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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Mini-Stories
Topic ID: 54
Message ID: 23
#23, RE: FI Mini: Wish You Were Here
Posted by FubarObfusco on Sep-19-08 at 08:54 PM
In response to message #20
>Either way, the core argument of ST that scares people and brings up
>the whole "fascist" critique about it is the idea that in order to
>have political enfranchisement, citizenship, you must have served in
>the military. Non-citizens don't seem to be lacking for any rights or
>privileges other than the right to vote and therefore make policy.

Except, of course, that this critique is not based on what's actually in the book. Voting rights in the Starship Troopers civilization depend upon "National Service", but that includes civilian as well as military service. (After all, most of the time there's not a war on.)

What really irks me about that critique, though, is not the claim that the fictional nation was militarist or fascist. It's the leap from there to the claim that the author is those things. That the same man wrote the hippie-neopagan favorite, Stranger in a Strange Land, never seems to register with those bozos.