The Handmaid's Tale

[Carolyn]

I began watching this last week, the series was released last year but the name made me think it was going to be some crappy period drama, it is definitely not that at all.

Its set in a dystopian future in New York I think or what was once new york, basically the world has declined so much and many people are losing the ability to reproduce, a right wing terrorist group have taken over New York and women are no longer allowed to work, dont have any rights, arent allowed to even read or have an eduction. Women who are found to be fertile are taken and forced into being Handmaids and are basically assigned to elite families, raped and forced to carry children for these elite families. Its absolutely brutal, dismal and horrific. I would love if VC could do an article analysing it. People are forced into dressing according to their status, the elite women all wear green, the male elites and army wear black , the Handmaids wear red dresses and capes with white hats and are tagged like cattle, female children who aren't born to the elite wear pink dresses and caps ( wonder if these are deemed to be future handmaids), women sent to the colonies wear light blue. Its pretty horrific and worse because it does seem like the kind of thing that could happen! Id definitely recommend watching it but be warned it is very upsetting and disturbing, absolutely brutal!

 

[Damien50]

I began watching this last week, the series was released last year but the name made me think it was going to be some crappy period drama, it is definitely not that at all.

Its set in a dystopian future in New York I think or what was once new york, basically the world has declined so much and many people are losing the ability to reproduce, a right wing terrorist group have taken over New York and women are no longer allowed to work, dont have any rights, arent allowed to even read or have an eduction. Women who are found to be fertile are taken and forced into being Handmaids and are basically assigned to elite families, raped and forced to carry children for these elite families. Its absolutely brutal, dismal and horrific. I would love if VC could do an article analysing it. People are forced into dressing according to their status, the elite women all wear green, the male elites and army wear black , the Handmaids wear red dresses and capes with white hats and are tagged like cattle, female children who aren't born to the elite wear pink dresses and caps ( wonder if these are deemed to be future handmaids), women sent to the colonies wear light blue. Its pretty horrific and worse because it does seem like the kind of thing that could happen! Id definitely recommend watching it but be warned it is very upsetting and disturbing, absolutely brutal!

Gosh I love you! The show is an excellent take on the novel and thankfully hulu hasn't botched it.

It's dystopian for a good portion of the United States and basically a military coup ensued, in part, due to rapidly declining birth rates and environmental decay thus leading the revolutionaries to believe that it was because America was abandoned by God.

The hand maids are women that have retained their fertility and are forced to procreate with military generals named Commanders. The new government dehumanizes and strips the maids of their identity referring to them as Ofrobertson or Ofjames to denote the different commander attempting to impregnate them. The women live in the house and once they provide a child to the husbands wife they are made to move to another house without the child.

The entire government works off a botched ideology stemming from the Hebrew old Testament and forces everyone into various forms of servitude.

Great show.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

Kind of reminds me of a phrase...

Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."​

​

The text is a favourite of collectors of quotations and is always included in anthologies. If you are looking for the exact "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" wording, then Acton is your man. He coined the phrase but he didn't invent the idea; quotations very like it had been uttered by several authors well before 1887. Primary amongst them was another English politician with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778, who said something similar in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770:

"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it"​

​

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html

In order to gain power over others, like a virus, those who seek power hide their intentions within the things people believe to be true. This might be Christianity, Islam or even atheism as The Crusades, ISIS or Stalin illustrate.

Margaret's "solution" is to avoid fundamentalism of all kinds but does this stand scrutiny? Certainly universal cynicism may protect you from one form of deception (being hoodwinked) but cause you to back towards another - the belief nothing is true.

 

[Red Sky at Morning]

I found this one interesting on the subject too...