{"id":1397,"date":"2006-08-22T18:05:50","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T22:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2006\/08\/22\/enemies-and-losers\/"},"modified":"2012-06-14T21:03:35","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T01:03:35","slug":"enemies-and-losers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2006\/08\/22\/enemies-and-losers\/","title":{"rendered":"Enemies (and losers)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Protest roils Riverside (N.J.)<\/a>\" report Joel Bewley and Nancy Petersen of The Philadelphia Inquirer.<\/i><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The pictures are worth 1,000 words<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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

The Inky<\/i> reports that this was not an isolated incident:<\/p>\n

\u2026 hundreds on both sides of the street cursed, spit and shouted at [the pro-immigration marchers] to leave and never come back.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, OK, the Real True American anti-immigration crowd waves the Confederate flag and does the Nazi salute. These two things \u2014 the Confederacy and the Nazis \u2014 share a delusional and inevitably violent notion of racial superiority, but they have two other things in common:<\/p>\n

1. Both were enemies<\/i> of the United States of America.<\/b><\/p>\n

I don't mean enemies in the sense of State-Department-travel-restrictions and chilly diplomatic relations. I mean all-out enemies.<\/i> They attacked American troops who fought under the American flag. They attacked the American flag \u2014 and the republic for which it stands, its military, its people, its Constitution.<\/p>\n

(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<\/a>\u2026 \" etc., but let's not push it.)<\/p>\n

2. Both lost.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

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

The most<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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

Some waved Confederate flags, while others thrust their right arms up to resemble a Nazi salute.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These demonstrators have declared their allegiance, explicitly, with the enemies of America.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\nEnemies (and losers)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""Protest roils Riverside (N.J.)" report Joel Bewley and Nancy Petersen of The Philadelphia Inquirer. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Enemies (and losers)","description":""Protest roils Riverside (N.J.)" report Joel Bewley and Nancy Petersen of The Philadelphia Inquirer. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}