There’s a saying in Europe, he said over dinner–France and Spain, at least. It is: We have the songs but they have the guns.

New one to me. I reminded him of the Pete Seeger story, where to his surprise the protest singer was invited to sing in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship. His car was tailed (and afterwards so much so that he wasn’t sure they would let him live.)

The large stadium was packed and the show carried live nationwide on the radio. Just before Seeger went on he was handed a list by some men clearly intending to look threatening of the songs he was not allowed to sing: most of his set.

So he walked out there, held up the piece of paper to one and all, told his audience what had just happened (knowing exactly how much that would tick off certain people) and said, I’ll tell you what: they said I couldn’t sing them. They didn’t say I couldn’t PLAY them. I bet you know all the words. Tell you what, I’ll play them and you sing them.

And sing they most certainly did, loud and clear. And the whole country heard it and knew they were not alone in resisting the dictatorship.

Franco’s regime crumbled after the concert.

When the people knew they weren’t the only people who had the songs, who were willing to sing the songs out loud and in defiance, the guns became powerless and irrelevant.

I thought of this after the story broke of a doctored video (NBC story link) playing on screens throughout the HUD building after all work-from-homes were required to work-from-work no matter where they actually lived that showed just how humiliatingly subservient 47 is to the (f)Elon. The regime’s men couldn’t figure out how to make it stop other than running from floor to floor and room to room unplugging the screens, knowing that unless they figured out more than that, that video would still be waiting to repeat on endless loops.

And knowing that so many people were laughing over it and that they had not succeeded in keeping it from getting out of the building must have burned.

There’s more than one way for a free people to sing.