There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor. Their faith was been shaken by an Arrowhead community manager they believed they found to be (gasp) progressive who was then subsequently harassed, but their head-scratching reading of Helldivers 2 as a “non-political” game is worth examining.
The only thing that makes sense is that these players have the shallowest of surface-level readings of the game. You are a patriotic soldier serving Super Earth. You must kill bugs and evil robots trying to hurt your brothers-in-arms and innocent citizens. There are no storylines to insert progressive causes into, everyone wears helmets so no “forced diversity.” Therefore, no politics.
Of course, this is…wildly off the mark, as Helldivers 2 is about the most blatantly obvious satire of militaristic fascism since the film that inspired it, Starship Troopers.
We’re also not given any circumstances behind this war. We can’t draw any definitive conclusions about it.
Heinlein was a WWII veteran, and WWII was where the concept of ‘total war’ was pioneered. (And later demonstrated to be a pretty bad idea, but that’s still not accepted by everyone.) We firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, knowing that it would cause massive civilian casualties, with only the barest military excuses; civilian casualties were the point, because we believed that it would break the will of the people of Germany and Japan to keep fighting. We can look back now and see that this was a dumb idea, esp. since Hitler was doing the same thing to England, and it was stiffening the resolve of the English. But unless you argue that the Allies were fundamentally fascist during WWII–which seems plainly false–then it’s not reasonable to argue that the idea of total war was a fascist idea.
At a minimum, we know that it’s a failed idea now.