US Marines with Sandino's flag, 1932

Yes, it’s the annual Picket the School of the Americas weekend: Re-live the glories of Sandino! Indict the United States as the source of all evil in the world! Buy a tee-shirt!

Former military chaplain Bill Cork offers a useful perspective on the annual Fort Benning protests led by Rev. Roy Bourgeois.

The Rev. Bourgeois (see second item), a stalwart of the anti-American Left, is a fixture on the campus lecture circuit. His speaker's bureau also books Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, while his fellow members of the advisory council of the Columbia Support Network include Messrs. Chomsky & Zinn, Bishop Gumbleton and the wonderfully-named Medea Benjamin, described here.

At any rate, as protesters this weekend invoke the memory of a selected few martyrs to discredit Reagan-era US foreign policy, take a moment to consider the full range of 20th-century Catholic martyrs, more than 13,000 of them, two-thirds of them from Europe and the nations of the former Soviet Empire.

Holy Cross hosts a web site on the major persecutions of Catholics in the 20th century, with sections devoted to the Mexican Revolution, the Soviet Empire, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Reich and Red China. Also see these pages on Jesuit victims of the Holocaust and Jesuits named among the Righteous of Nations, part of a larger site on Catholics and the Holocaust.