A Look at the Government and Society of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

The novel Starship Troopers is one of my favorite science fiction novels. It is not exactly a page-turner filled with nonstop action and battlefield heroics. Rather, it is a novel that makes you think about the nature of government, society, the role of the individual, the role of violence, et cetera.

The novel indeed offers up admiration and full-throated support for the men and women that fight wars on our behalf and, more accurately perhaps, on behalf of the civilian leadership. But while the novel's protagonist, Johnny Rico, may wax poetic about the virtues of the sacrifice of the individual for the collective good, the costs of war that are born by the soldiers are not ignored (although the emotional/mental/psychological trauma of combat are only touched on briefly). Yet you are free to accept or reject the philosophical arguments as you see fit. In fact, science fiction authors have done just that by writing what are commonly seen as rebuttals to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

However, I never really saw the fascism supposedly on display in Starship Troopers. After all, fascism has been publicly witnessed and its shortcomings and humanitarian abuses are well-documented. The government and the human society in Starship Troopers is undoubtedly not a utopia, but it hardly seems to qualify as fascism. Granted, we get the story almost entirely from people in the novel that wholeheartedly endorse the way that their society is set up and how it functions. But definitions and words matter. And I don't see any evidence in the novel that fascism is at work.

Below is a link to an interesting video examining the claim that Starship Troopers is fascist. Considering the casual and flippant way that "fascism" and "fascist" gets lobbed about today in political conversations, I would argue that many Americans would benefit from watching this video, including those that have no interest in Robert Heinlein's novel and/or science fiction.