Ireland's hidden survivors (BBC)
The article illuminates attitudes, policies, practices, organisations, and cultures that also directly controlled us in Canada. The Catholic Church (the role it played in authoritarian Duplessis Quebec), residential schools, foster care that was little more than slave labour, the "Christian Brothers" of Newfoundland abuse shame, the hateful, violent, murderous, and abhorrent abuse and genocide perpetrated on First Nations people throughout Canadian history. Policies of assimilation, colonialism, secrecy, impunity, violence, and official indifference to the suffering of those destroyed by the system - especially those deemed inferior or unworthy. The "other" that did not conform to sanctioned roles and ways of life, or those simply abandoned to be exploited and discarded
The grotesque morality policing by officially sanctioned and legally empowered religious groups and the institutions they ran - quite similar to the Saudi religious and morality police, but... "Christian"
It serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when religion and public services are combined and given the power of the state to revoke liberty and control behaviours. It serves as a direct warning of what will happen in the "white-power" right-wing theocratic/religious state that Mike Pence and his Canadian counterparts want to see in our countries
It serves as a warning that everything in "The Handmaid's Tale" is real and is currently happening (not a rhetorical exaggeration), or has happened in the real world
"The most appalling part of this terrifyingly plausible world is that it’s all based on real events. As Atwood herself has said, “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened… nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.”
Everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has occurred in a totalitarian state, military regime or religious order. The concept of assigning fertile handmaids to the highest in society has a historical precedent dating right back to the Bible."
When "incels" say women should be distributed to men who want sex but can't find partners... there is precedent - including "comfort women" in WWII Japan's control, and:
"One of her references is the Lebensborn programme of the Nazis' security and surveillance corps, the SS. In 1935, with Germany’s birth rates dropping, Hitler’s right-hand man Heinrich Himmler designed a breeding program to promote an 'Aryan future'. One element of the scheme involved members of the SS 'mating' with suitable German women. They also kidnapped blue-eyed, blonde-haired children to populate the Nazi 'Third Reich'."- Dystopian fantasy? The Handmaid’s Tale is based entirely on real history - BBC
"“Incels” (short for “involuntary celibate”) are a deeply chauvinistic group of people whose common bond is that they don’t have sex and are incredibly, violently mad about it.
Incel thinking is based on the idea that women are commodities—that they are objects that owe men sex."‘Redistributing Sex’ Is a Toxic Conversation About Toxic People - vice.com
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