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rfmcdonaldA few commenters (here) have noticed that The Handmaid's Tale unrealistically makes Canada a nation entirely free from the madness of the Republic of Gilead to the south. Gilead's political elite might be masterminding brutal wars in middle America and plotting--alongside their similars in the Soviet gerontocracy, of course--ways to sterilizing the threateningly large Indian population, true, and yet Canada manages to remain free, a North American Switzerland if you would. This, mind, despite the United States' overwhelming threatening heft, and despite the cultural ties uniting the two nations.
This tendency is something that I'd taken for granted. It was only when I read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ianmcdonald's novel Chaga that I became aware of it. In the course of the story, a "US-Canadian" brigade is dispatched to East Africa as part of a fight against the alien life terraforming that region, shortly thereafter wreaking havoc on the protagonists. My first reaction to this one item was sadness that Canada ceded such an important piece of its sovereignty and thus put itself in a position of moral responsibility for these crimes. Then, I began to think: Why wouldn't Canada do this? Leaving aside Canada's evolution as a dependent periphery of one sort or another, throughout its history Canada has been quite willing to be innovative in ways that the United States hasn't been, enacting policies like Alberta's eugenics programs (directed against racially inferior Slavs, First Nations, and French Nations), the "repatriation" of Japanese-Canadians after the Second World War, and maintaining systems of segregation directed against African-Canadians into the 1950s.
Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, makes Canada the Switzerland to Gilead's Nazi Germany. I wonder whether we might not be more appropriately paired with Austria.
This tendency is something that I'd taken for granted. It was only when I read
ianmcdonald's novel Chaga that I became aware of it. In the course of the story, a "US-Canadian" brigade is dispatched to East Africa as part of a fight against the alien life terraforming that region, shortly thereafter wreaking havoc on the protagonists. My first reaction to this one item was sadness that Canada ceded such an important piece of its sovereignty and thus put itself in a position of moral responsibility for these crimes. Then, I began to think: Why wouldn't Canada do this? Leaving aside Canada's evolution as a dependent periphery of one sort or another, throughout its history Canada has been quite willing to be innovative in ways that the United States hasn't been, enacting policies like Alberta's eugenics programs (directed against racially inferior Slavs, First Nations, and French Nations), the "repatriation" of Japanese-Canadians after the Second World War, and maintaining systems of segregation directed against African-Canadians into the 1950s.Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, makes Canada the Switzerland to Gilead's Nazi Germany. I wonder whether we might not be more appropriately paired with Austria.
