There are books that one reads convinced that they belong to the genre of fiction. Impossible dystopias. Exaggerated warnings. Stories written to entertain us while we think: "Good thing something like that would never happen here."
That's what many people thought when they read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Until we started hearing certain political speeches.
No, Spain is not Gilead. And to say otherwise would be absurd. But a democracy doesn't need to turn into a theocratic dictatorship overnight to start recognizing some disturbing patterns.
Because freedoms rarely disappear all at once. They usually start to erode little by little. First by questioning women. Then by questioning the LGTBI collective. Then by questioning personal autonomy. And finally by convincing a part of society that losing rights is actually regaining them.
There is Núcleo Nacional, legalized as a political party, claiming an ultranationalist vision that turns diversity into a threat. There is Vox, which has been using LGTBI rights as a permanent culture war for years. And there is a Partido Popular that, far from distancing itself, incorporates proposals that reopen debates that many thought were overcome.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo's proposal on the "unborn" is presented as an administrative measure. But words matter. Changing the debate framework is never innocent. When the center of gravity stops being placed on the woman's autonomy and starts shifting towards the unborn, many of us see the beginning of a path that could reinforce future restrictions on the right to abortion.
Added to this are his statements mixing labor absenteeism with medical leave, as if getting sick and being absent without justification were the same thing. That confusion deserves serious political criticism, because getting sick is not absenteeism.
What is truly disturbing is to see how different discourses end up sharing the same framework: presenting consolidated rights as if they were revisable concessions. In The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead didn't start by imposing red cloaks. It started by convincing society that certain freedoms were a problem.
Perhaps Margaret Atwood never wrote a prophecy. She wrote a warning. And warnings are only useful if we are able to recognize them before it is too late.
That is why today it is worth remembering the phrase that the maids turned into an act of resistance against authoritarianism:
"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum."
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
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