anniversary

Today of course is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire, and you can and should read many remembrances available online. It's important to remember what people are capable of.

Yesterday was an anniversary of its own, the assassination of the Archbishop Oscar Romero, the powerful, inspiring liberation theologist. Romero was murdered by the ruling junta, the one armed and funded by the United States. A UN report in 1993 stated what the evidence has made obvious, that Romero's killer was part of a death squad that had been funded and trained by the United States. The ruling junta, which carried out atrocities for decades, was one of the South American regimes our security apparatus liked the very best.

Since I have become politically aware, I have noticed a consistent dynamic when it comes to the extralegal foreign affairs of the United States. Those who defend this country's actions in the rest of the world deny, deny, deny, while the evidence of American culpability (often, and most damningly, coming from declassified documents) falls drop by drop into consciousness, until finally denying the truth becomes absurd. And then, as if by magic, the arguments suddenly change from denial to justification. You might think that no one justifies, say, the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh and the reinstallation of the shah, but years of arguing on the Internet tells me otherwise. The intermediaries are key; we love the deniability goons give us. Nobody doubts that the US was behind the assassination of Diem, but the fact that he wasn't actually killed by an American, to many, means everything.

I don't believe in American benevolence because of simple induction. Without history, you never learn.

On his now-curtailed trip to South America a few days ago, President Obama visited Romero's grave. You've got to hand it to us. We're always sure to send flowers.