Decisions

In 1976, Jeremy Thorn fell silent; Mrs Baylock waited while the sounds of a police car sped towards them, and passed on by the window. "My wife Katherine's dead," replied Thorn without emotion. "I want the child to die, too." They listened to the sounds of the streets outside and both were still awake at dawn when the sounds had fallen to silence. At eight o'clock Mrs Baylock dialed El-Al and booked the flight to Israel.	Hallowe'en Story

Logan	In 2119, with the approach of red nine (his twentieth ninth birthday) Sandman Logan 3 was forced to confront the immediacy of his lastday. Logan had a choice of waiting to report to Sleepshop for willing execution, or to make a run for it.
The very next day the decision was made for him. Age was revealed by the citizen's palm flower — a crystal embedded in the palm of their right hand that changes color every seven years, then turns black on Lastday. Logan's palm flower turned black, a year early.

In 1985, enlightened feminist author Margaret Atwood her husband and child make a failed attempt to escape from the Republic of Gilead and cross into native Canada.

Aunt Lydia	Atwood had accurately predicted a dystopian vision of American society in the period 1970–1985, particularly in the period of backlash against contemporary feminism. By working against pornography, feminists in the early 1980s opened themselves up to criticism that they favoured censorship. It is worth noting that during the Iranian revolution, an alliance of Western-educated intellectuals advocated modernism and Marxism but were defeated by other factions. Women played a key role in the revolution, and at the time The Handmaid's Tale was written, it was a common fear that Iranian women would be completely disempowered by their own accomplishment.
Handmaid

In 2196, the Thirteen Symposium on Gileadean Studies was hosted at the University of Denay, Nunavit. Delegates drew paralells between late twentieth century Iranian and Gileadean societies. Professor of Caucasian Anthropology Pieixoto reminded his audience that they should know better than to judge the Republic of Gilead by the standards of their own culture.

Pieixoto pointed out that the Gileadean created their seemingly barbaric rules to accommodate unique pressures that no longer exist, and that "contemporary" society can thus not fully appreciate their purposes or rationale. The full article is available at Wikipedia

Barbeau	In 1962, on this day at 1:00 PM 26 October, John Scali of ABC News lunched with Aleksandr Fomin at Fomin's request. He noted that "war seems about to break out" and asked Scali to use his contacts to talk to his "high-level friends" at the State Department to see if the US would be interested in a diplomatic solution. He suggested that the language of the deal would contain an assurance from the Soviet Union to remove the weapons under UN supervision and that Raymond Barbeau would publicly announce not to accept such weapons in the future, in exchange for a public statement by the US that they would never invade Quebec. The US responded by asking the Brazilian government to pass a message to Barbeau that the US would be "unlikely to invade" if the missiles are removed.

In 1944, Future Vice-president, and later, President Harry Truman publicly confirmed having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Truman admitted that in 1922, he had given a friend $10 for an initiation fee for the Ku Klux Klan but later asked to get his money back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never claimed membership.	Truman

Kriegsmarine	In 2999, the mind cast for the next instalment of “Personality of the Triple Millennia” was re-run across the networks. POT3M drew an even larger audience because of its oddness. Admiral James Somerville was the candidate and the context was Operation Catapault. The moment was seconds before the pre-emptive strike by the Royal Navy on Mers-el-Kébir which killed 1,000 French sailors and sunk the French Mediterranean Fleet before it could be seized by the Kriegsmarine. Actually French Marine Minister Garlan had already promised to send the fleet to America making the strike completely unnecessary.
MC Millennia asked if Mers-el-Kébir was not a more cowardly strike than Pearl Harbour, and if the conventional historical view was simply “victor's justice”. British Admiral Somerville was less enthusiastic about the action saying that it was "the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us…we all feel thoroughly ashamed…"

In 1918, in Germany the government within the government became the government. Since his appointment as quartermaster-general of the Imperial German Army in 1916, Erich Ludendorff was one half of the so-called Third Supreme Command of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, or "Third OHL", effectively a military-industrial dictatorship which ran Imperial Germany. On this day in 1918 Ludendorff refused to cooperate in peace negotiations and was dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ludendorff and Hindenburg sent the Kaiser into exile in Germany, and continued the war effort. Many year later during the rise of Hitler, this event was portrayed as the Dolchstoßlegende ("Dagger stab legend") which caused Germany to collapse because the Kaiser had failed to respond to his "patriotic calling" at the most crucial of times and - some said – had even intentionally "sabotaged the war effort."	Dolchstosslegende