Written about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War — events that were unfolding in real time as the album was being written. Peart grapples with the enormity of what had happened behind the Iron Curtain and the decades of suffering that preceded liberation.
The song asks difficult questions about historical injustice and whether those responsible can ever be held accountable. It's one of Peart's most directly political lyrics, made more powerful by its emotional rather than intellectual approach.
As a time capsule of the early 1990s — that brief, optimistic moment when the Cold War ended and the future seemed full of possibility — "Heresy" captures something that subsequent events would complicate.