https://www.jfed.net/antisemitismtoolsandresources/neo-nazi-...
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
Seems reasonable (although clearly not the intent of the story and not a deliberate “false flag”)
The movie's goal is showing the attractiveness of fascism and showing that people like you are incredibly open to fascist ideologies as long as the fascists have a scary "other" to put forward as an existential threat regardless of how real that threat truly is.
There's no frame story to support this. Going by the available evidence in the movie itself, it's a conventional action movie.
There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.
I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.
Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.
Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.
Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.
No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.
>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.
Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.
>We see the bugs killing the humans.
Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.
The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?
Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.
>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant
It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.
>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.
They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.
>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.
It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.
Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.
What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.
In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.
Ain't Art grand?
You could A) warp in a rock of sufficient velocity that a small one destroys life on the planet or B) warp in and move a bigger rock in system.
It only makes sense as a false flag by the humans.
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/-e...
https://screenrant.com/starship-troopers-movie-meaning-fasci...
From Wikipedia:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-...
Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.
They certainly haven't done the latter.
This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.
Thanks for the language lesson. You're of course correct, but "refute vs. dispute" isn't one of my language pet peeves (like "less vs. fewer" is), so thanks for the correction.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/anti-fascist-leanings-paul-verh...
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.
That is pretty clutching at straws argument. It would turn basically any movie into satire, because this thing is normal.
Like, it was a bad movie and failed both as satire and as action movie.
The point is that it doesn't justify the fascist society also depicted therein.
The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.
Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
The Mormons were not the United Citizen Federation, they were an independent group. The bugs indiscriminately attacked all humans in response.
>exterminating the native population to make room
The problem with this comparison is the bugs aren't humans. Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea (most people aren't vegans). Extending it to non-mammals is even more rare (most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming). Extending it to literally alien bugs, that don't even share the evolutionary history of Earth bugs with us, is an incredibly niche idea. And this situation is symmetrical, so the alien bugs almost certainly have the same attitude toward humans. There's no reason to think that peaceful coexistence is possible.
> Extending human-like moral weight to even non-human mammals is a rare idea
It's actually pretty frequent to demonstrate deep empathy and give more importance to pets that to unrelated humans. Some also argue that humans can be morally inferior to others. Drawing a line between human and non-humans may be tempting but the opinons down there are very diverse. Just a few years back and a common agreement would be "Extending white-like moral weight to even non-white..."
> most vegans don't care about the insects killed in farming
Of course they do! But found out it's the compromise with the lowest externalities. Most meat eater also don't like slaughterhouses but think it's a necessity.
> Extending it to literally alien bugs [...] is an incredibly niche idea
I bet if humanity do encounter alien bugs, this idea will be way more discussed. Moral is often somewhat put aside when engaging a fiction: Starship Troopers or Happy Tree Friends are perfect exemple. Most would's joke about that if that was real.
I can see only two possible reasons for disagreement. Either you are not actually addressing the movie itself, and are instead talking about an extended work of the movie plus the director's commentary, or you fundamentally disagree with me about human rights and do not consider slavery to be a serious problem.
Antibiotics are obviously mass murder toward bacteria, that's exactly their function I guess? Using them to cure a life-threatening infection (bacterias) isn't seen as immoral by most, neither do I. May you point out what part makes you think otherwise?
I agree that slavery is not morally acceptable but i'm not sure to follow you point afterward. Perhaps you rank slavery as the worst moral practice and as some humans still enslave others, the movies's characters that don't are "morally superior"? That's a fair and rational view. I also see invasion, violence and a lot of sadism from the humans in that movie. I don't give them a moral advantage.
My whole understanding is close Slg post [0] about the fascist critique. It's also a very popular view: A quick search on internet return many articles in this frame and as you referenced "director's commentary":
1 > I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982514
1 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-...