Re: Worst Hugos Ever?

On Feb 28, 5:41=EF=BF=BDpm, Quadibloc <jsav...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Feb 28, 11:43 am, Gene Ward Smith <g...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Disagree with the Soviet system and you cannot become a
> > Communist, thereby effectively disenfranchising you. Disagree
> > with the ST system and you won't join the army, effectively
> > disenfranchising you.
>
> That may be.
>
> Read _The Gulag Archipelago_ by Aleksandr Isaevitch Solzhenitsyn, and
> then explain to me where in "Star****p Troopers" Heinlein has this
> future society do such things to those who disagree with the system.
>
> Of course, there was the one place where it was shown how it was not
> necessary to do this, because the ingenious design of the future
> society meant that those who disagreed with it were also
> _temperamentally_ unsuited to becoming voters.
>
> Real Fascism - that's the sort of thing *Nehemiah Scudder* engaged in.
>
> Rather than saying that Heinlein advocated Fascism, I would have to
> say that I could not disagree too loudly or positively with someone
> who said that Heinlein was dangerously naive to think that a society
> could get _as close_ to Fascism as the one he illustrates in Star****p
> Troopers and still retain - as the society he depicted did - loyalty
> to the essential core of freedom.
>
> In the real world, such a society would quickly degenerate into real
> Fascism much more quickly than our style of democracy will collapse
> from the ignorance of the unwashed m***** - that *could* be argued
> quite effectively.
>
> Even if that is true, of course, that doesn't mean that Heinlein loved
> Fascism instead of freedom. (Given his... _experience_, that would be
> unlikely. Particularly as, unlike John Kerry, he did not, to my
> knowledge, after returning home from the war, parade around the United
> States claiming the U.S. military had been engaging in anti-German
> genocide.)
>
> It would just mean that to make one political point, he ****trayed a
> society that hadn't been fully thought through, he didn't remember how
> common military juntas were, and so on and so forth.
>
> John Savard

Some interesting notions.  I think, for example, that the
"temperamentally unsuited to becoming voters" is part of the myth of
the society and standing outside that myth we're invited to disagree
with it.  (I think Heinlein, like many people, was offended and vexed
by the problem of irresponsible voters, without having a "good"
solution -- the solution he built Star****p Troopers around was a
Solution Unsatisfactory.  The founding fathers of our system designed
it for a mostly agricultural electorate educated by 18th century
standards, after all, and there's certainly nothing vile --though
decidedly upsetting -- to point out it doesn't work for a mostly urban
electorate intellectually crippled by a century of "factory
education").  I think we're also being pointed to things like Wells' A
Modern Utopia with its discussion of temperament and social roles.).

I also think the categories of "utopian" and "dystopian" don't work
very well for the book, and that it's intended to be not better, not
worse, but simply different enough to highlight some things he wanted
to talk about.  It's so "identifiable" because it's so close to
America in the 1950's, so that when you stumble across one of those
differences, they have enough shock-power to make his
Verfremdungseffekt work. (Heinlein and Brecht!  Together again -- for
the first time!).  So, adequately thought through or not, I think the
features you are critiquing are deliberate, rather than failures of
technique.

I'm having trouble with "close to Fascism," though, perhaps for this
very reason.  Looking at the two models we have, Mussolini's Itay and
Hitler's Germany, I don't see anything in the book particularly
"close."  There appears to be less attempt to manage, control, or
limit the rather open market suggested in the book than we are
currently used to, for example, and it's hard to see how you could get
very close to fascism at all without adopting the characteristic
stance of private-owner****p coupled with government control of
businesses.  Commentators havre cited the fuehrerprinzip as the
keystone characteristic of fascist systems, and there doesn't seem to
be anything like fuehrerprinzip in the world of Star****p Troopers --
who embodies the race and therefore directs its activities and
suppresses dissent?  And, speaking of that, where's the dissent, and
where's the suppression?   There is a lot of grousing ****trayed in the
book, but by and large people seem not dissatisfied enough with the
way it works to sup****t anything like real dissent.  Other essential
characteristics the commentators list are the outgroup of pariahs,
against which racial hatred is directed, and in the brief glimpses we
have of the pre-war society, there was nothing like that common enough
or prominent enough to emerge.  The demonizing of the enemy in time of
war is not the same thing -- and that is what we do see a fair amount
of.  It's also hard to see militarism and "glorification of the
military" -- another factor in those lists -- in a system that puts as
much effort into discouraging enlistment as is ****trayed in ST.
Wartime exigencies are, again, different and don't point to fascism;
they point to being in a shooting war, with no assumed power of
conscription -- a point Heinlein stressed  (and that's another
powerful indicator that the system is not at all close to fascism in
any significant way.  Hell that makes them a more liberal democracy
than the U.S. at any time since the Civil War).

I just don't see anything particularly close to fascism in the world
of Star****p Troopers -- and in fact I think we're a lot farther along
in that direction IRL since Bush rolled back the Enlightenment (a
personal opinion likely to become stronger as I go through Air****t
"Security" again in mid-March and April this year).

GWS' mention of Rand reminded me that she claimed mixed economies
inherently trend toward totalitarian.  Economics does tend to sweep
the political along with it, so I find your notion that "in the real
world such a society would quickly degenerate into Fascism"
unexceptionable.  It's the preliminary notion that the world of ST is
in some special sense "close to Fascism" I'm having trouble with.