Bring The War Home

 

Kathleen Belew, “Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America,” Harvard University Press (Paperback), 2018, 239 pp..

As I write this review on 2/3/23, it is worthwhile to note that in the past three months there have been attacks on nine separate electrical power stations and one recently foiled attempt on five substations around Baltimore MD.

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It is at war against the federal government and its agents, it has carried out an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves (and neither was Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma bombing).  They are organized and motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.  Returning to an America ripped apart by a war that, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement has undertaken assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking.

My Notes:

The author uses the term white power to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995.

Pg. 11:  The primacy of the Vietnam War is clear in the cultural artifacts that inspired and coordinated the movement.  These included uniforms, language, strategies, and materiel derived from the war itself.  Essential in binding the movement together was the 1974 white utopian novel The Turner Diaries, which chronicled and responded to the nascent white power narrative of the Vietnam War.

  Pg. 16:  The White Power Movement was inflamed by encounters with state power, such as the standoff between federal agents and a white separatist family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.  Cataclysmic, militarized state violence helped to inspire the growth of militias, leading to the Oklahoma City bombing.  This act stands as the culmination of two decades of white power organizing and is the most significant single event in the movement’s history.

Pg. 20:  Just as some veterans fought for racial equality, others fought to oppose it.  Indeed, Ku Klux Klan membership surges have aligned more neatly with the aftermath of war than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism, to name a few common explanations.  After the Civil War the Confederate veterans who formed the first Klan terrorized both black communities and the Reconstruction-era state.  WWI veterans led second-era Klan efforts to violently ensure ‘all-American’ racial religion and nationalist power.  Third-era Klansmen had served in WWII and Korea played key roles in the violent opposition to civil rights, including providing explosives expertise and other skis they had learned in the military.  After each war veterans joined the Klan and played instrumental roles in leadership.

Pg. 110:  The Turner Diaries worked as a foundational how-to-manual for the white power movement, outlining a detailed plan for a race war.  Presented as a diary found and published after a white racist revolution has overthrown the US government, it describes an all-white utopia.  It recounts a series of terrorist attacks leading up to the partitioning of a white homeland in California and the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the US and then the world of nonwhite populations. 

Pg. 207:  Waco and Ruby Ridge did more than inflame the movement; for its members, they became the standard of atrocity associated with the New World Order, by now synonymous with the federal government.  In their aftermath, the militia movement surged to more than 50,000 members in forty-seven states and focused increasingly on taking violent action to stop the rampant federal government.  One SPLC analyst estimated that some five million people considered themselves part of the ‘patriot movement’.

Pg. 221:  The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in August 1994, outlawed nineteen typ0es of semiautomatic weapons.