Just to stir the pot...
- 1 : slavery can exist under another name (debt bondage for instance, or some forms of marriage);
- 2 : mass executions to enforce the conversion of the survivors is a form of human religious sacrifice: opens diverse possibilities;
- 3 : cannibalism doesn't have to be 'dystopic': ceremeniously sharing and eating the body of the departed beloved one, so that his / her flesh survives in your body and becomes part of it in the same way as his / her memory survives in your mind, while 'odd' from our pow, is perfectly understandable;
- 4 : totalitarian government: several recent (late Maoist China, Red Khmers) or current (North Korea) examples, and a resurrected Caliphate with all religious and secular powers in the hands of the same man would by ultimately totalitarian; then on a very local scale I wonder how much an Amish community under its patriarch is 'democratic', and those US small towns controlled by a fundamentalist community where jailed persons have only the Bible to read sound quite theocratic: maybe a post-traumatic Bible Belt could evolve in the religiously dystopic direction (but such cultures frown on any form of frivolous entertainment, so would forbide 12- televised gladiatorial bouts).
- 5 : repression of women: historically how many cultures outside the Abrahamanic ones were / are misogynist enough to require women to hide their basically obscene body under a burqa? Very few if any, 'pagans' worshipping goddess(es) simply cannot be *that* misogynist. Suggesting that the culture of this 'dystopic great power' should be impregnated with fundamentalist Abrhamanism - not specially Muslim, in the Middle-Ages all Christian women were heavily veiled, Hollywood notwithstanding;
- 6 & 7 : 'scientific' racism (including 'social racism' based e.g. on phrenology) and eugenics (at least in the form of selective sterilization; but don't forget the modern project of a sperm bank of Nobel prizes) were not uncommon in the 'white' world from the mid-19th C. to (in some Protestant countries specially) sometimes after WWII: this part is not very hard to fulfil;
- 9 & 10 : militarism and imperialist expansionism are not difficult: is a modern country where full citizenship is restricted to those having served in the military forces, 'Starship trooper' fashion, a figment of the imagination?
- 11 : torture as an accepted part of the judicial system: don't we have modern exemples, as part of the 'Total War Against Terrorism'?
- 12 : televised gladiatorial bouts : given the reactions of a part at least of the audience to unarmed fight competition, I wonder if we are really far away from such: 'sport' as a show is the modern opium of the people;
- 13 : euthanasia for people the state deems "unproductive" can take various forms: in the deep of a harsh winter gather the homeless, the 'rejects' of a city and carry them to a forest without food.... By the way such practice can lead to survival cannibalism.
Thus I fear that (except maybe for *institutionalized* cannibalism, which does NOT have to be dystopian anyway) the proposed combination is far less ASB (the Peshawar Lancers meteor....) than many seem to think (though 12 would be difficult to combine with 5), and certainly not restricted to a peculiar historical precedent. Post WWII some 'fundamentalist' variant of communism, and *even more* in the near future a fanatically fundamentalist Abrahamanic theocracy, seem to be the less unlikely candidates.