"Because the government doesn't care one bucket of swill whether you join or not! Because it has become stylish, with some people -- too many people -- to serve a term and earn a franchise and be able to wear a ribbon in your lapel which says that you're a vet'ran . . . whether you've ever seen combat or not. But if you want to serve and I can't talk you out of it, then we have to take you, because that's your constitutional right. It says that everybody, male or female, shall have his born right to pay his service and assume full citizenship but the facts are that we are getting hard pushed to find things for all the volunteers to do that aren't just glorified K. P. You can't all be real military men; we don't need that many and most of the volunteers aren't number-one soldier material anyhow. Got any idea what it takes to make a soldier?"
I am all for his statement about conscription -- if a nation can't, in a time of crisis, get enough volunteers to defend it, it deserves to go down.And this is the context to Starship Troopers that critics never seem to get - the whole exploration of "what makes people willingly serve their country" is an attempt to open the door to *less* fascism - specifically, the end of military conscription. Heinlein certainly held disdain for the left-wing attitude of "we hardly need a military". Note that the Korean War had recently ended in cease-fire when he wrote, "level of US military power" was inversely correlated with "size of North Korea", and a little foresight could see the positive correlation between that size and "number of people who would be tyrannized and dying for the indefinite future". But IIRC (I may be confusing him with Pournelle here) he saw the stereotypical economists' answer of "we can just get everything done with mercenaries" (or "market clearing salaries" in nicer words) as unacceptably dangerous. Money makes good force multipliers (compare Verhoeven's cannon fodder with Heinlein's walking tanks) but not good soldiers. And yet he definitely reserved his greatest animosity for the right-wing attitude of "when we do need a military, we can always enslave some people and jail the ones who don't cooperate".
justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow:I just want to reiterate that the text of Starship Troopers supports this theory, but Heinlein himself contradicted it in Expanded Universe:The requirement in ST is that enfranchisement is conditional on risking your life for the state. One of the alternatives listed in in the book to military service was asteroid mining in conditions harsh enough that casualties would be expected. In short, the condition for enfranchisement is putting one's life at stake in obedience to the state.
"Veteran" does not mean in English dictionaries or in this novel solely a person who has served in military forces. I concede that in commonest usage today it means a war veteran…but no one hesitates to speak of a veteran fireman or a veteran school teacher. 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." [ellipses in the original]In Gifford's opinion,
Heinlein’s statement is incorrect. The book does not 'flatly state' that any significant fraction of Federal Service positions are civil service-like even once, much less 'more than once.'Why Heinlein was so plainly wrong about his own book is something of a mystery.
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posted by Artw at 10:01 PM on November 26, 2012 [6 favorites]