Starship Troopers

(...)

For all the talk of personal responsibility and moral choices, it's hilarious that Juan enlists on a whim, because of a sexual reflex. I guess Heinlein set it up so that he could slowly sculpt Johnny throughout the story, letting the character slowly internalize the military Ethos. At the same time, it also points at the weakness of any morality that hinges on personal choice and individual responsibility: as if soldiers could learn 100% self-control after a few months of camp training or even active duty service.

To end, another amusing paradox. McCarthyist propaganda of the Second Red Scare clearly had an effect on Heinlein - a Navy man himself during the end of the 1920 and the 1930s, and as such maybe more susceptible to the pervading American nationalist rhetoric. For all the anti-communist subtext in Starship Troopers - the bugs seemingly the ultimate simile for an ultra cooperative social group - it is worth noting that Heinlein's ideal of military Citizenship "is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live." Not too different from the root of Bolshevism, I'd say.

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