@plainoldme,
Wow! i was going to look up the lyrics but found this interesting story which those hipper than me probably have known for years:
ike Tom Lehrer's "We Will All Go Together When We Go" and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," the song seems to deal with ever-present fears of an apocalyptic nuclear war. In this interpretation, the words of the song depict the horrors confronting the survivors of a nuclear holocaust in which the two sides have annihilated each other. A man from one side stumbles upon a man from the other side and asks him "Who won?" To stay alive, they share purple berries that have presumably not been poisoned by radiation. The lyrics beg "silver people on the shoreline" to "let us be;" these are commonly held to be men wearing radiation suits. As wooden ships are carrying the survivors away, radiation poisoning kills those who have not made it aboard:
Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries
Stare as all human feelings die
However, Stills has stated at music festivals that the song is actually about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II. Though the obscure lyrics do not refer specifically to the events of that particular war, the story of the song can then be interpreted as the meeting of two deserters, or two non-Jewish individuals, who are fleeing Europe to avoid either starvation or participation in anti-Semitic violence. In this context, the "silver people on the shoreline" may refer to Nazi soldiers; the Waffen-SS wore the standard grey uniforms of the German Wehrmacht. The lyrics "Horror grips us as we watch you die / All we can do is echo your anguished cries, / Stare as all human feelings die" could indicate that the characters in the song are observing a horrific slaughter, that of those whom Germany's government considered undesirable and indeed even subhuman, and yet can do nothing at all to prevent or even minimize it.
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