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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

White Power as a Social Movement

White power activists are often seen as a tiny, disorganized fringe who might occasionally cause trouble, but who lack the cohesion to pose a real problem to society. The central argument of Kathleen Belew’s book is that in the period between the end of the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, white power really did coalesce into a bona fide social movement, one with astonishingly high numbers of active members and associates and an important, if still relatively small, role to play in American politics and society. The Vietnam War laid the foundation for this movement, with veterans believing themselves (in some cases with good reason) to have been betrayed by their government and ignored, if not outright disrespected, by the civilian population. In addition, veterans returned to a society transformed by a host of social and economic upheavals. Veterans, and non-veterans who shared some of their grievances, first found community in paramilitary activity, perpetuating the wartime bonds of masculine fellowship. Various groups then built ties with their community over shared grievances to win more mainstream support for their cause. Their stances on abortion, feminism, gay rights, immigration, and federal overreach appealed to many, helping them to spread their influence even as relatively few adopted their message of all-out war against the state.

The white power movement was able to wield power and influence because it provided a genuine community, not just a series of ideological bullet points or objectives. It offered its far-flung members literature and schooling, friendship and romance, and a sense of purpose. It found roles for men, women, and even children. Even so, the government struggled to understand that these groups were in fact part of a single movement. As Belew points out, “white power should have been legible as a coherent social movement but was instead largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology but by madness or personal animus” (237). This faulty idea would persist even after the movement’s most significant action, the Oklahoma City bombing, where the media and government agreed to treat Timothy McVeigh as a single person with private grievances, whose arrest and execution seemingly rendered the problem moot.

The Overlap Between Extreme and Mainstream Politics

Common usage often refers to white supremacists as “right-wing,” a term Belew avoids to avoid confusion between the revolutionary aims of the white power movement and conservative politics, which not only has the explicit purpose of preserving rather than overturning the established political order but also accepts the constitutional limits on political contestation. At the same time, extremist movements do not operate in a political vacuum, nor do they espouse an entirely idiosyncratic set of beliefs. To the extent that white power activists’ goal is to establish some measure of popular support, their message had to have some resonance with mainstream attitudes, which they would then push to their most extreme conclusions. For example, Ronald Reagan gave a 1980 speech in which he declared Vietnam to have been a “noble cause” that failed only because “our government [was] afraid to let them win” (see Reagan Library, speech of August 18, 1980). Reagan then proceeded to win 44 states against an incumbent president, suggesting a wide margin of support for such attitudes. Therefore white power activists assumed they would receive a measure of official support for another war against communists, this time in Central America, where the administration had promised to do everything possible to win. This assumption proved largely correct, until the administration, also fending off congressional inquiry into Iran-Contra, “stepped in to regulate CMA […] after the group received enough public attention to force an investigation” (94).

During this period, mainstream conservatism was working hard to tone down the racial aspects of its platform that had been front and center during the Jim Crow era. Klansmen such as David Duke capitalized on this trend with “softened language” that “attempted to appeal to the mainstream of the New Right, where libertarian ideas of choice and coercion had found traction” (35). Duke’s considerable success in appealing to the mainstream suggests that many were willing to look past Duke’s affiliations with the Klan and American Nazis to advance certain common objectives, such as rolling back welfare programs. The extreme and mainstream have most closely converged on the issue of firearms. Belew notes that “in addition to his militia activity, McVeigh’s lifelong obsession with guns also gave him entry into a national network of weapons dealers” who catered to large crowds in gun shows across the nation (215). Although McVeigh was called an anti-government extremist, it is now a mainstream position that not only is it potentially necessary to use violence to keep the US government in check, but that such is the entire purpose of the Second Amendment.

Tactical and Ideological Mirroring

As the title of the book indicates, the white power movement saw itself as replicating the experience of Vietnam at home, waging war on its enemies with paramilitary organization and denying any meaningful distinction between soldier and civilian. White power activists also mirrored the ideology of their enemies, at home and abroad. Jeremy Varon’s similarly titled Bringing the War Home (2004) discusses how leftist groups like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground) saw Vietnam as a war of anti-colonial revolution that ought to inspire oppressed peoples in the United States. White power activists revised this narrative into a struggle against communism, which then effectively doubled as a race war, since people of color were the “childlike dupes of Jews and […] communists” who followed the siren song of liberation rather than accept their supposedly assigned role at the bottom of the social ladder (35).

The white power movement also mirrored the Left’s tactics in hopes of replicating their successes. David Duke branded himself as a civil rights leader for white people, while Louis Beam and others followed the example of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, forming small and highly motivated cadres that would eventually spur the masses into revolution. In Central America, where leftists had shifted their efforts to bring down right-wing regimes supportive of US interests, white power activists continued to mirror leftist tactics to advance their own agenda. For example, white power mercenaries in Nicaragua adopted the insurgency tactics of groups like the Sandinistas, with the purpose of terrorizing the public into submission rather than spur them to revolution.

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In 1983, when white power activists declared war on the United States government itself, they again took their cue from the tactics and objectives of their enemies, both real and imagined. Black nationalist activists had long argued that Black people would never truly be accepted in America and would have to define their cultural existence as Black people, often by building connections to Africa. In 1983, the white power movement arrived at the inverse conclusion that a Jewish-dominated America would never be hospitable for the white race. Since white people had no “homeland” to return to or connect with, they would have to create one. White power activists pointed to alleged plots by the “Zionist-Occupied Government” to “abort babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages—all of this […] to destroy the white race” (159), using these conspiracy theories to frame their struggle with the government as an existential one.