Enemies (and Losers)

"Protest roils Riverside (N.J.)" report Joel Bewley and Nancy Petersen of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

This kind of story about the so-called "immigration debate" is becoming routine. Pro-immigrant groups organize a march, waving American flags. Counter-protesters heckle them, shouting that they don't belong in America.

The pictures are worth 1,000 words.

Be sure to check out Photo No. 8 in the slideshow, captioned: "Counterdemonstrators cheer a car passing by with a Confederate flag."

The Inky reports that this was not an isolated incident:

… hundreds on both sides of the street cursed, spit and shouted at [the pro-immigration marchers] to leave and never come back.

Some in the crowd were intoxicated. Some waved Confederate flags, while others thrust their right arms up to resemble a Nazi salute. Dozens had signs calling for tighter border control.

So, OK, the Real True American anti-immigration crowd waves the Confederate flag and does the Nazi salute. These two things — the Confederacy and the Nazis — share a delusional and inevitably violent notion of racial superiority, but they have two other things in common:

1. Both were enemies of the United States of America.

I don't mean enemies in the sense of State-Department-travel-restrictions and chilly diplomatic relations. I mean all-out enemies. They attacked American troops who fought under the American flag. They attacked the American flag — and the republic for which it stands, its military, its people, its Constitution.

(Euphemisms like "the Union" don't change this fact. If anything, they serve to underscore the fact that "rebel" is a synonym for "traitor," which is generally considered a particularly odious kind of enemy. "With malice toward none, with charity for all… " etc., but let's not push it.)

2. Both lost.

This is an unavoidable fact, probably the second most important fact about each of these enemies. The Third Reich? Losers. The CSA? Them too.

The most important fact about each of these losers is not just that they lost, but that their ideology is wholly discredited. It is sometimes the case that a true, just and honorable ideology falters, for a time, because its proponents have suffered a military defeat, but that is not the case for these two enemies of America. They suffered military defeat, in part, because they were driven by ideologies that were not true, nor just, nor honorable. They were ideologies of Holocaust, of violent, lethal racism, and they collapsed under their own weight. They didn't lose the argument because they lost the war, they lost the war, in part, because they could never win the argument.

I've noted before (see "The Minutemen commit Sodomy") that immigration policy is complex. But there is nothing even slightly complex about the spectacle that unfolded Sunday in New Jersey: