Robert Heinlein Was A Liberal

[Aldarion]

A long discussion on the politics of the Starship Troopers, and why Heinlein wasn't a fascist that the Left portrays him as.

Thing is, he was a liberal, which to Marxists is no different from a fascist.

 

[ATP]

A long discussion on the politics of the Starship Troopers, and why Heinlein wasn't a fascist that the Left portrays him as.

Thing is, he was a liberal, which to Marxists is no different from a fascist.

Indeed.And fun thing - liberal now mean marxist.Except Poland,where we have one real liberal left - Janusz Korwin-Mikke.

 

[Agent23]

He started off as pretty leftwing in the 30s.Part of that was the Great Depression, part was him swallowing the technocrat/commie/liberal propaganda of the likes of the EPIC movement, his first wife was apparently a massvie leftard.
He got redpilled gradually, first by seeing that a lot of socialist groups were infiltrated by commies, then he became more of what can be called a social and economic liberal.
At about the time The Moon is a Harsh Mistress he as IIRC saying that he was more rightwing in some regards than Ayn Rand.
This is all evident in some of his earlier works, but as he aged he went to the right on things like economics and national interests and defense, but he was still pretty libertarian where some social issues were concerned, with his view frnakly being "Making babies and having some fun in bed is a good thing", with stuff like Time Enough for Love being his absolute most insane where, ahem, endorsement of alternate lifestyles was concerned.

 

[Aldarion]

Continuation:

 

[Circle of Willis]

I've heard that Paul Verhoeven never even bothered to read Starship Troopers, because he so absolutely couldn't stand how 'right-wing' the book was. Not that this stopped him from automatically associating it & its author with the literal Nazis who occupied his childhood home, and making an entire movie lampooning them for it (despite them only being fascists in his head).

Hmm. That sounds familiar. Truly, some things never change.

Well, I'll give him this much at least, one big thing did change. At least the proto-SJWs of that day and age could still make their attempts at mocking and 'deconstructing' the [insert thing they hate for being 'fash' even though they never even read/watched it themselves] entertaining.

 

[Aldarion]

I've heard that Paul Verhoeven never even bothered to read Starship Troopers, because he so absolutely couldn't stand how 'right-wing' the book was. Not that this stopped him from automatically associating it & its author with the literal Nazis who occupied his childhood home, and making an entire movie lampooning them for it (despite them only being fascists in his head).

Hmm. That sounds familiar. Truly, some things never change.

Well, I'll give him this much at least, one big thing did change. At least the proto-SJWs of that day and age could still make their attempts at mocking and 'deconstructing' the [insert thing they hate for being 'fash' even though they never even read/watched it themselves] entertaining.

Agreed. He actually stopped reading it after two chapters:

The Real Reason The Starship Troopers Director Never Read The Book - Looper

It's no secret Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film Starship Troopers differs widely from its source material, but there's a good reason why.

www.looper.com

 

[Navarro]

I've heard that Paul Verhoeven never even bothered to read Starship Troopers, because he so absolutely couldn't stand how 'right-wing' the book was. Not that this stopped him from automatically associating it & its author with the literal Nazis who occupied his childhood home, and making an entire movie lampooning them for it (despite them only being fascists in his head).

Hmm. That sounds familiar. Truly, some things never change.

Actually, Verhoeven had slightly different motivations. The most traumatising event of WW2 for him wasn't the German occupation, it was a bombing raid when some Allied bombers almost hit his home (it was right next to a V2 launching site). From what we see of the Federation's civilian life in the movie, it's very American.

And of course, he went out and said it in the DVD commentary - the real message of his SST movie isn't "Heinlein is fascist" or "imma gonna satirise the fash" but "America is just as bad as Nazi Germany". Basically, that American cultural power and dominance in the world is morally the same as Nazi Germany running around to conquer and genocide various nations. Supremely warped and deeply ungrateful, but that's left-wing Euros for you.

 

[Circle of Willis]

Actually, Verhoeven had slightly different motivations. The most traumatising event of WW2 for him wasn't the German occupation, it was a bombing raid when some Allied bombers almost hit his home (it was right next to a V2 launching site). From what we see of the Federation's civilian life in the movie, it's very American.

And of course, he went out and said it in the DVD commentary - the real message of his SST movie isn't "Heinlein is fascist" or "imma gonna satirise the fash" but "America is just as bad as Nazi Germany". Basically, that American cultural power and dominance in the world is morally the same as Nazi Germany running around to conquer and genocide various nations. Supremely warped and deeply ungrateful, but that's left-wing Euros for you.

IMO, it feels like a bit of column A & column B both. Verhoeven's later comments re: Heinlein, fascism, Trump, etc. make him seem as someone who's not only motivated by general anti-Americanism and a whole 'America are the real fascists!' mentality, but someone who really does seem to hold a serious personal animosity toward Heinlein and everything the latter stood for in general.

Verhoeven added that Heinlein’s philosophy was fascistic; for the director, as well as screenwriter Ed Neumeier, their film was having an open fight with the novel. The idea behind “Troopers,” according to Verhoeven, was to create a story that “seduced the audience” on one level, but then make it clear to the audience what they were admiring was actually evil.

“Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism,” Verhoeven said.

-----------------------

"Ed and I disagreed with Robert Heinlein and we felt that we needed to counter with our own narrative," he explains. "Basically the political undercurrent of the film is that these heroes and heroines are living in a fascist utopia – but they are not even aware of it! They think this is normal. And somehow you are seduced to follow them, and at the same time, made aware that they might be fascists."

I mean, damn dude, did Heinlein goose-step on your lawn right before setting fire to a bag of manure on it or something? Personally I've always been of the opinion that if you're seething & malding this much (and for so long! These articles came out in 2016-17, 20 years after the movie came out) about an author and their work, you don't have to adapt it and really should just turn down any offer to do so, but what do I know? As far as cultural vandalism goes, at least the Starship Troopers movie is more like an actually somewhat artful graffiti scrawl rather than the Ecce Mono ''''recreation'''' or pure hateful shitflinging we're seeing out of woke studios today, even if it was ultimately no less deliberate.

 

[Bassoe]

Alexander Wallace called it American-imperial Heinleinism and alternatehistory forum, Anarcho-Frontierism.

The point of divergence consists of the United States and the Soviet Union deciding to focus on space exploration rather than more bog-standard imperialism as their way of proving their respective systems as superior to the rest of the world. It’s an unrealistic premise, one that rankles the international relations student in me, but one that I was and am willing to accept if it creates a good story.

Fortunately, Antonelli has spun a good yarn with the skills of a master weaver. It starts out with Dave Shuster, a Republican Party staffer in New York who is compensated for his participation in a lost electoral campaign by being sent to work for the government of Mars. When he arrives, he finds that the governor has died under suspicious circumstances, leaving himself as the governor, a stranger in a strange land.

The book is set in the 1980s, and it draws heavily from a sort of mid-century science fiction that brimmed with optimism and triumphalism, as it was the product of an America (and to a much lesser extent, a Britain) that bestrode the world like a colossus. The world looked so bright to Americans because the rest of the world had been plunged into darkness and by the 1950s was only beginning to crawl out of it. Kim Stanley Robinson provided this sort of science fiction a very apt name: American-imperial Heinleinism.

In the world that Antonelli has created, Robert A. Heinlein is an admiral in the United States Navy that leads a heavy push to get humanity into space; he got a city on Mars for his efforts. It’s an incredibly fitting choice, given how Heinleinesque this book feels; it brims with the sensibility of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land, this sort of dream of a future that could be so much better than now, full of wonder and awe. But countering that, there is a sense of loss in that that beautiful future can never come to pass. Indeed, in much of its aesthetic it feels consciously retro from the 1960s to the 1980s; in doing so, it becomes perhaps the only example of what TvTropes calls ‘cassette futurism’ I’ve seen in print. For a concise summation of ‘cassette futurism,’ think the lab scenes in Stranger Things, of which I was strongly reminded while I read the book (having watched the entire series not long before helped too).

Anarcho-Frontierism

-Home, home on Legrange...
​

What is Anfront? The simple answer is that it's an unorthodox school of anarchism that inexplicably has four distinct Reddit communities devoted to it in a perfect microcosm of ideological splittism! The long answer is a bit more complicated but is ultimately grounded in the frontier thesis and billed as the natural conclusion of the theory. First proposed in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier thesis argued that the development of democracy in America was rooted ultimately in the existence of "the frontier" which, Tucker argued, generated liberty by eroding traditional Old World cultural norms and social mores, producing egalitarianism, disdain for high culture and a violent disposition as further byproducts.

Anarcho-Frontierism holds itself strictly to Tucker's thesis, arguing that the closing of the frontier brings with it centralized authority and hated hierarchy. In a world without a frontier where is one to find true freedom? Off-world, of course! Seeing space as an endless final frontier, adherents of Anfront argue for the absolute necessity of human expansion into space, embracing transhumanism to better adapt themselves to the life of the asteroid miner.

In an unintentional way Anfront creates an interesting mirror image with Novuteranism. Both favor transhumanism, though the former focus on adapting to asteroids and desert worlds and the latter is obsessed with living on the equivalent of Hoth. The Novuteran advocacy for a fascist command economy is completely at odds with Anfront's complete disdain for government and mutualist perspective of limited markets. Ironically both groups idealize a frontier, though Anfront's love of Texas and the American West is in marked contrast with Novuteranism's lust for the frozen Canadian tundra. And of course there's the whole race theory thing, which the former lacks but the latter revels in.

The symbol of Anarcho-Frontierism is a black and tan anarchist flag with a crossed rifle, tomahawk and railroad spike in white.

TL;DR: Fallout: New Vegas would be a totally awesome you guys!

As good guys: Think The Moon is a Harsh Mistress- government is pretty lax but everyone pulls their weight in the face of a razor thin margin of survival, with frontier justice disposing of the occasional bad apple and incentivizing the rest to keep to the new norms and mores that have evolved among the moons and asteroids of the System. Markets are small and localized, with an informal system of collective solidarity creating a cushion in the lean times.

As bad guys: Might makes right and what defines frontier justice is up to the ones with the strength to enforce their will on a populace unable to leave. Life in the mines is harsh and short, with your ration of scrip buying less and less at the company store with each standard cycle.

If anyone cares, the Heinlein-as-an-admiral alternate history idea came from Larry Niven's Return of William Proxmire, but that's not the point. Instead, the idea that this isn't the future we were promised and we're understandably a bit upset about this.

Heather remembered how her own mother -- God, nearly fifty years back -- would tell her of the kind of future she had grown up with, in more expansive, optimistic years. By the year 2025, her mother used to say, nuclear-powered spacecraft would be plying between the colonized planets, bearing water and precious minerals mined from asteroids. Perhaps the first interstellar probe would already have been launched. And so on.

Perhaps teenagers in that world might have been distracted from each others' body parts -- at least some of the time! -- by the spectacle of the explorers in Mars's Valles Marineris, or Mercury's great Caloris basin, or the shifting ice fields of Europa.

But, she thought, in our world we're still stuck here on Earth, and even the future seems to end in a black hurtling wall of rock, and all we want to do is spy on each other.

Basic principles being:

• The Cultural War cannot be won by either side, since both sides believe they've got too much to lose and will start an outright civil war and destroy civilization if facing otherwise-inevitable defeat.
• Thanks to the quality of our weapons, a modern Great Power War would destroy civilization.
• If civilization collapsed now for whatever reason, it won't be able to reestablish itself since all the raw materials essential for building technological infrastructure as we know it which can be extracted without using preexisting technological infrastructure have already been used up.
• We've got a finite quantity of oil and rare earth ores left on earth and they're running out.

All of these problems have the same solution, we need more resources and a frontier to serve as a pressure release value for dissidents to establish whatever type of society they'd prefer. We have the technology, what we don't have is the money and that's primarily because our leaders know they couldn't accomplish their dream of ruling everyone if people escaped to self-sustaining space colonies and possessing engines capable of moving large masses around in space, had a MAD deterrence.

 

[*THASF*]

I've heard that Paul Verhoeven never even bothered to read Starship Troopers, because he so absolutely couldn't stand how 'right-wing' the book was. Not that this stopped him from automatically associating it & its author with the literal Nazis who occupied his childhood home, and making an entire movie lampooning them for it (despite them only being fascists in his head).

Hmm. That sounds familiar. Truly, some things never change.

Well, I'll give him this much at least, one big thing did change. At least the proto-SJWs of that day and age could still make their attempts at mocking and 'deconstructing' the [insert thing they hate for being 'fash' even though they never even read/watched it themselves] entertaining.

Verhoeven is a clever and incisive satirist who conceals interesting messages beneath the brutal violence, dehumanization, and stark obscenity of his movies. I love Robocop and Total Recall, and, yes, even his mocking rendition of Starship Troopers.

If only modern SJWs were half as creative.

 

[Cherico]

Verhoeven is a clever and incisive satirist who conceals interesting messages beneath the brutal violence, dehumanization, and stark obscenity of his movies. I love Robocop and Total Recall, and, yes, even his mocking rendition of Starship Troopers.

If only modern SJWs were half as creative.

I'm glad they arn't it lets people see through them and helps build the conditions for a response against them.

 

[Aldarion]

Verhoeven is a clever and incisive satirist who conceals interesting messages beneath the brutal violence, dehumanization, and stark obscenity of his movies. I love Robocop and Total Recall, and, yes, even his mocking rendition of Starship Troopers.

If only modern SJWs were half as creative.

Yeah, I unironically enjoyed the Starship Troopers movie despite knowing precisely what it is.

 

[Agent23]

Alexander Wallace called it American-imperial Heinleinism and alternatehistory forum, Anarcho-Frontierism.


If anyone cares, the Heinlein-as-an-admiral alternate history idea came from Larry Niven's Return of William Proxmire, but that's not the point. Instead, the idea that this isn't the future we were promised and we're understandably a bit upset about this.

Basic principles being:

• The Cultural War cannot be won by either side, since both sides believe they've got too much to lose and will start an outright civil war and destroy civilization if facing otherwise-inevitable defeat.
• Thanks to the quality of our weapons, a modern Great Power War would destroy civilization.
• If civilization collapsed now for whatever reason, it won't be able to reestablish itself since all the raw materials essential for building technological infrastructure as we know it which can be extracted without using preexisting technological infrastructure have already been used up.
• We've got a finite quantity of oil and rare earth ores left on earth and they're running out.

All of these problems have the same solution, we need more resources and a frontier to serve as a pressure release value for dissidents to establish whatever type of society they'd prefer. We have the technology, what we don't have is the money and that's primarily because our leaders know they couldn't accomplish their dream of ruling everyone if people escaped to self-sustaining space colonies and possessing engines capable of moving large masses around in space, had a MAD deterrence.

And the premise is eerily reminiscent of Pournelle and Niven's CoDominium series from what I have read.
If anything this is indicative that Xers and Millenials are taking over the culture, since now we have nostalgia and retro futurism based on the 70s and 80s, not the 60s and 50s.
Is the book itself any good, though?
I am looking for something decent to read, preferably not a doorstop.

But that is a side note, I completely agree on frontier-ism, as probably every Heinlein fanboy would, however the American Imperial bits are IMHO bunk.
Heinlein wanted American frontier values and self-sufficeincy, by his bootstraps kind of individualism, and frankly that goes counter to the Imperialist political power consolidation, social stratification and cultural stagnation and decadence we see in late stage empires.