Now that we Americans are seeing people being openly disappeared within our own country–activists and legal residents like Ruymesa Ozturk and Mamoud Khalil, kidnapped by masked government thugs (the latter in front of his pregnant wife) for daring to exercise their freedom of speech to protest genocide; when untried Venezuelan detainees are forming a human “SOS” in a Texas detention center; when folks like Abrego Garcia are being shipped off to a Salvadoran gulag without due process–it may be time to learn our lessons from those who have themselves lived through times of government disappearances before.

Some context: in 1986, in the lead up to the release of their all-time best-selling album The Joshua Tree, the Irish rock band U2 went on a series of benefit concerts for Amnesty International across Central and South America. There, frontman Bono met with members of Madres de Plaza de Mayo and COMADRES, a pair of organizations representing women whose children had been forcibly disappeared by the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, and El Salvador, respectively. These unelected dictatorships were all U.S. supported (and given, again, how the current administration is sending innocent deportees to prison camps in El Salvador today, this all has a bitterly ironic full-circle feel to it).

The members of U2 composed “Mothers of the Disappeared” as a direct tribute to these brave women, and featured the song as the album closer and final statement to The Joshua Tree. As we’ve discussed before, this pairing of an Irish band with Latin American protesters is not so left-field: there is first and foremost the fact that right there in 1980s Ireland, Irishmen were being kidnapped and disappeared by U.K. government agents into the Long Kesh detainment camps, which later became a model for U.S. internment camps in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grhaib. That is, U2 was not patronizingly singing of the “mothers of the disappeared” as something distant happening in a foreign land, but as an act of solidarity from an island where the exact same atrocities were also occurring.

But the similarities don’t end there: both regions feature majority-Catholic populations forcible colonized by nearby hemespheric, Anglo-centric super-powers (the U.K. and U.S., respectively), and have been subjected to repeated extermination attempts (e.g. the Potato Famine in Ireland, the U.S.-trained Death Squads in Central and South American dictatorships). These two populations have not only paralleled, but intersected: Irish immigrants for example are part of the populations of both Chile (whose founding father was a man named Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme) and Argentina (which today hosts the world’s fifth largest Irish population)—the homelands for the Madres de Plaza de Mayo specifically. For that matter, Irish draftees into the U.S. army defected to the Mexican side during the Mexican-American War. We could multiply examples.

Furthermore, as I have previously argued, these two populations share similar attitudes towards the dead (it is not the least bit coincidental that Halloween comes from Ireland, and Day of the Dead from Mexico): by way of contrast, the English and Anglo-Americans, under the firm sway of the Protestant work ethic, tend to despise every population they deem “unproductive”–it’s why we have such vicious and cruel anti-homeless laws in our cities; it’s why we tend to classify Latino immigrants as “lazy freeloaders” contrary to all evidence in order to justify deporting them–and almost by definition, there is no population more unproductive than the dead. It is why almost all English and Anglo-American ghost stories are horror stories: we hate and despise anything “unproductive” that insists on existing, and demand that they be exorcised and exterminated.

The Irish and Latin Americans, however, have not had the luxury of fearing ghosts; they of necessity have had much friendlier relations with the dead they have so often been consigned to join. This allyship, in fact, is a form of resistance; for if the dead can persist, then that means: 1) death holds no more terrors, and therefore the threat of death can no longer be used as an effective tool of state repression, and 2) the dead can also return, to haunt, destabilize, and even overthrow the forces of oppression that sought to silence them in the first place.

This in turn is the sentiment expressed by U2 in “Mothers of the Disappeared:” the comforting conviction that not only are our dead still with us, but that they will return, and serve as a swift witness against those who cut them down. It is grief as grievance, mourning as protest, lamentations as resistance–the promise of both comfort and of justice. The tears that cry out from the ground shall also be wiped away from all our eyes.

This should be all be of interest to us essaying to be Latter-day Saints; for in spite of the overwhelming Anglo-centrism and Protestant work ethic of our current Church hierarchy, our actual doctrine is something other-worldly as well. Per our most sacred Temple rituals, we also officially believe that the dead persist, that they speak, and that the dead whom we have cut down specifically speak to the Lord, and will return one day–sooner than we suppose–to cry out against the wicked and the oppressor, so that the Lord can come out as a swift witness against them. It is therefore incumbent upon those of us who claim to be awaiting the imminent return of Christ in these Latter-days, to determine which side of the Lord we wish to be on: for inasmuch as we’ve done it unto the least of these, we’ve done it unto Him.