize to the audience outside the setting too.
I don’t think Starship Troopers really describes an utopia - the impression I had when I read it was that it describes a fascist regime from the inside. And when I say “inside”, I don’t mean a rebel that tries to fight the system from within. Starship Troopers gives us the point of view of a conforming citizen who has fully internalized the fascist propaganda he was subjected to.
Dystopian fiction tends to have the protagonist quickly figure out how bad society is (and when I say “quickly” I mean soon after the story begins - it’s possible for the character to have a long prior history during which they were completely devoted to the totalitarian rule). The reader and the author already know we are dealing with an evil government, so it makes sense to bring the protagonist up to speed and make them the hero who fights against the atrocities - or at least tries to survive them.
Rico is different. He had some doubts early on, but they are quickly crushed and by the time he finishes his training he remains obedient for the rest of the story. And it’s not like he’s unaware of the establishment’s wrongdoings - he just doesn’t see them as wrongdoings, but just as how things are. Or even more than that - how things should be. And the democracy-accustomed reader is expected to understand the horror of these practices, even through the point of view of a character who admires them.
And this, in my opinion, is Starship Troopers’ greatest and most unique trait. Something that franchises Warhammer 40k or Helldivers are too tongue-in-cheek to truly replicate.
I disagree. Rico’s family was quite well off. They lived a very comfortable life, and his dad didn’t see any reason to go to the effort of gaining citizenship, because it earned him nothing more than what he already had. They had basic rights, they just weren’t citizens with the right to vote. Rico joined because he had a more civic-minded group of friends that was joining. TBH, Rico isn’t shown as being particularly bright; when he did his aptitude tests, mobile infantry was the very best that he was qualified for, and… That wasn’t really that great. (That would be like getting a 36 on the ASVABs right now; juuuuuuuuuust enough to get into the Marine Corp, and not high enough to do anything other than the most basic jobs.) As far as a human population goes that we see in the story, there isn’t any obvious underclass, which is a requirement for fascism. Yes, there were non-citizens that had no vote, but there was always a path for them to get their franchise, if they were willing to put in the effort. (As far as I recall, there wasn’t a specific requirement that you serve in military; given that Heinlein goes out of his way to say that a position would be created for someone that was profoundly disabled, I think it’s pretty clear that it was never just military service. But Heinlein was a military vet, and he was writing science fiction for a YA audience at the time, and military service was more exciting than, say, civil engineering.)
Moreover, Heinlein goes out of his way to say that no one that is currently in their term of service has the franchise. By choosing to become career military, Rico is giving up the ability to exercise his franchise unless and until he retires. Fascism is often–if not always–characterized by military control over large areas of civilian life. But if the military has no direct political power, that’s sharply undermined.
…But it was a democracy. It just wasn’t a birthright democracy. Every person had to affirmatively choose to work for citizenship, rather than citizenship being granted based on where you were born, or who your parents were, but the right to work towards citizenship was afforded to everyone regardless of parentage, etc. I think that’s a pretty positive thing, TBH. I think that the US would likely be a lot better place politically if everyone had to be personally invested in the system, and if everyone had to actually pass civics and history tests before they were allowed to vote. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but maaaaaaaaybe a basic understanding of civics would mean that someone like Trump never would have gotten elected in the first place, since he’s so bent on undermining and destroying the entire system.
I think that Heinlein gets some things very right; people value a thing much more if they have to put in some kind of personal effort to get the thing than people who simply have it handed to them. I also think that he gets some things very, very wrong, like his ideas on corporal punishment. (Which, TBF, were not that out of line for 1959.)
I think that you haven’t read very much Heinlein if you think that he was writing satire at this point in his career. Stranger In a Strange Land had elements of satire, and Job was absolutely satire, but things like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is very straight forward. Heinlein is remarkably consistent in a lot of his writing; he’s largely libertarian and believes people should be able to be self-reliant, but he still mostly believes in the gov’t as a positive force. He’s deeply distrustful of religion though; any time religion shows up in his books, it’s a net negative.
The book opens on an active genocide which includes flamethrowering a hiding mother and child, before randomly nuking a city. And this is complimented and normal.
We’re also not given any circumstances behind this war. We can’t draw any definitive conclusions about it.
Heinlein was a WWII veteran, and WWII was where the concept of ‘total war’ was pioneered. (And later demonstrated to be a pretty bad idea, but that’s still not accepted by everyone.) We firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, knowing that it would cause massive civilian casualties, with only the barest military excuses; civilian casualties were the point, because we believed that it would break the will of the people of Germany and Japan to keep fighting. We can look back now and see that this was a dumb idea, esp. since Hitler was doing the same thing to England, and it was stiffening the resolve of the English. But unless you argue that the Allies were fundamentally fascist during WWII–which seems plainly false–then it’s not reasonable to argue that the idea of total war was a fascist idea.
At a minimum, we know that it’s a failed idea now.
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