Roe vs Wade has been overturned in the US, putting millions of women at risk of losing their right to safe and legal abortions, and some people have likened the situation to a Margaret Atwood dystopian novel.
On June 24 the nationwide right to abortion was ended in the US after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 landmark decision.
Famously, on many UK school syllabuses, the first thing you learn about The Handmaid’s Tale is that nothing in the novel stems from falsified events. Everything that happens in Gilead is based on real-life case studies. So, what else did Atwood’s novel ‘prove right’?
Book Burnings
The move towards a ‘theocratic dictatorship’ as Atwood phrases it, is leaping ever closer. As in her own dystopian novel and George Orwell’s ‘1984’, this move must start with changing the narrative. Books are burned, words are changed, and in modern society, ‘fake news’ is rife.
In Nazi-led Germany, books with ideologies opposing Nazism were burned. Without the internet, books were a key source of information and communication. So, without the books, the narrative could be changed to suit the Nazi party.
Recently, Atwood released an ‘unburnable’ copy of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in protest of the increasing censorship of texts in American schools and colleges.
Spills, wars and climate change all have their part to play in the calculated hysteria that builds the society of Gilead.
With regular oil spills decimating aquatic life, the continued Russian attack on Ukraine, and the Jacobabad climate/stillbirth crisis, the consequences of these events are hardly surprising. And yet, the Western world’s governments continue to be surprised and continue to bury their heads.
