Thank you so much, Dr. Snyder. Excellent article! Alexie Navalny begins his autobiography, Patriot, by saying he learned to be direct. I agree. JD Vance was direct when he called Trump America’s Hitler. Perhaps Trump is also America’s Ayatollah. We need to be direct so we remember what we are fighting for and know what we are up against. Navalny’s last words, “You are not allowed to give up. “
What’s wrong with this country? How many are really interested in how all of this ends up? Why do people believe (especially after seeing his choices for his cabinet, etc) that Trump and the Trumplicans care about them and will be more useful than Democrats? Do they think that Elon Musk and his buddies are concerned about working Americans?
Muck made 20 billion the day after the election, that’s 20 thousand million. That is precisely what is wrong with our country. And he is planning on an austerity program which will inflict severe hardship, not on himself mind you, but on the rest of us peons.
These folks are fed a constant diet of lies & conspiracies & either never had or have lost the ability to think critically. If you're familiar with Nazi Germany Hitler's propaganda minister did a fantastic job of whipping up support for Hitler. Josef Goebbels would be so proud & jealous that today's fascists have the Internet with no controls to use to spread their lies!
Keep in mind that a few weeks before the election a frequent Google question was "Is Biden running for re-election." Also keep in mind that for most USians (including me, some of the time) "government" and "democracy" are like very distant thunder -- and that getting reliable information about everything from current events to how government works takes serious time and effort. IOW, what's wrong with this country has been wrong for a long time, and serious illnesses tend to progress if left untended.
I've decided that those who voted for Trump were essentially cramming all their hopes and dreams into a box labeled 'Trump'. It's nonsense, it's feeling-based, it's going to destroy us.
The important thing, Carol, is that "working Americans" think Republicans speak for them.
Bankers, captains of finance, hedge fund pirates, and corporate CEOs all in perverse, abstracted, Ivy League, other M.B.A., and law school combinations spent the post Powell memo years offshoring tens of millions of U.S. working class jobs.
I think the people attacked and abandoned by these nihilist elites could never name and blame their predators exactly because the press, the mainstream media never saw it happening. Nobody, for decades, saw how the 1971 Powell memo was behind all this evil. Very, very good people -- Wendell Berry, Diane Ravitch, Kurt Andersen, and more -- saw key parts of the fabric, but for a long time never the whole.
The reason Americans remained in the dark about what the bastard elites were doing was that, before the offshoring could begin, the far-right foundations of the Powell memo spent the decade of the 1970s laying the groundwork for their perfidy against working America. They removed humanities from U.S. schools, all of them, K-12 and higher. The novels, memoirs, films, and songs were there -- they spoke to the personal and social fabric carnage abroad the land -- but schools taught everyone to speak language void of the personal, with never any access to any humanities.
Standardized testing and corporate textbook packaging came in and made sure everyone spoke a sanitized, abstracted, neutered, categorical form of English instead (viz, Diane Ravitch, "The Language Police").
The working classes didn't know any of this. They only knew their kids were getting shafted big time by elites who packaged the dehumanized textbooks and administered the incessant tests. As Dems largely did America's teaching, the victimized former working classes gradually came to blame Dems for effing them over.
That's why those tens of millions of effed-over now blame the Dems, and (wrongly, but totally) embrace MAGA.
Buyers' Remorse is not instantaneous. It takes a while for the full impact to sink in. The last couple of generations come from a lived experience of instant gratification and planned obsolescence. Push a button, flip a switch, say, "Hey, Google", use AI. Making things effortless often means no one makes an effort... to check things out, get another opinion, research or dig deeper. Sadly, it the way they view everything. And, yes, they will have a rude awakening...unfortunately for everyone it will be too little, too late and creating a Restore Point is going to take a lot of work from all of us.
As a long-time physician, of course I’ve been witness to violence against women and children, and the occasional man, in abusive relationships. Interventions were necessary, and at least here in the U.S. there is the expectation that victims would be assisted, and perpetrators would be apprehended. What happened after that, though, varied widely.
I started to work in our newly-formed Forensic Asylum Clinic in my medical school, along with a dedicated group of medical students who wanted to change the world. We began interviewing (witnessing) the torture, violence, and abuse of people from all over the world who had survived and finally arrived in the U.S., requesting asylum.
The stories and photographs of our clients (we are not allowed to care for them if we have done an asylum evaluation due to a perceived conflict of interest, so we cannot call them ‘patients’) are heart-breaking and nightmare-inducing, and these are just the ones who’ve made it all the way here. There are more then 100,000 people in the metro NY area alone who are waiting for asylum hearings.
For a long while, the cases we were seeing in our clinic were domestic abuse cases from Central American clients. Countries such as Honduras have the highest rates of femicide, and we would witness the same story over and over again: a girl born into a poor, rural home, preyed-upon by a much-older male relative or man from the community, coerced into a sexual relationship that was essentially chronic rape, and then once she became pregnant with his child, physically abused, battered, and left behind for the next female victim in the area.
One man could have dozens of young female victims. He would often choose one to be his main female to live with. She would be forced to cook for him, raise their offspring, work on the outside of the home for enough money to feed the children and endure his chronic rape.
When I would ask them about going to other relatives or to the police these women would tell me that the police never investigated these crimes, unless a death was reported. What went on in a man’s home was his business, not theirs. Even writing this now, it sickens me. I had so many of these cases in a row that it began to affect me in an unacceptable way. I began to look at men in a different way, especially Hispanic men.
A good friend and colleague at work helped me see what was happening, and after taking a break for a while to get my head straight, I am back doing this work again. Gender violence is rampant all over the world. It can and does happen here, and it can get worse – especially for those who view themselves as non-binary.
The most severe physical violence that I have personally documented on a client occurred against those in the LGBTQ+ community by those egged-on by members of the Christian-Right traveling to their countries to foment violence and incarceration against these individuals. In most of these countries the weapon of choice is a machete, so I will leave it at that for the type of wounds we witnessed.
Thank you, Dr. Snyder for beginning this discussion. It’s already painful, but we can’t make progress without a clear-eyed view of what is really happening
Thank you for your post and your work at the clinic.
" ... domestic abuse cases from Central American clients. Countries such as Honduras have the highest rates of femicide ..."
You point towards something not enough discussed - the Latin American male and a worldview heavily influenced by Catholic misogyny and machismo, hardly distinguishable from the Taliban. Not everyone knocking on our doors in search of freedom for themselves want this also for others, and especially for women.
Tobias - Machismo! Glad to see you use the word. I have been wondering why so many people have forgotten this aspect of hispanic Catholic misogyny. Misogyny plays a huge role in the USA driven IMHO by millions of InCels. I can see the next season of The Handmaid's Tale using the Christofascist's, "Your body, MY CHOICE!" in an episode or two.
Thank you, Tobias. The vast majority of the people I have personally seen in our clinic have been women. Most from Central America, and with a history of domestic abuse. However, gang-related violence was also another history, especially if the woman was able to open a successful small business. She became a target of MS-13 members who would threaten her and her family if she didn't pay "protection" money to them. No help from police, even when her business was burned to the ground when she didn't pay.
Of the four men I personally interviewed, two were from the LGBTQ+ communities of their countries: Honduras and Nigeria; and the other two were from Bangladesh, and were members of a political minority assaulted by militia members from the majority party. One of them was 16 years old (the son of a member of the minority party), and the other was a Humanitarian worker.
Funny, Dee, how you refer to your having inquired as to local police help for these women.
One of the key facts in the perversion of those central American countries is that it's the U.S. and its most far-right institutions that prop up the dictatorial regimes there. For over 100 years U.S. corporations have feasted on those countries for their resource extraction from them. (Bananas, anyone? Avocados?)
The top U.S. Marine general of that era, Smedley Butler, wrote scathingly of what he saw first-hand then as to the corruption rich Americans required of all for their continued profits there.
The U.S. far-right today excoriates the flood of migrants trying to flee those lands, but nobody on the far-right has the honesty or decency to admit that it is the U.S. -- particularly its School of the Americas, adjacent to Ft. Benning, Georgia -- that has ever trained the militia of these dictators in the surveillance, illegal detention, torture, and murder that has ever propped up the U.S. stooges.
Yes, you're right. You've reminded me of a fifth young man I interviewed two years ago now, from Nicaragua -- who was just a kid of 20 years old, caught up in supporting the student protests against the government.
Local police and paramilitary soldiers arrived in his town and literally mowed down the demonstrators in the streets with rifle fire. He escaped home but was later kidnapped by the police and brought to a concrete bunker hours away from his home, where he was tortured for two days.
He thought he was going to be killed when they loaded him up in their truck, but they dumped him on the side of the road where an old man found him and helped him get back to his family.
Police often aid the military and MS-13 gangs in Central America. No wonder victims don't pick up the phone and call for help. It then becomes a form of learned helplessness.
Thank you, Kathy. Over 150 students in my school had already taken the training to do this work in 2019 when we started the Clinic. My hope is that they will stay involved and teach many more, so that soon there will be an army of dedicated witnesses. Torture and abuse will not be done in silence, wherever it occurs.
I have been following Andra Watkins' Substack because she has read Project 2025 and she is an expert on Christian Nationalism. https://andrawatkins.substack.com/
I have been reading Project 2025 too, in a book discussion group of Democrats Abroad. We did not finish it, but read about 2/3 of the chapters. Now we are turning our attention to studying Democracy and what we can do to support it. The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most banned books in the USA. It is ironic that the people doing the banning belong to Christian Nationalist groups, and therefore are banning discussions of themselves, because it is clearly critical. I am interested in where you will take us with the discussion of this book.
In another substack, I noted that Margaret Atwood wrote Project 2025, and published it under the original name The Handmaid's Tale. I stand by my statement.
I re-read HMT every so often since it first appeared. When I first read it, I felt is was "out there" and could not really happened. Amazing what can change in a single adult life time.
Good for you, Linda, and your "book discussion group of Democrats Abroad."
Speaking of being outside of the U.S., you might note the Japanese-British English writer Kazuo Ishiguro. His most recent novel, "Klara and the Sun" (2021) picks up on a key part of what Timothy Snyder here refers to as how "The children the handmaids bear are taken from them and raised by . . .." The Ishiguro concerns his look at the raising of such children.
Thanks for the recommendation Phil. I was also thinking of the Lebensborn program in Germany where young women were picked for physical characteristics and loyalty to the party, and had to have sex with men picked for them who also had certain physical traits and then were to be raised by other families. I learned about it from a friend in Germany, and then looked it up. It comes up in the PBS Masterpiece series The World on Fire.
I'm currently reading "War" Bob Woodward's new book. I just finished the chapter about the Hamas attack on Israel. It tells of women being tied to trees while they are raped, they are tortured by having wood & metal objects thrust into their vaginal cavity & they are murdered. All the while the Hamas fighters are crying "God is Great"! That's the bastardization of Islam.
The bastardization of Christianity started with murdering doctors who performed abortions. They did it for "the greater good"! It has led to the sanctioned killing of women who are not permitted to receive medical care.
Now, seeing that I am a woman I'd like to say a little something about Viagra!! Is the ED it treats life threatening? (Yes, I know for some guys it is indeed emotionally life threatening.) Can men not urinate to allow the toxins to be released from the body? I didn't think so!
And then there are the ads I see about Peyronie's Disease. Again, just because you have a "bent carrot"(hey that's used in the ad) as long as your "carrot" allows you to pee, you're good.
Quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass about your "carrot" if it works to let you pee that's all you need! (Sorry, I tried really hard to keep this part of the post civil but if LIFE SAVING treatment can be denied for women, (You're body, my choice!) then I think women should have a say in treatment of your "carrots", remember keeping you from those meds won't threaten your life!!!)
Thank you so much. Last night Margaret Atwood spoke at Oregon State University and said the novel was based on things that had actually happened somewhere in the world.
Exactly right. Thank you (again). Shared and translated in French on my facebook page where the words resonate in a very specific way, given the ongoing trial against a man who, over a period of ten years, invited more than 50 men to rape his wife, sedated-into-unconsciousness. Defence offered by some of them: "Since her husband said it was OK..."
Thanks for this interesting take that reveals the NYT headline writers (who do the blurbs I suspect as well) to be mimsy little white boyz in need of a good slap most of the time. I would also recommend another "dystopian" novel that has significant resonance today: Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The Times probably describes it as "In a dystopian future men and women enact their assigned roles . . ."
I have been an avid reader for at least six decades, reading many genres. Nothing has caused me more anxiety than The Handmaid's Tale. I debated whether the book was nonfiction or a novel vision of the future. Despite the turn to strong nationality identity to divide us, we are still embroiled in our diverse religious beliefs and the need to force them on others.
G, Babette & Tobias - The reason to watch the TV version is because it shows how resistance is possible and religious hypocrisy is rampant. It shows how to be brave and to never give up hope. One of the most glaring examples today of rampant, religious hypocrisy is MAGA Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House.
Point was, as I get older I have less and less stomach for violence and transgression on the screen, even if it stems from reality and is portrayed to open our eyes.
I had a tough childhood (do you know anyone who hasn’t?), and we made the best of it. My siblings and l formed a clubhouse (we actually had a lifesize playhouse in the backyard)! When our Dad died after a long, undiagnosed illness, l was 10, my brother 8 and our young sister was 4 and a half.
Point being, count your blessing and pursue your bliss, even if it just means taking a walk at sunset.
Gilead occupied only part of the United States. In modern times you’d expect the red states to become the home to the Christian Reconstructionist state. The problem is that, with the regime soon to be in power in Washington D.C., Gilead could occupy the entire country. And, there will be only one way to stop it - secession and, if necessary, revolution. Hoping for half the country to wake up or for a change through voting is beyond wishful thinking.
That white women in the majority voted for Trump leads me to believe they are in need of Jack Nicholson and his ping pong paddles. Flabbergasted is me. Jess Piper defined some she has met.
Thank you for your work, Professor Snyder. I am beginning the Solidarity section of On Freedom. My pencil is busy taking notes and underlining passages. I have long been a fan of Simone Weil. I am so happy that you bring her ideas into the light. I believe Zadie Smith is currently working on a project which includes Simone Weil in some fashion. There are photos online of her writing studio with pictures of Simone Weil's books open on the desk.
Nevermind the Rapist in Chief and his rapist AG nominee. (Did someone already say that?) Maybe it was retracted . . . still. And rape as an instrument of war.
I used to avoid camouflage prints as an objection to war, but then . . . Trump. Now my grey camo backpack matches my hoodie matches my windbreaker. (Chicago folks, see Women at War: 12 Ukrainian Artists exhibit at the Cultural Center until December 8.)
Thank you so much, Dr. Snyder. Excellent article! Alexie Navalny begins his autobiography, Patriot, by saying he learned to be direct. I agree. JD Vance was direct when he called Trump America’s Hitler. Perhaps Trump is also America’s Ayatollah. We need to be direct so we remember what we are fighting for and know what we are up against. Navalny’s last words, “You are not allowed to give up. “
What’s wrong with this country? How many are really interested in how all of this ends up? Why do people believe (especially after seeing his choices for his cabinet, etc) that Trump and the Trumplicans care about them and will be more useful than Democrats? Do they think that Elon Musk and his buddies are concerned about working Americans?
Muck made 20 billion the day after the election, that’s 20 thousand million. That is precisely what is wrong with our country. And he is planning on an austerity program which will inflict severe hardship, not on himself mind you, but on the rest of us peons.
These folks are fed a constant diet of lies & conspiracies & either never had or have lost the ability to think critically. If you're familiar with Nazi Germany Hitler's propaganda minister did a fantastic job of whipping up support for Hitler. Josef Goebbels would be so proud & jealous that today's fascists have the Internet with no controls to use to spread their lies!
Trump’s #Lugenpresse is working overtime.
Keep in mind that a few weeks before the election a frequent Google question was "Is Biden running for re-election." Also keep in mind that for most USians (including me, some of the time) "government" and "democracy" are like very distant thunder -- and that getting reliable information about everything from current events to how government works takes serious time and effort. IOW, what's wrong with this country has been wrong for a long time, and serious illnesses tend to progress if left untended.
I've decided that those who voted for Trump were essentially cramming all their hopes and dreams into a box labeled 'Trump'. It's nonsense, it's feeling-based, it's going to destroy us.
Agreed. It's as we elected a sexual predator who is appointing more sexual predators to positions of power and influence. This is terrifying!!
Won't someone leak the Matt Gaetz investigation? The public has a right to know. But will anyone care once it's out in the open?
p.s. we must remember that we have at least 2 sexual predators in the US Supreme Court - Thomas And Kavanugh.
The important thing, Carol, is that "working Americans" think Republicans speak for them.
Bankers, captains of finance, hedge fund pirates, and corporate CEOs all in perverse, abstracted, Ivy League, other M.B.A., and law school combinations spent the post Powell memo years offshoring tens of millions of U.S. working class jobs.
I think the people attacked and abandoned by these nihilist elites could never name and blame their predators exactly because the press, the mainstream media never saw it happening. Nobody, for decades, saw how the 1971 Powell memo was behind all this evil. Very, very good people -- Wendell Berry, Diane Ravitch, Kurt Andersen, and more -- saw key parts of the fabric, but for a long time never the whole.
The reason Americans remained in the dark about what the bastard elites were doing was that, before the offshoring could begin, the far-right foundations of the Powell memo spent the decade of the 1970s laying the groundwork for their perfidy against working America. They removed humanities from U.S. schools, all of them, K-12 and higher. The novels, memoirs, films, and songs were there -- they spoke to the personal and social fabric carnage abroad the land -- but schools taught everyone to speak language void of the personal, with never any access to any humanities.
Standardized testing and corporate textbook packaging came in and made sure everyone spoke a sanitized, abstracted, neutered, categorical form of English instead (viz, Diane Ravitch, "The Language Police").
The working classes didn't know any of this. They only knew their kids were getting shafted big time by elites who packaged the dehumanized textbooks and administered the incessant tests. As Dems largely did America's teaching, the victimized former working classes gradually came to blame Dems for effing them over.
That's why those tens of millions of effed-over now blame the Dems, and (wrongly, but totally) embrace MAGA.
Buyers' Remorse is not instantaneous. It takes a while for the full impact to sink in. The last couple of generations come from a lived experience of instant gratification and planned obsolescence. Push a button, flip a switch, say, "Hey, Google", use AI. Making things effortless often means no one makes an effort... to check things out, get another opinion, research or dig deeper. Sadly, it the way they view everything. And, yes, they will have a rude awakening...unfortunately for everyone it will be too little, too late and creating a Restore Point is going to take a lot of work from all of us.
As a long-time physician, of course I’ve been witness to violence against women and children, and the occasional man, in abusive relationships. Interventions were necessary, and at least here in the U.S. there is the expectation that victims would be assisted, and perpetrators would be apprehended. What happened after that, though, varied widely.
I started to work in our newly-formed Forensic Asylum Clinic in my medical school, along with a dedicated group of medical students who wanted to change the world. We began interviewing (witnessing) the torture, violence, and abuse of people from all over the world who had survived and finally arrived in the U.S., requesting asylum.
The stories and photographs of our clients (we are not allowed to care for them if we have done an asylum evaluation due to a perceived conflict of interest, so we cannot call them ‘patients’) are heart-breaking and nightmare-inducing, and these are just the ones who’ve made it all the way here. There are more then 100,000 people in the metro NY area alone who are waiting for asylum hearings.
For a long while, the cases we were seeing in our clinic were domestic abuse cases from Central American clients. Countries such as Honduras have the highest rates of femicide, and we would witness the same story over and over again: a girl born into a poor, rural home, preyed-upon by a much-older male relative or man from the community, coerced into a sexual relationship that was essentially chronic rape, and then once she became pregnant with his child, physically abused, battered, and left behind for the next female victim in the area.
One man could have dozens of young female victims. He would often choose one to be his main female to live with. She would be forced to cook for him, raise their offspring, work on the outside of the home for enough money to feed the children and endure his chronic rape.
When I would ask them about going to other relatives or to the police these women would tell me that the police never investigated these crimes, unless a death was reported. What went on in a man’s home was his business, not theirs. Even writing this now, it sickens me. I had so many of these cases in a row that it began to affect me in an unacceptable way. I began to look at men in a different way, especially Hispanic men.
A good friend and colleague at work helped me see what was happening, and after taking a break for a while to get my head straight, I am back doing this work again. Gender violence is rampant all over the world. It can and does happen here, and it can get worse – especially for those who view themselves as non-binary.
The most severe physical violence that I have personally documented on a client occurred against those in the LGBTQ+ community by those egged-on by members of the Christian-Right traveling to their countries to foment violence and incarceration against these individuals. In most of these countries the weapon of choice is a machete, so I will leave it at that for the type of wounds we witnessed.
Thank you, Dr. Snyder for beginning this discussion. It’s already painful, but we can’t make progress without a clear-eyed view of what is really happening
Thank you for your post and your work at the clinic.
" ... domestic abuse cases from Central American clients. Countries such as Honduras have the highest rates of femicide ..."
You point towards something not enough discussed - the Latin American male and a worldview heavily influenced by Catholic misogyny and machismo, hardly distinguishable from the Taliban. Not everyone knocking on our doors in search of freedom for themselves want this also for others, and especially for women.
Tobias - Machismo! Glad to see you use the word. I have been wondering why so many people have forgotten this aspect of hispanic Catholic misogyny. Misogyny plays a huge role in the USA driven IMHO by millions of InCels. I can see the next season of The Handmaid's Tale using the Christofascist's, "Your body, MY CHOICE!" in an episode or two.
Thank you, Tobias. The vast majority of the people I have personally seen in our clinic have been women. Most from Central America, and with a history of domestic abuse. However, gang-related violence was also another history, especially if the woman was able to open a successful small business. She became a target of MS-13 members who would threaten her and her family if she didn't pay "protection" money to them. No help from police, even when her business was burned to the ground when she didn't pay.
Of the four men I personally interviewed, two were from the LGBTQ+ communities of their countries: Honduras and Nigeria; and the other two were from Bangladesh, and were members of a political minority assaulted by militia members from the majority party. One of them was 16 years old (the son of a member of the minority party), and the other was a Humanitarian worker.
Funny, Dee, how you refer to your having inquired as to local police help for these women.
One of the key facts in the perversion of those central American countries is that it's the U.S. and its most far-right institutions that prop up the dictatorial regimes there. For over 100 years U.S. corporations have feasted on those countries for their resource extraction from them. (Bananas, anyone? Avocados?)
The top U.S. Marine general of that era, Smedley Butler, wrote scathingly of what he saw first-hand then as to the corruption rich Americans required of all for their continued profits there.
The U.S. far-right today excoriates the flood of migrants trying to flee those lands, but nobody on the far-right has the honesty or decency to admit that it is the U.S. -- particularly its School of the Americas, adjacent to Ft. Benning, Georgia -- that has ever trained the militia of these dictators in the surveillance, illegal detention, torture, and murder that has ever propped up the U.S. stooges.
Yes, you're right. You've reminded me of a fifth young man I interviewed two years ago now, from Nicaragua -- who was just a kid of 20 years old, caught up in supporting the student protests against the government.
Local police and paramilitary soldiers arrived in his town and literally mowed down the demonstrators in the streets with rifle fire. He escaped home but was later kidnapped by the police and brought to a concrete bunker hours away from his home, where he was tortured for two days.
He thought he was going to be killed when they loaded him up in their truck, but they dumped him on the side of the road where an old man found him and helped him get back to his family.
Police often aid the military and MS-13 gangs in Central America. No wonder victims don't pick up the phone and call for help. It then becomes a form of learned helplessness.
Thank you Dee for your heroic and compassionate work and fearless leadership!
Thank you, Kathy. Over 150 students in my school had already taken the training to do this work in 2019 when we started the Clinic. My hope is that they will stay involved and teach many more, so that soon there will be an army of dedicated witnesses. Torture and abuse will not be done in silence, wherever it occurs.
I have been following Andra Watkins' Substack because she has read Project 2025 and she is an expert on Christian Nationalism. https://andrawatkins.substack.com/
I have been reading Project 2025 too, in a book discussion group of Democrats Abroad. We did not finish it, but read about 2/3 of the chapters. Now we are turning our attention to studying Democracy and what we can do to support it. The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most banned books in the USA. It is ironic that the people doing the banning belong to Christian Nationalist groups, and therefore are banning discussions of themselves, because it is clearly critical. I am interested in where you will take us with the discussion of this book.
In another substack, I noted that Margaret Atwood wrote Project 2025, and published it under the original name The Handmaid's Tale. I stand by my statement.
I re-read HMT every so often since it first appeared. When I first read it, I felt is was "out there" and could not really happened. Amazing what can change in a single adult life time.
Good for you, Linda, and your "book discussion group of Democrats Abroad."
Speaking of being outside of the U.S., you might note the Japanese-British English writer Kazuo Ishiguro. His most recent novel, "Klara and the Sun" (2021) picks up on a key part of what Timothy Snyder here refers to as how "The children the handmaids bear are taken from them and raised by . . .." The Ishiguro concerns his look at the raising of such children.
Thanks for the recommendation Phil. I was also thinking of the Lebensborn program in Germany where young women were picked for physical characteristics and loyalty to the party, and had to have sex with men picked for them who also had certain physical traits and then were to be raised by other families. I learned about it from a friend in Germany, and then looked it up. It comes up in the PBS Masterpiece series The World on Fire.
I'm currently reading "War" Bob Woodward's new book. I just finished the chapter about the Hamas attack on Israel. It tells of women being tied to trees while they are raped, they are tortured by having wood & metal objects thrust into their vaginal cavity & they are murdered. All the while the Hamas fighters are crying "God is Great"! That's the bastardization of Islam.
The bastardization of Christianity started with murdering doctors who performed abortions. They did it for "the greater good"! It has led to the sanctioned killing of women who are not permitted to receive medical care.
Now, seeing that I am a woman I'd like to say a little something about Viagra!! Is the ED it treats life threatening? (Yes, I know for some guys it is indeed emotionally life threatening.) Can men not urinate to allow the toxins to be released from the body? I didn't think so!
And then there are the ads I see about Peyronie's Disease. Again, just because you have a "bent carrot"(hey that's used in the ad) as long as your "carrot" allows you to pee, you're good.
Quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass about your "carrot" if it works to let you pee that's all you need! (Sorry, I tried really hard to keep this part of the post civil but if LIFE SAVING treatment can be denied for women, (You're body, my choice!) then I think women should have a say in treatment of your "carrots", remember keeping you from those meds won't threaten your life!!!)
I agree; it's a brilliant concept!
Thank you so much. Last night Margaret Atwood spoke at Oregon State University and said the novel was based on things that had actually happened somewhere in the world.
Exactly right. Thank you (again). Shared and translated in French on my facebook page where the words resonate in a very specific way, given the ongoing trial against a man who, over a period of ten years, invited more than 50 men to rape his wife, sedated-into-unconsciousness. Defence offered by some of them: "Since her husband said it was OK..."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/19/he-has-already-fathered-many-children-now-musk-wants-all-of-the-us-to-embrace-extreme-breeding
Thanks for this interesting take that reveals the NYT headline writers (who do the blurbs I suspect as well) to be mimsy little white boyz in need of a good slap most of the time. I would also recommend another "dystopian" novel that has significant resonance today: Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The Times probably describes it as "In a dystopian future men and women enact their assigned roles . . ."
And let’s not forget (how could we if we’ve read them) Octavia E Butler’s “Parable” books.
I have been an avid reader for at least six decades, reading many genres. Nothing has caused me more anxiety than The Handmaid's Tale. I debated whether the book was nonfiction or a novel vision of the future. Despite the turn to strong nationality identity to divide us, we are still embroiled in our diverse religious beliefs and the need to force them on others.
I couldn’t make it past the first chapter. That’s how close to the bone (home), it was decades ago.
I sympathize. I got through about half of it. Recently gave the TV show a try. Excellent made television. But the same. I could not stomach it.
G, Babette & Tobias - The reason to watch the TV version is because it shows how resistance is possible and religious hypocrisy is rampant. It shows how to be brave and to never give up hope. One of the most glaring examples today of rampant, religious hypocrisy is MAGA Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House.
Good point. I might start season 2 ff.
Point was, as I get older I have less and less stomach for violence and transgression on the screen, even if it stems from reality and is portrayed to open our eyes.
I had a tough childhood (do you know anyone who hasn’t?), and we made the best of it. My siblings and l formed a clubhouse (we actually had a lifesize playhouse in the backyard)! When our Dad died after a long, undiagnosed illness, l was 10, my brother 8 and our young sister was 4 and a half.
Point being, count your blessing and pursue your bliss, even if it just means taking a walk at sunset.
Browsing for moments of sanity, I suggest considering the lecture Bertrand Russell gave for his Nobel Prize in Literature: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture/
The Handmaids Tale, It Can’t Happen Here and 1984 are powerful but they were warnings ignored.
Rebuilding will take knowledge and action of people with secular wisdom. Knowledge vs fear.
The demographic of the Trump vote suggests, reading books, and especially reading literary novels, is not something Trump voters do a lot.
Gilead occupied only part of the United States. In modern times you’d expect the red states to become the home to the Christian Reconstructionist state. The problem is that, with the regime soon to be in power in Washington D.C., Gilead could occupy the entire country. And, there will be only one way to stop it - secession and, if necessary, revolution. Hoping for half the country to wake up or for a change through voting is beyond wishful thinking.
That white women in the majority voted for Trump leads me to believe they are in need of Jack Nicholson and his ping pong paddles. Flabbergasted is me. Jess Piper defined some she has met.
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/trumps-white-women?r=3m1bs
Scariest essay so far, Tim. This is happened right now and is being supported by rough neck incels who are proud of their misogyny.
Michael - Correct! This is already well underway. Back in 2022 this became apparent:
“How the loss of Roe directly serves white supremacists' horrifying plot
“Some white supremacist groups see rape of white women as an “extremely effective” way to increase white births. After the death of Roe, the ideology is all the more horrifying.” https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/how-anti-abortion-rights-white-supremacist-extremism-overlap-n1297896
Couple this with the insanity of Greg Abbott:
“Greg Abbott Said He’d “Eliminate Rape” to Justify an Abortion Ban. He’s Failed Horribly.
“Thanks to his ban, Texas leads the nation: 26,300 estimated pregnancies as a result of rape.” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/abbott-texas-abortion-ban-rape-record-pregnancies-failure/
The US might end up with a white only version of Gilead. The threat is real.
Thank you for your work, Professor Snyder. I am beginning the Solidarity section of On Freedom. My pencil is busy taking notes and underlining passages. I have long been a fan of Simone Weil. I am so happy that you bring her ideas into the light. I believe Zadie Smith is currently working on a project which includes Simone Weil in some fashion. There are photos online of her writing studio with pictures of Simone Weil's books open on the desk.
Nevermind the Rapist in Chief and his rapist AG nominee. (Did someone already say that?) Maybe it was retracted . . . still. And rape as an instrument of war.
I used to avoid camouflage prints as an objection to war, but then . . . Trump. Now my grey camo backpack matches my hoodie matches my windbreaker. (Chicago folks, see Women at War: 12 Ukrainian Artists exhibit at the Cultural Center until December 8.)
Let's call him the Rapist-Elect. He is not Rapist in Chief before end of January.
Sigh. Yes.