Back when I served in the aughts, there was a certain species of film soundtrack–e.g. Braveheart, Gladiator, The Last of the Mohicans, Lord of the Rings, etc.–that was popular among young missionaries, especially the elders. Our favorite Pop music was of course verboten, while “Classical” was tolerated, so film soundtracks were our happy little compromise. The fact that these soundtracks largely featured on R-rated action films was part of their mildly-subversive appeal, naturally, a nice little wink and a nudge shared among teenagers while folding laundry on P-Day. But of course it wasn’t just the minor thrill of getting away with something that made these soundtracks popular among missionaries, but the subject matter of the films themselves: typically, tales of oppressed peoples outnumbered and out-armed, fighting for their freedom against impossible odds.

For a bunch of LDS missionaries like us, raised as we were on such rousing hymns as “We Are As The Armies of Helaman,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and constantly told we were engaged in “spiritual warfare” while vastly outnumbered by all other denominations, these old action movies were like catnip. It frankly didn’t seem right to us that so many of their R-ratings made it a supposed sin to watch them, since they provided us with a model for how to persevere in the Work in the face of near-constant rejection, insults, and set-backs.

This is all what I mean when I say that NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD—the most recent album by the Canadian instrumental post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor—sounds like something I might have inadvertently listened to during my mission. In contrast to the more ambient noise-rock that Godspeed You! Black Emperor became renowned for back in their late-’90s/early-2000s heyday, these tracks are downright anthemic, melodic, even cinematic, the closest they’ve come to sounding like a Pop group in their 30 years together (at least comparatively). That opening track especially, “SUN IS A HOLE SUN IS VAPOR,” sounds like it could feature in a movie soundtrack, perhaps playing over some slow-motion scene of two armies clashing in battle, featuring a desperate and resilient people fighting oppression against impossible odds, outnumbered and outgunned. Maybe something Scottish. Hence the gut-punch when you realize that, per the title, this album isn’t about some fictional movie battle at all, but the very real–and very horrifying–Israeli bombing of Gaza Strip since October of 2023.

The 28,340 of the title was the official death-toll in Gaza after only four months of IDF bombing when the album was recorded on 2/13/24–a number that had nearly doubled by the time of the album’s release in August of ’24, and has shown little signs of ending or abating since. These bombings have resulted in the destruction of hospitals, schools, homes, businesses, and grocery stores, and has included the indiscriminate massacre of doctors, nurses, aide workers, journalists, and children. (The title to track 2, “BABIES IN A THUNDERCLOUD,” becomes especially harrowing once you realize it is about literal babies getting blown apart by bombs as we speak.) This has not been a movie at all, one where we all get to get up and leave once the credits roll, but a devastatingly real humanitarian calamity, featuring real human beings with real human bodies being destroyed with blood and horror upon this earth.

Indeed, if anything, these songs almost feel too epic, too melodic, too triumphant, to be about something that has been an unmitigated catastrophe from the beginning–and I do mean the beginning. The Nakba (literally Arabic for “Catastrophe”) famously began in 1948 when over 750,000 Palestinians whose families had lived there for centuries were forced from their homes by the newly-arrived Israeli settlers–in many cases, their food still cooking on the stoves, their family pictures still hanging on the walls, their clothing still hanging in their closets–and were then crammed into crumbling ghettos without consistent access to electricity or running water or basic human rights in what is now Gaza Strip and West Bank. There are elderly Arab grandmothers alive today in Lebanon and Palestine still wearing around their neck the keys to the houses they were forced from at gunpoint in 1948.

And has oft been stated, the Nakba never ended; 21st-century “settlers” continue to forcibly seize homes and evict Arab residents in Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem down to the present day. Those who defend the actions of the settlers by citing the much more recent viciousness and cruelty of Hamas in October of 2023 all ring hollow, because the Israeli Defense Force has been doing all the exact same things to Palestinians–taking hostages, storming homes, and indiscriminately killing civilians–for over seventy years straight; those who claim all criticisms of Israel are antisemitic are likewise being dishonest, because some of the loudest critics of Israel’s bombings have been Jewish themselves^[1]e.g. Noam Chomsky, Jon Stewart, Emily Wilder, a whole roster of Jewish writers and film-makers listed here, a Jewish student I have right now who wrote his final paper on how Zionism has been a rape … Continue reading (not to mention the fact that Arabs are also Semites, and hence calling for their extermination is, definitionally, antisemitic); citing the Holocaust to justify modern Israel’s actions won’t do, when the Palestinians had nothing to do with the German Nazis, and (as Victor Frankl would note) surviving one genocide doesn’t justify committing another; that 28,340 is in addition to all the thousands dispossessed and killed in Palestine before October 2023.

These facts are not new, nor were they ever hidden from public view. I recall being a young Republican in high school clear back in the late-’90s, learning in class about the origins of modern Israel from a conservative history teacher who, despite giving his absolute best pro-Israeli slant, still couldn’t help but acknowledge that the Israeli state had been founded by seizing and stealing homes from people who had lived there longer than the United States has existed. That mass-theft struck me as inherently wrong even as a conservative teen in 1999, and hasn’t stopped feeling wrong since then.

Which gets to the crux of the issue: those who have found Israel’s treatment of Palestinians horrifying, have always found it horrifying, no matter their initial political or religious persuasion; while those who justify Israel’s actions in Gaza Strip and West Bank have always justified them, no matter how violent or repressive they get. There are no arguments one can articulate–no appeals to either logic or compassion–that will be sufficient to change someone’s mind either way on the matter.

Hence why it may be relevant that Godspeed You! Black Emperor is first and foremost an instrumental band: they make no arguments in their music because there are none one can make–at least not with words–that will ever persuade anyone. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, for all of their open politics, has never written a manifesto, because manifestos never work; for all of our pontificating and arguing, the fact remains that politics, like the gospel itself, is at root a feeling, and can only ever be expressed as a feeling^[2]Perhaps it is no coincidence that Godspeed You! Black Emperor used to open for Low back during the Secret Name tour—which has come full circle with a widowed Alan Sparhawk opening for them now. … Continue reading. You have either felt from the beginning that certain things are wrong, or you have not; and like missionaries out in the field, your only hope for converting anyone is by helping others experience that feeling, too. The instrumental music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor also seeks to persuade not by carefully-worded argument, but by communicating a feeling. Like St. Francis and Elder Holland, Godspeed You! Black Emperor preaches the gospel, and if necessary, uses words.

Speaking of which, the only words to appear on this record come during the interlude to track 3 “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD,” wherein a young woman delivers a spoken-word poem in Spanish, one that is buried deep in the mix and obscured by distortion. As in a difficult prayer, you really have to strain your ears to pick out the following, which in English translates as:

Raindrops cast in lead
Our side lit up
Then put out and buried and extinguished
Underneath the perfect sun
Underneath the body falling from the sky
They were martyrs falling
Because on our side they were martyrs since before we were even born
The women who tried and were killed for trying
The women who died young, furious, or old, and nevеr saw the sunrise
Innocents and childrеn and the tiny bodies that laughed, and will sleep forever
And never saw the beauty of the sunrise

But then, even if you can’t made out these words, the important part of this song is not the words at all, but, again, the feeling generated by the music itself. As with the Holy Spirit, conversion does not come about by sound arguments or logical chains-of-facts, but by something beyond discourse, a “song of redeeming love” without lyrics that is felt, not explained, a groaning beyond utterance, a peace which surpasseth understanding, the still small voice, which (like the soft-loud dynamics of Godspeed You! Black Emperor) whispereth through and pierceth all things, yet also often times maketh my bones to quake while it maketh manifest–

This all, of course, is small comfort to people currently getting bombed to hell. In fairness, Godspeed You! Black Emperor is keenly aware of this fact, too. Hence, all they can really do in the meantime, is try to find hope in the hopelessness^[3]“Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world” wrote Moroni in Ether 12:4, after beholding the genocide of his people., the divine in the violence, the redemptive in the suffering–or, as in the title to the final track, Green Shoots in the Grey Rubble.