From: Nicholas Slabaugh
Columbus
You never think it could happen here. I wasn’t prepared to believe it, even when I saw the column of men sporting armbands and a black flag marching down the sidewalk toward me. This occurred Saturday night on Washington Street while I was enjoying an al fresco dinner with friends.
Believe it or not, the neo-Nazis have come to Columbus. Oh, of course, they would reject the label. “We’re nationalists!” they’d likely complain. But we know who they are. We’re not stupid enough to think they adopted the symbols of fascism by accident.
Lest it go unsaid to these people, I’ll say it here: There is no place for an ideology of racial supremacy in Columbus or in America. We reject your demand to elevate yourselves and people who share your skin color over the rest of America. The table of “white people” you marched past that night was a table of immigrants. I’m a Polack mutt, just two generations removed from people your dear leader called the Untermensch.
Loving America means loving what it stands for: All people are created equal. My ancestors fought for that ideal in the world, but I never thought I’d have to defend that ideal in my own hometown. This place is a city of immigrants in a nation of immigrants. When fascists make demands that America turn in on itself, close itself off and become an ethnically homogeneous state, they are demanding nothing less than the destruction of America as we know it.
It is the responsibility of patriots to deny the demands of fascists at every turn and to have the clarity of thought to recognize and resist crypto-fascism in its lightly altered “white nationalist” forms.
