The Sting in the Handmaid's Tale.

Particularly now London is ruins I know that I really do have to get back to covering the current fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and associated groups.

The UK news media certainly aren't covering it.

However that will take significantly longer then the roughly 45 minutes I can spare here. So instead I'll quickly talk about the absolutely huge US TV show of the moment; "The Handmaid's Tale." After all I suspect I will be revisiting it around the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest.

The TV show is a re-telling of the 1974 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name.

It is very much in the same vein as Aldous Huxley's 1931 novel "A Brave New World" and George Orwell's 1949 novel "1984." It is set in a dystopian future in which a totalitarian regime is trying to build a utopian society. On the fringes of that society there is an ever present war but no-one's really allowed to talk about it or how it started.

The particular twist in the Handmaid's Tale though is that pollution has caused a fertility crisis. To compensate any fertile women are forced to act as concubines and surrogates for the ruling elite. These women are known as; "Handmaids."

Due to this subjugation of women many Hillary Clinton supporters have claimed that the TV show is a timely warning about the fate of women's rights under President Donald Trump. However if you watch carefully the show seems packed with these subtle little references that suggest maybe the joke's on them.

For example the Handmaids dress in a uniform of red and are trained at what is known as; "The Red House/Centre."

Margaret Atwood is Canadian. In Canada as with almost all the rest of the World politically the colour red is synonymous with socialism and the political left. The confusion arises because in mounting their revolution against the Tsar Russian Communists were inspired by US Republicans who overthrew the British Monarch in their revolution of 1775. Red is the colour of US Republicans.

So while people in the US may look at these references to the colour red and see them as a reference to the US Republican Party everyone else will see a reference to the socialist left. Or the "progressive left" as Hillary Clinton prefers to describe them.

In one scene in the opening episode the Handmaids are gathered together in a wooded area of a park. In that area there is one of those small stages that you see frequently at protest rallies in the US. This creates a seen rather similar to the recent anti-Trump "Sister Marches" or the more recent "March For Truth."

This ceremony begins with the Handmaids being forced to kneel in prayer. No specific religious prayer is mentioned but the use of prayer mats and gender segregation suggests Muslim prayer. The Sister Marches and March For Truth are organised by the US branch of the Muslim Brotherhood alongside Hillary Clinton's Democrat Party.

Once they have risen from prayer the Handmaids are addressed by the older women who control them known as; "The Aunties." They present the Handmaids with a man who they say has committed rape. The Aunties then encourage the Handmaids to beat that man to death.

When it was first published in 1974 The Handmaids Tale and it author Margaret Atwood were adopted almost as religious figures for the very aggressive Feminist movement that existed at the time. This is a movement that would declare all men to be rapists, all forms of penetrative sex to be rape and women who shaved their armpits to be gender traitors.

One of the Aunties on stage during this Handmaid's rally scene was Margaret Atwood in a blink and you'll miss it cameo.

In a later episode one of the Handmaids is caught having a lesbian affair with an infertile woman. Neatly flipping the language of the 1970's feminist movement they are both declared to be gender traitors and put on trial.

The infertile woman is sentenced to death by hanging. If the show was trying to make reference to the US right I think it would have shown her being hung from a tree in reference to racist lynchings of America's past. However it shows her being hung from a crane. The preferred method of execution in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As she is fertile the Handmaid is spared death. Instead she is sentenced to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in order to allow her to reproduce but leaving her unable to experience sexual pleasure. FGM is a predominately African tribal practice that exists on the fringes of Islam. It seems to be growing in popularity in heartlands of the US Democrats such as Dearborne, Michigan and Minnesota.

In flashback the show demonstrates how society came to arrive at this point. It started with a law declaring that women cannot own property and must be escorted in public by a husband or male relative.

In short the Islamic Guardianship rules that are still common in many Gulf Arab states. Particularly Saudi Arabia. The same Saudi Arabia that Hillary Clinton's pal Khazir Khan lobbies for.

As soon as this guardianship law is introduced protests erupt. These are shown very much in the style of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and earlier Occupy Wall Street protests.

Both of these protest movements hold the 1968 Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama as a sort of religious ideal. Due to current US Democrat Senator John Lewis suffering nothing more then a bump to his head the American left refer to this as; "Bloody Sunday."

The original Bloody Sunday occurred on January 22nd 1905 (22/1/05) when striking workers marched on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Russia. The Tsarist guard opened fire on the crowd killing an estimated 4,000 people.

The second Bloody Sunday occurred on November 21st 1920 (21/11/2) in Dublin in what is now the Irish Republic. In response to British agents being killed by Irish Rebels the British Army marched into a football stadium with heavy machine guns and murdered 32 people.

Probably the most famous Bloody Sunday occurred on January 30th 1972 (30/1/72) in the Northern Irish city of London/Derry. Here the British Army opened fire on a Catholic Civil Rights march murdering 14.

In the Handmaid's Tale the protest march is broken up on a bridge by men with heavy machine guns. These scenes are very similar of scenes from the 2002 British TV Movie "Bloody Sunday" about the events in Derry in 1972.

So I doubt anyone watching the protest scenes in Handmaid's Tale will dare to refer to the 1968 events on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as "Bloody Sunday" ever again. Particularly with menstruation featuring so heavily in the episode.

As with 1984 and A Brave New World before it the main message of The Handmaid's Tale is a warning about the perils of ideological absolutism.

So if you do see any ideological absolutes in it I think there's a fair chance you're doing it wrong.

17:40 on 13/6/17 (UK date).