Heinlein’s Citizen-Soldiers

I used to read a fair amount of science-fiction between the ages of 12 and 14. Unlike many I was not a fan of Robert Heinlein.

After I read Farmham’s Freehold it was clear he was nuts – and Stranger in a Strange Land was a fraud from beginning to end.

Still, he had some pretty good stuff. Starship Troopers, for one. I was impressed by Heinlein’s idea that you should not be allowed to vote unless you served in the military. For that matter you shouldn’t be allowed to run for office unless you served.

Presidents who never served have been catastrophes. The brain-damaged (from being kicked in the face by a horse), syphilitic, homosexual Abraham Lincoln never served and started the War Between the States, leading to at least 620,000 casualties – about five million today with the increase in population.

Woodrow Wilson, who was as ignorant as hell and so clueless he fell victim to forged maps after World War I – got the U.S. involved in another in a long line of European wars which was none of the United States’ business. WWI led directly to WII, putting the lie to the incompetent Wilson’s desire to impose the left-wing delusion of “democracy” on the world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt – World War II. Another European war that was none of our business (by the way, for the historically ignorant the United States had been attacking Japan for ten years before they responded with the attack on Pearl Harbor – that’s what happens when you cut off a country’s oil).

John F. Kennedy did serve but was such a bad officer he should have been court-martialed – and that would have been the end of his political career. Has everyone forgotten he was so incompetent he got his PT boat cut in half by a Japanese ship?

He did get the U.S. involved in Vietnam but it was the never-served LBJ who escalated it (he said he was afraid his critics would call him “chicken” if he didn’t) then declined to run for a second term, dumping the war in Nixon’s lap.

Poppy Bush did serve as a pilot (and got shot down, killing the two airmen on his plane) and started two unnecessary but temporary wars. His alcoholic brain-damaged moron of a son, who hid in a Champaign National Guard Unit (and didn’t even finish his time in it) and declined to fly a fighter jet in Vietnam, is/was a coward Chickenhawk who started two completely unnecessary wars which are still going on after 16 years and have made things much worse over there. That’s what the brain damage from 20+ years of alcoholism will do to you. Shrub, as ignorant and incompetent as Wilson, thought “democracy” could be imposed on a bunch of inbred Arab Muslims – and didn’t deport the Saudis from the U.S. (we were attacked by Saudi Arabia on 9-11, not Afghanistan, not Iraq). Such stupidity and incompetence is breath-taking.

Heinlein, who was in the Navy but invalided out with tuberculosis, had given much thought to the ideas in Starship Troopers. The movie, which is incredibly bloody and violent, has little to do with the novel and I suspect it would have made Heinlein spin in his grave.

Heinlein’s world wouldn’t be a perfect one but it would have kept incompetents such as Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, LBJ and Dubya Shrub out of office – and it would be a much better United States.