An article on a Web site based in “occupied Iraq” hauls out the tired old argument that Robert Heinlein was a fascist.
How long has it been since you watched Starship Troopers? Perhaps you should again. I caught some of it last week on television, and I was surprised at how reality has outpaced it. I don’t mean the space travel and the giant bugs; I mean the abandonment of democracy and dutiful dissent and the remodeling of America into a martial society. The bugs, of course, were never bugs anyway. They’re the eternal, dehumanized other that needs only extermination. (The original title of 2002’s giant spider movie Eight Legged Freaks was “Arac Attack.”)
Paul Verhoeven’s film is smart enough to satirize Robert Heinlein’s rather straight-ahead authoritarianism (for instance, citizenship is a privilege of those who sign up for “federal service”), though satire seems a hard thing to grok for those who were disgusted by the story of “Hitler Youth in love.”
Besides expounding principles of governance which could arguably be described as fascist, Heinlein was also – again, arguably – a student of the occult, and a familiar of the principals of the Babalon Working: Jack Parsons, L Ron Hubbard and “the Scarlet Woman,” Marjorie Cameron.
How typical of the left to equate anything military with fascism.
In an example of guilt by association, the writer goes on to link Heinlein to the writer of the white supremacist manifesto “The Turner Diaries.”
I’ll do the guy a favor: Next time you want to leap to conclusions, you might want to mention Heinlein’s short story “Free Men,” which is about a bunch of red-neck gun nut survivalists who attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States.
[tags]heinlein,fascism,turner diaries[/tags]
Err, actually, ‘Free Men’ was about some patriotic holdouts still fighting on, as a resistance movement, against a foreign occupation of the United States.
“How long has it been since you watched Starship Troopers?”
How telling.
How about “How long has it been since you READ Starship Troopers?”
The movie was a travesty, not at all faithful to the original. Verhoven, I believe, admitted that he hadn’t even read the book.
But you know the Left – if they say it, it must be true.
We have always been at war with Oceana.