this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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And it didn't succeed at showing the only part of the book that mattered, power armored space marines with shoulder nuke launchers!
If it was a good criticism of Heinlein's weirdo militarism it'd have been another thing, but the most damning criticisms of it are made up because Verhoeven couldn't be bothered to finish reading a short novel.
See the thing is that Heinlein wrote about a lot of different societies, some of which are completely antithetical to the militaristic selective democracy in ST.
People often say "oh this author thinks this or that" but if multiple of their works contradict how can you tell what is and isn't their personal views?
That being said, yeah most of what Verhoeven "criticized" wasn't even in the novel, there was no propaganda because they didn't actually want people to enlist lol if only he'd made it to the second chapter where the anti-recruiter gave his spiel about the military industrial complex and it's continuing growth due to the benefits tied to service...
I think Heinlein was actually much more against militarism than people give him credit for, hell he wrote "if this goes on-" about half a century before the problem became acute, he saw the religious authoritarianism from the US right wing coming miles away. I can't imagine he wasn't also critiquing our GI bill system of service for education, and the increasing dependency of military contractors on our economy with the novel.
Was RAH a weird dude? Absolutely. I think people are too quick to judge his personal values and beliefs based on one novel out of dozens of conflicting ideologies. Hell go read "beyond this horizon", the good guys are communists and run an automated economy with no standing army lol try and make that fit with the society of Troopers.
Starship Troopers is a bit different in that most critics agree it was Heinlein describing his own thoughts on the matter, particularly because he was angry about Eisenhower's suspension of nuclear testing.
I agree you should be careful about conflating a depicted society with the author's personal beliefs though, especially for an author who has such a long career and clearly changed his views during it.
The ending of The Puppet Masters describes a war against the aliens' world that seems taken from Starship Troopers. It seems a recurring idea for Heinlein.
Heinlein was horrified by Soviet Communism (and he'd traveled in the Soviet Union). He believed the US nuclear program (and space program) were a necessary protection against people like Stalin and Mao taking over the world.
There's a running theme in a number of his works, of people trying to find a society and a place in it where they can live safely, where they won't be oppressed for disagreeing with that society. It shows up in Stranger in a Strange Land, in "If This Goes Onβ", in the Lazarus Long stories, etc.
I think Heinlein's militarist liberal Americanism was contextual: he saw America as a place where a weirdo like him had a chance to live in peace, and that made it worth defending.