Gilead: Could This Happen Here? | Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale

when you think of fictional authoritarian states one might imagine oceania from 1984 or the world state from brave new world but one nation that is on everyone's minds lately thanks to its recent adaptation is the republic of gilead from margaret atwood's the handmaid's tale but as frightening as gilead is can we say with any certainty that it is plausible hello everyone i'm matt mitrich the alternate historian to mark the beginning of a new season of hulu's adaptation of the handmaid's tale i'm going to be taking a closer look at gilead and see just how solid its foundation really is first a primer on what is gilead and i'll be focusing more on the tv version but with that said the republic of gilead is a militant christian theocracy with rigidly defined gender in class rose it came to be as response to a global infertility crisis that could see all of humanity dying out in just a few generations thus women especially fertile ones have been stripped of their rights and are treated as a national resource to be doled out to those gilead considers worthy our protagonist june is a handmaid in gilead it's primarily to her point of view that we learn about this nightmare version of america you see gilead claims to be successor to the united states of america and controls most of the continental us we know from two maps released by hulu one of which i did a whole video on that kiliat proper is situated in the northeast and midwest of america but gilead does occupy the southern and western parts of the country as either military districts or colonies which are ecologically destroyed regions that gilead haphazardly tries to repair rebels which are either loyal to an america in exile based out of anchorage alaska or else otherwise independent still control parts of america especially along the western gulf coast along the border of canada and a shrinking enclave around chicago also for you fallout fans out there doesn't the shape of the districts look a lot like the 13 commonwealths of the united states of america check it out it's weird we don't know too much about how gilead's government is structured we know the us constitution has been suspended and the states have been abolished but washington dc is still the capital perhaps to defend gilead's claim as a successor to america we do however see that local councils handle the day-to-day decision-making of the districts or at least local towns so it's safe to assume there is a national council operating out of dc most of gilead's laws are based on their interpretation of the christian bible although to be fair calling gilead christians the same as calling isis muslim the similarities are there but it's an insult to say they accurately represent either their respective religions for example you know a word i don't remember hearing said from the true believers of gilead jesus which is an odd word for a christian theocracy to fall out of use and sing i don't know maybe i'm mistaken but let me know if anyone else noticed that discrepancy anywho as you can imagine gilead outlaws things like abortion contraception premarital sex adultery and homosexuality which can be punished by torture maiming or execution in fact a lower class citizen breaking any law usually ends in their death also there is no freedom of religion either drink the kool-aid or you go up against the wall this applies even to other christian faiths and we do see in the series that gilad is destroying christian churches it's not entirely clear what happened to non-christians in gilead although i assume being an atheist is frowned upon we do however see one character who is secretly a muslim that is later executed as for jewish americans i don't think we learned of any specific gilead policy toward them but given that we saw a female rabbi in the counties i think it's fair to say that they face the usual convert or die ultimatum from gilead just think of gilead as american puritanism at its most extreme as mentioned before gilead has rigidly defined gender and classrooms each of which have different names and uniforms gilead is a dj or patriarchal society where men hold all the power although some men are more powerful than others as for women by law they are blamed for the global infertility crisis which justifies gilead treating them as state-regulated property of their husbands or fathers most women are not allowed to read which gilead takes so seriously they have removed words from storefronts street signs etc additionally women are expected to get married and become sexually active as soon as they can in practice this means that the state will assign underage girls usually from the lowest classes to the men that they choose living out the dark fantasies of in-cells and eugenicists alike sadly this legal inequality between the sexes and gilead is not completely implausible as nicola health pointed out in her 2018 article on sbs.com many nations today treat women as second-class citizens for example yemen and saudi arabia are patriarchal societies where women have few if any rights meanwhile nations like el salvador highly regulate pregnancy and women who attempt to get abortions or suffer a miscarriage could face decades in prison anyway the rulers of gilead are the commanders who are known for their black suits they chair the consoles pass the laws lead the military carry out religious rituals and do all the other tasks that keep gilead running smoothly there appears to be a hierarchy among the commanders as some hold common military ranks like colonel or ranks such as field commander or high commander this gives gilead the feel of a military dictatorship and perhaps is evidence that the old u.s military had a hand in creating gilead the commander's partners are the wives who wear blue dresses and enjoy their husbands high standard of living many wives like the character serena joy also helped create gilead however in a case of reaping what you sow they now find themselves in society where they lack the most basic freedoms even their position does not protect them from punishment as wives who try to read or have an affair can lose a finger or be exiled to the counties under the commanders are the guardians of the faith or simply guardians who act as a combination of gilead's police and military and are usually dressed in black military gear they also act as bodyguards and servants of the commanders being a guardian does come with some perks as loyal soldiers of gilead can be awarded wise assigned by the state there are also the eyes of god or just the eyes who are gilly at secret police because every dictatorship needs their gestapo they appear to exist outside the hierarchy as their members seem to come from all classes and genders and are simply there to spy on and terrorize the population to keep them in line then we have the brown clothed ants who enforce gilead's rules for women for their work they are allowed to read and seem to have some power as they can command guardians they appear to be unmarried infertile women who supported gilead's rise and were thus rewarded by being given positions of power that in practice makes them more influential than the wise despite technically being a lower social clash under the law the ants are primarily responsible for the handmaids fertile women who have run a file of gilead law so they are punished by being ritualistically raped once a month by commander until they become pregnant only to be passed off to another commander when the baby is born they are known for their red robes and white blinders that hide their face out of all the female classes in gilead theirs is the most regulated but also the most valuable in the eyes of a state obsessed with reversing declining birth rates this will protect handmaids who break the law from execution but does not stop them from being punished and genital mutilation can happen to handmaids who don't conform to their expected behavior then there are the el cano people the men and women who make up the working class of gilead and are probably what the vast majority of former americans are lumped into nevertheless they have few freedoms and are kept in line through a combination of state terror and propaganda fertile econowomen have to walk a particularly dangerous road as one wrong move can see them being marked as ungodly and thus taken away to be a handmaid nevertheless the econo people may have some social mobility as one would assume the men fill the ranks of the guardians and thus could rise in rank to become a commander below them are green dressed headscarf wearing marthas who are usually older infertile women who often serve the commanders and their wives in their homes despite technically being slaves they do appear to have some freedom of movement at least which can allow them to maintain a network of communication and smuggling among their class there are also jezebels or prostitutes they aren't an official class of gilead as commanders tend to keep them secret from everyone especially the wives but they are used to entertain commanders and foreign guests they are trying to woo because hey even puritans have orgies finally we have the unwomen for their crimes they are used as slave labor in the counties rather than being executed nevertheless execution might be more merciful as working in the counties is hard and disease is rampant so an unwoman's life expectancy is rather short surprisingly there aren't many male slaves in gilead and most men who commit a crime that would get a woman sent to the counties are instead executed not sure why but my theory is that because gilead's ideology is basically male supremacy they can't be slaves as that is a role reserved only for women but because women especially fertile ones are in short supply the commanders are more willing to execute men in order to have less competition over this valuable commodity sort of like an extreme version of how fundamentalist mormon communities will exile young men so there is less competition over wives so that is gilead in a nutshell but how did america get to this point in the handmaid's tale well the handmaid's tale is set in the near future of a timeline similar to our own hell at one point we even hear oprah speaking on the radio as the voice of the american resistance the major difference is that this world is dealing with an infertility crisis that has seen birth rates drop to the point where the continued existence of the human race is in jeopardy it's not clear what is causing it although pollution radiation and climate change have been thrown around even who is impacted by it is debated as mentioned before gilead blames women for the crisis but scientists in the rump america have theorized that men are the ones becoming infertile which if true would completely undermine gilead's very reason for existence i should also point out that humanity dying of old age means you can classify the handmaid's tale as apocalyptic fiction in the same vein of children of men sure humanity's end is not as flashy as death by asteroid or robot uprising but you still see people act like it's the end of the world and that will make people desperate for any kind of solution this will ultimately motivate people in the handmaid's tale world to take serious risk and do horrible things oh because the alternative to them is the death of humanity anywho pre-gilead the infertility crisis was used to justify the curtailment of women's freedoms in america for example we've seen the show that married women needed their husbands to sign off on birth control additionally harsher rules are imposed regarding the care of children which makes things difficult for working and or single mothers which seems to encourage women to stay home and pop out kids without going as far as ordering them to do that meanwhile the mass existential crisis humanity was experiencing led to a religious revival in america which saw the rise of the sons of jacob at a surface level they seemed like any other modern day conservative quasi-christian group demanding a return to their imagined traditional values the sons of jacob however are much better funded organized and due to the looming apocalypse have a lot of members across the country we also see that they have members who hold high ranks in the federal government nevertheless as the crisis continued the sons of jacob became increasingly radicalized and violent culminating in the president's day massacre where the president the entire line of succession all members of congress and supreme court are killed by them but they blame it on islamic terrorists afterwards a new provisional government made up of civil servants some of who are allied with the sons of jacob take over first off how convenient every leader in the federal government was in the same place at the same time for this decapitation strike to work second for the sons of jacob to succeed in season control their infiltration of the federal bureaucracy military intelligence community etc would have to be near complete and yet no one got elected to public office there are congress members today who think a baby eating satanic cult controls the world and you're telling me not one member of the sons of jacob got elected to high office really come on and yet while it seems implausible i can't dismiss it completely because unfortunately we in america live in a post-capital insurrection world the people who attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election were just alt-right trolls they were lawyers ceos civil servants cops active duty soldiers or veterans many were middle or upper middle class or had access to resources most americans don't have hell one rider flew to dc on a freaking private jet so just imagine if those traitors were as organized and funded like the sons of jacob so if you asked me before january 6 2021 whether the sons of jacob's coup was plausible i would probably say no but ask me that now i think it's plausible enough that it's really scary okay let's get back to the fake america and its problems shortly after the coup the new government declares martial law and you start seeing the precursors of the guardians appear on american streets women's rights which are already on a shaky foundation to begin with are soon stripped completely away women are prevented from working or even holding wealth and since so much of people's finances are digitized the government is easily able to deny women access to their own bacon counts there are protests against any regime but these are violently put down presumably this crackdown led to the civil war that the handmaid's tale refers to one where america is almost completely driven off the continental united states while the provisional government evolves into the infamous gilead while there is a lot of yadda yadding about the civil war to be fair the handmaid's tale isn't military sf it's a dystopia where women are treated as breeding stock that being said that doesn't mean we can't speculate on what this civil war would be like it's important to point out this second american civil war would not be anything like the first one when the slavers rebelled it's doubtful that the infertility crisis will have clearly defined regional sides like how the first civil war had the free and slave states ideology will determine which side your average person is on pro or anti-gilead will divide entire communities or even families the american military itself would be divided looking back at this map of gilead we can assume the anchorage based america and the rebel-controlled west coast could not exist without the pacific fleet being on the rump u.s side nevertheless given how the original government was able to enforce martial law and ultimately conquer the continental us it would appear that much of the army and the various national guards were lied to the sons of jacob as for the other branches i'm not so sure but given how influential evangelical christians are among the air force we can proudly assume they side with the sons of jacob and it's anyone's guess what would happen to the thousands of american soldiers stationed overseas we can also assume there would be private militias that would either allied themselves with america or gilead or even just become another faction in the civil war the southern baptist rebels mentioned in the novel might not take orders from anchorage and may be like rojava in our timeline syrian civil war and much like that war the second american civil war is going to be a bloody fight we could see all the horrors of modern warfare such as tank battles across the midwest and drone strikes on american cities more low-tech militias would rely on ieds car bombs and even suicide bombers we may even see the use of chemical and biological weapons or even nuclear weapons as one of the gilead maps does suggest at least one was used in california although i'm not sure who was responsible for that presumably america's infrastructure would be completely destroyed by the fighting which would mean food and fuel could not reach the cities forcing people to abandon them the dikes around new orleans could be destroyed by gilead after they were denied the city flooding the port the hoover dam may also have been destroyed which could have devastated the entire american southwest in fact one wonders if the counties were created in part because of a scorch earth policy enacted by american forces as they were driven west by gilead thinking about this makes me wonder if the refugees we see in canada are downplayed a fight on the scale the show suggests would create a refugee crisis even worse than the one created by our timeline syrian civil war non-americans would be the first to flee the country likely right after the coup as they would not want to take their chances under the new regime once the civil war erupts however the number of people crossing the border would only increase as americans flee the fighting of societal breakdown canada and mexico would take most of the refugees as they the only ones who share a land border with america but you may see americans along the gulf coast make for the caribbean nations and whatever boats they can find the anchorage government may also try to evacuate as many people as they could to alaska hawaii or other regions they controlled but they would probably prioritize the families of soldiers and people who could help with the war effort also this would be a civil war that would have massive ramifications for the rest of the world i mean the american economy is the largest in the world and it will now be cut off from the global economy meanwhile the us dollar would lose a lot of value which is bad once you consider it is the world's primary reserve currency is the official currency in several countries and a de facto currency and many others and it is used in most international transactions furthermore major industries like computers or pharmaceuticals would suffer after losing one of their leading nations countries across the world many of them large economies and their own rights would see their economies collapse with the loss of their largest trading partner this could help explain in part however why the rest of the world sat out the war since the infertility crisis is a global phenomenon nations across the world would be too busy dealing with their own eternal problems to effectively intervene in america plus i'm sure there were some out there who were either sympathetic with gilead schools or else just wanted to knock america down a peg and thought they could ride out any economic pains that would cause plus a civil war where both sides have access to weapons of mass destruction means that it's very easy to get caught in the crossfire when one side gets desperate thus the rest of the world could only contain the catastrophe as best as they could and the series has shown us this appears to be limited to economic sanctions on gilead and troops in canada to discourage any aggression so kelly announced to build a new country full of war-torn cities irradiated waste and an active insurgency all while a global infertility crisis is happening but how can they well to answer that question we need to talk about gilead's economy because ideology propaganda and death threats can only motivate people for so long no one is going to take orders from you forever if they can't feed or house themselves or their families so let's first talk about what we know about gilead's economy besides the economy it appears to rely partly on slave labor from the marthas and to a lesser extent the un-women who try to clean up the colonies in addition we can assume gilead does not have a large pool of skilled labor as many probably fled the country were deliberately killed by gilead for not fitting into their new world order or else were women and thus were deliberately denied access to the workforce gilead also lacks many of the modern conveniences that we take for granted like computers or cell phones or common goods like coffee or oranges even among the commanders in their households we also don't see many examples of private ownership or for that matter even money at least in the way we understand it for example we see handmaids go to the grocery store with tokens they exchange for goods perhaps gilead is experiencing rationing or this is a deliberate policy imposed by the state so i think it's safe to say that gilead doesn't have a capitalist economy but what does it have is it something new or is it something older for that we need to talk about commander lawrence who is probably one of the more interesting characters in the handmaid's tale at least from a world building perspective he is credited with building gilead's economy but what that means we haven't been told except that he is responsible for creating the colonies however in one scene june currently assigned to lawrence as a handmaid is asked by him to get a book and we see several books on the shelf written by him one of which criticizes populism another that praises religion and economics and another which suggests bringing back mercantilism so first what is mercantilism well eric reid while writing for the street in 2018 called mercantilism an economic philosophy built around exports and trade a mercantilist economy tries to increase its wealth by maximizing exports and minimizing imports this is based on the mercantilist belief that exports make an economy richer because they bring money into the economy while any imports take money out of it mercantilist nations would thus set up high tariffs to keep imports out which discourages potential trading partners which is probably why mercantilist nations especially european nations during the height of colonialism relied on their military to force weaker nations into this position so perhaps gilead is a mercantilist economy managed by a theocracy that puts high tariffs on foreign goods while heavily regulating their own economy we can probably assume there are several government-sanctioned monopolies that hannah producing the goods gilead's population needs which may explain the absence of private businesses here's the problem however it's hard to have a mercantilist economy if absolutely no one wants to take your exports as we know the un which i assume doesn't continue to operate out of new york city in this timeline has put economic sanctions on gilead and no nation officially recognizes them while we can assume some trade happens through smuggling and other shadier means we see from the series that gilead is struggling to work out trade deals with mexico and canada countries that were some of america's largest trading partners so how is gilead affording to maintain even their shrunken economy along with waging an ongoing civil war well kilian may just be taking whatever they can scavenge from rebel areas they conquer or whatever resource they can extract from the counties sort of like how indie nigel described in his between two wars in world war ii in real time series on how nazi germany's pre-war economy grew through overspending but would ultimately need the resources to sustain itself that could only be won through conquest hence why a war that saw much of europe looted to maintain the german economy was inevitable furthermore this system really only benefited the nazi elite who hoarded any wealth gained from the plunder of europe in what they stole from the people they persecuted which is pretty much what the commanders of gilead are doing they enjoy mansions the best quality food and drink available and brought those where all manner of flesh is theirs for the taking any wealth that makes it to the econo people or other classes is either scraps or redistribution of wealth from the people gilead is persecuting it's american fascism pure and simple guess what gilead is it's a fascist state we can call it theocracy we can wrap it up in as many crosses as you want but they're just nazis and if it seems gilead is destined to fail with a structure like that well it will and not just because the epilogue of the novel makes it clear gilead will fall it'll fail because we have seen gilead before we have seen evil power-hungry people use fear lies and violence to seize power the men and women behind gilead used the infertility crisis to preach their apocalyptic vision that only they could prevent but either they were deluded zealots or criminals who only wanted to seize as much power and wealth as they could before the end sure gilead might not be the most believable dystopia but margaret atwood didn't set out to write some plausible alternate history or create a vast lore she set out to tell a story that felt like it could happen here and for the most part the novel and the tv series accomplishes that which is a warning i think we should all heed well that's off the same subject if you enjoy what i do please like comment subscribe share this video support me on patreon i'm matt mitrich the alternate story bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Alternate Historian

Views: 206,883

Keywords: alternate history, Gilead, The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, Hulu

Id: R3ogUzwVy-A

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021