“Starship Troopers” Tried To Warn Us About Endless War
The '90s sci-fi splatter movie isn’t really about space bugs
“Starship Troopers,” a 1997 film about Earth’s military heroes wreaking glorious genocide against a planet of giant bugs, makes a lot more sense when you realize that director Paul Verhoeven intended it to be a satire of fascism.
"War makes fascists of us all," Verhoeven explains in the DVD commentary track. As a boy living in Amsterdam during the Nazi invasion, young Paul watched from his window as German planes bombed his city. That imagery, as well as the resulting devastation and the underlying ethos, was his inspiration for a cinematic adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 sci-fi novel.
In a 2017 interview, Verhoeven toed the Hollywood line and alluded to Donald Trump as the face of American fascism. His opinion on the genuine fascism of the WEF/Biden regime is unknown, but like all great truths, the message of "Starship Troopers" easily overcomes any flaws in the messenger.
Today, as we see Western leaders and mainstream media outlets united in a bloodthirsty frenzy for full-scale war with Russia (and probably China, Iran and North Korea), Verhoeven's thesis that war makes fascists of us all is as timely as ever.
Instead of giant, alien bugs (who - according to the movie - provoked us into total war by defending their territory against human efforts to colonize it), we have demonic Russians, rumored to be raping and pillaging the peaceful Ukrainians. Against such a vile foe, how can we do other than devote every possible resource towards annihilating them? At the same time, we have a war on COVID, a war on drugs, a war on global terror (not to be confused with the war on domestic terrorism), a war on fossil fuels, and innumerable other wars that seem to pop up like mushrooms, but each of which is absolutely justified, and vitally important to our way of life and/or survival.
But when everything becomes war, war becomes everything. The only priority is to keep fighting; nothing else is important, and therefore everything must be sacrificed to keep the battle raging. And at that point - when war has made fascists of us all - what is left for us to defend? When do we realize that we are no longer fighting to promote life, but simply to bring more death?
"Starship Troopers" ends with a final blast of propaganda, proclaiming "They'll keep fighting – and they'll win!"
Maybe they will win. But by the time they do, we all will have lost.
Thanks for the post. My takeaway from the novel and thus the movie was the importance of military service in “earning” citizenship and the rights that come with it. Having served myself, this was a novel argument to me, particularly when we saw politicians like Bill Clinton and GW Bush avoiding harm’s way in Vietnam by gaming deferments via ROTC pledges (Clinton) or claiming to serve in the National Guard (Bush) to remain politically viable.