Yeah, they're Tea Partiers. But they're DRM-free Tea Partiers.
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There a quite a few interviews with Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers, where he explains that at least one motivation of his was to rub away the veneer of the Heinlein book and show the pro-fascist ideology that lay beneath the novel (deference to power, unquestioning patriotism and the like).
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Except, among other things, one of the themes of the book
informed, not unquestioning, patriotism. That's the point of the History & Moral Philosophy class that forms an important part of the story:
understanding the foundations of the society and its beliefs -- that is, being a citizen, not just a blind follower. Which is something people on
all sides of the political spectrum need to start doing before we dig ourselves in any deeper than we already are. And that goes for every citizen of every country.
For that matter, deference to power is no more fascist than it is communist, or a lot of other -ists. It's not just human nature, it's
nature, period. We just rationalize it more, instead of the rest of the animal kingdom's uncomplicated understanding of "if the big guy doesn't like what I'm doing, he's gonna bite me," but it's the same thing. We're primates that rationalize excuses for our instinctive behavior.
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It was, in a roundabout way, a statement on how easy it is to fall into the mindset of the fascist.
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Very, very, very roundabout. So roundabout it missed the point entirely and went whirling off into cloud-cuckoospace.
And the humans are "the wrong side"? Might I point out who started the war? Even with Verhoeven's best efforts to turn the humans into the bad guys -- making Sergeant Zim a gratuitous sadist, for instance, and the whole business with the SS uniforms -- they're still the people trying to fend off an invasion by an enemy intent on eradicating the entire human race.
But in any event, it wasn't Starship Troopers. All political content aside, the Starship Troopers M.I. are one-man doomsday machines in powersuits ... not cannon fodder in T-shirts who apparently have no long-range weapons, no grenades, no air support, no artillery, and no tactics aside from suicidal human wave attacks. The Bugs were a technologically-advanced species with starships, not intergalactic FTL
farts! You might agree or disagree with the themes of the book, but at least it wasn't mind-numbingly
stupid. Verhoeven lost any chance he had to convince me that the book wasn't what I thought it was when he decided he could disregard anything from the book -- or from science -- that didn't fit his worldview and replace it with something that did.
Seriously, intergalactic bug farts?