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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1356241" data-attributes="member: 463">Quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Originally Posted by Mongoose_MattMike: You know, way before the film, I always took the government of the book to be fascist. Some people I have spoken to agree, others do not - funny thing, interpretation  Heinlein himself was fairly ambiguous on this point. . .--------------------------------------------------------------------------------He went into great depth on this.  The government in the book was a representative democracy, not that different from modern USA (maybe with a stronger participative element), except that only ex-servicemen and ex-servicewomen were entitled to vote. So it was a militocracy as well as a democracy but definitely not fascist in any way other than "right wing= fascist". It seems to have been Heinlein's idea of a utopian setup, and of course he's been attacked for it for decades. Note that serving personnel didn't vote, only those who had completed their terms, it's not a militocracy. Verhoeven clearly doesn't share Heinlein's politics so he twisted Heinlein's vision and hinted at the Earth government in the movie being proto-fascist, as well as clearly militarist. He was primarily interested in drawing out parrallels between the humans and the bugs, not a concern of Heinlein.I enjoyed the TV show, which in gung-ho spirit is closer to the book although it looks more like the movie. It has a lower death rate than either, though, and this + CGI gives it a very videogame feel in the many battle scenes.EDITOK, so I contradicted myself - er, you know what I mean...  it's rule by ex-soldiers, not by the generals.  You have to cease being in the military before you can vote.  Clear enough?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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