Counter-Currents
Guide to Kulchur
Episode 4: Starship Troopers
Counter-Currents Radio
87 words / 1:31:40
Counter-Currents contributor Guillaume Durocher joins Fróði Midjord on the latest episode of the new podcast series, Guide to Kulchur, to discuss Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers, which is based on a novel by renowned science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and portrays a fascist future society embroiled in a war of extermination against a civilization of intelligent bugs. Both the book and the film reveal political insights that are not often seen in today’s popular culture. The episode is available on both YouTube and Spreaker (see below).
Listen to “Guide to Kulchur (guest: Guillaume Durocher) – episode 4, Starship Troopers” on Spreaker.
7 comments
Still no download button.
There is, as there has been on every episode, if you look on Spreaker to the right of the screen immediately below the audio line. There is a button that clearly says DOWNLOAD.
Oh, ok I see now. But you do have to go to Spreaker website for this and make a Spreaker account before you can get the download.
Greg’s podcast episodes start with a download link to an mp3. Would it be difficult to make this one in the same manner? It would be a help for many.
Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is a great book and should be required reading for any thinker in our times. Strangely enough it was written for teenagers and young adults, but the sci-fi action (and a certain apologia for war) is just a cover for a really sui generis moral philosophy.
‘What is the best way to share power and choose a government?’ ‘What is the real relationship between rights and duties?’ ‘What is the appropriate use of violence (not whether it should be used or not)?’
All the questions are answered under a meta-politics which ignores humanism and sentimentality on behalf of what is deems as true and necessary. It even takes that increasingly prevalent non sequitur of ‘whether man has any right to expand and conquer’ and provides the unexpectedly obvious answer.
The movie is entertaining but it’s just a shadow of the book. Verhoeven’s take on the book however remains ambiguous, as if he was confused of his own positions. He gives on one hand this absurdly over the top meatgrinder ripping up hapless newbies, but then contrasts that with an unmistakably positive portrayal of this neo-fascistic system.
The armed forces are brutally aggressive and yet they are still utterly heroic, and even somewhat paternalistic: despite the inclusion of women it comes across as a Mannerbund.
Possibly Verhoeven had a ‘death of the author’ moment and the vividness of Heinlein’s ideals broke through his attempt to satirise. Or maybe he just had more sympathies with the work than he admitted.
Thank you for your kind comment! Guillaume will definitely return to the show as often as possible. I agree, he’s great!
Someone needs to tell Mr. Guillaume Durocher the correction pronunciation of “Unz.” He repeatedly mispronounces the name in the first five minutes on the podcast.
Unz It is, in terms of pronunciation, the ‘plural’ of Un.
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