by Daniele Scalea and Emanuele Mastrangelo

Italy is once again debating citizenship law. First, the Olympic gold medal victory by the women's national volleyball team refreshed the debate: the media emphasized the presence of two black players (most of the time, completely ignoring the existence of the others) and in particular of Paola Egonu, already well-known for denouncing alleged Italian racism and for being brought up as an example by Roberto Vannacci, in his famous book, of somatic traits that are not typically Italian.

After that, Antonio Tajani and his party Forza Italia decided, despite the fact that Italy is already the most generous (according to the numbers) European country in granting citizenship to foreigners, to extend the Left a hand with the so-called ius scholae. Without dealing, for reasons of space, with the proposal, let us just mention, in the wide-ranging debate that has ensued, one position that has been particularly controversial. The author - for a change - the newly appointed MEP Vannacci.

General Vannacci, voicing his opposition to Tajani's proposal, remarked that citizenship entails rights and duties, and that studying in Italy does not imply automatic acceptance of the latter. The three duties he refers to are: compliance with the laws, tax payment, and defense of the homeland. Thus in a speech at Versiliana festival, later reiterated in an off-the-cuff interview, during which Vannacci asked, “Are those who attend school here willing to defend our land even at the expense of their own lives?”

The third duty in particular, “the sacred duty of defending the Fatherland” (Art. 52 of the current Constitution), immediately stirred up heated reactions. But also reminded, to many, what was written in a book, as much overheard as misunderstood, by another military-born Robert(o) turned writer. We refer to Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. And we seize the opportunity, Vannacci's words, to devote a few thoughts to it.

Starship Troopers - the book, not the movie

The American author (1907-1988) is widely recognized as one of the writers who, in the 1940s and 1950s, succeeded in bringing science fiction from the pulp magazines to be recognized as a worthy literary genre. Starship Troopers, published in 1959, is his most famous and perhaps most controversial work. One need only consider that his publisher at the time, Scribner's, after years of partnership, rejected his novel with a cold pre-printed letter. Heinlein, who was already a famous author, had to wait more than a year before finding another publisher willing to release the novel.

Many may be more familiar with the 1997 film adaptation of the same name by Paul Verhoven. Let us clear the air at once of any possible misunderstanding. A film that has become iconic in spite of itself, it was an attempt to exploit the Starship Troopers plot to satirize media society (the Internet was then in its early days) while simultaneously criticizing the militaristic motifs of Heinlein's novel. It missed the mark, because in the end the segment of the audience that enjoyed the film (few, actually), did so for the opposite reasons to those Verhoven expected...

The twist in meaning also involved a twist in form. Consider how Verhoven purported to portray a society with clear Nazi traits - even at the cost of having the protagonist and the main female subject, Filipino Juan “Johnny” Rico and Hispanic Carmen Ibanez, impersonated by the very blond and blue-eyed Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards. In addition, the movie contains many more action and combat sequences than the book, which, for a good half, only recounts the protagonist's training (with great attention to detail and realism, Heinlein having been a U.S. Navy officer) and ideological explanation of the future world in which the story is set.

Citizenship in Heinlein's view

A futuristic world that scandalized a wide audience, starting with Charles Scribner. Throughout his science fiction story about the war between a human federation spread over dozens of planets and a technologically advanced race of bugs, Heinlein inserted numerous reflections on society and history. One of these is precisely that concerning citizenship, which, in the scenario he envisioned, was conferred only on those who had served and honorably completed their entirely voluntary and optional military service.

The logic was to balance authority and responsibility as best as possible. Attributing responsibility to someone without authority is absurd; giving authority to the irresponsible is disastrous. Voting, Heinlein writes, is authority, the supreme authority from which all others derive; while responsibility is demonstrated by considering the well-being of the majority more important than personal well-being: morality is realized when one understands the mother cat who dies defending kittens, Heinlein says in one of the many aphorist-flavored lines for which he is famous. Such demonstration is given through military service: "We require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life — and lose it, if need be — to save the life of the state".

According to Heinlein, our democracies have an unbalanced relationship between authority and responsibility. They grant the right to vote to anyone without any check on his or her sense of responsibility: " If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead".

Heinlein's argument appears maybe extreme, but the author justified it by the fact that every democratic system already has limits to the right to vote, for example, those of age ("How a thirty-year old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year-old genius"). Heinlein, then, resolves to imagine a future in which passive and active electorate is selected solely and exclusively on a principle of self-sacrifice to the community. A sort of voluntarist version of ancient Greek-Roman democracies or eighteenth-nineteenth-century “nations in arms” (think of Giuseppe Garibaldi's views), in which, however, participation was not voluntary, but taken for granted: “Every citizen is a soldier, every soldier is a citizen.” Heinlein, a child of the most libertarian America, adds to this the principle of voluntarism: those who do not want to, can comfortably stay out, no one will harass them.

It is very ironic that the main critics of Heinlein's ideas are in those circles that, moving from 1959 to the present, cherish proposals to limit universal suffrage on the basis of another kind of merit, knowledge. They theorize to exclude “functional illiterates” from voting, often defining this as all those who do not conform to the official ideas. Behind the mask of meritocracy, there is actually ideological conformism. It is since 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, that we have been reading lofty positions on the abolition of universal suffrage. A counter-deduction that, moreover, Heinlein himself ruthlessly confronts and dismantles in the very folds of his novel: "Let the intelligent elite run things" said one of the characters. "The pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility", is the answer. Game, set, match.

The society of entitlements

That between authority and responsibility is not, according to Heinlein, the only imbalance inherent in our democracies. The other is that between rights and duties.

“The basis of all morality is duty” to the community, it is stated in Starship Troopers. The acquisition of the concept of duty, placed before instinctive self-love, marks the transition to adulthood. Our society, however, talks relentlessly about rights. Citizens glorify the mythology of “rights” and lose sight of duties. “No nation, so constituted, can endure” - said the American author, who had already expressed his ethical worldview based on the spirit of individual sacrifice in the poignant short story The Long Watch, in which a man prevents a coup at the cost of his life and before he dies sees himself surrounded by the spirits of all the heroes, from the humble and unknown to the most famous war medal recipient, who sacrificed their lives for the community.

READ ALSO
L'America si conta --- Daniele Scalea a Radio Maria

It was not the writer of this article who put “rights” in quotes, but the novelist from Butler, Missouri himself. He did not believe in the existence of natural, inviolable rights. There is no natural right to life, he wrote, because the ocean does not hear the pleas of the drowning man; nor could the father who refused to die, when there is no other choice to save his children, justify himself with his own right to life. Rather, the sacrifice of life was necessary to win another, liberty, which is itself not a “natural right” but must be regularly redeemed with the blood of patriots. Sublimating the instinct of preservation from the self to the collective of which one is a part (primarily the family, but equally true of the nation) is, according to Heinlein, at the origin of moral sense: "The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation".

Twilight of the West

Although this will divert us from the starting topic, namely that of citizenship, we cannot avoid following the thread of the critique of our society contained in Starship Troopers. We write “ours” because, despite the fact that Heinlein was thinking of the 1950s American society, he anticipated with great foresight the course of the West's moral decline. When he described the final stage of the dying liberal-democracy, he was painting a picture that was, alas, very similar to what we have before our eyes today. Here is a lesson told by protagonist Rico's history professor:

"Law-abiding people," Dubois had told us, "hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons... to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed. (...) Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings.

It is sadly reminiscent of the situation of degeneration and insecurity that is becoming more worrisome year by year on our streets, often featuring baby gangs.

Heinlein had a clear theory: the spread of juvenile crime depends on the lack of proper punishment. First by parents, then by the state. He was in favor of corporal punishments (he considered them democratic: a whipping affects the rich as much as the poor, but a fine is capable of putting the poor man down and being dismissed with laughter by the rich man), but most of all he disapproved of the fact that there is not an immediate severe punishment that can correct the young offender. Instead, mild punishments are administered until the offender reach adulthood, and only then, suddenly, do we punish harshly those who we had not wanted to educate and save earlier (Heinlein was optimistic: today, even for adult criminals, harsh punishments are a mirage).

Denatality

“Dulcis in fundo” - or perhaps it would be better to write, “in cauda venenum.” In the pages of Starship Troopers we find another masterful warning against another evil of our civilization, perhaps the supreme one: infertility, childlessness.

Reflecting on whether it is possible to wipe out war through birth control - that is, to limit oneself numerically so as not to need additional resources to conquer - Heinlein penned a memorable sentence, which the current state of affairs in Europe confirms to be true:

(...) any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out by breeds which expand. Some human populations did so, in Terran history, and other breeds moved in and engulfed them.

Conclusion

Heinlein's thoughts seem to echo in Roberto Vannacci's. How many of the immigrants we have gifted Italian citizenship to would be willing to take up arms, defend and die for our country? I believe very few, very few. Perhaps even fewer than those willing to take up arms and die against our homeland (this is not a misguided assumption: in Britain in past years it was found that twice as many Muslim residents left to join ISIS as had volunteered to join “their” country's Armed Forces).

And while the above mentioned average progressive may object that even quite a few Italians by ius sanguinis today would refuse to defend the homeland in arms, this does not authorize bestowing citizenship with superficiality. It is not just a matter of national security (in the fight against terrorism, the instrument of administrative expulsion is missed against Islamists with citizenship). Rather, we need to reflect on that Article 52 that the Constituent Fathers conceived after careful and thorough debates in 1948, considering precisely that the only time the term “sacred” appears in the Constitution is in that passage.

Everything suggests, then, that the problem is not in broadening the granting of citizenship but, on the contrary, rethinking it. And - ironically - there where pretentious debates launched by interested supporters of ius soli and ius scholae are failing pitifully, a 70-year-old children's science fiction novel seems to be giving us insights that deserve to be humbly and realistically assessed.

+ post

Founder and President of Centro Studi Machiavelli. A graduate in History (University of Milan) and Ph.D. in Political Studies (Sapienza University), he teaches “History and Doctrine of Jihadism” at Marconi University and “Geopolitics of the Middle East” at Cusano University, where he has also taught on Islamic extremism in the past.

From 2018 to 2019, he served as Special Advisor on Immigration and Terrorism to Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Guglielmo Picchi; he later served as head of the technical secretariat of the President of the Parliamentary Delegation to the Central European Initiative (CEI).

Author of several books, including Immigration: the reasons of populists, which has also been translated into Hungarian.

EM
+ post