Lest anyone later accuse me of having a hidden agenda, let me make my agenda public at the outset: Starship Troopers might just be my favorite book of all time. This web page was inspired in large part by the degree of misinterpretation, false statement, and outright character assassination I have recently witnessed concerning Robert Heinlein in general and Starship Troopers in specific, ranging from people on the internet who obviously felt that they didn't have to read the book (or read it thoughtfully) before condemming it, to the hypocritical statements of those responsible for Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.
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In the case of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, the Big Lie is best stated by Verhoeven himself:
The philosophy of Heinlein is certainly in the movie. Whether I adhere to that society myself is something else, but it is the philosophy of the world he described, and we took that from his book.
This is a theme that we see repeated time and again, both by those who made the movie, and some of the writers (such as Dan Persons, Paul Sammon, and Bill Warren) who have written about it: that the sadistic, fascist society in the movie is a Polaroid snapshot of the world Heinlein described, that faithfulness to the first grand master of science fiction was their overriding concern. This is, without question, a bald-faced lie, as the society described bears only the most superficial resemblance to the society described by Heinlein, and philosophically it is its antithesis. Equating the two is the equivalent of saying that, because both countries periodically have "elections," that the United States and the People's Republic of China are both democracies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite tagging this "the big lie," please note that I am not claiming that any of the people responsible for this film (Neumeier, Verheoven, Marshall, or Davison) are Nazis -- they aren't. Neumeier and Verhoeven come from countries that saw the horrors of the Third Reich up close and, in Verhoeven's case, within his own lifetime; their agenda, if anything, is anti-fascist in nature. What I am accusing them -- and the industry writers who are aiding them, by printing their ridiculous claims unchallenged and making similar statements on their own -- of is repeating a patent falsehood with the hope that, if reiterated enough times, people might begin to believe it. Whether they now believe their own propaganda, I won't hazard to guess.
