JIC my post left the wrong impression, I am not in favor of corporal punishment. I raised my son without it and he turned out fine. Re: Dulce Et Decorum Est: What a poem means is subjective. My dad was in the first wave of sailors send to clear up Hiroshima after the bomb and he was still waking up in the night screaming from nightmares about what he saw over 20 years later. I will always read this poem as a soldier screaming at a government that lied to him about the glories of war and who found no glory in war at all, just horror.

Huh, I didn't remember the bit about non-military service, but I haven't read the book in quite a while. Thanks for bringing that up.

Heinlein was getting disability payments in the 1930s, which was exactly the sort of aid he would rail against later in life. Hence the irony. Also of note, he worked as an engineer in a shipyard during WW2, but he was not in the Navy. Re racism, there's Farnham’s Freehold, which has Africans castrating white men, taking white women as concubines and eating white children - all while it's supposed to be an anti-racist book. And, while he did write some strong female characters, let's not get into the amount of misogyny in some of his books. As I said, he's all over the place.

Thanks for the response. I'll leave it to people with stronger history backgrounds than mine to say it the US's engagements in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Samoa,... are the equivalent of what Europe was doing. No sarcasm, I literally don't feel qualified to answer that