 Well, here we go. On the surface, military sci-fi doesn't seem like a particularly political genre. It's all about taking a group of people, putting them in a fictional setting with advanced technology, and then having them fight. But when you look at the reasons why people are fighting, how they're fighting, and what other sorts of political or social commentary are being made, the messages being pushed are rather obvious. And I want to put in at the beginning that I'm not calling any of the creators here fascists, because I don't know them, or their specific political beliefs personally. It is possible to send out messages unintentionally in your work, since after all, people interpret it differently. To them, it might seem innocuous, but when you look at it more critically, it's more... let's say interesting. Nor am I saying that the people who like these books are fascists. You can enjoy things as pure escapism while admitting there are some unsavory aspects to them. I'm not calling anyone here names, except Robert Heinlein because fuck that guy. Also this video probably won't have many visuals because there isn't much to put here. Just browse Twitter while you listen, we all know that's what you were going to do anyways. Let's start by figuring out what fascism is. Too many people use it to describe all sorts of authoritarian regimes where it doesn't fit. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian nightmare for most of its residents, but it wasn't fascist. Most French Empire was a dictatorship, but that wasn't fascist either. Fascism has long been a term without a hard and fast definition, and it's been used as a political insult for decades, which makes it even harder to pin down. In pinning down what it is, you have to point to the similarities that fascist regimes have had. The best definition I've ever heard goes like this. Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. I would also add that it's a far-right ideology based on authoritarianism, deep-set social hierarchies often based on race and aggression. And it's strongly, even violently, against socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and decadence as they see it. None of these are exclusive to fascism, but the combination results in a blend that can broadly be referred to as such. There's more details we could go into, but for now, that'll serve. One of the grandaddies of the military sci-fi genre is Starship Troopers. It's a simple story all about human soldiers fighting a race of aliens simply called bugs. Earth at this time is under a single-world government called the Terran Federation, ruled by a military elite. At some point, democracies collapse due to their supposed inability to control crime or their youth. Now, citizenship is only offered to those who go through military service, during which they're treated as expendable cannon fodder. After that, they're allowed to vote and become politicians, but not before. Most people are familiar with Starship Troopers through the 1997 film adaptation, but the underlying themes of the movie are quite a bit different from the book. The movie is very much a criticism of militarism and fascism. The book is… not that. The author, Robert Heinlein, felt like the United States was being too conciliatory in its dealings with the USSR during the Cold War, and that they should have taken a harder, more militaristic stance. He used to refer to his own military service as an example for why young people should join up to learn about duty and sacrifice for America. Of course, this leaves out how he never served during any sort of combat, but we'll just sweep that under the rug. The bugs operate in a hive mind with no individuality, so there are pretty clear analog for communists. The Terran Federation is supposed to be an analog for the United States, since they're all about freedom, some terms and conditions may apply. An important cornerstone of fascism is that it rejects the idea that violence is negative. Things like war and imperialism are seen as a method of national rejuvenation, a way of redeeming themselves, cleansing society, and making up for past wrongs visited upon them, since, at the end of the day, they're obsessed with being victims. These invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland were portrayed as retaking land and resources that rightfully belonged to the German people and punishing those who wronged them. The invasions weren't a necessary evil, they were intrinsically a good thing. Participating in the war against the bugs and starship troopers is seen as a positive thing that humans should aspire to do because being a soldier makes you a better person. More than that, they need to protect their people, and in this instance, the existence of the state is equated with the existence of the people. So the message here is that collectivism is bad, but you should also give up your individual desires in service of the state. This is the sort of double-think that fascism has always been known for, like the Nazi idea that the Jews secretly run the world by controlling businesses, banking, and politics, but also they're physically and mentally inferior to us Aryans so it'll be easier to exterminate them. In the end, starship troopers puts forth a worldview that is not only inconsistent but obsessed with armed conflict as a way of pushing a worldview on others, and if that sounds like something you've read before or something from real history, you might be starting to get my point. For an even better example of fascist ideals being promoted as good, let's take a look at a more recent series, the Starfire Books by Steve White and David Weber. As far as military sci-fi goes, the setting is very standard. It's a few hundred years in the future, humans have spread out to hundreds of planets, they've also met some alien races, and they spend a lot of time in space shooting missiles at each other. Also, humanity lives under one government called the Terran Federation because names are hard. I'm going to go over these out of order because the chronology is off and I think it works better this way. The first book in the timeline is called Crusade. Almost a hundred years before the story starts, the Terran Federation went to war with a race of aliens called Oryans. A group of humans fled through an unmapped warp point and were never heard from again. Turns out they ran into an alien planet called Thebes where the natives hadn't achieved spaceflight. They gave the Thebans their technology and told them all about how evil the Oryans were, which caused the Thebans to build up a religion around killing them all and liberating Holy Terra. As a brief aside, even though the book is called Crusade, and even though the Thebans are all speaking English, they only refer to their Holy War as a jihad. This was a conscious decision on the part of the authors, and I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with trying to demonize any real world religions. I'm sure the book was only trying to criticize religious zeal in general. I'm sure. So they attack, the good guys fight them, and eventually win. Pretty simple outside of the backstory, mostly. In the latter parts of the book, the Theban fleet has been completely wrecked and the Terrans are moving into their home solar system. By this point they've realized that the Theban leaders don't believe their religion and they're just using it to control their population. Their planetary defenses are extremely strong though, and while the military leaders are debating what to do, the Terran parliament is debating whether or not to order them wiped out. The tension in the climax doesn't come from whether the humans will beat the Thebans, but whether they'll beat them fast enough to prevent the parliament from ordering them to kill the entire population. Decades before Crusade takes place, the Terrans and their allies went to war with a race called the Regalians, and in the end they decided that genocide was the only way to ensure lasting peace. So they killed all the Regalians. Most of the human leaders look back on this as a source of shame and guilt, and those who advocate killing all the Thebans are the villains, rightfully derided as self-serving madmen. In the end, the Terran military defeats the Thebans without having to kill all of them, and this is treated as an unequivocal victory. So clearly this series is anti-genocide, right? Hang on. The actions undertaken by the Thebans are monstrous and resulted in the deaths of millions of people. But the reasons given for not committing a genocide on them aren't that punishing those who weren't involved in the acts as wrong, it's not even for cynical political reasons like no one will want to be allies with us if we act that way. The main reason is that most of the Thebans that committed the various atrocities were being manipulated by their leaders. The normal soldiers SHOULD have done what they were told without thinking. They aren't guilty, their commanders are. At one point, a couple of characters just straight up say that the Nuremberg trials were unjustified because the perpetrators of the Holocaust were just following orders and therefore they're absolved of guilt. Holy shit. This makes even less sense when one of the Thebans follows his conscience, turns traitor, and helps the humans overthrow his old government, but I need to move on now. It gets worse than the next two books. In Death Ground and The Shiva Option. These are much simpler to understand. A race of insect-like aliens comes out of space and attacks humanity, then them and their allies fight back. The aliens are called arachnids and operate in a hive mind, but I'd call it more of an homage to Starship Troopers than a rip-off. It's an interesting look at what a hive mind really is. The arachnids aren't even really individuals, so much as one creature with the mind on the scale of an entire civilization. It genuinely makes them a great villain. I just wanted to say something positive before I tear into the underlying messages because on the surface, these are pretty good books. The bugs come out and destroy a bunch of shit for no reason. They won't negotiate with anyone, and they never surrender, fighting on until they're completely destroyed. When they capture planets, they herd all the animals and begin eating them, including sentient races such as humans. By the end of the second book, the Grand Alliance has pushed the arachnids back to their homeworlds and bombards them all until they die. Now I know what you're thinking. James, if the last book was all about how genocide is bad, why is the perpetration of genocide seen as a victory here? Man, I don't fucking know. The authors seem to go out of their way to make the arachnids as bad as possible. They're completely merciless, unfeeling, robotic, have no real reason for doing what they do, and they eat people. The leadership and general populace of all the races of the Grand Alliance just take it for granted that the arachnids must be killed to ensure peace. There's not even any argument about it. I guess the message is that genocide is okay if the race you're doing it to because I'm pretty sure everyone who's ever perpetrated to genocide has thought that the group they're killing is evil. There's a brief one-off character in the Shiva option, a journalist named Vincent Steele, which sounds like an alpha male love interest from a romance novel who's tagging along on a navy ship to document the war. In the brief time we spend with him, we learn that he's angry that the war is happening at all because there was never an attempt to solve the issue diplomatically. The navy accidentally showed the arachnids how to get into Terran space and because he feels the Terran Federation is spending far too much money on its military. Now obviously the audience knows about how over the top evil the arachnids are, but clearly the denizens of the Federation don't have an omniscient narrator telling them what's going on. All they know is that first contact with a new race was violent and their government immediately mobilized for full-scale war. Millions of soldiers and civilians alike have been killed, and as far as this guy can see no one is trying to solve the problem without more death. As for military expenditure, well, yeah, no one likes paying taxes, and when your taxes go to what looks like a bloated military-industrial complex instead of things like education or infrastructure, you'd be right to be frustrated. But from a fascist perspective, they must be the biggest, strongest, most powerful, most masculine guy around. Just like how violence and conflict are seen as a way to make themselves better. In the fascist mind, might makes right, therefore they must be the mightiest, otherwise they won't be right. At the end of the journalist's brief appearance, he climbs into a torpedo tube and gets his legs torn off. He's mentioned by other characters and they all dismiss him as a dumbass who was getting in the way of the real fighting men. In other words, the only person in this story whose anti-war is portrayed like a feckless idiot who has no clue how the real world works. Did I mention that this book came out five months after 9-11? Then we reach the final book in this series that we'll discuss. Insurrection, in which David Weber and Steve White talk about how democracy is bad. To clarify, I don't mean that they point out some of the flaws in a representative democratic system. I mean the heroes of this book rebel against their government for the specific reason that the democratic system isn't serving every demand they make. But they're also fighting for freedom, I guess. A few decades after the war with the arachnids, the Terran Federation is undergoing a political shift. For most of its existence, it's been a representative democracy split into hundreds of member states. The planets fall into three broad categories. Heart Worlds, the first, richest, and most populous planets that humanity colonized, including Earth. Corporate Worlds, strategically located planets that were first colonized by private companies and remain dominated by business interests. And Fringe Worlds, which are sparsely populated planets on the edges of civilized space. For centuries, politics in the Federation have been dominated by the first two groups, since that's where the vast, vast majority of the people live. Most Fringe Worlds that we hear about only have three or four million inhabitants, while the average corporate world has two billion, and the average heartworld has even more. There are literally thousands of times more people living in the core than the fringes. The Fringe Worlders are very upset that they don't get to run everything, which is kind of like being upset that the US government isn't dominated by the people of Baker County, Georgia. Around the beginning of insurrection, the population is beginning to shift. The Fringe Worlds are growing rapidly, and soon they'll have enough representatives to be able to have a bigger say in what goes on in government. They want to, quote, demand an accounting for two centuries of economic exploitation. I know it sounds like I'm summarizing, but this really is all the information that we get. There aren't any specifics given at all. The first problem with this setup is obvious. It ignores all political differences except for the regional ones. While regions can and often do develop political identities that distinguish them from others, there's never going to be a uniformity. People will disagree because we're individuals. Nor do we ever get any information on what these political identities consist of. Are the corporate world representatives, who apparently vote as a bloc, left or right wing? What are their thoughts on things like labor unions and tariffs? How do they feel on social issues like LGBT rights? What are their environmental plans? We literally never get any semblance of an idea what either side actually wants or what they disagree over, but we're supposed to side with the Fringe Worlders because that's what the authors want us to do. The second problem is that we never get any sort of idea how the Fringe Worlds are being mistreated. All we know is that they're apparently being economically exploited, but no information is ever given how. Presumably, the mega corporations dominate the economy and prevent smaller businesses from getting started on the Fringe and the lion's share of their wealth gets taken to other planets. That's a valid reason to be upset. However, it's also just how the game works. There are going to be losers in a capitalist economy. The Fringe Worlders never say anything bad about business in general, only about their perceived exploitation. Nor do they ever offer up any solutions to their issues, maybe like greater autonomy from member states of the Federation. It's just taken for granted that once they're in charge, everything will be fine. So the Fringe Worlders are criticizing capitalism, but only when THOSE people do it. They aren't against the principle they just hate being on the receiving end of unfair practices. The goal seems to be to punish the corporate worlds without making any significant changes otherwise. Using the rhetoric of the left to attract support and then never applying any policies to match while you violently purge your country of political dissidents? I have never heard of that, National Socialist German Workers Party. This setup is completely self-serving and contradictory. It aims to make the Fringe Worlders look like completely innocent victims while the rest of the book, when all the battles take place, aims to make them look like a bunch of powerful badasses. There's some more double-think for you. So then the Fringe Worlders in the Navy mutiny and a civil war starts. Eventually, they manage to win their independence from the Federation. Along the way, millions of military personnel were killed, the economy of both countries was wrecked, and the resulting power vacuum during and after the war allowed several small dictators to pop up, and pirate raids became more common, resulting in many more deaths and some colonies being abandoned entirely. But the audience is clearly supposed to feel like this was a victory, like it was worth the cost. Oh yeah, and at one point the rebels launch a nuclear strike that bombards an entire continent and kills millions of civilians along with a couple of military facilities, but it was an accident, so it's perfectly fine. I'm reminded of a George Orwell quote here. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. The problem with this isn't that a minority is trying to assert itself. The problem is that we never find out what the hell they want. How are they being oppressed? What does this freedom they're constantly speaking of mean? That's rhetorical. Freedom, in their minds, is being in charge of all things at all times. I could probably do this all day. The island in the Sea of Time trilogy isn't outright fascist, but it does openly profess Christian civilization as being superior to others. The Lost Fleet has a very strong overtone of militarism. It openly espouses the idea that civilian entities are inferior to military ones since they don't fight. The powerful are the worthiest to rule. Caliphate is basically just 400 pages of Tom Kratman screeching about the evils of brown people in their phony religion, don't think I need to explain that one too much, and so on. Starfire and Starship Troopers are the most blatantly fascist examples of military sci-fi that I've ever come across, but they're far from the only ones to have aspects of that particular brand of cancer masquerading as political thought. Science fiction has always been, and likely will always be, a very political genre. It's an amazing vehicle with which to explore various societal issues from a safe distance, changing minds through art is a practice as old as civilization. People are allowed to put controversial messages in what they create. But just like you're allowed to say what you want, I'm allowed to criticize you for it. And if your professed ideology involves subverting democracy, suppressing free thought, killing those deemed inferior, concentrating wealth in the hands of a select few, and holding this all together with violence, don't be surprised when you encounter resistance. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The sorts of messages you consume or promote are very important, whether they're intentional or not. Liking Starship Troopers doesn't make you a fascist as long as you're aware of what's being pushed forward. You can come to your own conclusions about it and avoid falling into the traps that others have set. Thanks to everyone who watched, and to my patrons, without whom I'd be lost. Thanks especially to Oppo Savilainen, Brother Santoads, Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Pendergraft, and Tobacco Crow. You guys are, you guys are great. I'm fully expecting the comments to turn into a shitstorm after this, so I just want to ask everyone to be civil, and I hope most of you have a nice day. Bye.