Two poignant verses from rocker Ronnie James Dio’s masterpiece “Stargazer” offer a comment to the failure of a recent Chinese launch of communication satellites.
By Marco Respinti


Ronald James Padavona (1942–2010) died of a stomach cancer at age 68 in 2010. He was internationally known as Ronnie James Dio, one of the most gifted voices in the heavy metal landscape. His name is tied to historic rock groups such as “Elf,” “Black Sabbath,” “Rainbow,”“Heaven and Hell,” and his own “Dio” band.
He was also a talented writer of imaginative and neogothic lyrics, influenced by his readings, since his youth, of Arthurian tales, the works of Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), and science fiction, often alluding to the supernatural, the magical, the esoteric,and the occult. While it is speculated that he could have been a Taoist of some sort, he was often depicted in sulfurous colors that ignited legends, sometimes amounting to simple lies. He then deserves justice.
For sure, Dio popularized the gesture of a hand in the shape of three horns (thumb, index finger, and little finger). Performed also in the variant of raising only two fingers (index and little), which is now typical of rock concerts, it reached the pop entertainment scene also beyond the heavy metal crowds. Critics call it the sign of the “devil’s horns.” It may well be. Others—including Satanists, real or self-styled—may have turned the meaning of the gesture on its head, but for Dio it was essentially an apotropaic sign. He said it in a lost 2001 interview (but still available through the Wayback Machine): “It’s NOT the devil’s sign like we’re here with the devil. It’s an Italian thing I got from my Grandmother called the ‘Meloik.’” This was of course Dio’s twisted recollection of the Italian word “malocchio,” rendered in English with the calque “evil eye.” Dio explained it as something “to ward off the Evil Eye or to give the Evil Eye, depending on which way you do it.”


For some, also his stage name “Dio,” which in Italian means “God,” proves the rocker’s “devil worship,” while instead it is only another debt to his Italian-American parents, whose roots were probably in Veneto. It in fact seems likely that his grandmother—again—, referring to his ability as a singer, once uttered he had a gift from God and should then be called after Him.
A rock parable
One of the best songs ever written by Dio, perhaps even his masterpiece, is “Stargazer.” It is contained in the 1976 “Rainbow” band album called “Rising.” His melodic complexity, insistent riffs, musical structure, and narrative setting make it a heart wrenching classic that seems to draw near the genre of rock opera, poking the shoulders even of symphonic music. In epic style, the mind of Dio writes, and his voice sings, of ancient Egyptian times. Slaves were employed to their death by a powerful and egocentric wizard, obsessed with the idea to reach the skies. He wanted and ultimately succeededin building a mystical stone tower from which he could take off and literally fly.


Of course, the lyrics contains suggestions from the tale of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Dio used to re-count where the most famous incident happened also Christian-inspired stories, by placing them in a different context and location. Another famous example is his song “Holy Diver,” the title-track of the 1983 album of the “Dio” band. This too fed rumors about his supposed impiety, but probably, as it is for many other writers, all comes instead out of a sense of awe for the Sacred Scriptures. Whether he was a believer or not, Dio understood that the Scriptures could not be freely altered for entertainment or even artistic reasons.
In his 2004 “Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal,” Swiss critic and musician Ian Christie calls “Stargazer” “a parable” about a magician who “cripples civilization by attempting” to basically substitute himself to God. Two of its verseshammer the listener, crying—in both senses of the word, i.e., shouting and weeping— “To see him fly/ So many die.”
Let us now use Ronnie James Dio to divine the paths of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The Long March to the Space
The neo-post-national-communist Chinese regime works at space programs since the 1950s. In earlier times, it developed them in cooperation with the Soviet Union, but when, in the following decade, Soviet Union became “revisionist” and even “fascist” in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the PRC continued independently. The same did the Soviet Union, continuing to sacrifice almost all to the dream of reaching the skies before the United States. In 1971, a Soviet dissident who had worked in that field, Leonid Vladimirov (1924–2015), published an important book, “The Russian Space Bluff: The Inside Story of the Soviet Drive to the Moon,” denouncing that foolish policy.


In more recent times, the Chinese race to the stars became similarly ambitious, thanks to funds that its economic reforms (which do not make China non-Communist, as “Bitter Winter” and, more importantly, Xi Jinping himself have repeatedly explained) made available. In the dream of power of President Xi Jinping, the idea to beat the US and Europe in the skies still looms large.
The flagship of the PRC’s space program are the Long March rockets that provide a sophisticated launchingsystem able to place Beijing on the forefront of its space trips competitors. Of course, the name of that family of rockets is an homage to the retreat of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, or the military wing of the CCP from 1928 to 1937, during the first phase of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1936). It may seem bizarre to name a competitive strategy after a retreat, and also strange that the CCP wants to remember a defeat, but reality is otherwise. In fact, during the Long March, in early January 1935, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) emerged as the leader of the CCP, projecting his figure into the future. He rhetorically decided to call the Communist Army’s retreat an attack against Japan that was advancing on Chinese lands. Basically then, the name of the Long March is the name of a pivotal Maoist propagandistic operation by the CCP. That the PRC’s space program jewels are named after a gigantic piece of propaganda is intriguing.
The wizard and Xi
On March 13, 2024, a Long March rocket 2C, carrying communication satellites, was launched from Xichang, one of the four PRC’s spaceports, and its flight failed. The two satellites were not put into orbit around the Earth. Of course, it may happen. Space failureshappened before in the US, in the Soviet Union, and in Europe. But in the case of the PRC, a totalitarian country where the government spends millions in things like space programs and surveillance system on innocent citizens, the notes of Dio’s “Stargazer” and its verses “To see him fly/ So many die” come immediately to mind.


The CCP unlawfully puts millions of its citizens into jail or labor camps. It uses slave workers. It annually performs a record number of capital punishments that are covered by state secret. It harbors forced organ harvesting. It tortures, it sterilizes women, it lets people starve in a paranoid attempt to make “science” triumph over everything else, as it happened during the COVIDpandemic. As famous Chinese dissident leader, Zhou Fengsuo, Executive Director of “Human Rights in China” and co-founder of “Humanitarian China,” told “Bitter Winter,” during COVID people (not only in Urumqi, where the most famous incident happened)were “imprisoned” in their houses and apartments,electronic locks at house doors and gates were blocked, the folly of the wizard and so people died on occasions when fires burst.
The hybris and hunger for power of Xi Jinping resemble the folly of the wizard in Dio’s “Stargazer,” but, unlike that wizard Xi was not able to take flight, at least this time. Yet, “To see him fly/ So many die.”