A Handmaid’s warning
I arrived late to the party and only just started watching The Handmaid’s Tale. And let me tell you, it’s good.
It’s also a terrifying, dystopian portrayal of life under extremism and totalitarianism all for the ‘greater good’.
The first few episodes made my skin crawl, then, as I slowly became numb to the horror of what I was watching, I could manage to watch the rest. It’s amazing how quickly we become attuned to violence.
I’ve not suddenly become a film critic, in fact, I never really write about things I watch, but this is so valid after what we’ve gone through, and are still going through, that I can’t just ignore it.
What’s more, now that I’ve reached the end, with some relief I might add, it’s still haunting me. My dreams are filled of escapes. I don’t know whether I’m reliving some past memories, astral travelling or communing with my subconscious to heal, but these dreams are vividly real.
The world of Gilead within The Handmaid’s Tale
For those who haven’t watched it, the book is set in a dystopian world where women lose their rights, where religion and censorship reign, and where plummeting birth rates, blamed on a toxic world and climate change, are the threats that force a religious movement to overthrow the US government and establish Gilead.
Handmaids are women, forcibly impregnated by the husbands of barren wives. Society is a nightmare cross between North Korea, nazi Germany, communist Russia, the witch trials in America and Mormonism, all rolled into one.
A living hell, in other words, full of sanctimony, secrecy, terror and fear.
I don’t know why I had to write about this, perhaps because it triggered something so deep within me that brings that same fear rushing to the surface.
Having studied Nazi Germany at university, I have always been driven to understand the behaviours of the German people that led to the persecution, annihilation and genocide of certain groups in society. Perhaps, even more so, the banality of evil that allowed such atrocities to be carried out.
Little by little we let evil out
What I’ve learnt is that it happens slowly, in increments. This is how they pull the wool over your eyes, thread by thread.
All powers that be know that if they take away human rights in one fell swoop people might smell a rat, so they go slowly slowly, gently gently.
Like a frog in water, you turn the temperature up bit by bit so the frog doesn’t realise the water is slowly burning it alive. You never think it’s going to happen, you exclaim that “it would never happen here, not to you, not in this place, not in this civilised era”. And that’s exactly when it does happen.
We’re all owned by our basest needs; namely fear, which keeps us looking inwards rather that outwards, focused on keeping ourselves safe and alive.
It’s this driving fear that makes us all so easily manipulated. It starts from birth and comes at us from all angles, conditioning and programming us as we go: the news, television, video games, repetitive and mind-numbing violence, horror and true crime all build these vibrations of fear within us.
It’s so subtle it climbs into bed with us at night and we don’t even know it’s there.
The control and manipulation of minds only needs the core emotions of fear and shame to let evil lose. Fear makes us selfish and reactive, and shame is the emotion we will do anything to avoid because it triggers subconscious unworthiness that is so deeply buried and so painful to witness that we will do anything but avoid feeling it.
They are the drivers of our actions and powerful people know this.
Is it really for the greater good?
As I watched I kept reflecting back on the past three years.
How is it that we allowed some named authority to tell us what we were and weren’t allowed to do? How is it, that we allowed them to tell us that the most basic human function of touch wasn’t allowed? Why is it, that we all followed these rules, even though they made no logical sense?
Then it goes deeper.
How is it that we ignored all those people coming forward with injuries and illness after the vaccine? Why was it that we mocked, ridiculed and humiliated anyone speaking out with a different opinion? How is it that we idly stood by as some people were allowed privileges of travel or entry somewhere depending on whether they had a vaccine passport?
Well, these last ones are just the banality of evil in its infancy. If you’ve ever read a history book, you’ll know that it always starts with segregation.
It also always starts under the resounding fanfare and trumpets of ‘the greater good’. Ah, it’s for the greater good that we must willingly sacrifice our freedoms. Ah, it’s for the greater good that censorship is so rampant. It all makes sense now.
And when it’s for ‘our own good’, well, that’s the phrase that should set alarm bells ringing in full force.
Why ‘never again’ always happens again
Back then I wrote about all of my feelings as a way of processing my grief, fear and anger.
I wrote about cognitive dissonance, the separation, the madness and insanity of this time in history. I wrote until I didn’t have to write any more, and the world seemingly regained its sense of humanity.
Then suddenly, after watching a Handmaid’s Tale, I wanted to scream out loud, or punch a wall, or open my heart and rip out all of the horror and memories of what humans do to other humans.
I know the tale isn’t true, but it is. The story is an amalgamation of all the evil that has, and still is, slithering through humanity in all corners of this earth. None of it is fiction.
Margaret Atwood was a prophet and historian all at once. This is her role: to show humanity the potential of our downfall.
It’s these prohecies which worry me, It’s the 15-minute smart cities and congestion charges that limit freedom of movement under the name of climate change. It’s the censorship of speech in oh-so subtle of ways, ironically under the banner of wokeism and letting voices be heard. It’s the emergence of a cashless society, for our money’s protection.
There is no money in the Handmaid’s Tale, it’s all done on computers. Margaret Atwood writes “I guess that’s how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.”
Potent.
If we forget ourselves, we will slowly boil alive like the frog. But, if we learn from the past, and the prophets who seed these messages in our consciousness, we might just get out alive.
Learning from the past so we can make it out alive
Watching this tale brought up so much for me, so much that I couldn’t just let lie, like the past three years didn’t happen. They did. I’ve never felt such powerlessness at watching the world unfold into such darkness, feeling so alone and like I was drowning.
The Handmaid’s Tale helped me, in a beautiful and unique way, to process deeply buried trauma and fear, from this life and, no doubt, past lives too. It’s been a gift.
I haven’t written such a dense and heavy piece of writing for so long but I have to write the truth when I feel it. Telling the truth is my karma within my Soul Contract, and so I must share it, knowing that my feelings deserve to be expressed.
And unlike in Gilead, where women aren’t allowed to read or write, I am, and so I will.
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