A telltale heartbeat crept into listeners' ears, followed by a low, ominous rumbling. A red glow suggested itself behind their eyes, as if a Balrog were stirring underground and tectonic plates were shifting over its head. A deep voice droned in ghostly tones.
After the Nazis we were baited by the Russian bear / Our liberators wanted Poland for a thoroughfare / I was a victim of December 1981 / I took a final beating from the blunt end of a Russian gun
Gradually the music faded into marching. The footfalls grew progressively louder and there came a volcanic vocal eruption, freezing the blood in listeners' veins. The instrumentation came back with a vengeance and an accusing tenor grabbed the audience by the throat.
You plant your missiles while our people wait in line for bread / You hang an army tank above us by a bloody thread / You bought our government; they crawl like bleating sheep to you / We know from history that human life is cheap to you
Over my dead body / Redemption draweth nigh / Over my dead body / I hear a battle cry / Try to blow out the fire / You're fanning the flame / We'll rise up from the ashes / 'Til we're ashes again
You make a mockery of all that we hold sacred here / You drive us underground in hopes that we will disappear / We seek a sanctuary where the altar candle burns / Our dignity's a legacy the cross of Jesus reaffirms...
As the momentum built and the sound of marching resumed, listeners found themselves jamming to it, grinning and pumping their fists.
After the Nazis we were baited by the Russian bear / Our liberators wanted Poland for a thoroughfare / Rise up, my brothers; don't despair the Iron Curtain's rod / Someday we'll draw the string assisted by the hand of God
I was a victim of December 1981 / I took a final beating from the blunt end of a Russian gun / You made a memory, the memory will multiply / You may kill the body but the spirit, it'll never die...
When Sophia started speaking, she seemed to have read their minds.
"That felt good, didn't it? Reviling Russia today is as natural as breathing. But what if I told you that this was not always so? For that matter, what if I told you that the Slavic relationship with slavery is even more intimate than ours, that the word 'slave' was derived from the ethnic name 'Slav' and that Slavs were enslaved both before and after our experience in the Americas?"
Jaws dropped. No one listening had heard the words "Slav" and "slave" used side-by-side before, but now that they had, the similarity was too strong to dismiss.
"Just as it is in the East that the sun rises, it is also in the East that our excavation begins.
Russia was the last country in Europe to abolish serfdom, doing so in 1861. Slavs were being pressed into slavery as far back as the 800s, some of them even being owned by Africans, all the way up to the 1700s, and as I just noted, serfdom was still a thing in Russia more than halfway through the 1800s. There was a brief respite--though they still had a king--from 1861 to 1917...and then it got even worse. The new masters began their reign with promises of peace, justice, and reparations in the form of free land. Sound familiar? Most countries build walls to keep people out... The Soviet Union built walls to keep people in. It was that bad. When Steve Taylor wrote the song that you just heard, this was the Russia he was talking about.
In December of 1981, Soviet forces rolled into Poland to crush a growing movement called Solidarity. Before that, Poland was the victim of one of history's dirty little secrets: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which allowed Nazi Germany to invade from the west while Soviet Russia invaded from the east so each could control half of Poland. At the end of World War II, Poland became Soviet property in its entirety.
When martial law was declared and Solidarity forcibly suppressed in 1981, Steve Taylor was upset and so was much of America in general, but that outrage was not necessarily shared by the American Left. Why? Because the Soviets were communists and that made them above reproach. As the world's first governing communists, they were the standard bearers of History, the lifeblood of the Dialectic. Everything they did, no matter how repugnant it may have seemed to us, had to be somehow justified by necessity...or even holy.
In perfect lockstep with Soviet interests, the American Communist Party was firmly pacifist for as long as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact lasted and if Franklin Roosevelt--our longest-serving President--knew that Stalin was a monster, he hid that knowledge frighteningly well, saying, 'I may say that I got along fine with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe that he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia, and I believe that we are going to get along with him, and with the Russian people, very, very well.'
It was developments much like that one that led to the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC for short), the Alger Hiss trial, and the birth of the word 'McCarthyism' on the Left as a dysphemism for anti-Soviet sentiment. Pro-Russian sentiment was very strong indeed on the Left at this point in time. In fact, it was Ronald Reagan, a friendly Hollywood witness for the hated HUAC, who would later go against his own policy advisers and publicly tell Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which had been built to keep people in.
All the way to 1991, so long as the Red Flag flew over Moscow, American leftists continued to venerate the Kremlin, with first grade teachers excitedly telling their students about Gorbachev as if he were the Christ. All the while, Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Danzig Baldaev, and Yuri Bezmenov tried to warn us. 'Soylent Green is people,' they told us in essence. 'Soylent Green is people.' But did we listen? Of course not. We smelled the long pig on the wind and told ourselves that it was just barbecue."
Listeners winced. That dark pun would taint the scent of barbecue for a good while, to say nothing of the taste.
"So why do we hate Russia now? Taylor's words would prove prophetic. The Soviet Union would dissolve and Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, would go on to lead Poland. And therein lies a clue to the problem. Our predecessors didn't want these things to happen. We liked the Soviet Union just the way it was and were not exactly interested in watching it become something else, even if that meant freedom and an end to bloodshed. To watch these things happen was to be dragged, kicking and screaming, toward the unpleasant conclusion that we had been wrong and that Soylent Green was indeed people.
Just as the Nazis made themselves odious to the communists not by killing innocent people but by breaking the pact, Russia broke up with Marx and, by extension, broke up with us. We became the jilted lover who keys her ex's car, slashes his tires, stalks him like a madwoman, and talks smack about him to everyone who will listen. And while this acrimonious breakup happened in slow motion, we began transferring our affections from one boyfriend to the next. We shifted our attention away from Vladimir Lenin and toward Mao Zedong, with the help of men like Herbert Marcuse.
The theory was formed that the American worker was too happy to be won with old school class rhetoric. Identity-related fault lines such as race and sex would be emphasized instead. Culture, not economics, would be the engine that got us where we wanted to go. When the Soviet Union dissolved, China--second in the communist line of succession--became the new idol. Even China would eventually go the way Russia did, as we now know, but not before our politicians got cozy enough with Beijing to take Chinese money, bang Chinese spies, and keep portraits of Mao on their walls.
As before, our domestic 'enemies' were wary of the foreign power to which we had taken a shine, but that didn't stop them from mourning the plight of those who lived under its heel. I doubt that Randy Stonehill had any time for the Chinese government in 1983, but he clearly had a heart for the Chinese people. When you fight monsters, see that you do not become one. Our 'enemies' remembered this...but did we? As we close for today, take a listen and ask yourself: could you look at Russia or China today, even assuming that all your worst fears about their governments were true, and still find it within yourself to sing to their rank and file as this man did?"
The music started soft, opening with keyboard notes followed by steady drums. Their insides twisting uncomfortably at the question, listeners bit their lips.
Ohhh-ohhh... Ohhh-ohhh...
A billion hearts are beating / Far across the water / China / And when the sun is shining / Their land is cloaked in darkness / China
Silent eyes, watching the western world / Guarded hearts, hidden like precious pearls / Who can reach you, China?
All the ancient wisdom / Passed down through the ages / China / Still has left you thirsting / For something that can heal you / China
Laboring under the crimson hand / Countless wheels, turning at each command / Praying for you, China
Listeners wiped their eyes. Stonehill's sorrow was proving contagious.
Some recall the story / Told by distant strangers / China / Whispered like a rumor / The King of Hearts is coming / China
Hands of love knock on your mighty wall / All of your tears, Jesus has felt them fall / He's calling to you, China / Praying for you, China
The music stopped for half a second, then broke into a heartbreaking ghostly chant.
Who can reach you, China?
The music lulled, then there came a plaintive sound akin to a siren, which Sophia turned up for emphasis. It bored into the audience like a drill, hitting nerves. Faces contorted. Some sobbed, some darted unhappy glances at the wall, all flinched.
It was hard to know exactly how to feel about all this old and yet new information. Suddenly, everything they knew about world history was wrong. Theirs was not the only experience of slavery...or even the longest? Russia and China, both of them now hated, had formerly been adored by all the "best" people and were hated by those same people now, for precisely the wrong reasons? The "enemy" had done all the heavy lifting when it mattered the most? And now their capacity for empathy was being weighed against that of a dead man, at whom they would have scoffed as a reactionary...and it was losing the contest. Was it even possible to recover from a collision like this one? And this was just the beginning? What else was Sophia going to show them?
Behind the mic, Sophia closed her eyes and took calming breaths, consciously spreading her fingers to prevent them from forming fists. If she wasn't committed before, she was definitely committed now.