Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

This term refers to a religious ideology that argues that the actual “Jews,” namely God’s chosen people of the Old Testament, are not in fact the Jewish people of the present day. Borrowing from a 19th-century tradition known as British Israelism, this movement claims that White Anglo-Saxons are the real Jews, and that their identity was stolen by a people who are the offspring of the serpent from the Garden of Eden, and are therefore not human. Such teachings allow an elaborate genealogical study of the Bible to justify an attitude of white supremacy, a modern idea that has no actual Biblical foundations and is obviously opposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

White power activists struggled with the fact that they were claiming to uphold American traditions and values, yet consistently found themselves at odds with their own government, to the point where they believed it necessary to use violence against it. A concept that helped reconcile this contradiction was to conclude that the government itself had fallen prey to a shadowy group of (usually Jewish) elites plotting to enslave the US population and impose a tyrannical world government. Through this lens it became permissible to view all governments agents, even the humblest, as enemy agents of an evil and foreign power, and that war on them was absolutely justified.