I'd prefer military fiction books that are ...

Yeah, but taking that philosophy to its logical extreme is pretty much equivalent with fascism in every sense, and fascism just doesn't work out the same way liberal democracy does.

Be sure. Few years ago Empire magazine ran a story "Triple Dutch" about Verhoven's Hollywood years. He was horrified by the book, did not finish it even, so it was a firm decision to make the movie a satire. I remember when I watched it first time I was rooting for the bugs. Only this movie and Avatar has had that effect on me. The uniforms were deliberately Nazi-like, the bathroom scene was intended to show that those soldiers are so brainwashed, so machine-like that they are not exhibiting even basic human traits such as being interested in the naked body of the opposite sex.

The whole interview was very interesting. First Verhoven gets shit from the Dutch film institute or some such because he made "too commercial movie" - meaning the most popular Dutch movie of all time - Turkish Delight. Revolted he goes to Hollywood. First movie is Robocop. The American critics hails the movie, pointing to the many layers in the story. Europeans do not get it that well. Then it's Total Recall. Originally he wanted to make something much closer to Dick's story but once Arnold joined Verhoven rewrote the whole thing to suit the big star. People on both sides of the pond like the movie.
And then he does troopers. To his absolute horror the Americans accuse him of being a Nazi and propagating their ideas [NYT article no less]. Deliberately or not all American critics decide to "misunderstand" the message. Europeans loved it though - there was not a single critic in Europe that did not get the message.

Fascinating story....

The main one that people always talk about is that in the novel citizenship is contingent on having served in the military. That, and the general interpretation that the book is pro-military (e.g. GP's "utopian vision of war").

Personally, I think that we've been so conditioned to see metaphors and morals in our stories that we automatically assume that there must be a subtext to narrative choices. The whole concept of Chekhov's gun - if it's worth mentioning, it must be critical to the plot. We always have giant semaphore flagmen pointing out the dramatic ironies, and cluing us in to where the plot is going. Have a significantly different social policy without having it lead to absolute ruin? The author and the book must be promoting that policy. Show war and violence without immediately showing the horrors and highly negative consequences? You must be glorifying it. There's something of an inability to just take things at face value. ("Society is ruled by superintelligent apes?", "Okay, that's cool and different." versus "The apes must symbolically represent mans' savage nature - if things turn out well, that must mean the novel is a cautionary tale against progressivism and urging us to throw off what dehumanizing technology and return to a "noble savage" state, but if things turn out poorly, it's obviously a paean urging us throw off our base nature and become more civilized and technologically advanced.")

But then again, I managed to read and enjoy the Chronicles of Narnia as a child without really picking up their Christian subtext, and was absolute shite at the "by painting the room blue, the author is hinting at the character's repressed longing for his mother" game that high school/university literature classes played, so I might have a different perspective on this that most people.

(This is the point in the argument where someone pulls out some quotes from Heinlein, attempting to prove that a pro-military mindset really was the impetus behind the book. Personally, I don't really care. If literary critics can argue that the author's intent is irrelevant and the book has obvious homoerotic subtext, I can certainly argue in the other direction and say that it doesn't matter what the author intended, the cigar is just a cigar, and the book is still enjoyable.)