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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Just wanted to note that Orson Scott Card is Mormon, not Catholic and George Orwell definitely did not consider himself as a communist, but rather a socialist.

Edit: Also, imo, a book with a more interesting tension with Card's religious beliefs is Ender's Shadow in which the child genius main character has some extremely lucid thoughts about why religious people are mistaken.

I'd be surprised if those were the only two things I got wrong in that list.

Well the regime in Starship Troopers also very much isn't fascist but very strongly liberal, but that's a conversation in itself.

It's fascist in the loosest "the fasces is a good metaphor for an important concept" sense, but by that point the definition is so watered down that even Hilary Clinton ("It takes a village to raise a child", and obviously "Stronger Together") fits it.

In an arguably more important sense the politics in Starship Troopers are much less fascist than every modern country in the world. The mainstream modern approach to military service in times of existential (or too-often less-than-existential) crisis is the draft. We force people to take new jobs or be imprisoned, but instead of just backbreaking work in a field they'll also be getting shot at by and ordered to kill strangers, and since in the USA we'd like the Constitution to not stop us we somehow claim this service-which-isn't-voluntary doesn't count as involuntary servitude. One question Starship Troopers is trying to answer is: if you actually want to forbid slavery, then how do you still get enough people to take such horrible individual risks in service of a collective good freely?

a defense of a Fascist military dicatorship

Arguably "military dictatorship" here is the least accurate claim. A military dictatorship has a military leader or small junta in charge of everything; in the Starship Troopers' world the military leadership isn't even allowed to vote until after they become civilians, at which point an ex-General and ex-Admiral each get the same one-person one-vote that any single-term ex-Private got to start exercising decades earlier. If they win an election after that point, the connection between political power and military service is just the same indirect "it helped the voters respect me" that e.g. Eisenhower got.

Even "defense of" here is only like 95% accurate. There's a lot of self-justification coming from within the system about why they think it's a good system, and Heinlein did seem to be happy with most of that, but even in-universe they admit that the way the system got started was basically "there was some serious war, and afterward the veterans just didn't want to trust anyone who hadn't had their backs during."