Shadow said:
I've always interpreted it as about prison camps... maybe the Nazi concentration camps?
Correct!
Here more info
( from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sector_A ):
"Red Sector A" is a song by Rush that provides a first-person account of a nameless protagonist living in an unspecified prison camp setting.
Lyricist Neil Peart has stated that the detailed imagery in the song intentionally evokes concentration camps of the Holocaust. Peart has stated that while Nazi concentration camps of World War II were his primary lyrical motivation, he decided to abstract the lyrics so as to apply to the experiences of atrocity of
any similar prison camp scenario.
From "How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee", Jewish News Weekly, June 25, 2004:
The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from Dachau a few weeks later.) The whole album “Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib,
“is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.”
Though “Red Sector A,” like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.
“I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says during a phone conversation.
“She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”
In a 1984 interview Neil Peart describes writing Red Sector A:
"I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Bergen-Belsen and all of that (...) through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that through all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds."
...I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving.."
The song title 'Red Sector A' comes from the name of the NASA launch area at Kennedy Space Center, where the band was granted special permission to view the launch of Columbia on April 12th, 1981.
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Time for a disco video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wKsEh5TAxI (anno 1984)
)
Shit, that was like the best year in music! I was only 3 
