Editing Starship Troopers (section)

===RAGE II: Electric Boogaloo===
[[File:Skubship troopers.jpg|thumb|right|It's a whole spectrum of skub.]]
The controversy of course continues on 4chan, and comes primarily from three factions who argue with each other every single day on /tv/'s ''Starship Troopers'' troll threads:

* Lefties and [[tumblr|ostensibly left-adjacent]] people who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is bad).
* [[/pol/|Neo-Nazis]] who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is good).
* [[Neckbeards|Heinlein fans]] who think the Federation is not fascist (and that anyone who disagrees is a retard).

====Leftists====
The book's got ''some'' evidence to support the first viewpoint - the simple fact that the founding of the Federation reads like a classic fascist's wet dream of manly, hard-headed soldiers standing up to reassert social order when a decadent, failing democratic government is in a state of collapse (see the rise of Fascism in Italy and the Freikorps after WW1). However, the people arguing this - including many leftists and those playing at leftism - are also, as a rule, heavily influenced by Verhoeven's movie. Said movie not only threw in a bunch of direct parallels to historical fascist movements (an asteroid attack being a false-flag operation, for instance, as with all those false-flag attacks made by fascist powers during the lead-up to WW II to manufacture casus belli and justify naked aggression), but played up the Nazi fashion of the cast. Additionally, while denying them franchise without civil service, The Federation has a great deal of legal protection for its non-citizen population. In the end, a lot of them end up arguing against the idealized view of stratocratic government the book presents; while they aren't wrong ''historically'', well... it's also a ''book'', and Heinlein isn't supporting that form of government, either.

====Neo-Nazis====
The film also ended up handing ammo to the second group of people, despite wearing its satirical intentions on its sleeve (if not the entire coat - this is Verhoeven we're talking about); it also manages to make the Federation look like a decent place to live with a functional government, because his satire usually consists of letting the people we're supposed to disagree with present their points into the camera without argument. The result is that [[/pol/|real-life fascists]] like to use it as a bad-faith example of how fascism isn't that bad, really. Is this Verhoeven's fault?

''Fuck'' no, they're fascists, and as such are categorically weasels that co-opt any angle they can get their hands on.

If anything could be blamed on the film and/or Verhoeven ''besides'' being too heavy-handed, it's that the satirical approach of "let the villains state what their motives are outright in a way that makes them sound patently bugfuck insane to any rational person" thus assumes a rational audience. Far from an argument for some baby-brained "satire requires clarity of purpose" bullshit, the conclusion is simply that most neo-Nazis and fascists [[/pol/|are not very smart]].

====Heinlein fans====
Heinlein fans tend to be very, ''very'' protective of ''Starship Troopers'', and very defensive about the supposed virtues of the Federation, to the point of inventing things that aren't in the text - which doesn't go into much detail on the inner structure of how the Federation government actually works. Granted, this is in service of of one of the most important writers in the history of science fiction's most seminal works, but even so it can be a bit tardy.

There is something to be said for drawing equivalences between the way the vote works in ''Starship Troopers'' and the way it worked in the classical democracies and republics of the ancient world - and the Federation is not a place that discriminates on the basis of race, class, or sex, virtually all of which are anathema to modern-day fascist movements even if they aren't necessarily requirements for a belief system to be fascist. 

Ultimately, you have people who didn't get the movie, people who thought the movie was great, people who said that the book was better, and people who didn't get the movie, thought it was great and made a 'sequel' with... flashlights, and all of these things are backed up by the intensely political nature of both the books and the parody. At least the third one (''Starship Troopers 3: Marauder'') featured real powered armor, for all of like five minutes.

So yeah... '''''Lotta''''' skub there.