Friday , March 29 2024

The Handmaid’s Tale of the EU Dystopian Future

For those of you watching the second series of The Handmaid’s Tale it is probably a very harrowing watch on a Sunday evening. You see an elite abusing power at the expense of the people through centralised and very cruel control of the place called Gilead. There are aspects of it that bear very close resemblance to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China let alone the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Socialism where any sense of community and care for one another is centred on a ruling elite whose appetites are sated by a subjugated people. None of this elite is elected. They just happen to be. Rules and laws are made up on the hoof and the people have no say in their creation or implementation. A marriage between two women who have a child between them and one that was lawfully invoked suddenly becomes unlawful and one of the partners has to stay behind as the other and child leave Gilead. The cruelty is all consuming but accepted by this elite that has lost any sense of moral compass.

The Nazi Party in Germany had similar thinking where it was enforced that an Aryan race of pure blooded Germans would not only rule Germany but annihilate all that did not conform to this picture of ethnic beauty such that Jews, Gypsies and Romanies were destined for gas chambers and the horrors of the concentration camps. This was just over 70 years ago in Europe. The Nazi idyll was to conquer the whole of Europe and force this dystopian view of racial perfection on the entire continent.

Fortunately for Europe there stood Great Britain and the United States against this madness despite many in Britain wanting to appease the Germans and cut a deal with the madman directing this horror show -Adolf Hitler. Hitler and his elite were soundly defeated but not before much of Europe had been taken by German troops. France, Belgium and Holland fell rapidly to the march of the jackboot down the Champs Elysee and elsewhere.

Following this travesty of modern European history, the powers of the U.K., USA, Russia and France vowed that Germany would never be able to have such military power again but still the Americans loaned vast sums of money to Germany under the Marshall Plan to rebuild. However, financial recompense was never provided by Germany to Britain and the other European countries for the atrocity of World War Two. On the back of this fear of German megalomania the early seeds of what developed into the EEC and then EU were born.

The initial concepts of the EEC were quite laudable in that European countries would set up a market into which and from which each would be able to trade freely with one another. No mention was ever made plainly open to the people that the end game in this project would be the loss of individual sovereign power, the loss of the ability to negotiate free trade deals with other countries in the world, that there would be a common currency and such as the pound, franc and lira would cease to exist, that fiscal policy would be based on the economy of Germany, that the ruling elite would be unelected and be based in Brussels and that there would be an imposed centralised judicial system that would supersede the laws of the countries of Europe and that there would be no borders between member states and that all Europeans would be free to come and go into other European countries, set up home and work in any country with no power of any country to legislate for the numbers of such migrants. To run this vast monopoly of centralised power, huge sums of money would be paid by each member state with no accountability as to where the money was going and on what it might be spent.

The dystopian similarity to The Handmaid’s Tale Gilead lies in the cruelty of the imposition of a single currency, of a single market that brooks no competition and customs union whereby intertrade alliances between fellow European countries would be at agreed tariff levels that are relatively minor between them but are at such exhorbitant levels for non-European countries as make it very difficult for countries from Africa, for example, to trade on a level playing field.What has been created by this centralised control and the euro in particular, is the impoverishment of most of Southern Europe and unemployment on a vast scale particularly among the young.

The decision of Britain to leave this real life version of Gilead has been criticised by the well off as ruining the futures of the children of this country. The children of many of the European countries already have no future but this seems to be somehow acceptable to the establishment elite of Britain. Not a view that has much of a moral compass but if that elite is capable of accepting all that has been lost to Great Britain throughout 40 years of this European megalomania then the inconvenience of millions of young lives blighted by unelected officials in Brussels would somehow be a price worth paying.

As The Handmaid’s Tale series two develops it will be interesting to see how the Gilead elite can be overthrown. As Brexit develops it will, likewise, be interesting to see how the unelected elite of Brussels will be overthrown. As revolutions in history have shown all too graphically, you can only subjugate a people for so long before the masses rise up. The 17.4 million mass of Britons rose up in June 2016 against an establishment elite in this country who thought that the EU project towards a dystopian future of centralised control would never be questioned, particularly by a part of our society so long overlooked and looked upon by the elite with total scorn. This same elite in the British House of Lords and in Brussels also is treating our departure from the iniquitous EU with the same level of scorn.

As the Germans found 70 years ago, you do so to the Briton at your absolute peril.

About Ian Pye

Ian is grammar school educated although he briefly flirted with the idea of becoming Britain's answer to Breaking Bad's Walter White with a short sojourn at university. The constant smell of hydrogen sulphide caused the break up of that partnership and thereafter he pursued a career in sales culminating in partnering with his second wife for many years in their own recruitment business. When the second marriage came to an amicable end, so did Ian's allotted time in the world of commerce and he became a retired person of no means but a still active brain. He lives on the outskirts of the great metropolis of Manchester and has close affinity with the red side of the football city being a United fan of over 50 years. He has deep interest in British politics, is conservative by nature and persuasion as well as reading much on aspects of religious theology particularly the works out of Albuquerque, New Mexico of Richard Rohr and hitherto Richard's mentor, Thomas Merton. Ian has three children, two of whom live in London and the third in Toronto as well as four adorable grandchildren

Check Also

The Peace Proposal: Shadows of Versailles

A change of seasons brings a change of perspective. With St Martin appearing on a …