I’ll take the fuzzy well, thanks.
Extremely troubling to cite your own self-published paper without proper disclosure.
AB compounds the situation by describing the work as “a complete and coherent argument for the latter, leaving only some very subjective interpretation,” again without disclosing that he was talking about* his own work*.
Another level of concern involves the fact the Starship Troopers Wiki appears to disagree 180°.
I agree, and I apologize sincerely for appearing to have done so. It was not my intent. I let my effort to keep a firewall between my identities cloud the way I posted and referenced the material.
Had JC PM’ed me a good reaming on the point, I would have corrected it posthaste.
Ten years ago, I would have taken that as a challenge and spent a week ripping the material there to shreds with the very unfair tactic of actually citing what Heinlein wrote and said. Now… as Robert Rodriguez once said, “Five feet that way… five feet that way… it’s a home run. I ain’t spilling my beer.” Twenty-five years was long enough in Heinleinland.
Bolding mine. Appearing to have done so? It is exactly what you did.
Heinlein wrote ST at a time when most people trusted the government. that kind of trust doesn’t exist today, IMHO.
Interestingly, Google Scholar says that paper has been cited a grand total of 5 times.
In between socialism and (a certain kind of) libertarianism, he went through a Social Credit phase in between.
Probably the most dismaying and WTF?! thing about Heinlein’s politics was his fiscal/monetary politics, specifically his goldbuggery, as expressed at several places in Expanded Universe – to be fair, written in the late '70s, when hyperinflation seemed like The Worst Thing Ever.
There are people like Christopher Hitchens or Dennis Miller who were life-long liberals and then became deranged because of 9/11; deranged used because they started to associate every other behavior with the one. Heinlein is, to me, the epitome of those who were similarly affected by WWII. His case is perhaps worse because it is thoroughly mixed with his psychological demons caused by his forced exit from the military due to his tuberculous, which created huge guilt about his not participating. Heck, maybe Miler and Hitchens have similar issues we’re just not as familiar with.
Whatever the cause, by the 1970s Heinlein was so alienated from the growing counterculture that calling him a fascist is the fastest way to peg his position on the political scale of those times.
That said, I found AB’s paper to be fascinating, a model of close reading a text.
The only aspect I might quibble with is the section on why Heinlein made ridiculously absurd remarks in Expanded Universe. Weren’t those exactly when he had no blood flowing to his brain? 
I don’t think Heinlein is so easily politically categorized. He was always passionate about his politics, but exactly what issues he was passionate about varied considerably. For instance, even at his most militaristic, he was always a very strong opponent of the draft.
Now that I know who Amateur Barbarian is (I had no idea until now, or if I once did I have forgotten) I can tell you that his Heinlein scholarship is extremely well regarded and most Heinlein fans would consider him an authority. I’ve certainly known his name for decades and read most of what he’s written and find it excellent. He’s not just some blogger with a self-published paper.
That paper, by the way, is a slam-dunk and pretty much correct in every way as far as I can tell.
Yes, federal service was military service. But you didn’t have to serve in combat roles. You DID have to serve in an unpleasant role - you couldn’t ride out your term sitting behind a desk shuffling papers. That was a civilian job.
Heinlein DID feel that the ability to vote your own largesse was a flaw in a democracy, and he explored many ways to counter that - most of them satirical. For example, in Expanded Universe he suggested that to vote you’d have to put some money at risk, then when you went into the voting booth you’d be asked a question to test your capacity for understanding the issues. Fail the test, and you lose your $50 or whatever, and you don’t get to vote. Another more Swiftian proposal was that the booth would open, and you would go in and take the test. Pass, and you get to vote. Fail, and the booth opens again - empty.
As to whether a society has ever voted for bread-and-circuses to the point of its own destruction… Isn’t Greece a good example? They have voted themselves outrageously generous early pensions, paid for with borrowed money. This weekend they will have a referendum and vote on whether they should bother to pay their debts back. If that vote goes the wrong way, they will probably wind up out of the Euro and with a grossly devalued currency and a major collapse of their living standards.
Either way, there is little doubt that the Greeks have been voting to borrow other people’s money and spend it on their own comfort, and when the crisis hit their response was to elect a government that promised even more of the same.
I think Heinlein eventually made peace with this flaw in democracy by simply deciding that government’s scope should be kept very small to minimize the damage.
Finally, it’s clear in the book that this is not a fascist society. There is no charismatic leader, the military doesn’t parade around to cheering throngs. In fact, the citizenry seems to have quite a bit of contempt for the military. And not having the franchise isn’t as important in that society simply because the scope of government seems to be much smaller. Rico’s father was proud of his non-citizenship, and said that this was a multi-generational characteristic of the family, and yet they were captains of industry.
I would say that the society in Starship Troopers could be thought of as somewhat libertarian, but with a hard justice system for people who break the law. The latter helps to give it a bit of that ‘fascist’ feel to people who aren’t thinking too hard about it. Public floggings and lashes for children and the death penalty are not very touchy-feely. But they aren’t necessarily indicators of fascism.
Do you base this on any actual evidence? Heinlein was much more affected by anti-communism and the cold war. His political views also changed after traveling the world and being greatly disappointed by the social democracies he visited. At the time, in the 50’s, he was still holding out hope that socialism could work. His visits to Britain and New Zealand dispirited him and soured him on socialism, as did his involvement with a number of political campaigns and the behaviour he observed of the people in them.
In other words, Heinlein’s conversion was incremental and well thought out. He wasn’t ‘deranged’ by WWII into becoming a ‘zealot’.
And what evidence do you have that Heinlein was horribly scarred by his exit from the military due to Tuberculosis? Certainly he wasn’t happy about it, but I’ve read a lot of his correspondence, both volumes of his biography, everything he himself had written, and a lot of Amateur Barbarian’s work and that of other Heinlein scholars, and I’ve never any sort of heavy ‘scarring’. After all, Heinlein did honorable work for the military in WWII, and maintained close friendships for life with many people in the military, some who were were high-ranking officers (Admiral level). No one seemed to think he was ‘scarred’ anywhere other than his lung tissue.
Bullshit. Calling him a fascist was just a cheap shot that was also thrown at pretty much everyone who didn’t buy into the values of the counterculture. Heinlein remained a man who was very distrustful of state power, who considered himself closest to libertarianism, who was a nudist and a believer in ‘alternative’ marriage forms. Hell, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ helped kick off the counter-culture, and Heinlein never disavowed that book. In fact, he thought it was critical to understanding him.
Heinlein’s great sin to the counterculture was that he was an ardent cold warrior. That was all it took to get the ‘fascist’ label back then. But at that time, ardent cold warriors could be found on both sides of the aisle.
I don’t remember the exact timeline of the surgery, but I think Expanded Universe came later. In any event, I believe those passages mentioned are best thought of as Swiftian proposals, meant to make you think but not to be taken seriously.
There are those who defend Heinlein and those who condemn Heinlein and neither will ever convince the other of that belief.
Everything I’ve read on Heinlein - which is a lot, although not as much as you and AB - tells me that he considered himself a superior person and that he hated the ignorant rabble he was surrounded by. That feeling intensified over life as you indicated, and the worship by the very counterculture that he so hated solidified it. (*Stranger *did not kick it off, any more than Tolkien did. Just the reverse. The counterculture found and elevated them.) He had a vivid image of what an ideal world would be like, and that was both a) very much the world of World War II solidarity with the knowledgeable people on top telling everyone else what to do and b) very much not what the world was after.
I carefully qualified my fascist comment by pegging it to a particular time period. I don’t think you can understand the Nixon era without stating bluntly that Nixon is the only president to make war on his own people. (Lincoln is of course a different universe.) Calling the Nixonian side fascist is a massive simplification, but not a cheap shot. They earned it with diligent effort. I sat next to a Hall of Fame-level writer at the 1975 Nebula Awards banquet and had him tell me that all wars were Democratic wars. *All *wars. Well, it’s sure been true that for the rest of those 40 years the Democrats have been at war with the Republicans and no sensible dialog passes between them.
So I normally stay out of political discussions and I stay out of Heinlein discussions because they always turn political. I only posted here because I saw, um, elsewhere, some mocking of AB’s article which made me read it and made me want to tell him how good it was. That I got in a bit of Heinlein twitting is only fair.
The Nixon twitting is the cherry on the sundae.
The problem with many armies is they lose their funding an importance if they have nobody to fight. So in Starship Troopers it was suggested that they started the war with the bug race so they could have a reason for federal military service and to fund all those starships and big space stations.
I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of The Forever War.
Heinlein was well recovered from the surgery by 1979, the time those remarks were recorded during a phone conversation with an unidentified interviewer, possibly/probably Jim Baen. I will stand by my assessment that they should not be taken as seriously, and certainly not given as much weight as things Heinlein said in more formal, careful ways. The interstital material in EU is clearly a casual conversation - an amusing one, an enlightening one, but absolutely not a reliable one.
The amount of blood, sweat, tears and ink expended on RAH’s brief, late and exasperated comments to an interviewer, without any supporting material before or since, and (IMVVHO) provably wrong against the text of the book, continues to astound me.
This young hippie loved Heinlein because of his juveniles–& the other books I managed to find. Never liked* Stranger* all that much. Thought* Starship Troopers* was kinda interesting–I didn’t & don’t expect every book to be Instructions On How One Must Live; sometimes the writer just has a story to tell. I would periodically reread Heinlein–not limiting myself to what was “cool.” (Although I read most of that, too. I read a lot.)
I fully agree with you about hating Nixon…
I’ve heard this expression many times. Is there an actual example of where this has happened?
I think our (US) Founding Fathers got it right (more or less) that the right answer isn’t about pure democracy but about providing checks and balances against absolute power, whether it’s a tyranny by a dictator or by the unwashed masses.
In any event, whether it’s Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip K Dick, Asimov, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubburd or any other science fiction author, I don’t hold their works up to be a template for how to run society. They may be great at world-building a universe that is logical and consistent with their particular world view. But ultimately it’s still fantasy.
I’ve always thought that the politics of Starship Troopers sound an awful lot like the griping of my one Grandfather-the one who never saw combat- when he talked about what’s wrong with the world, and how his time in the Army straightened him up and made him a man.
And then I remember what my other Grandfather- the one who saw combat- thought of the Army.
True. We get ideas about society and politics from many sources and generally give them the weight they’re worth. But for some reason, Heinlein tops the list for being taken far too seriously, and literally, and word-of-godly. He had some amazing insight and ideas. (And some pretty dopey ones.) I think we should listen to his insights, but not carve them into the walls of the temple.
(Rand, of course, outdoes them all… but she intended to. Fiction was just a vehicle to express her philosophy.)
Well, it’s worse than that. The whole suffrage scheme is based on military service but they seem to have a world government, which implies that, aside from the inevitable regional flareups, there’s actually nobody to fight. You can’t depend on bugs popping up every couple of years. So what happens to this society when peace actually breaks out for an extended period of time?
Suffrage is based on military service, but what if that military service isn’t particularly harsh and dangerous, simply because you can’t find enough harsh and dangerous conditions for all your volunteers? How do you staff your government when there are no veterans? What if people get tired of throwing money at a military whose only purpose is to serve as a gateway to political power? And how does sitting around a barracks for a few years waiting for a conflict to break out prepare you for anything except boredom?
Meanwhile, the grad student who finally cures cancer and changes the world can’t even run this universe’s equivalent of the CDC.