In 2017, the red cloaks donned by the fictional sex slaves in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale became the uniform of the resistance when pink pussy hats failed to make their point. A thrice-married playboy who referred to Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” was absurdly supposed to be ushering in a fundamentalist, dictatorial theocracy.
Three and a half years into Donald Trump’s presidency, quite the opposite has happened. The Supreme Court’s recent victory for transgendered and gay people is just the latest sign of the Trump era. But The Handmaid’s Tale is indeed happening — just not in Trump’s America.
It’s happening in China, with Xi Jinping’s slow-walk to genocide against the Uighurs in Xinjiang.
Women in Atwood’s Gilead — the fictional future America hijacked and overthrown by environmentalist Christian terrorists — are subject to either domestic servitude, sexual slavery, or death on the basis of their fertility, class, and past heresies. Men and women alike who violate any of Gilead’s rules — be it insufficient loyalty to the state, keeping a Quran, or in the case of the latter sex, read — are surgically maimed, tortured, or hoisted away in black vans to meet an all but certain death. The guiding goal of Gilead, other than to establish a perversion of a Christian state, is to reverse catastrophically falling birth rates due to unprecedented pollution and the uncontrolled effects of sexually transmitted diseases.
What’s happening in China is the communist fundamentalist version of this — a racially charged version, wherein the Chinese Communist Party is campaigning for ethnic Han Chinese to have a baby boom, while engineering the racial cleansing of the predominately Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.
Uighur women have it even worse than Gilead’s “Jezebels,” the fictional fallen women sterilized and raped by elite agents of the state. Unlike the Jezebels, who have the days mostly to themselves and live in a seedy Playboy Mansion-style prison, Uighurs live in de facto concentration camps where women are subject to sterilization and rape. CCP officials have attested to a state-sanctioned and funded program in which Han men are encouraged to rape Uighur women in the name of “promot[ing] ethnic unity,” and those not forced into formal arrangements are regularly gang-raped, according to refugees who have escaped the camps.
Uighurs are forced to live against their Islamic beliefs — force-fed alcohol, pork, the atheistic dogma of the CCP, and nakedness. All the while, wall-to-wall digital and video surveillance ensures that one word uttered in a language other than Chinese or a gesture indicating any belief in Islam or fealty to Uighur culture is met with the same sort of silent, immediate, and unilateral disappearance and state executions that Muslims in Gilead face.
Unlike Atwood’s relatively retro Gilead, where dissenters are still capable of subverting the state with clandestine in-person communications, the CCP’s technological surveillance of its citizenry is something right out of 1984. Even Han Chinese are subject to formalized “social credit” scores, and not one minute of interned Uighurs’ lives goes unsurveilled or recorded through glass walls and cameras.
But the most unique parallel to Atwood’s novel is the CCP’s theft of children from their Uighur parents. As the state forcibly prevents new pregnancies from happening and aborts extant ones, Uighur children are torn from their parents just as Gilead’s children are stolen from their handmaid and Jezebel mothers and reassigned to the elites.
If you ever wondered how so much of the world stayed silent as Hitler began to exterminate the Jews, you don’t have to wonder anymore. Every outlandish fear telegraphed by feminists and Muslim advocates opposing Israel is happening right now to Muslim women in China, and somehow, the most vocal self-described proponents of human rights are silent, if not actively complicit, in an escalating genocide.
The NBA is happy to declare itself the moral paragon of civil rights when it comes to the rare police officer who murders a nonwhite man, but as China exterminates hundreds of thousands if not millions of them, it shuts up and dribbles in Beijing for blood-soaked Chinese cash. One million Muslims have been corralled into concentration camps, and yet the U.N. Human Rights Council reserves its ire for Israel. And Islamic governments like the one in the Palestinian territories turn a blind eye to their fellow Muslims’ tragedy, actively endorsing the Xinjiang genocide.
Perhaps more glaringly, the same feminists who swore we were on the cusp of becoming Gilead in 2017 haven’t remained silent as the dystopia materializes for real in China. Are the systemic rapes of Uighur women less offensive because they’re half a planet away? Are children separated from their parents by the state less offensive because they’re the wrong sort of minority? Or is it because intersectionality has broken the morality of “human rights” movements to the point that it’s impossible to admit that a leftist, nonwhite government is enacting the exact sort of anti-Muslim, racist, sexist genocide that the wokes only thought conservative Christians would ever think of carrying out?
The Handmaid’s Tale is happening, and your silence won’t make it disappear.
