Starship Troopers (1997) isn’t just a movie about killing bugs in outer space. It’s also like a two-headed Hindu god, one which satirizes two different faces of capitalism at the same time. The first face looks like friendly beautiful Beverly Hills liberalism from the perspective of exploiters living inside the imperial core. The second face looks like fascism from the perspective of exploited people living in the Global South.
When the film was first released, however, confused movie reviewers believed that the film was a paean to fascism rather than a deeper anti-capitalist satire. Roger Ebert called the film “quasi-fascist;” Janet Maslin noted its “gung-ho patriotism.” But after a decade or two reviewers began to understand that they had missed the joke played on them by the movie’s director, Paul Verhoeven, who described the film as a satire of fascism in at least one interview published prior to its release. Most retrospective reviews published in the last few years now comfortably agree with Verhoeven, especially since Starship Troopers has become a cult classic which refuses to die.
And why shouldn’t they agree? Starship Troopers’s references to fascism are numerous and obvious in the society (“the Federation”) it presents, and include gray uniforms with black ties, gigantic militaristic eagle insignias, oaths to serve the military for as long as it may require, ridiculous xenophobic news clips, and worship of veterans—who are the only people in this society with the right to vote, and also the Federation’s founding fathers. Verhoeven later stated that the film is also a satire of possible “fascistic” influences in the USA which he noticed in the 1990s when Starship Troopers was first released.
But to call Starship Troopers a satire of fascism means only scratching the film’s surface. Today’s fascists appear to have no interest in this movie, while liberals claim that they dislike it because of its wooden acting and over-the-top violence, qualities which do not appear to trouble them when they line up to catch covid in movie theaters while watching the latest Marvel film. The reality is that liberals dislike Starship Troopers because the film satirizes capitalism and shows how it takes on the appearance of liberalism for the expropriators and fascism for the expropriated.
Plentiful references to liberalism abound in this film. The opening scene involves a news reporter being eviscerated by a gigantic insect which belongs to a “race” (not a species) of beings called arachnids, though none of the enormous insects presented here resemble spiders. (The film’s IMDB trivia page speculates that the term is a racial epithet—alongside the word “bug,” of course.) Later in the film, just before the first battle between humans and arachnids, the same reporter attempts to both-sides the war, commenting that a live-and-let-live policy might be preferable to armed confrontation. This liberal statement enrages the nearby soldiers who overhear him, prompting Johnny Rico, the film’s main character, to shout: “I say we kill ‘em all!”
For a prominent reporter to both-sides a war fought by his own country might have been conceivable in the 1990s when America was basking in the glory of the USSR’s collapse, but any corporate news reporter today who even hinted that there might be another side to the NATO-Russia conflict would be fired and blacklisted on the spot. People who question corporate narratives rarely get corporate news gigs to begin with, but at least one Western journalist was purged for making inappropriate comments during the Iraq War; Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges was recently erased from YouTube after he failed to toe the corporate line on Ukraine. In some ways, the Federation is actually more liberal than the USA in the year 2022.
One of Starship Troopers’s other news clips—these are the movie’s heart and soul—is a parody of the Crossfire-like debate shows which began (I believe) with crypto-nazi William F. Buckley and continued through the 1990s and into the 2000s with Crossfire itself (back when Tucker Carlson wore a bow tie and worked for CNN) until they were more or less discontinued by Jon Stewart’s famous “I’m not going to be your monkey” speech, though Stewart himself was comfortable inviting fascists (like Lou Dobbs or Henry Kissinger) onto The Daily Show for friendly conversations about how much better things would be in America if liberals and fascists could just put their differences aside and work together for the common good (of the bourgeoisie).
Starship Troopers’s nameless debate show involves a woman arguing about the possible existence of a “smart bug” with a man who is wearing one of Carlson’s old signature bow ties. (Although Carlson himself was only appointed co-host of Crossfire in 2001.) But like Carlson today, this character’s job is to make the most ignorant and reactionary statements possible. The Carlson analogue exclaims that he finds even the idea of a brain bug “offensive.”
Carlson himself is actually the only corporate media figure I can think of who has criticized the Ukraine War, though this criticism is only in service of the culture war, itself meant to distract liberals and conservatives from capitalism’s decline; there can be little doubt that he would fully support the Ukraine War if Republicans were waging it rather than Democrats. In 2019, when liberal economist Rutger Bregman told Carlson on his show that the Fox News host was merely a millionaire propagandist working in the service of billionaires, Carlson was so enraged that he called Bregman a moron and refused to air the segment—perhaps because, deep down, Carlson knew that Bregman was right.
Today these kinds of televised debates have mostly migrated to Twitch and YouTube, but Real Time with Bill Maher still hosts arguments between liberals and fascists (like Milo Yiannopoulos) every week, and presidential debates continue to be a feature of America’s endless campaign season, in accordance with one of liberalism’s main precepts: I might disagree with you, but I’ll die to protect your right to free speech, unless you’re a communist, in which case I’ll team up with fascists to destroy you. In contrast, real-world fascist societies like Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy have shown little interest in providing liberals with airtime; one of Hitler’s first moves as chancellor was sending all the communists to the concentration camps, though many liberals quickly followed—victimized by the same concentration camp system which liberal democracies first pioneered.
This means that the society depicted in Starship Troopers is actually liberal or at least possesses many liberal elements, since it tolerates public debate within certain ideological boundaries (unlike society in Nazi Germany). At the beginning of the film, in a high school ethics classroom, one character (Dizzy) says that “violence never solves anything,” a statement liberals have been making relentlessly these days regarding the Chris Rock / Will Smith slap scandal, even as they sit atop mountains of wealth accumulated by the structural violence of five centuries of capitalism. Dizzy’s ethics teacher, Mr. Razak, smiles patronizingly in response. Though he then goes on to disagree with her, stating that “naked force has solved more issues throughout history than any other factor,” the wishy-washy liberal Dizzy is still free to argue, which would not be the case in a more fascist classroom. It seems that in its core, in flashy Buenos Aires where this scene takes place, the Federation is secure enough to tolerate some dissent, while along its outer edges—at the other side of the galaxy—the violence it uses to maintain its wealth is much easier to see. Capitalism takes on a liberal form for its expropriators and a fascist form for the expropriated.
How else is the Federation liberal? Consider its multiracial harmony, which makes no sense if you believe that this film is only about fascism. Had Starship Troopers been released today, it would have been review-bombed by internet fascists for its wokeness: actors belonging to many different races have memorable speaking roles throughout this film. The main character, Johnny Rico, has a Spanish name, even if he is played by Casper van Dien, who looks like an Aryan superman from Triumph of the Will. Dizzy Flores, one of Rico’s love interests, is played by Dina Meyer, a dark-skinned Jewish woman. A Black soldier whips ten lashes into Rico’s back at boot camp. And most notably, the Federation losing its first engagement against the arachnids results in the replacement of its official leader, Sky Marshal Dienes—a screaming white male martinet who could have easily played one of the film’s drill instructors—with a calm Black woman named Tahat Meru.
This means that Starship Troopers not only predicted 9/11—by re-creating the Reichstag Fire in the form of the bug meteor which wipes Buenos Aires off the map, resulting in a suspiciously rapid declaration of war from the Federation (as well as yet more slick CNN-style propaganda) within minutes—but likewise predicted the Iraq War as well as the American ruling class’s decision to replace the incompetent and jingoistic George W. Bush with the more intelligent, refined, and Black Barack Obama, whose presidency was all about forging new paths for America’s more bourgeois people of color to maintain the capitalist status quo while fighting smarter and more efficient wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and who even knows where else. Or, as Tahat Meru resolutely declares: “To fight the bug, we must understand the bug.” Obama became infamous for his reliance on drones, while Tahat Meru orders the Federation fleet to use its air force to “glass” the planets surrounding the bug homeworld of Klendathu before invading them—a strategy which incinerates thousands of bugs but appears to move the needle nowhere.
The neoliberal obsession with appointing to power a few of the more tractable people of color—whose actions are indistinguishable from the white males they replace—is on full display in Starship Troopers. (The Neoliberal Counterrevolution began with the Chilean coup in 1973; in the Global South fascism and neoliberalism are much harder to distinguish than in the imperial core.) But Starship Troopers takes the woke-washing of neoliberalism to the next level. Racial animosity has disappeared in the Federation, and hatred of the arachnids has so thoroughly welded humanity into one “race” that the appointment of a Black woman as Sky Marshal occasions no comment. In many ways the world of Starship Troopers is a dream come true for California progressives as well as those people who still believe that AOC serves anything except the status quo.
The film’s famous shower scene—in which male and female characters display an almost Edenic ignorance of their own nudity—likewise suggests that gender barely matters to these people. The Roger Young, the film’s main starship—a gigantic gray phallus which resembles a star destroyer with the Enterprise’s warp engines attached to the stern—is both captained and piloted by women, while numerous women fight and die within the ranks of the Mobile Infantry (the Federation’s space marines). At the same time, in keeping with the rampant homophobia in the period of the film’s release—in which even progressive champion Barack Obama stated on numerous occasions that be believed gay marriage to be an affront to God—queerness does not seem to exist in the Federation.
Nonetheless, the Federation appears to be a relatively sex-positive society. In the film’s only love scene, Rico and Dizzy are caught in the act by former high school ethics teacher-turned-lieutenant Razak, who then encourages them to continue having sexual intercourse, presumably in order to provide more soldiers for the cause. (Razak is so serious about discipline that he states his intention to personally execute anyone who disobeys his orders—the liberal ethics teacher becomes a Nazi officer when he moves from the imperial core to the Global South—but he seems easygoing when it comes to his troops getting it on.) Earlier in the film a nameless biology instructor states that the “Arkellian sand beetle”—a kind of arachnid—is a superior form of life because it “reproduces in vast numbers,” while toward the film’s end there is a hint that the Federation—which lost a hundred thousand soldiers in one hour during the Battle of Klendathu—is running so low on manpower that Rico’s unit is reinforced by soldiers who are clearly teenagers “fresh out of boot.” One suspects that in the near future, the Federation will begin forcing women back into the home to replace all the soldiers lost in this war, in keeping with the thesis presented by Silvia Federici’s masterpiece, Caliban and the Witch.
Starship Troopers ends on a high note with the capture of the brain bug, the declaration by Gestapo-mode Doogie Houser that the war has reached a turning point, and a final volley of bombastic propaganda stating that the Federation—which “needs soldiers”—“will keep fighting…and they’ll win!” But they haven’t really won yet, have they? Though the film never states that the Federation is losing—because Starship Troopers is the kind of movie the Federation itself would make—there is little indication that the fascists and liberals who control this society have learned anything from their mistakes. (The Federation’s “mighty fleet” is decimated by bug plasma artillery on two separate occasions because its starships fly too closely together.)
Fascism, or late capitalism, whatever you want to call it, depends on war to slow the overall tendency of profit to decline, which means it doesn’t matter if the Federation wins or loses, so long as it keeps fighting, and so long as that fighting keeps enriching the bourgeoisie—people like Rico’s parents, who early in the film strongly discourage him from joining the military. Although Rico wants to join in order to follow his girlfriend Carmen (who dreams of becoming a pilot), he is also inspired by the idea of being a citizen and earning the right to vote. (In modern American society, it is almost impossible to gain American citizenship (and the right to vote) outside of birth or marriage; feudalism casts its shadow on the present.) Rico’s parents, however, have no interest in voting, likely because voting in the Federation is (like in the USA) an illusion to trick liberal rubes into accepting the status quo, and bourgeois folks like Rico’s parents are the ones who really control society—although, like the investors in the military industrial complex who perished in the towers on 9/11—Ward Churchill’s “Little Eichmanns”—Rico’s mother and father are later killed by a bug meteor, because sometimes the chickens really do come home to roost.
Until the film’s end, one has the impression that the Federation is losing the war—since almost every battle it fights is a catastrophic defeat—until Gestapo Doogie Houser announces that things have turned around with the brain bug’s capture. In reality, this supposed triumph guarantees nothing, particularly if the ones studying that bug are liberal or Nazi scientists. The Federation has already captured, studied, dissected, tortured, and murdered all kinds of bug prisoners in this film—remember those Arkellian sand beetles? Because of this, the Federation is actually less humane than the bugs, who “don’t take prisoners,” but R&D worthy of Mengele, Japan’s infamous Unit 731, and the CIA’s countless misadventures has made virtually no difference to the Federation’s war effort. At boot camp, for instance, cadets never practice with foes who fight like arachnids, and this leaves the human soldiers completely unprepared for battle. Shortly before being dropped into combat on Klendathu, one officer nonetheless screams: “Remember your training, and you will come back alive!” A bug tears him to pieces almost the instant he sets foot on the surface of the alien world—hilariously, in fact, because at its core this movie is a comedy showing what happens when liberals and fascists actually live up to their ideals, whether that means volunteering via reddit to fight in Ukraine or on an alien planet like Klendathu.
Capitalist alienation itself—alienation from one’s fellow workers (the humans versus the arachnids and even the mobile infantry grunts versus the fleet officers), from one’s own body (the many soldiers and arachnids who are torn to pieces because of this war), from one’s environment (striding upon hostile alien worlds where dangerous foes can kill you at any instant), from one’s family (Rico’s father throws him out of the house with only the clothes on his back), from one’s friends (Dizzy, the only character who remains totally true to Rico throughout the film, meets a gruesome and meaningless end)—is a major theme.
Yet while liberals may now understand that Starship Troopers is about living and breathing fascism—without anyone in the film explicitly stating that “this is fascism and it is bad”—liberals lean on philosophers like Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, or Umberto Eco to deliberately misunderstand the concept of fascism itself. David Roth’s article on the film in The New Yorker (a magazine edited by noted Iraq War cheerleader David Remnick) quotes Susan Sontag’s description of the characteristics of fascism—“the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect”—but these are vague mystical descriptors, impossible to measure, that could apply to virtually any human society at any time or place.
These liberal critics and philosophers, of course, have no interest in scientifically analyzing the economic system which gives rise to fascism—nor noting that fascism first arose in second-rate capitalist powers like Germany, Italy, and Japan which wanted a bigger piece of the colonial pie—since that same economic system has provided them with wealth and fame. But fascism’s roots go deeper than Hitler or Mussolini, as described in Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. One of the major influences on Starship Troopers rarely mentioned by liberal critics is Zulu (1964), which features Michael Caine as a young British soldier joining his fellow lads in slaughtering hordes of totally savage and dehumanized Africans for the glory of the empire. This is a lengthy, boring, and disgusting film, but it has a near-perfect rating on Rotten Tomatoes, much higher than that of Starship Troopers.
Along the lines of Zulu’s pro-colonialism, a white character in Starship Troopers named Ace picks up an electric violin and begins playing Dixie, the Confederate national anthem. To paraphrase Aimé Césaire, fascism is just colonialism washing up on the shores of the imperial core. Domenico Losurdo, in Liberalism: A Counter-History—which describes how the most prominent liberal philosophers in history were all investors in the slave trade—might agree. Wilhelm Reich adds, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, that sexual suppression in the declining petite bourgeois family is the germ of fascism; Verhoeven has stated that American censors have no problem with violence; bared breasts, however, drive them completely out of their minds. (With the exception of its homophobia, the Federation may be more liberal about sexuality than the USA.)
To tie this all together: we can only conclude that the liberal squeamishness and revulsion directed toward Starship Troopers is a case of hating one’s own mirror image, and that since its beginnings in rural 16th century England capitalism has always looked like fascism from the perspective of those whom it exploits, whether they are the peasants driven off the commons or Ukrainians being slaughtered by the Nazis of the Azov Battalion. For the exploiters, however, capitalism takes on a more liberal appearance.
And so when liberals dump billions of dollars of weapons on Ukraine, and order that country’s child soldiers to commit suicide in a war started in the name of natural gas and NATO expansion; when liberals like The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, speak out in favor of the Iraq War; or when The New York Times supports Boris Yeltsin’s fascist coup against the Russian parliament in 1993—Starship Troopers is the result. “War makes insects of us all,” Verhoeven has said, though no insect could ever be as inhumane as the average fascist. It might be said, instead, that wars fought in the name of increasing profits are monstrous, and that the people who support or excuse these wars—the tens of millions of liberals and fascists who are thriving on our societal collapse—are far more monstrous than any arachnid.