Start with affordable government daycare. Add “appropriate” education, media and entertainment. Social enhancement for everyone who emulates the correct attitudes.
Should this not move people along fast enough include subtle and then not-so-subtle penalties for non-compliance.
In a couple of generations a structured program could make strides in altering the behaviors and thoughts of vast numbers of people.
Fortunately nobody in the US is capable of devising a structured program of anything. Heh.
That will be quite enough of that. I too want to call the NSDAP right-wing, but then the right-wingers want to call it left-wing, solely because it was the paragon of evil, so it must be more like those other guys who are not like me.
Of course, if you want to consider the vile-topian Turner Diaries, that one sure read like right-wing to me, and it is much uglier than the 3rd Reich.
No, the handmaids weren’t specifically criminals. The criminals (and women who completely refused to be handmaids) are sent to the colonies to work. The colonies are described as places where toxic waste needed cleaned up and they worked people there until they died. Later in the book we find out there is also an option for some of criminals to work at what is essentially a whorehouse where the high ranking men can go and unwind. Fertility is so desired that a woman could have committed a crime and still be a handmaid, but it would depend on the crime.
The handmaids are simply women of childbearing age who are given a chance to bear children for the higher ranking men whose wives are unable to provide children. Offred states after so many chances (3 or 4 different officers?) if conception isn’t achieved the handmaid is sent to the colonies.
IIRC the women are broken down as:
Handmaids (as above) - wear red
Marthas - wear green and are maids/cooks/household staff who are usually older women beyond childbearing age. Offred is among the first wave of handmaids and she indicates that in the future the handmaids will eventually become Marthas after childbearing age if they bear children for the officers and shipped to the colonies if they did not.
Wives - they wear blue and are married to officers. They are given the child to raise (with the help of the Marthas) if a handmaid produces a child. They’re present when the husbands attempt to conceive with the handmaids.
Econowives - (I think they wear stripes?) - are wives of poorer men who don’t “rank” enough to be given a handmaid. IIRC their wives are most likely not able to conceive or they’d be handmaids as well.
:rolleyes: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia… and a whole lot of older societies. History disagrees with you.
And under the right circumstances I can certainly see something like The Handmaid’s Tale happening. America is a deeply religious, overwhelmingly Christian country, and the hatred of women has always been a central feature of Christianity. A large religious revival could easily cause a major rollback of women’s rights in America; coupled with a large enough disaster that could let the fanatics seize control.
If so she is roughly as delusional as Tea Partiers who think Obama is turning this country into a Sharia Moslem theocracy. A society that banned abortion still exists in places like Ireland to-day and within the lifetimes of many still living in pre-1973 United States (with the exception of the handful of states that legalized abortion beforehand) and none of them were insane sociopathic theocracies like the one described in The Handmaiden’s Tale. Considering the said theocracy in the book even forbids the education of women it is not even comparable to actual theocractic or theonomic Christian governments such as John Calvin’s Geneva but a knockoff of Taliban Afghanistan.
I’d say 1984 is slightly more likely in the real world (see North Korea) although I doubt “thought crimes” will be detectable anytime soon nor will historical records be so easily changeable while Brave New World overall is probably the most likely (although still very unlikely) considering the sentiments of many transhumanists.
While I haven’t read the book since high school, it’s my recollection that handmaids were all women who were considered criminals by the new regime (although mostly for things that aren’t crimes today). IIRC, Offred’s crime was adultery. The information on the Wikipedia article seems consistent with my memory:
Taliban taking the working female population of Afghanistan and putting them back into purdah. Sounds like women are property there. Africa with the refusal of men to use condoms and the rape statistics - doesn’t sound like women are respected as anything other than a screw, free labor and a convenient way to keep the food cooked and the house clean for a sizable segment of the population.
And Handmaids Tale - try getting an abortion in a lot of countries in the world, and how many Planned Parenthood offices have been closed, and ‘abortion clinics’ closed in the US - how many states is it effectively impossible to get morning after pill or regular birth control because the pharmacists refuse to honor the prescriptions? That woman in Ireland dying because she was refused a theraputic abortion?
Ireland, the nation that rounded up women for use as slave labor and has been willing to condemn women to slow death with its “pro-life” stance? They may not have gotten as bad as the story, but they certainly were headed there.
And really, the Republic of Gilead isn’t that far off from what most Christian societies were like towards women historically. Consider such practices as using the Scold’s Bridle on women for speaking their minds. A rabid, insane hatred towards women is as I said a central feature of Christianity.
I’ll also point out that as a “pro-life” person who has called for women to be forced to go through pregnancy as punishment, she’d consider your expressed beliefs as evidence of her position.
The Taliban didn’t gain power until about a decade after the publication of Handmaid’s Tale, so unless she’s psychic then Margaret Atwood couldn’t have been inspired by Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Some of the handmaids were those who were guilty of the newly instituted gender crimes, but any seemingly fertile woman who was otherwise unmarried was a handmaid by default. So some were but not all. Wombs weren’t going to be wasted while a woman waited to be wed.
Well, they do that because things don’t go from A to Z overnight, and including B through Y takes a lot of time.
So the OP specifically mentioned the U.S. and a single lifetime - who knows whether things could happen that fast, but I suspect sure they could. Look at the bad WMD claim. The guy who made it got reelected even after everybody knew it was wrong.
Look how relatively fast Nazi Germany happened. It just takes the right combination of ingredients. I don’t think small scale dystopias are uncommon in history.
And people who think that women, even in the U.S., would act as a 51% bloc to prevent their own subjugation need to take a better look around. There’s just as many women who would go along with it as men who wouldn’t.
That was not necessarily the source of the tyranny. Some people interpret it as a society in which the masses were given bread and circuses until they were too lazy and complacent to question authority. Sort of like Fahrenheit 451: keep the plebes entertained, and they will not notice or care that you are oppressing the intelligentsia. I think that is quite possible.
Starting a war on bad intelligence is not comparable to establishing a totalitarian dictatorship.
Weimar was unstable from the start due to clashes between communistic and nationalistic factions, the aftermath of World War I, economic crises, and other factors. In contrast, Anglophone nations (including the United States) have long traditions of constitutional government-the United States has never had a government forcibly overthrown since the Revolution and England has seen one since 1688.
In what sense? It is true that women are equally pro-life as men if that’s what you mean by “subjugation” (:rolleyes:), but I don’t see a lot of women (or men) calling for a ban on the education of women as occurs in Atwood’s dystopia.
The Taliban gained a foothold in a backwater country like Afghanistan while The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hungers Games or Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 all take place in the US. That’s where it falls apart. There is no way to go from the US in 2013 to these futures without some fictional handwave.
You see it a lot in apocalyptic fiction too: VAMPIRES!.. Something Something Something… The Military is Dead!.. Something Something Something… One Plucky Group Survived and Will Fight Back!
No! If the vampires take out the entire world (including entire armies and trained law enforcement) and only a plucky group of survivors remain, they’re not going to be able to fight back. But you roll with it, because the books are entertaining. Just like dystopian fiction.