Interesting Links for 19-01-2015

[andrewducker]

• Women (and black people) less likely to go into professions perceived to require innate talent
  (tags: women race jobs )
• Steven Soderbergh, copyright hypocrite
  (tags: copyright movies )
• Scottish law on assisted suicide is intolerably unclear
  (tags: suicide Scotland law )
• Does anyone know of a barber in Edinburgh who will give a gent's haircut to a

Comments

[ext_2864067]

I would say there'd be quite a substantial difference, though neither's ideal.

With full (military) national service, you make your entire population soldiers, but the negative effects would be mitigated because if everyone's special that way, no-one is. The military would have to be slightly more tolerant (and I don't just mean in the equalities sense) of its members in order to accommodate the entirety of society.

With the Starship Troopers version, you'd instead get the impressively unhealthy setup of a political militocracy, constantly self-justifying its own rulership (as it does in the classroom scenes in Starship Troopers) and therefore prone to be more, not less, militant. You'd also have a self-disenfranchised underclass, despised by those in power.

Heinlein posits a situation in which this militocracy would be less likely to engage in wars because the votes would be from the soldiers who would have to do the fighting. I think this is questionable, based on what can be seen of real-world military-led countries' behaviour.

[lil_shepherd]

But the one important difference between military led countries in the real world and military led countries in Heinlein's world is that in the real world all the people who have been military do not vote their leaders into power. And incompetent generals/colonels would not get the vote.

It is an interesting point that at the end of WW2, Winston Churchill, who had himself been a soldier (indeed, he liked being an active soldier) and who was hailed the world over as a great war leader was voted out of power almost entirely by the returning soldiers. (This had a lot to do with the Beverage Report, but still.)

Not, incidentally, do I think that Heilein meant Starship Troopers to be regarded as a Utopia, you know. He is exploring a possibility and, for my money, whether we define it as Fascist or not stems from how we read the book, and our own political knowledge and assumptions. Heinlein's conclusions are... easy to make assumptions about.

[ext_2864067]

True, true. However, the other interpretation of Churchill's fall from political power is the same as that of Wellington's: great war-leaders do not make great peacetime-leaders. The two require markedly different personality traits.

If the only politically enfranchised class were the soldiers, who except great war-leaders would have the political clout to run for election?

[lil_shepherd]

If the only politically enfranchised class were the soldiers, who except great war-leaders would have the political clout to run for election?

Well, there also seems to be a tradition that coups are often conducted by ranks below staff officer.

It must also be said that, according to my father, who was there, when Churchill went to France to take plaudits from victorious UK troops in 1945, he was booed.