You need to read the book.

@Xsploit said:

Like you can suddenly freeze all female bank accounts ( most banks are multinational, and we already know that we that people were trying to flee to canada suggesting that the problem is directly located in america) suddenly rabble can overtake the military.. ok the rest of the world stands by and lets this happen? ..ok

maybe some of these things will eventually be explained but somehow i doubt it

This is based on a book written about 30 years ago... so the world was a bit less complicated then... they have made some updates to have it set in today's world. Maybe not enough to seem plausible, I don't think the passage of time has been made clear enough. We see the chart of baby births dated 2015 but I assume that was many years prior to where we are now in the story. It is the rarity of birth that has really made such drastic changes in society, I think. I read the book but it was a while ago and I don't remember a lot of the specifics but I think it is worth suspending your idea of reality and just enjoy the ride...

must have been quite updated, as it seemed to be very accepting of gay marriage before the incident happened, offsten or whatever her name is, was married and the woman from orange is the new black is openly gay without it being a problem untill that sudden event that is what made the coffee shop scene seem weird to me, like there was no gradual build up?

I hope a lot more is explained, good show.

@bratface said:

You need to read the book.

I am not going to read the book now i have started the season, i was unaware of the book before this, if i enjoy the entire season i might however

The book reveals things quite slowly, as it only acts as a snapshot of this particular period, so I assume more will unfold as the show progresses. I found the book especially terrifying because, at its core, this is entirely plausible.

@Xsploit said:

Like you can suddenly freeze all female bank accounts ( most banks are multinational, and we already know that we that people were trying to flee to canada suggesting that the problem is directly located in america) suddenly rabble can overtake the military.. ok the rest of the world stands by and lets this happen? ..ok

maybe some of these things will eventually be explained but somehow i doubt it

I admit I haven't read the book and I saw the movie years ago, but honestly? I don't find the premise to be THAT impossible, given that it's only a matter of enough people with enough money buying the government and gradually repealing certain laws and passing others that take away citizens rights and controlling the internet and the mainstream media while squashing any independent media and yeah, a slow-moving koo by religious fanatics doesn't seem so outrageous.

And assuming the executive branch and congress are responsible for this in the TV show, there would be no need to take over the military, they would simple recall/discharge all the women and enact martial law. North Korea is kind of a template of how to do maintain control. I doubt it would last more than a few years, but like I said, get enough motivated oligarchs together and they would have no problem repealing the constitution.

Xsploit--

I haven't seen this series, but I've seen the 1990 film and read the book (twice). And reading the book, I think, would really help you to understand the series better (if the series isn't too different from the book).

I found the book deeply depressing and terrifying at the same time. It's what made me realize, years ago, that I'm a conservative but not a fundamentalist. The Handmaid's Tale is one of my top 10 most influential books, on the same list as the Bible, strange as that might seem.

I don't think with our present technology that the ability to freeze women's bank accounts is that unrealistic, transferring that money to their husband's name and, presumably, the money of single women would be forfeited to the government.

As far as taking over the military, I always got the impression that the coup people slowly infiltrated it over a period of years before finally overthrowing the government; so that, the remaining loyal officers could do nothing when there was another "Angel" officer sitting right next to them when the coup finally happened (and so on with the sergeants and the lower enlisted ranks).

The book, in a postscript at the end, goes into more detail about this; in fact it mentions that the fundamentalists used a CIA manual on how to overthrow regimes against their own (the U.S.) government.

And, cswood is right-- according to the postscript, the fundamentalist regime did not last long (about 20 years?), but the U.S. was forever destroyed and broke up into multiple little countries.

_"I don't think with our present technology that the ability to freeze women's bank accounts is that unrealistic, transferring that money to their husband's name and, presumably, the money of single women would be forfeited to the government." _

Agreed. But I think they mentioned giving control of a single woman's money to her next of kin -- male, that is. So a father or brother or something.

_"suddenly rabble can overtake the military.. ok the rest of the world stands by and lets this happen? ..ok" _

Coups d'etat occur all over the world. And a lot of time the rest of the world does just stand by and let it happen. There's nothing in the novel that hasn't happened somewhere in the world -- a fact that I find incredibly disturbing. What's so creepy about this show (for me, anyway) is that it is set in my own country. It's one thing to read about people fleeing oppressive regimes when it happens overseas, but the idea that it could happen here... well, I'm sure that's what they thought, too. Here's a link to an article on an interview the author gave that talks about this topic: http://ew.com/books/2017/03/08/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-reality/

@cswood said:

And assuming the executive branch and congress are responsible for this in the TV show, there would be no need to take over the military, they would simple recall/discharge all the women and enact martial law. North Korea is kind of a template of how to do maintain control.

Just started the series, and although I'm not a gun nut, I remember thinking during the chase-in-the-woods scene that she needed a weapon. The lead even says "I feel like grabbing one of those guns..." during indoctrination. This is a bit of the irony of step one in many people's view of world peace: disarm the public. Again, not a gun nut personally, but I get the concern over the 2nd Amendment in the US.

@Daddie0 said:

@cswood said:

And assuming the executive branch and congress are responsible for this in the TV show, there would be no need to take over the military, they would simple recall/discharge all the women and enact martial law. North Korea is kind of a template of how to do maintain control.

Just started the series, and although I'm not a gun nut, I remember thinking during the chase-in-the-woods scene thinking that she needed a weapon. The lead even says "I feel like grabbing one of those guns..." during indoctrination. This is a bit of the irony of step one in many people's view of world peace: disarm the public. Again, not a gun nut personally, but I get the concern over the 2nd Amendment in the US.

I've started watching season 2 and I am starting to see the way the government was taken over to be less and less likely. I simply don't see enough men going along with the new government. I mean would the military actually back up a bunch of terrorists who took over the government?

I also think race would play a big part. After all I don't recall many of the "commanders" being non-white guys. I think most blacks and hispanics would see this new government as basically Alt Right type guys who are looking to take all their black and hispanic women away so that only the new white male government gets to have sex with them and impregnate them. This new government would die in its infancy unless they're using magic.

@acontributor said:

The government has already been taken over by criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and other infamous crimes which they then use to justify their agenda of world domination. This happened a long time ago. All that remains now is for them to declare martial law and then they can start rounding people up. Why do you think they are pushing so hard for anti-gun legislation?

Reagan did a pretty good job of screwing the country up long before 9/11. As for the martial law argument, the government has drones that can kill you from miles away. An AR-15 isn't going to save you if the government rolls up to your door with a tank or Apache Attack Helicopter, so please drop that dumb argument. EVERY gun control proposal has been about high capacity rapid fire weapons.

Look up the National Firearms Act of 1934 which was implemented to stop gangsters from using Tommy Guns to battle each other in the streets.

Example: In 2005 they went door to door seizing private citizens guns in violation of the 2nd and 4th Amendments.

Wait are you talking about the people who wouldn't leave New Orleans after Katrina? The government were trying to evacuate those people in order to save their lives but they refused to leave. It's not like that was a special situation or anything. Also that was under a Republican president.

They create these real world emergencies so that they can respond to them as exercises. And they do a lot of things in secret with national security as their justification. Oftentimes these things are illegal but they get around that by saying that a secret FISA court approved it. Which itself is illegal.

And don't forget they're turning the frogs gay.

Okay sure, has the government been caught doing shady things? The Tuskegee syphilis experiment comes to mind, but again, they won't need to take your guns if they want to do something evil.

As far as the Handmaid's Tale goes, accomplishing a total government takeover on that scale and getting the bulk of the populous to go along with it would take years to accomplish. Using Nazi Germany as an example is pretty accurate since they were elected into office by less than half the voters.

This is why it's important to actually do research on who's running for office in your area and make sure their policies line up with yours, and if they don't urge someone to run who whose policies do line up with yours, or run yourself. Unless of course you're running as a Democrat in which case they will cheat you if you don't support the establishment, but let's hope that changes soon.

@acontributor said:

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Feel free to enlighten me. I'll wait.

Yeah I was talking about New Orleans. The government has no authority to tell people to leave, or trespass, or confiscate guns even if there is a storm which by the way had already passed. The government gets its authority from the Constitution which clearly does not allow that.

So you'd rather those people should have been left to die. Got it.

Some have mentioned that 'Coups d'etat occur all over the world' <-- when has that happened in a first world country in our life time? or your parents, or your grandparents. It is an interesting premise but just look how well prohibition worked out for america, Something like this would be many levels of magnitude more fucked up that prohibition

britain would along with the commonwealth

@Xsploit said:

Some have mentioned that 'Coups d'etat occur all over the world' <-- when has that happened in a first world country in our life time?

Seems to happen every two to four years in the US...it's called elections. :)