Before the 13 Colonies in the "New World" became the United States of America, its settlers from Europe, wanting to be free from religious intolerance, fired bullets at the indigenous population-- men, women, and children. Racial difference was already an issue. For sure. Millions of the Indigenous people witnessed their homes and crops go up in flames, their wives and children, and elderly parents, trying to outrun bullets. When bullets didn't manage to kill, disease did!
The violence of the Atlantic Slavery Trade, the kidnapping and exploitation of African American labor was nothing short of tyrannical. As tyrannical as the conquering of the Indigenous for land and resources. Growth!
American "innocence" can't save the American experiment in democracy.
" We stop together as if on signal," states the Handmaid narrator of the Handmaid's Tale . We "stand and look at the bodies, she explains. "It doesn't matter if we look. We're supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they'll be there for days, until there's a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them."
In the 1978 Hollywood version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers , it's not long before the food safety inspector, played by the late Donald Sutherland, Mr. Bennel, notices the change. Already underway, the invasion is reflected in the stiffness of the passersby. There's less smiling, kissing, hand shaking, hugging. He hears how people are reporting that others are "different" and not who they're supposed to be. In Mr. Bennel's circle of friends and acquaintances, there is the go-to-psychologist who is already no longer human. As Mr. Bennel states, "'that's because they are all part of it. They're all pods, all of them.'"
They may resemble humans but, as aliens, they've lost their humanity. No emotions. No display of love or compassion, and, as Dr. David Kibner, the "psychologist," declares, there's no need to hate, either.
The following year, 1979, Alien hit the movie theaters. The aliens are on a mission to eliminate humanity, with the assists of engineered "engineers," that is, other aliens, produced by megacorporations. Aliens have been "dead a long time."
The same could be said of Winston and all the characters in Orwell's 1984 . In our minds eye, we see Winston, and he sounds like a man alive in resisting Big Brother, he seems like a man alive with love for a woman, but he has long been dead. Under the tyrannical thumb of Big Brother, everyone is being watched. Every one must believe in the power of Big Brother to deny the right of freedom to all. Here, in this world, the Wall isn't necessary. There is Room 101.
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