I’m a rather young man, 23 and a couple months old when 9/11 happened. I like to read history so much because, despite the horrors and atrocities committed, there were people and leaders who truly cared about more than themselves. I read Starship Troopers in basic training in 2019 and it made an impact on me. The biggest takeaway I got was that nobody my age or below the age of 40 care about nothing except themselves. That a political system based on that kind of individualistic freedom with no responsibility only leads to destruction. Rome fell in its decadence. Freedom cannot be free, because then it can’t be appreciated. I appreciated my phone, my freedom, my choice of diet, the ability to walk around wherever I want etc after I went through basic training and later Infantry School. Even afterwards when I got out and tried to get back into American Society, I couldn’t. The unearned unending self destructive hedonism disgusted me. The way that people my age thought was unbelievably ignorant and irrational. I really like this channel a lot. Keep up the good work.
I've been in the army 20 years, currently national guard, I'm 42 now. I wish I could tell you it gets better, but I don't think it will. This society is so pro-everyman that it's fundamentally impossible to see leaders and institutions as anything but the problem, and to see the people as anything but victims. It doesn't matter what happens, that narrative will dominate. Politics don't matter: the left is anti-institution by definition, the right is drunk on an individualist Kool-aid conspiracy about one world order that's obvious nonsense, rife with incoherent versions of freedom and real Americans. It's too bad, because a less decadent people could work fine with the system we have. Its flaw, after all, is that it spoils people, enables them to be dependent on trash corporations and not bother to forge any real communal bonds. I feel like we're not only gonna watch a decent system burn, and the historiography will be written by fools so no one will remember it was decent. Just know that you're not alone and you're not crazy, it's just lousy timing. Find some good people and try to laugh about it.
Full declaration. I am a retired soldier. I have read Starship Troopers a few times & I am due to read it again shortly. It is one of my favourite books by my favourite author, Heinlein. What I took away from it was that Citizenship was absolutely for post military service. The Federation started with discharged soldiers in Scotland deciding that they had, had enough & got a grip of things. The reason why only former soldiers got the vote & this was better, was because soldiers had instilled in them that there was something more important than themselves. The implication being that they wouldn't vote for someone offering tax cuts by borrowing money from their grandchildren.
"A distinction that makes no difference" sorta thing. You take the oath, you show up for assignment, and then you go where you are told do go and do what you are told to do for the duration of your service. Military service in everything but name.
Accept for the shooting, killing, and dying part. And the fact that those who are not in the military and in an active war can quit without notice at any time. So... it's really not like the military. It's more like any job you have to do whether for pay or so the school won't burn down or so your crops don't die, or so you will get your degree, or get the graduate assistant position, and so on.
@@macmcleod1188 Actually, even the military can resign at anytime except during active combat. For the M.I., that can be right before you enter the drop capsule. While not explicitly stated in the novel, someone in the non military service might be restricted from resigning during an actual life threatening emergencies.
Hello. You, I respect, so I'll engage. I first read Star Ship Troopers when I was sixteen or seventeen. ( I'm now 66. ) Heinlein had many things to say in that book. His main argument however was, in a society where elections are held, the vote is the greatest authority the individual can exert over society. He then goes on to say, in any just system, there must be some mechanism in place to balance authority with responsibility. If you have authority with no responsibility, you have a despot. If you have responsibility with no authority, you have a scapegoat. In order to bring the two into balance, he proposed that anyone wanting to vote first be required to show/prove/demonstrate they are willing/able to place the welfare of society above their own personal interest. The method he devised was they be required to serve 2 years of PUBLIC ( Not Just Military ) service with special characteristics. Those were, any unpleasant task with a statistically observable amount of personal risk involved. i.e. cleaning bedpans in a leprosarium or collecting and disposing of used syringes in an HIV ward. Performing such a task for 2 years would earn you the right to vote. At time stamp 1:27, the words you seem to overlook were " he said scornfully" . He was not satisfied Johnny's careful answer because it was incomplete. There was much more than just "defense" and " safety" involved, which is why its about so much more than military service. Its about CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY which is a much broader concept. I am very sensitive to misinterpretations of SST because, at my then tender age, when you read the first book of the DUNE ( at the time ) Trilogy, then follow that with SST, you start thinking HARD about the military and its place in society. I was very upset with verhooven's disrespectful lampooning of SST. The fool never even read the book. He read only the first chapter or two, tossed the book then created that abortion. ( People today cry about what is sometimes done to their favorite IP, its not a new phenomenon ). Before I convince you that I'm totally on board with Heinlein's ideas, I need to point out that Heinlein was a libertarian. ( and radically more so as he aged ) The problem I have with many libertarian ideas is although they may sound great at first exposure, they often leave an itch in my mind that is similar to having food stuck between your teeth and trying to get it out with your tongue. The actual problem with H's proposal is it's a voter qualification test. Such tests have historically been used to disenfranchise whichever group is out of favor at the time. Or in other words, it's the Perfect People Problem. Any society that could make it work wouldn't need it and any society that needed it couldn't make it work. The problems people have with SST are other than what's often expressed. You are wrong, it wasn't about military service. It was Public Service, a much broader concept. Verhooven was wrong. Heinlein wasn't a fascist ( whatever that is ) . He was a libertarian striving towards higher ideals in a doomed effort. Thank you for your time.
Good post and I completely agree with your assessment of Heinlein’s main argument from a philosophical standpoint and I suspect that if he were actually talking about a real proposal he probably would suggest non-military alternatives. But in the book, they aren’t there. Every form of service is under the military umbrella, based on what the recruiting sergeant says, the bit with the merchant marine sailors in Seattle, and everything we read from Mr. Dubois’ civics class. We all extrapolate from the text. In my case, I think that Heinlein put in all those “make-work” jobs to keep unfit recruits busy as a commentary on the bloat and politicization of the military, a military increasing its role in society while damaging its ability to do its real job of fighting wars efficiently. The message is clear to me, but it’s only implied in the text. Just as the text implies public service, but what it actually says at every instance is military service. It’s sort of the Bible problem. We can read it as metaphor or read it literally and come up with very different conclusions. In this case, I’m focused on what’s in the text itself. But at some point I plan to a do a more broadly philosophical take on Starship Troopers, Forever War, and a few others and I welcome your input on the non-military public service aspects of Starships Troopers from that standpoint. As Patton once said, if everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
@@feralhistorian Thank you for responding. Heinlein wrote SST either shortly after or towards the end of the Korean War. ( I forget when the K war ended. the book was published in 1959. ) He had definite ideas about how the war should have been fought. One of the rules for enlistment I found interesting was for military enrollment, the term of service was two years or one war which ever came LAST. Heinlein saw this as reasonable because he had definite ideas about how wars should be fought . He was a rabid anti-communist who saw " Reds Under the Bed" and would have understood nothing less than stamping out the "Red Menace" with maximum effort. ( the reality of many wars that drag on indeterminately, end inconclusively, and leave haunting legacies down the years was something he couldn't consider in his libertarian purity. ) The point is, under his proposal, the two years of non-military public service could be seen as preferable since you knew when it should end. I look forward to future essays you may put out on the military scifi works you've mentioned. Until then, thank you.
I was ten years behind you. Was assigned three of the Juvie Heinleins during 4th and 5th grade at a small school run by a libertarian. Transferred to public school. The public junior high school I attended had tons of Heinlein, as did the local public library. When I was looking for schools for my kids in early 2000s, I checked their libraries during visits. Classical schools, expensive private, Christian--none of them had a single volume of Heinlein. Fifteen years later, I don't even want to know.
I must say that I respect the time and effort you put into this, thank you. I had a similar feeling when reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, that of having something unpleasant stuck. The book appealed to me when I read it, as I was a rather devoted communist at the time, but since then I have realised how horrifically utopian it all was.
@@H.J.Fleischmann Heinlein can have that effect. I remember reading in his future history his description of a photovoltaic power source and thinking if its that easy, why hasn't anyone done it yet. ( I still believe that TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE is, with all of it's flaws, one of the best science fiction books ever written, and STRANGER in a STRANGE LAND was the book that turned me into a confirmed scifi fan. )
I always took the "terranizing Venus" line as to mean there was something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers but shittier and involving more near slave labor. Involved in civilian civil and environmental engineering/infrastructure but still under the DOD umbrella.
It almost looks like the Federation military has 3 branches. Army, Navy, and drudges that get called in to do whatever the State needs on the support end. Like a militarized WPA, or the German Reichsarbeitsdienst.
I actually think that Heinlein was thinking more of the CCC. We forget that many of the CCC jobs were very hard and dangerous. People keep thinking that he was allowing bureaucrats to be service, this would undermine the idea in the book.
There's certainly some suggestion of that. Though by having it all done through the military, it's less like the Civilian Conservation Corps and more like the Reich Labor Service, a straight-up uniformed service structured along military lines.
Biggs was in the Star Wars Storybook and original Marvel Comics adaptation. We all had those or a friend who did, so like a lot of other urban legends it morphed into a false memory
I think a lot of this misunderstanding comes from a blanket misunderstanding of military service, especially in the contemporary of when the book was written. A lot of people, especially those that have never served, tend to forget that the military has always had a large role in exploration, civil works, and social programs. It's not unreasonable that in The Federation that things like advanced scientific research projects like CERN, or civil sustainment programs like the postal service and space peace corps, are all part of the military complex. That was how I had read the book. Employment by the federal government and military service are one and the same. This is especially foreign to us when you consider that in the modern U.S. military as many non-combat works as possible are being handed over to civilian contracts to accommodate our shrinking enlisted forces. I can't remember ever actually seeing a DFAC that was run by servicemembers, save for field kitchens in smaller FOBs.
After rereading the relevant chapter of the book I have to admit that people in that pre-interstellar war era saw "Federal Service" as synonymous with "military" -- despite my memory insisting you could do things like deliver the mail. I was apparently conflating the book with the conscription laws of some countries today where the mandatory service requirements can be satisfied with the equivalent of community service. Still, in today's Marine Corps only a fraction (1/7, 1/8?) of those coming out of boot camp go on to advanced combat training. You might always be a Marine regardless of your day job, so to speak, but the fact remains they need people to drive and repair trucks, cook food, etc. and you can't rely on civilian contractors for everything. And that's not even considering a future military fulfilling the possible non-combat, scientific/exploratory roles you mention. Rico's genius buddy is angling for a job in an electronics research lab after all. Given there hadn't been a war for several decades at that point, Rico's father's impression that the military is just a bunch of freeloaders is understandable. On some points it's clear Heinlein was avoiding any attempt at a realistic blueprint of military organization. (Who needs JAG officers, right?). He never explains where the off-planet doctors come from, for example. They can't all be like the cynical civilian doctor who claims a peace-time military is so dangerous you'll wind up an invalid or dead. If the bug war hadn't occurred Rico's mobile infantry service might well have consisted of drills, drills, and more drills.
My one remaining quibble is that Heinlein repeatedly (and off the top of my head, universally) used the word "enroll" rather than "enlist" for the action of signing up to a term of service, which has different connotations and strikes me as a deliberate choice. But it's also possible Heinlein wasn't entirely clear himself about the workings of the system he was describing.
You are correct, Heinlein uses "enroll" rather than enlist. There's even a line referring to an "oath of enrollment" which makes it sound like an enlistment to me. I don't know off hand how common word usage in that case may have shifted from the 1950s when Heinlein wrote it to today, but that's something to look into.
I wonder if it has anything to do with conscription. Enrollment has more connotations of a voluntary choice. Enlistment was, if I recall correctly, used to describe both voluntary and conscripted personnel joining the military. One of the themes of the book I think is often overlooked today is the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the service.
You forgot to mention the mention of the merchant marine lobbying to be included as a path to citizenship. It was brought up right after Rico graduated his training and got a weekend pass in town. Also many of the jobs specifically mentioned were those that would in our world fall under DARPA, a civilian agency, for example testing extreme cold weather gear in Antarctica. While ultimately yes you could argue to lump all the painful, scary, designed to make you want to quit, drudge work to be 'military' it would be as accurate as trying to claim that an intern under the president is military because both jobs suck.
I've thought about some of the possible jobs that could be done as Federal Service that do not involve the military. Here's my take: You are given a vest, a stick with a nail and bucket...now go clean up all of this trash along the Interstate. You get no help; only a civilian supervisor who maintains the mobile trailer that you live in each night (remember that the Federation values capability so the supervisor is also the janitor/cook). You have to work in the rain, snow, heat, flora and fauna with nothing but what you have on you. The trailer is barely large enough to house two people (and you're not being paid to live there!) but, like any work in the Service, you can summon your supervisor and quit at anytime. Two years working on the side of the road, cleaning up trash using the most rudimentary implements to do so, isolated from everyone you ever knew with little to no contact, exposed to the elements and the wildlife each and every day...sounds like hard labor, doesn't it? Well, that's because I would imagine that in a society that did away with prisons in favor of capital punishment many of the jobs performed by prisoners would instead be done by prospective citizens with option to leave. I imagine that certain technologies would be available to make the job easier but are denied to, as the novel attests, make the civilian remember what they had to do in order to earn their citizenship. In this case they had to clean up a valley of muck and grime to come out clean on the other side.
Great job getting to the bottom of it. Always good to see someone break the RUclips no-no of filling a screen with a block of text. Sometimes that's what it takes to get it done. I wonder if some Heinlein fans confused some of the Juvenile Heinlein books' elements with that key element of Starship Troopers. There was one called Citizen of the Galaxy, and both Space Cadet and Starman Jones had plot elements similar that might have led readers to think Troopers was in the same fictional "juvie" universe, so they subconsciously assumed the restriction to military service for citizenship wasn't absolute. As for Star Wars false memories, I picked up at 7-11, while it was still in theaters, the Star Wars comic book. Having seen the film, I was quite confused because the Biggs scenes are in the comic. That could be another source for some of the false but strong memories of having seen the Biggs scenes. (The comic book used the same perspective and framing of many of the movie's scenes.) In a twist, I saw it a few more times and had the comic book, so I was on the other side of it--telling my friends there was a friend of Luke who should have been in the movie! And anyone who has read this far and is less than 50 years old or so, don't believe the claim that Lucas had already written, or at least sketched out, 9, 6, 3, or even 2 of the films and just decided to start with #4. Very persuasive evidence to the contrary exists in the fact that respected sci fi author Alan Dean Foster was hired to write a sequel to Star Wars to cash in on the fever. 1000s of us were stunned sitting in the theater when the sequel of course not only didnt have the same title but in fact was nothing like the official sequel book we had purchased. "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" in case anyone wants to check it out (and no longer trust Lucas' version of the past, unfortunately)
I began reading the novel about 20 years ago. Didn't finish it. I did have the opportunity around that time (what forum I can't recall) to ask Mrs. Heinlein what Robert's favorite meal had been. She replied pancakes with maple syrup and link sausages.
Doesn’t seem like you are hurting for material, but as long as you’re covering one Heinlein book, may I recommend another: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. One of his very best, and one of my favorites.
voting is not just the act of deciding your own future in the body politic, you are also influencing the future of everyone else. democracy is not a system that ensures freedom, but a system of authority that limits freedom according to thd decisions of its electorate. that means that the act of voting is in a way also limiting the freedom of your fellow man, a privilege that should be earned by proving that you understand thr risks of commanding and being commanded.
I keep on seeing people miss two main points about Starship Troopers. One, everyone had all civil rights. Property, religion, speech, movement, petition, sit on juries, all of them except the right to vote and run for office. Two, the government ruthlessly protected those rights because anyone, ANYONE could volunteer for federal service. A quadriplegic in a wheelchair could type out the oath with an eye blink interface and have to be accepted. Even if you failed bootcamp you could insist on completing your service elsewhere. I think in the book some guy did just that by ending up a cook on a troop transport. That's a mighty strange designation of fascism as it is currently understood. It seems like the book is actually describing a republic with universal human rights and an open but earned franchise. The problem with making this into a movie is that Heinlein created something unique in political thought. To label the book as fascism or make a movie attacking the straw man so labeled is intellectually lazy. I think many people do so because they are terrified of asking a basic question. Then really debating it. Did Heinlein have a good idea?
I think of Heinlein as a man going through different phases, which reflects in his different books. Sometimes he is the sort of libertarian who is very protective of his particular freedoms.
I've always thought that the Terran Federation as per Heinlein was an adaptation of the Spartan model of representative government and citizenship. For Sparta, military service was the foundation of good citizenship, and was accepted as such by Spartan society. Heinlein made the necessary changes for a futuristic space traveling civilization, but to me the story made it clear. Only military veterans or those who had performed similar service could become citizens and be entrusted with the voting franchise.
It's worth pointing out that you're describing an ideal Sparta that never existed (but most Spartans seemed to believe existed a couplethree generations ago.) They justified Spartan citizens being entirely supported by the state because it meant that they could devote themselves to the study and practice of war; it turns out that the trauma of their upbringing (murder, starvation, sexual violence) tended to produce dysfunctional individuals rather than dedicated soldiers. The Spartans' utterly unjustified reputation is a personal bugaboo, I'm afraid. They were a pointlessly cruel people, even by the standards of ancient Greece.
It's just a democracy with franchise limited to those who volunteer to serve everyone else for a couple years. And very few get the military slots. And they have to wait the longest to get the right to vote. It's like not being able to vote until 21 even tho you could be drafted at 18.
That's not how Sparta worked at all. There was nothing "representative" about it. It was a strict hereditary aristocracy with positions of power controlled by specific elite families and not open to anyone else under any circumstances. As in most states in Greece at the time, "citizenship" was actually an elite status held by only a small percentage of the populace (the 10% in Attica was unusually large, though I don't know the number for Sparta/Lakedaimonia offhand), so it's important not to confuse it with either the modern version of the concept or Heinlein's imaginary version. The "Spartan citizenry" was more akin to the British "peerage" than to what citizenship means in modern republics. They did restrict membership in certain military units (famously the "hoplite" heavy infantry formations) to members of these aristocratic families, both for logistical reasons (such as the expensive equipment required, and the leisure time to spend drilling) and because these special upper-class units generally received more attention in artists' and historians' portrayals of battles. So more like "citizenship guarantees service" than vice versa, but not even, since commoners still fought, just in less prestigious roles. Plus there was a whole social class of people who were literally owned as slaves by the state, and they had a "festival" that was sort of like the Purge movies, where teenagers from the rich families ran around murdering slaves to prove they were ready to join the army. Overall, it was a bizarre, psychotic dystopian society, and I frankly don't understand why so many modern people are so desperate to romanticize it. Zack Snyder movies are no substitute for taking a real history class.
@boobah5643 What you said is true, although the Spartans would have said differently, naturally! It's the Spartan ideal that Heinlein wanted to explore, or at least the version of the ideal that was taught in classrooms across the English-speaking world. And stripped of period inconveniences like helots, communal living, and a lack of comfortable furniture, it's something that could work. If the people of Earth could accept it, and in the novel, they did.
Good video. Very interested to hear your additional thoughts on The Forever War, as I consider it a vastly more interesting and plausible scenario. An odd thing about the book to me is Heinlein's insistence on a *large* military. I mean he never specifically says that it's large, but logically, given the system he establishes, it has to be. Which is really kind of odd for a man of his generation. Traditionally Americans have not wanted, nor tolerated a large standing army in peacetime. Prior to the Civil War, the army was only about 16,000 people. During the war it swelled to about a million (union) soldiers, but by 1866 there were only about 90,000, and by 1867 there were only about 20,000. By the 1890s it was back down to 16,000 or so. It swelled to about 100,000 between the Spanish war and WW1, with half overseas at any given time. This was the world Heinlein was born into. It swelled to 2.5 million in WW1, but then dropped to a couple hundred thousand by 1920, and hovered in the mid-200,000s until World War 2. Granted the book wasn't written until considerably after WW2, but after the war ended there was a *lot* of dissatisfaction at there not being a larger reduction of forces, and many people believed (As they had in the previous century) that a large standing army was contrary to "The American Way." Obviously things change, and we settled rather uncomfortably into our role as The Bastion and Arsenal of Democracy, but it's just interesting to me that he was so gung-ho on not just a military, but a fetishized version of a military. I had a friend who was a marine in Korea and Vietnam, and lost a leg in the latter. . He was a big SF geek - as am I - from way back, and one time when I asked him about Starship Troopers he became *extremely* agitated about - this is the exact quote - "Some overcompensating navy guy who washed out and missed the biggest war in history having the gal to tell Marines how to live and die." He considered the entire book to be essentially armchair quarterbacking by a guy who missed his chance, and couldn't get over it. And the part of his (several) rants that I think is most relevant is that it's a very *dry* analytical view of the military, and combat, which in no way matches the reality of war. He also objected - as a career military guy who's career was cut short - to the concept of pushing government and military so close together. "The reason our country has been stable as long as it has is because the Military supports the government, but does not have any power over the government. In Heinlein's Republic, that relationship is completely impossible."
Heinlein was the Daddy. I am currently re reading my library and I am up to him. Currently, The Number of the Beast fills my evenings and looking forward to re-reading Star Ship Troopers. The book is great. The film is US Marines in space. Running around in each others pockets. The exact opposite of Cap Troopers who fight alone, as portrayed in the book.
Pictures of the Biggs Darklighter scenes were in a picture book I has as a child. I looked on and off for years for that scene in Star Wars, convinced I had somehow overlooked it in previous viewings.
I remember how Heinlein in the book made a point about how all MI are combat personnel. Their cooks make combat jumps, their chaplain too. I thought the federal military would have tons of civilian employees paid a wage to do non-combat jobs.
@@victorkreig6089 I thought the federal employees would be way back. Admin staff on Earth, shipyard staff and the like. People making and fixing federation kit. Doing so at risk on the frontier or near the front is probably federal military duty. There is a federal navy and other branches who are not MI. The technical side of the book described warfare conducted by small, widely dispersed platoons of people in motorized armour.
in the book, they did. Heinlein wrote that the military just bought them, like beans. but a military cook in a shock unit is a combat job, just like a cook in a modern line unit. they get a rifle and post watch sometimes.
@@ideologybot4592 It makes me wonder how Heinleins system would survive shifts in the military need. Anything between long periods of peace where the risk to and need of troops is low to attritional warfare where armies in the millions clash. Any change to military service in this system would also be a constitutional change.
@@SusCalvin not really, they would probably just change the recruiting standards and techniques. More permissive, more aggressive in finding people, and I doubt any of that would be covered in a constitutional law. And that flexibility still keeps the ideal intact. In a serious war, the situation means that the requirement for service to be dangerous or grueling would be satisfied, no manufactured unpleasantness needed.
While the book never explicitly says that non-military service is a path for citizenship I think it's just because power armor is cool and the book is called Starship Troopers, not Starship Janitor. And perhaps there's probably some element of preferential hiring for public clerical/sanitation/construction jobs etc. for veterans who complete their terms of service so it eats up a lot of the other options for service.
Point of order! In the Verhoeven adaptation of the book, a female, black recruit is asked (in the infamous shower scene, as I recall) why she joined up and she says that she wanted a career in politics and that federal military service is the only GUARANTEED way of attaining citizenship. This line clearly implies other means of obtaining citizenship, just that those other ways are subject to some sort of judgment calls from established bodies of oversight. I've never read the book and can't say if there is such a mechanism in Heinlein's Federation, but in the movie, it is implicitly stated, and I dare say more people have only seen the movie that have read the book, as well, so that's why there's such belief in the existence of alternate routes to citizenship.
No it wasn't, but there was the part about the merchant sailors looking to get the right to it. While in the novel it's to show that the qualities of a citizen in Heinlein's world is not just the ability to withstand hardship, it did give me the impression that some other venues must have existed for the merchant sailors to even think they had a chance and that more that one means must have existed for them to conclude hardship is the qualifier, as all other civil services must all share this common trait.
I lived in Northern Michigan for a few years and knew a couple merchant sailors. Those guys seemed to think of themselves as a quasi-military group in a lot of ways (and Coast Guard will argue it fiercely) I always assumed that's what Heinlein was drawing on with that scene.
@@feralhistorian In WWII, over 9500 Merchant Marine sailors lost their life. Mathematically, a higher percentage of merchant marine sailors were killed in combat during WWII than US Navy personnel. That's why they are salty. Hauling cargo in U-boat infested waters isn't military, but there is no doubt it's bloody dangerous.
@@feralhistorian It might well depend on your generation. Given Heinlein's naval service in the WW II era he was well aware of how dangerous their jobs were. These days however... A few years back I chatted with a guy who described himself as a vet. I thanked him for serving and asked which branch he had served in. He was evasive and I had to press him for an answer before he stated he'd been in the MM. The conversation sort of petered out after that. I rather imagine a Marine would have answered my query before I'd even finished asking it.
In the book you don't get to choose what job you have and it's implied they assign the job you want the least but are qualified for. The author wrote what he knew.
Military service is the quickest path to citizenship? Perhaps two years putting ordnance on target is worth more than 10 years digging ditches? You can't be color blind and drive a ship, but you can do other jobs that do not require that skill set. Who knows, but at the base, they want people that give a dam about the world they live in, and since the VETERANS won, and established the law, they wanted it more than whoever went up against them. Don't forget that one armed invalid left his parts elsewhere so YOU did not become bug food! Disabled Veteran if you please.
Ringo's comment about makework made me think of MacNamara's Morons Lower the IQ limit for the army, fill in those 'low trades', like infantry (that was the theory. Turns out being smart keeps you alive, allows you to understand tactics beyond, "CHARGE!" They ended up with men who could not tell left from right, could not ascertain imminent and mortal danger
I strongly disagree, but I respect you for including the quotes for context. To me, it seems the federal military is too much an elite, exclusive thing (lampshaded in the scene leading into the discussion of canine units) to have this massive body of functional-idiots under arms, its branches overflowing with manpower. Fact is, that the military is restated many times to be very exclusive, I think precisely because they're concerned about the point you highlighted: people will see the non combat, and as I see it the outright non-military, roles on offer and say "obviously, these are designed to be as unpleasant as possible. I'll keep my personal comfort in exchange for risking my life for a couple years and coming back okay." So, military applications get loaded up with this sort of young 'shamming' soldier that must be aggressively weeded out by a high bar for standards in the forces themselves before enlistment, then a harsh basic training encouraging drop outs, and so on. The obvious loophole being accounted for is a time that must have existed for this society without an existential bug threat, no wars to fight, and so on- wherein anyone with two brain cells to rub together hopes to gain a "combat" role so they can enjoy a relatively carefree military service period rather than backbreaking labor or whatever else is on offer. Anyway, I'm rambling, but if the military is so damn exclusionary yet the government must take anyone willing to enlist for civil service, there must be public works projects. The man counting caterpillar fuzz, or the terranizing of Venus, I'm not sure I can see these as being militarized endeavors. I don't even think these would require authoritarian jackboots to ensure compliance from the workers- if a worker or fuzz-counter decided they didn't want to do it anymore, all it'd take would be a man armed with a radio to call for a transport to take them home- no questions asked- but without any franchise. That's the purpose of a volunteer corps like this. It makes it different from militarized slave labor corps found in modern military penal units or dirty 30's regimes. No need to threaten and compel means that you don't need a harsh set of pass-fail rules outside of OSHA like workplace safety. Its a job any foreman could perform; not working? Okay, you're out.
I think the conscript army was standard in huge parts of Europe, not just the totalitarian states. The argument for increasing democratization could be that if you trust all these people with a gun, you eventually need to trust them with the vote. It is a bit harder to use the army as a elite force against the population when the population is the army. Like what could the French command do in '17, tell the cops to arrest an army corps.
The problem with memory is that it’s not like a digital computer. Whenever we remember our brains recreate the event. The story becomes blurred and new bits get added in. That’s why word of mouth storytelling evolves over generations. Each retelling is a new version of the story. The same with our minds being shaped by our mood, current circumstances and how we’ve all changed since the incident occurred.
Heinlein said that there were non-military paths to citizenship, and that it was mentioned in the books more than once. Should the stated opinions or the text be considered the only truth?
@@SuperGman117 Well, it's Heinlein's universe and he gets to make the rules. As a WW II vet he might well have considered non-combat jobs mentioned in the book such as Carl's working in an electronics research lab or Rico's list of non-combat options to not be "military". Digging holes and filling them up again on Venus might satisfy Federal Service requirements yet not be something that readers of the 1950s considered "military". Larry Niven once acknowledged the point of sharp-eyed Ringworld readers that the ring needed corrective rockets with the remark that the rockets had been there all along and he'd simply not noticed or mentioned them when he wrote the first book. His book and universe, his rules.
Forever war?!?!? Wow, there's going to be some shit in there that will not have aged well! (Re-read it a few years ago... and, man! Look out, Orson Scott Card!!! lol.)
Personally, I think "Service guarantees Citizenship" is a good idea. At minimum people should have to prove they actually know what/who they are voting for, "vote blue no matter who", shows the death of civics within the U.S. Or "your voting against your interests", we are supposed to be voting for the constituency we are part of, no our own personal desires. Democracy is highly overrated, i just can't think of a form of government that is better
I seem to recall that the idea that military service was not the only path to citizenship was something Heinlein argued in a letter. I read the book in high school and certainly I came out of it with the very clear understanding that military service was the only path to citizenship, and I found Heinlein's after the fact argument entirely unconvincing.
Let me join in here. Perhaps this started as a misapprension on someone part about what military service is. For most non-veterans the military is just the combat arms and/or serving in combat. Of course veterans of the Combat Arms get citizenship but so do the veterans of combat support, combat service support and auxillery service (think CCC, or Army Corp or Engineers). While they are not directly in combat they still do dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.
While I wasn't aware at the time of this video, it turns out that the source of confusion is an essay based on things Heinlein himself said 20+ years later. It's part of the Expanded Universes collection. Basically he says that "service" in Starship Troopers isn't solely military, but he misremembers his own book. For more detail, I recommend James Gifford's essay on the matter, which covers all the points. www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
It's Heinlein's theory that the civilians' human and civil rights are permanently protected(meaning you're taking my rights over my dead body type scenario) except to the right to vote because you have to think responsibly to vote for the long term issues and not emotional sentimentality short term issues and the citizens will defend these human and civil rights to the bitter end🤓
I can answer the basis of headcanon question on the spot. Word of God from Heinlein in an interview. I know Word of God is contentious as is all other topics relating to the Death of the Author principle but from Heinlein's own conception of the World it was true to him.
Where it gets fuzzy is that Heinlein said it 20+ years later. The quote is: "In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal civil service.” Only it's not stated flatly or more than once in the text, quite the contrary. Which could lead to a long discussion about perceptions, intent, and if it's a retcon when the original author does it.
I think it might also be coming from a lot of people (including me) don't hate the idea of restricted voting based on self-sacrifice in the shape of helping (or protecting) society but just thought that the bit about finding work for everyone meant the federation didn't really care about putting you boots on the ground it just wanted you to shovel shit to the extend that any grifters would run away
How can you look at whether or not federal service is military only without mentioning the merchant marine sailors Johnny encounters in Seattle. The mention how the MM guild had tried and failed at getting MM service classified as federal. Doesn’t that imply that there isn’t a cultural barrrier to suggesting nonmilitary gigs be considered service? I mean it could go either way but the lack of mention seems curious.
Definitely an oversight on my part (it was in my notes, but somehow missed in recording) and I had forgotten it entirely until I reread the book prior to doing this video. The way it struck me was that if being in the merchant marine isn't considered "federal service" than none of the other often-posited alternatives are. It's certainly closer than alternatives like teacher or park ranger, or even police officer that I've heard suggested over the years. I suppose it serves the point that memory is never exactly right.
The Minuteman Museum is about an hour's drive from there, three different sites actually with the silo a few miles away from the launch control site. I recommend the tour of the launch control bunker if you're ever in the area. Have to book it months in advance though.
I think a big part of it is that it's entierly left in the subtext of the book, and the movie is just satire. Which is honestly one of reason it's hard to take these videos seriously when you keep clipping and quoting the movie. I read the book only once, and it was years ago, but I thought the text presented something like a hierarchy within federal service, but I can't remember if that was just social construct or actually established law. It's problematic eitherway, but the book was supposed to be both philosophical and problematic. Where the movie took the worst elements of the book and weaponized them into cringy political satire, that some folks still manage not to get.
There's an essay by James Gifford that covers the whole Federal Service in Starship Troopers (the book exclusively) topic better than I did, which can be read here, www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf The short of it being that the book is explicit about it being military service, with no other options, but then Heinlein himself contradicted that 30 years later, leading to the ongoing argument.
@@feralhistorian Gotcha, thanks for the recommendation! Editing after reading said article: That is a great breakdown of the different arguments and the context which supports them. Either are resonible, but as a military brat some of the terminology and the way I remember the subjects being discussed early in the book still leads me to agree with the notion that Heinlein intended the idea that both military and civilian, federal service to be paths towards voting. He just may not have communicated that particularly well or clearly. Honestly the whole book presents a world so entierly federalized that the distinction between civilian and military seems to have significantly faded away? I don't remember any discussion of the kind of roles that the states play in either society or government being even discussed, and that would make this discussion even more complicated.
I liked the pure sci fi-military doctrine of jump infantry. The steel gorillas of the book with a dispersion of one MI per a few hundred meters. Like a platoon of bouncing steel gorillas comes your way tossing nuclear grenades all over.
@@feralhistorianI think the book makes a point that everyone in the MI are combat staff. He explains how cooks and chaplains join combat jumps. There might be ranks of civilian employees doing the grunt labour of the federal forces, paid but not on path to citizenship.
Starship Troopers is a bit like Atlas Shrugged. A work of fiction that tries to impart incoherent moral lessons onto the reader. Unfortunately, many people read these in their formative years and took these works of fiction as gospel on how to design a society.
I think the problem really is that the basic concept being conveyed gets tangled up with story specifics. For example, for someone to read Starship Troopers in their teens and internalize the idea of putting veterans in charge of society as the moral lesson is . . . face-palm inducing incoherent. But the broader concept of a society degrading if its big decisions are made by people who don't have a direct stake is a lesson a lot of people seem never to have learned.
@@feralhistorian Thanks for the reply. Love your channel! I agree. I've just had too many pseudo-philosophical arguments based on SST or Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter) where the conclusions seem superficial and without regard for how these proposed systems would fare among people that don't always have the best intentions. Cheers from Denmark!
starship troopers explained sargon of akkad only thing don't agree meaning force only way . Forces are action. Action can vote, speak own ideas, if ideas violence moral values u my not thanking part and more
One more starship troopers same Philippines sing national anthem after Philippines Patriotic Pledge or Patriotic Oath of the Philippines u can see RUclips. Only missing law allowed vote only people add value to society 😉
One of the more interesting things to me about Starship Troopers, is the fact that the world its set in, is one where Germany won World War II. Notice all the military titles like 'Sky Marshal', and the fact that Rico, and everyone around him in Brazil, is white.
That's the film, not the book. As a fan of the book, those differences to me were obvious signs that the underrated film was intended as a clever commentary. (Heinlein's Rico was Juan Rico, I think Filipino, but nor certain)
In the novel Rico is Filipino. His native language is Tagalog. He's not from Buenos Aries. When Buenos Aries is hit, he feels bad, but has no personal connection. It's only later that he gets a letter from his Aunt telling him that his mother was visiting there when the asteroid hit.
I’m a rather young man, 23 and a couple months old when 9/11 happened. I like to read history so much because, despite the horrors and atrocities committed, there were people and leaders who truly cared about more than themselves. I read Starship Troopers in basic training in 2019 and it made an impact on me. The biggest takeaway I got was that nobody my age or below the age of 40 care about nothing except themselves. That a political system based on that kind of individualistic freedom with no responsibility only leads to destruction. Rome fell in its decadence. Freedom cannot be free, because then it can’t be appreciated. I appreciated my phone, my freedom, my choice of diet, the ability to walk around wherever I want etc after I went through basic training and later Infantry School. Even afterwards when I got out and tried to get back into American Society, I couldn’t. The unearned unending self destructive hedonism disgusted me. The way that people my age thought was unbelievably ignorant and irrational. I really like this channel a lot. Keep up the good work.
I've been in the army 20 years, currently national guard, I'm 42 now.
I wish I could tell you it gets better, but I don't think it will. This society is so pro-everyman that it's fundamentally impossible to see leaders and institutions as anything but the problem, and to see the people as anything but victims. It doesn't matter what happens, that narrative will dominate. Politics don't matter: the left is anti-institution by definition, the right is drunk on an individualist Kool-aid conspiracy about one world order that's obvious nonsense, rife with incoherent versions of freedom and real Americans. It's too bad, because a less decadent people could work fine with the system we have. Its flaw, after all, is that it spoils people, enables them to be dependent on trash corporations and not bother to forge any real communal bonds. I feel like we're not only gonna watch a decent system burn, and the historiography will be written by fools so no one will remember it was decent.
Just know that you're not alone and you're not crazy, it's just lousy timing. Find some good people and try to laugh about it.
Full declaration. I am a retired soldier. I have read Starship Troopers a few times & I am due to read it again shortly. It is one of my favourite books by my favourite author, Heinlein. What I took away from it was that Citizenship was absolutely for post military service. The Federation started with discharged soldiers in Scotland deciding that they had, had enough & got a grip of things. The reason why only former soldiers got the vote & this was better, was because soldiers had instilled in them that there was something more important than themselves. The implication being that they wouldn't vote for someone offering tax cuts by borrowing money from their grandchildren.
That last sentence, is it from Heinlein?
Because it's usually "free" stuff that government gives out that gets future generations indebted.
@@GrimFaceHuntertax cuts require governments to borrow money, meaning they take on debt. That’s part of the reason why the US debt is so large.
@@baneofbanes No they don't. You can increase revenue with lower rates.
That happened with Reagan's tax cuts.
@@GrimFaceHunter no it’s not. The government isn’t a business, it’s not a profitable enterprise.
@@baneofbanes It did. Reagan spent it on military.
"A distinction that makes no difference" sorta thing. You take the oath, you show up for assignment, and then you go where you are told do go and do what you are told to do for the duration of your service. Military service in everything but name.
My academic roots compel me to talk at length about distinctions that make no difference. It's probably an acquired character flaw.
Accept for the shooting, killing, and dying part. And the fact that those who are not in the military and in an active war can quit without notice at any time.
So... it's really not like the military.
It's more like any job you have to do whether for pay or so the school won't burn down or so your crops don't die, or so you will get your degree, or get the graduate assistant position, and so on.
@@macmcleod1188 Actually, even the military can resign at anytime except during active combat. For the M.I., that can be right before you enter the drop capsule. While not explicitly stated in the novel, someone in the non military service might be restricted from resigning during an actual life threatening emergencies.
@@robertlehnert4148 yes, that was my meaning
@@feralhistorianitvwk fun tho
This is the only critique of Starship Trooprrs that actually makes reasonable sense to me.
It's not a critique though
@@victorkreig6089 It kind of is. He does argue the book is somewhat unrealistic, but with some great points.
Hello. You, I respect, so I'll engage. I first read Star Ship Troopers when I was sixteen or seventeen. ( I'm now 66. ) Heinlein had many things to say in that book.
His main argument however was, in a society where elections are held, the vote is the greatest authority the individual can exert over society. He then goes on
to say, in any just system, there must be some mechanism in place to balance authority with responsibility. If you have authority with no responsibility, you have
a despot. If you have responsibility with no authority, you have a scapegoat. In order to bring the two into balance, he proposed that anyone wanting to vote first
be required to show/prove/demonstrate they are willing/able to place the welfare of society above their own personal interest. The method he devised was they
be required to serve 2 years of PUBLIC ( Not Just Military ) service with special characteristics. Those were, any unpleasant task with a statistically observable
amount of personal risk involved. i.e. cleaning bedpans in a leprosarium or collecting and disposing of used syringes in an HIV ward. Performing such a task for
2 years would earn you the right to vote. At time stamp 1:27, the words you seem to overlook were " he said scornfully" . He was not satisfied Johnny's careful
answer because it was incomplete. There was much more than just "defense" and " safety" involved, which is why its about so much more than military service.
Its about CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY which is a much broader concept.
I am very sensitive to misinterpretations of SST because, at my then tender age, when you read the first book of the DUNE ( at the time ) Trilogy, then follow that
with SST, you start thinking HARD about the military and its place in society. I was very upset with verhooven's disrespectful lampooning of SST. The fool never
even read the book. He read only the first chapter or two, tossed the book then created that abortion. ( People today cry about what is sometimes done to their
favorite IP, its not a new phenomenon ).
Before I convince you that I'm totally on board with Heinlein's ideas, I need to point out that Heinlein was a libertarian. ( and radically more so as he aged ) The
problem I have with many libertarian ideas is although they may sound great at first exposure, they often leave an itch in my mind that is similar to having food
stuck between your teeth and trying to get it out with your tongue. The actual problem with H's proposal is it's a voter qualification test. Such tests have
historically been used to disenfranchise whichever group is out of favor at the time. Or in other words, it's the Perfect People Problem. Any society that could
make it work wouldn't need it and any society that needed it couldn't make it work. The problems people have with SST are other than what's often expressed.
You are wrong, it wasn't about military service. It was Public Service, a much broader concept. Verhooven was wrong. Heinlein wasn't a fascist ( whatever that
is ) . He was a libertarian striving towards higher ideals in a doomed effort.
Thank you for your time.
Good post and I completely agree with your assessment of Heinlein’s main argument from a philosophical standpoint and I suspect that if he were actually talking about a real proposal he probably would suggest non-military alternatives. But in the book, they aren’t there. Every form of service is under the military umbrella, based on what the recruiting sergeant says, the bit with the merchant marine sailors in Seattle, and everything we read from Mr. Dubois’ civics class.
We all extrapolate from the text. In my case, I think that Heinlein put in all those “make-work” jobs to keep unfit recruits busy as a commentary on the bloat and politicization of the military, a military increasing its role in society while damaging its ability to do its real job of fighting wars efficiently. The message is clear to me, but it’s only implied in the text. Just as the text implies public service, but what it actually says at every instance is military service.
It’s sort of the Bible problem. We can read it as metaphor or read it literally and come up with very different conclusions. In this case, I’m focused on what’s in the text itself. But at some point I plan to a do a more broadly philosophical take on Starship Troopers, Forever War, and a few others and I welcome your input on the non-military public service aspects of Starships Troopers from that standpoint. As Patton once said, if everyone is thinking alike then someone isn't thinking.
@@feralhistorian Thank you for responding. Heinlein wrote SST either shortly after or towards the end of the Korean War. ( I forget when the K war ended. the book was published in 1959. ) He had definite ideas about how the war should have been fought. One of the rules for enlistment I found interesting was for military enrollment, the term of service was two years or one war which ever came LAST. Heinlein saw this as reasonable because he had definite ideas about how wars should be fought . He was a rabid anti-communist who saw " Reds Under the Bed" and would have understood nothing less than stamping out the "Red Menace" with maximum effort. ( the reality of many wars that drag on indeterminately, end inconclusively, and leave haunting legacies down the years was something he couldn't consider in his libertarian purity. ) The point is, under his proposal, the two years of non-military public service could be seen as preferable since you knew when it should end.
I look forward to future essays you may put out on the military scifi works you've mentioned. Until then, thank you.
I was ten years behind you. Was assigned three of the Juvie Heinleins during 4th and 5th grade at a small school run by a libertarian. Transferred to public school. The public junior high school I attended had tons of Heinlein, as did the local public library.
When I was looking for schools for my kids in early 2000s, I checked their libraries during visits. Classical schools, expensive private, Christian--none of them had a single volume of Heinlein. Fifteen years later, I don't even want to know.
I must say that I respect the time and effort you put into this, thank you. I had a similar feeling when reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, that of having something unpleasant stuck.
The book appealed to me when I read it, as I was a rather devoted communist at the time, but since then I have realised how horrifically utopian it all was.
@@H.J.Fleischmann Heinlein can have that effect. I remember reading in his future history his description of a photovoltaic power source and
thinking if its that easy, why hasn't anyone done it yet. ( I still believe that TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE is, with all of it's flaws, one of the best
science fiction books ever written, and STRANGER in a STRANGE LAND was the book that turned me into a confirmed scifi fan. )
I always took the "terranizing Venus" line as to mean there was something similar to the Army Corps of Engineers but shittier and involving more near slave labor. Involved in civilian civil and environmental engineering/infrastructure but still under the DOD umbrella.
I always pictured it as a WPA type group but more dangerous or boring.
Essentially the same thing. Only difference is which body of the government is in charge of it.
It almost looks like the Federation military has 3 branches. Army, Navy, and drudges that get called in to do whatever the State needs on the support end. Like a militarized WPA, or the German Reichsarbeitsdienst.
I actually think that Heinlein was thinking more of the CCC. We forget that many of the CCC jobs were very hard and dangerous. People keep thinking that he was allowing bureaucrats to be service, this would undermine the idea in the book.
There's certainly some suggestion of that. Though by having it all done through the military, it's less like the Civilian Conservation Corps and more like the Reich Labor Service, a straight-up uniformed service structured along military lines.
Biggs was in the Star Wars Storybook and original Marvel Comics adaptation. We all had those or a friend who did, so like a lot of other urban legends it morphed into a false memory
If I'd seen your comment, mine wouldn't have been so long. Exactly right.
He's in the deleted scenes with lukes friends.
I think a lot of this misunderstanding comes from a blanket misunderstanding of military service, especially in the contemporary of when the book was written. A lot of people, especially those that have never served, tend to forget that the military has always had a large role in exploration, civil works, and social programs. It's not unreasonable that in The Federation that things like advanced scientific research projects like CERN, or civil sustainment programs like the postal service and space peace corps, are all part of the military complex. That was how I had read the book. Employment by the federal government and military service are one and the same.
This is especially foreign to us when you consider that in the modern U.S. military as many non-combat works as possible are being handed over to civilian contracts to accommodate our shrinking enlisted forces. I can't remember ever actually seeing a DFAC that was run by servicemembers, save for field kitchens in smaller FOBs.
After rereading the relevant chapter of the book I have to admit that people in that pre-interstellar war era saw "Federal Service" as synonymous with "military" -- despite my memory insisting you could do things like deliver the mail. I was apparently conflating the book with the conscription laws of some countries today where the mandatory service requirements can be satisfied with the equivalent of community service.
Still, in today's Marine Corps only a fraction (1/7, 1/8?) of those coming out of boot camp go on to advanced combat training. You might always be a Marine regardless of your day job, so to speak, but the fact remains they need people to drive and repair trucks, cook food, etc. and you can't rely on civilian contractors for everything. And that's not even considering a future military fulfilling the possible non-combat, scientific/exploratory roles you mention. Rico's genius buddy is angling for a job in an electronics research lab after all. Given there hadn't been a war for several decades at that point, Rico's father's impression that the military is just a bunch of freeloaders is understandable.
On some points it's clear Heinlein was avoiding any attempt at a realistic blueprint of military organization. (Who needs JAG officers, right?). He never explains where the off-planet doctors come from, for example. They can't all be like the cynical civilian doctor who claims a peace-time military is so dangerous you'll wind up an invalid or dead. If the bug war hadn't occurred Rico's mobile infantry service might well have consisted of drills, drills, and more drills.
My one remaining quibble is that Heinlein repeatedly (and off the top of my head, universally) used the word "enroll" rather than "enlist" for the action of signing up to a term of service, which has different connotations and strikes me as a deliberate choice. But it's also possible Heinlein wasn't entirely clear himself about the workings of the system he was describing.
You are correct, Heinlein uses "enroll" rather than enlist. There's even a line referring to an "oath of enrollment" which makes it sound like an enlistment to me.
I don't know off hand how common word usage in that case may have shifted from the 1950s when Heinlein wrote it to today, but that's something to look into.
@@feralhistorian Don't know if this helps, but my dad (Korean Vet) used the word "enlisted."
I wonder if it has anything to do with conscription. Enrollment has more connotations of a voluntary choice. Enlistment was, if I recall correctly, used to describe both voluntary and conscripted personnel joining the military. One of the themes of the book I think is often overlooked today is the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the service.
@@cynbartek9324 That's consistent with how I've always seen it used. Sometimes Heinlein was just a little odd.
@@benjackson1454 Good point. And now I regret not talking about the purely volunteer nature of it, there are some interesting implications there.
You forgot to mention the mention of the merchant marine lobbying to be included as a path to citizenship. It was brought up right after Rico graduated his training and got a weekend pass in town. Also many of the jobs specifically mentioned were those that would in our world fall under DARPA, a civilian agency, for example testing extreme cold weather gear in Antarctica. While ultimately yes you could argue to lump all the painful, scary, designed to make you want to quit, drudge work to be 'military' it would be as accurate as trying to claim that an intern under the president is military because both jobs suck.
I've thought about some of the possible jobs that could be done as Federal Service that do not involve the military. Here's my take:
You are given a vest, a stick with a nail and bucket...now go clean up all of this trash along the Interstate. You get no help; only a civilian supervisor who maintains the mobile trailer that you live in each night (remember that the Federation values capability so the supervisor is also the janitor/cook). You have to work in the rain, snow, heat, flora and fauna with nothing but what you have on you. The trailer is barely large enough to house two people (and you're not being paid to live there!) but, like any work in the Service, you can summon your supervisor and quit at anytime.
Two years working on the side of the road, cleaning up trash using the most rudimentary implements to do so, isolated from everyone you ever knew with little to no contact, exposed to the elements and the wildlife each and every day...sounds like hard labor, doesn't it? Well, that's because I would imagine that in a society that did away with prisons in favor of capital punishment many of the jobs performed by prisoners would instead be done by prospective citizens with option to leave. I imagine that certain technologies would be available to make the job easier but are denied to, as the novel attests, make the civilian remember what they had to do in order to earn their citizenship. In this case they had to clean up a valley of muck and grime to come out clean on the other side.
Great job getting to the bottom of it. Always good to see someone break the RUclips no-no of filling a screen with a block of text.
Sometimes that's what it takes to get it done.
I wonder if some Heinlein fans confused some of the Juvenile Heinlein books' elements with that key element of Starship Troopers. There was one called Citizen of the Galaxy, and both Space Cadet and Starman Jones had plot elements similar that might have led readers to think Troopers was in the same fictional "juvie" universe, so they subconsciously assumed the restriction to military service for citizenship wasn't absolute.
As for Star Wars false memories, I picked up at 7-11, while it was still in theaters, the Star Wars comic book. Having seen the film, I was quite confused because the Biggs scenes are in the comic. That could be another source for some of the false but strong memories of having seen the Biggs scenes. (The comic book used the same perspective and framing of many of the movie's scenes.) In a twist, I saw it a few more times and had the comic book, so I was on the other side of it--telling my friends there was a friend of Luke who should have been in the movie!
And anyone who has read this far and is less than 50 years old or so, don't believe the claim that Lucas had already written, or at least sketched out, 9, 6, 3, or even 2 of the films and just decided to start with #4.
Very persuasive evidence to the contrary exists in the fact that respected sci fi author Alan Dean Foster was hired to write a sequel to Star Wars to cash in on the fever.
1000s of us were stunned sitting in the theater when the sequel of course not only didnt have the same title but in fact was nothing like the official sequel book we had purchased.
"Splinter of the Mind's Eye" in case anyone wants to check it out (and no longer trust Lucas' version of the past, unfortunately)
Nice museum - should have spent more time near the B-52; the better bomber. Been a long time since I've been to that museum.
the best plane is the one that doesn't need repairs at the time
I began reading the novel about 20 years ago. Didn't finish it. I did have the opportunity around that time (what forum I can't recall) to ask Mrs. Heinlein what Robert's favorite meal had been. She replied pancakes with maple syrup and link sausages.
Virginia Heinlein was a fascinating woman.
Doesn’t seem like you are hurting for material, but as long as you’re covering one Heinlein book, may I recommend another: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. One of his very best, and one of my favorites.
I need to read it again to do it justice, but yes.
A mighty source of shade
Aluminum overcast.
voting is not just the act of deciding your own future in the body politic, you are also influencing the future of everyone else. democracy is not a system that ensures freedom, but a system of authority that limits freedom according to thd decisions of its electorate. that means that the act of voting is in a way also limiting the freedom of your fellow man, a privilege that should be earned by proving that you understand thr risks of commanding and being commanded.
I keep on seeing people miss two main points about Starship Troopers.
One, everyone had all civil rights. Property, religion, speech, movement, petition, sit on juries, all of them except the right to vote and run for office.
Two, the government ruthlessly protected those rights because anyone, ANYONE could volunteer for federal service. A quadriplegic in a wheelchair could type out the oath with an eye blink interface and have to be accepted. Even if you failed bootcamp you could insist on completing your service elsewhere. I think in the book some guy did just that by ending up a cook on a troop transport.
That's a mighty strange designation of fascism as it is currently understood. It seems like the book is actually describing a republic with universal human rights and an open but earned franchise.
The problem with making this into a movie is that Heinlein created something unique in political thought. To label the book as fascism or make a movie attacking the straw man so labeled is intellectually lazy.
I think many people do so because they are terrified of asking a basic question. Then really debating it. Did Heinlein have a good idea?
I think of Heinlein as a man going through different phases, which reflects in his different books.
Sometimes he is the sort of libertarian who is very protective of his particular freedoms.
I've always thought that the Terran Federation as per Heinlein was an adaptation of the Spartan model of representative government and citizenship. For Sparta, military service was the foundation of good citizenship, and was accepted as such by Spartan society. Heinlein made the necessary changes for a futuristic space traveling civilization, but to me the story made it clear. Only military veterans or those who had performed similar service could become citizens and be entrusted with the voting franchise.
It's worth pointing out that you're describing an ideal Sparta that never existed (but most Spartans seemed to believe existed a couplethree generations ago.) They justified Spartan citizens being entirely supported by the state because it meant that they could devote themselves to the study and practice of war; it turns out that the trauma of their upbringing (murder, starvation, sexual violence) tended to produce dysfunctional individuals rather than dedicated soldiers.
The Spartans' utterly unjustified reputation is a personal bugaboo, I'm afraid. They were a pointlessly cruel people, even by the standards of ancient Greece.
It's just a democracy with franchise limited to those who volunteer to serve everyone else for a couple years. And very few get the military slots. And they have to wait the longest to get the right to vote.
It's like not being able to vote until 21 even tho you could be drafted at 18.
That's not how Sparta worked at all.
There was nothing "representative" about it. It was a strict hereditary aristocracy with positions of power controlled by specific elite families and not open to anyone else under any circumstances.
As in most states in Greece at the time, "citizenship" was actually an elite status held by only a small percentage of the populace (the 10% in Attica was unusually large, though I don't know the number for Sparta/Lakedaimonia offhand), so it's important not to confuse it with either the modern version of the concept or Heinlein's imaginary version. The "Spartan citizenry" was more akin to the British "peerage" than to what citizenship means in modern republics.
They did restrict membership in certain military units (famously the "hoplite" heavy infantry formations) to members of these aristocratic families, both for logistical reasons (such as the expensive equipment required, and the leisure time to spend drilling) and because these special upper-class units generally received more attention in artists' and historians' portrayals of battles.
So more like "citizenship guarantees service" than vice versa, but not even, since commoners still fought, just in less prestigious roles.
Plus there was a whole social class of people who were literally owned as slaves by the state, and they had a "festival" that was sort of like the Purge movies, where teenagers from the rich families ran around murdering slaves to prove they were ready to join the army.
Overall, it was a bizarre, psychotic dystopian society, and I frankly don't understand why so many modern people are so desperate to romanticize it. Zack Snyder movies are no substitute for taking a real history class.
@boobah5643 What you said is true, although the Spartans would have said differently, naturally! It's the Spartan ideal that Heinlein wanted to explore, or at least the version of the ideal that was taught in classrooms across the English-speaking world. And stripped of period inconveniences like helots, communal living, and a lack of comfortable furniture, it's something that could work. If the people of Earth could accept it, and in the novel, they did.
Good video. Very interested to hear your additional thoughts on The Forever War, as I consider it a vastly more interesting and plausible scenario.
An odd thing about the book to me is Heinlein's insistence on a *large* military. I mean he never specifically says that it's large, but logically, given the system he establishes, it has to be. Which is really kind of odd for a man of his generation. Traditionally Americans have not wanted, nor tolerated a large standing army in peacetime. Prior to the Civil War, the army was only about 16,000 people. During the war it swelled to about a million (union) soldiers, but by 1866 there were only about 90,000, and by 1867 there were only about 20,000. By the 1890s it was back down to 16,000 or so. It swelled to about 100,000 between the Spanish war and WW1, with half overseas at any given time. This was the world Heinlein was born into. It swelled to 2.5 million in WW1, but then dropped to a couple hundred thousand by 1920, and hovered in the mid-200,000s until World War 2.
Granted the book wasn't written until considerably after WW2, but after the war ended there was a *lot* of dissatisfaction at there not being a larger reduction of forces, and many people believed (As they had in the previous century) that a large standing army was contrary to "The American Way."
Obviously things change, and we settled rather uncomfortably into our role as The Bastion and Arsenal of Democracy, but it's just interesting to me that he was so gung-ho on not just a military, but a fetishized version of a military.
I had a friend who was a marine in Korea and Vietnam, and lost a leg in the latter. . He was a big SF geek - as am I - from way back, and one time when I asked him about Starship Troopers he became *extremely* agitated about - this is the exact quote - "Some overcompensating navy guy who washed out and missed the biggest war in history having the gal to tell Marines how to live and die." He considered the entire book to be essentially armchair quarterbacking by a guy who missed his chance, and couldn't get over it. And the part of his (several) rants that I think is most relevant is that it's a very *dry* analytical view of the military, and combat, which in no way matches the reality of war. He also objected - as a career military guy who's career was cut short - to the concept of pushing government and military so close together.
"The reason our country has been stable as long as it has is because the Military supports the government, but does not have any power over the government. In Heinlein's Republic, that relationship is completely impossible."
Heinlein was the Daddy. I am currently re reading my library and I am up to him. Currently, The Number of the Beast fills my evenings and looking forward to re-reading Star Ship Troopers. The book is great. The film is US Marines in space. Running around in each others pockets. The exact opposite of Cap Troopers who fight alone, as portrayed in the book.
Pictures of the Biggs Darklighter scenes were in a picture book I has as a child. I looked on and off for years for that scene in Star Wars, convinced I had somehow overlooked it in previous viewings.
He's in deleted scenes here on RUclips. But he wasn't in the original movie in '78.
@@macmcleod1188 77
I remember how Heinlein in the book made a point about how all MI are combat personnel. Their cooks make combat jumps, their chaplain too.
I thought the federal military would have tons of civilian employees paid a wage to do non-combat jobs.
Civvies generally don't do good with following orders especially in high stress situations
@@victorkreig6089 I thought the federal employees would be way back. Admin staff on Earth, shipyard staff and the like. People making and fixing federation kit.
Doing so at risk on the frontier or near the front is probably federal military duty. There is a federal navy and other branches who are not MI.
The technical side of the book described warfare conducted by small, widely dispersed platoons of people in motorized armour.
in the book, they did. Heinlein wrote that the military just bought them, like beans. but a military cook in a shock unit is a combat job, just like a cook in a modern line unit. they get a rifle and post watch sometimes.
@@ideologybot4592 It makes me wonder how Heinleins system would survive shifts in the military need. Anything between long periods of peace where the risk to and need of troops is low to attritional warfare where armies in the millions clash.
Any change to military service in this system would also be a constitutional change.
@@SusCalvin not really, they would probably just change the recruiting standards and techniques. More permissive, more aggressive in finding people, and I doubt any of that would be covered in a constitutional law.
And that flexibility still keeps the ideal intact. In a serious war, the situation means that the requirement for service to be dangerous or grueling would be satisfied, no manufactured unpleasantness needed.
While the book never explicitly says that non-military service is a path for citizenship I think it's just because power armor is cool and the book is called Starship Troopers, not Starship Janitor.
And perhaps there's probably some element of preferential hiring for public clerical/sanitation/construction jobs etc. for veterans who complete their terms of service so it eats up a lot of the other options for service.
Just finished listening to Forever War, currently on the sequel. Looking forward to your video on that!
Point of order!
In the Verhoeven adaptation of the book, a female, black recruit is asked (in the infamous shower scene, as I recall) why she joined up and she says that she wanted a career in politics and that federal military service is the only GUARANTEED way of attaining citizenship. This line clearly implies other means of obtaining citizenship, just that those other ways are subject to some sort of judgment calls from established bodies of oversight.
I've never read the book and can't say if there is such a mechanism in Heinlein's Federation, but in the movie, it is implicitly stated, and I dare say more people have only seen the movie that have read the book, as well, so that's why there's such belief in the existence of alternate routes to citizenship.
Correction of a typo:
...more people have only seen the movie THAN have read the book....
No it wasn't, but there was the part about the merchant sailors looking to get the right to it. While in the novel it's to show that the qualities of a citizen in Heinlein's world is not just the ability to withstand hardship, it did give me the impression that some other venues must have existed for the merchant sailors to even think they had a chance and that more that one means must have existed for them to conclude hardship is the qualifier, as all other civil services must all share this common trait.
I lived in Northern Michigan for a few years and knew a couple merchant sailors. Those guys seemed to think of themselves as a quasi-military group in a lot of ways (and Coast Guard will argue it fiercely) I always assumed that's what Heinlein was drawing on with that scene.
@@feralhistorian In WWII, over 9500 Merchant Marine sailors lost their life. Mathematically, a higher percentage of merchant marine sailors were killed in combat during WWII than US Navy personnel. That's why they are salty. Hauling cargo in U-boat infested waters isn't military, but there is no doubt it's bloody dangerous.
@@feralhistorian It might well depend on your generation. Given Heinlein's naval service in the WW II era he was well aware of how dangerous their jobs were. These days however... A few years back I chatted with a guy who described himself as a vet. I thanked him for serving and asked which branch he had served in. He was evasive and I had to press him for an answer before he stated he'd been in the MM. The conversation sort of petered out after that. I rather imagine a Marine would have answered my query before I'd even finished asking it.
Biggs and Co are in the novelization from 77.
In the book you don't get to choose what job you have and it's implied they assign the job you want the least but are qualified for.
The author wrote what he knew.
Based on many of your other episodes, you may get a kick out of the Jupiter Ascending - Bureaucracy Scene
Absolutely the best scene in that movie.
Military service is the quickest path to citizenship? Perhaps two years putting ordnance on target is worth more than 10 years digging ditches? You can't be color blind and drive a ship, but you can do other jobs that do not require that skill set.
Who knows, but at the base, they want people that give a dam about the world they live in, and since the VETERANS won, and established the law, they wanted it more than whoever went up against them.
Don't forget that one armed invalid left his parts elsewhere so YOU did not become bug food!
Disabled Veteran if you please.
Ringo's comment about makework made me think of MacNamara's Morons
Lower the IQ limit for the army, fill in those 'low trades', like infantry (that was the theory. Turns out being smart keeps you alive, allows you to understand tactics beyond, "CHARGE!"
They ended up with men who could not tell left from right, could not ascertain imminent and mortal danger
I strongly disagree, but I respect you for including the quotes for context. To me, it seems the federal military is too much an elite, exclusive thing (lampshaded in the scene leading into the discussion of canine units) to have this massive body of functional-idiots under arms, its branches overflowing with manpower. Fact is, that the military is restated many times to be very exclusive, I think precisely because they're concerned about the point you highlighted: people will see the non combat, and as I see it the outright non-military, roles on offer and say "obviously, these are designed to be as unpleasant as possible. I'll keep my personal comfort in exchange for risking my life for a couple years and coming back okay." So, military applications get loaded up with this sort of young 'shamming' soldier that must be aggressively weeded out by a high bar for standards in the forces themselves before enlistment, then a harsh basic training encouraging drop outs, and so on. The obvious loophole being accounted for is a time that must have existed for this society without an existential bug threat, no wars to fight, and so on- wherein anyone with two brain cells to rub together hopes to gain a "combat" role so they can enjoy a relatively carefree military service period rather than backbreaking labor or whatever else is on offer.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but if the military is so damn exclusionary yet the government must take anyone willing to enlist for civil service, there must be public works projects. The man counting caterpillar fuzz, or the terranizing of Venus, I'm not sure I can see these as being militarized endeavors. I don't even think these would require authoritarian jackboots to ensure compliance from the workers- if a worker or fuzz-counter decided they didn't want to do it anymore, all it'd take would be a man armed with a radio to call for a transport to take them home- no questions asked- but without any franchise. That's the purpose of a volunteer corps like this. It makes it different from militarized slave labor corps found in modern military penal units or dirty 30's regimes. No need to threaten and compel means that you don't need a harsh set of pass-fail rules outside of OSHA like workplace safety. Its a job any foreman could perform; not working? Okay, you're out.
I think the conscript army was standard in huge parts of Europe, not just the totalitarian states. The argument for increasing democratization could be that if you trust all these people with a gun, you eventually need to trust them with the vote.
It is a bit harder to use the army as a elite force against the population when the population is the army. Like what could the French command do in '17, tell the cops to arrest an army corps.
The problem with memory is that it’s not like a digital computer. Whenever we remember our brains recreate the event. The story becomes blurred and new bits get added in. That’s why word of mouth storytelling evolves over generations. Each retelling is a new version of the story. The same with our minds being shaped by our mood, current circumstances and how we’ve all changed since the incident occurred.
Todays video brought to you by the letter "B." For B-1 and B-52 bomber. Two very different air frames tasked with the same mission.
Heinlein said that there were non-military paths to citizenship, and that it was mentioned in the books more than once. Should the stated opinions or the text be considered the only truth?
Considering the stated opinion makes a claim about the book that isn't true? The book is inherently the only truth.
@@SuperGman117 Well, it's Heinlein's universe and he gets to make the rules. As a WW II vet he might well have considered non-combat jobs mentioned in the book such as Carl's working in an electronics research lab or Rico's list of non-combat options to not be "military". Digging holes and filling them up again on Venus might satisfy Federal Service requirements yet not be something that readers of the 1950s considered "military".
Larry Niven once acknowledged the point of sharp-eyed Ringworld readers that the ring needed corrective rockets with the remark that the rockets had been there all along and he'd simply not noticed or mentioned them when he wrote the first book. His book and universe, his rules.
@@tylersperry9164 It's still a lie about the content of the book.
Forever war?!?!? Wow, there's going to be some shit in there that will not have aged well! (Re-read it a few years ago... and, man! Look out, Orson Scott Card!!! lol.)
I interpret it as jobs that are military in the sense that they were provided by the military
I read the book, and I didn't remember any alternative paths to citizenship, either.
Personally, I think "Service guarantees Citizenship" is a good idea. At minimum people should have to prove they actually know what/who they are voting for, "vote blue no matter who", shows the death of civics within the U.S. Or "your voting against your interests", we are supposed to be voting for the constituency we are part of, no our own personal desires. Democracy is highly overrated, i just can't think of a form of government that is better
I think real life military juntas outside of the Heinlein fantasy are clown shows who focus on preserving the privileges of the army.
I seem to recall that the idea that military service was not the only path to citizenship was something Heinlein argued in a letter. I read the book in high school and certainly I came out of it with the very clear understanding that military service was the only path to citizenship, and I found Heinlein's after the fact argument entirely unconvincing.
Maybe it was in Grumbles from the Grave?
Biggs Darklighter got done dirty. He should have been the hero of Yavin 4.
Let me join in here. Perhaps this started as a misapprension on someone part about what military service is. For most non-veterans the military is just the combat arms and/or serving in combat. Of course veterans of the Combat Arms get citizenship but so do the veterans of combat support, combat service support and auxillery service (think CCC, or Army Corp or Engineers). While they are not directly in combat they still do dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.
While I wasn't aware at the time of this video, it turns out that the source of confusion is an essay based on things Heinlein himself said 20+ years later. It's part of the Expanded Universes collection. Basically he says that "service" in Starship Troopers isn't solely military, but he misremembers his own book.
For more detail, I recommend James Gifford's essay on the matter, which covers all the points.
www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
It's Heinlein's theory that the civilians' human and civil rights are permanently protected(meaning you're taking my rights over my dead body type scenario) except to the right to vote because you have to think responsibly to vote for the long term issues and not emotional sentimentality short term issues and the citizens will defend these human and civil rights to the bitter end🤓
Reminds me of the Roman Republic.
Sorta I guess.
I can answer the basis of headcanon question on the spot.
Word of God from Heinlein in an interview. I know Word of God is contentious as is all other topics relating to the Death of the Author principle but from Heinlein's own conception of the World it was true to him.
Where it gets fuzzy is that Heinlein said it 20+ years later. The quote is:
"In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal civil service.”
Only it's not stated flatly or more than once in the text, quite the contrary. Which could lead to a long discussion about perceptions, intent, and if it's a retcon when the original author does it.
I think it might also be coming from a lot of people (including me) don't hate the idea of restricted voting based on self-sacrifice in the shape of helping (or protecting) society but just thought that the bit about finding work for everyone meant the federation didn't really care about putting you boots on the ground it just wanted you to shovel shit to the extend that any grifters would run away
Hey, was this filmed at the Hill Air Force Base Aerospace Museum?
Ah, never mind. Looks like it isn't. In those first few scenes under the B-1 it looked a lot like the front of Hill AFB's museum.
How can you look at whether or not federal service is military only without mentioning the merchant marine sailors Johnny encounters in Seattle. The mention how the MM guild had tried and failed at getting MM service classified as federal. Doesn’t that imply that there isn’t a cultural barrrier to suggesting nonmilitary gigs be considered service?
I mean it could go either way but the lack of mention seems curious.
In fact I think that passage alone might be more responsible for the misremembering than your postulation.
Definitely an oversight on my part (it was in my notes, but somehow missed in recording) and I had forgotten it entirely until I reread the book prior to doing this video. The way it struck me was that if being in the merchant marine isn't considered "federal service" than none of the other often-posited alternatives are. It's certainly closer than alternatives like teacher or park ranger, or even police officer that I've heard suggested over the years.
I suppose it serves the point that memory is never exactly right.
Doesnt that museum have a silo exhibit?
The Minuteman Museum is about an hour's drive from there, three different sites actually with the silo a few miles away from the launch control site.
I recommend the tour of the launch control bunker if you're ever in the area. Have to book it months in advance though.
Nice
I think a big part of it is that it's entierly left in the subtext of the book, and the movie is just satire.
Which is honestly one of reason it's hard to take these videos seriously when you keep clipping and quoting the movie.
I read the book only once, and it was years ago, but I thought the text presented something like a hierarchy within federal service, but I can't remember if that was just social construct or actually established law.
It's problematic eitherway, but the book was supposed to be both philosophical and problematic. Where the movie took the worst elements of the book and weaponized them into cringy political satire, that some folks still manage not to get.
There's an essay by James Gifford that covers the whole Federal Service in Starship Troopers (the book exclusively) topic better than I did, which can be read here, www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf
The short of it being that the book is explicit about it being military service, with no other options, but then Heinlein himself contradicted that 30 years later, leading to the ongoing argument.
@@feralhistorian Gotcha, thanks for the recommendation!
Editing after reading said article: That is a great breakdown of the different arguments and the context which supports them. Either are resonible, but as a military brat some of the terminology and the way I remember the subjects being discussed early in the book still leads me to agree with the notion that Heinlein intended the idea that both military and civilian, federal service to be paths towards voting. He just may not have communicated that particularly well or clearly.
Honestly the whole book presents a world so entierly federalized that the distinction between civilian and military seems to have significantly faded away? I don't remember any discussion of the kind of roles that the states play in either society or government being even discussed, and that would make this discussion even more complicated.
I liked the pure sci fi-military doctrine of jump infantry. The steel gorillas of the book with a dispersion of one MI per a few hundred meters.
Like a platoon of bouncing steel gorillas comes your way tossing nuclear grenades all over.
@@feralhistorianI think the book makes a point that everyone in the MI are combat staff. He explains how cooks and chaplains join combat jumps.
There might be ranks of civilian employees doing the grunt labour of the federal forces, paid but not on path to citizenship.
Starship Troopers is a bit like Atlas Shrugged. A work of fiction that tries to impart incoherent moral lessons onto the reader. Unfortunately, many people read these in their formative years and took these works of fiction as gospel on how to design a society.
I think the problem really is that the basic concept being conveyed gets tangled up with story specifics. For example, for someone to read Starship Troopers in their teens and internalize the idea of putting veterans in charge of society as the moral lesson is . . . face-palm inducing incoherent. But the broader concept of a society degrading if its big decisions are made by people who don't have a direct stake is a lesson a lot of people seem never to have learned.
@@feralhistorian
Thanks for the reply. Love your channel!
I agree. I've just had too many pseudo-philosophical arguments based on SST or Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter) where the conclusions seem superficial and without regard for how these proposed systems would fare among people that don't always have the best intentions.
Cheers from Denmark!
I think Heinlein was a man going through phase after phase of different ideas. Some of them not entirely coherent.
starship troopers explained sargon of akkad only thing don't agree meaning force only way . Forces are action. Action can vote, speak own ideas, if ideas violence moral values u my not thanking part and more
One more starship troopers same Philippines sing national anthem after Philippines Patriotic Pledge or Patriotic Oath of the Philippines u can see RUclips. Only missing law allowed vote only people add value to society 😉
Has somebody recently sent UK prime minister Rishi Sunak a copy of this book?
One of the more interesting things to me about Starship Troopers, is the fact that the world its set in, is one where Germany won World War II. Notice all the military titles like 'Sky Marshal', and the fact that Rico, and everyone around him in Brazil, is white.
That's the film, not the book. As a fan of the book, those differences to me were obvious signs that the underrated film was intended as a clever commentary. (Heinlein's Rico was Juan Rico, I think Filipino, but nor certain)
I mean even today, there are quite amount of white people in South America.
In the novel Rico is Filipino. His native language is Tagalog. He's not from Buenos Aries. When Buenos Aries is hit, he feels bad, but has no personal connection. It's only later that he gets a letter from his Aunt telling him that his mother was visiting there when the asteroid hit.