Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Kathleen Belew.
(Edited review from the website Andrew: https://medium.com/@ahseeder/a-short-summary-of-kathleen-belews-bring-the-war-home-8ac4a74f3fe2)
Belew’s book is a history of the white power movement’s “groundswell” in the United States, between 1979 and 1995, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier. The movement “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.”
Belew writes that as the white power movement matured, it became more violent, and “[as] violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away.” Belew calls this process “violent community formation” (34). Yet as a social movement, Belew makes a distinction between the white power movement’s “revolutionary violence” and the Ku Klux Klan’s “vigilante violence.”
Vigilante violence “served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power.” Revolutionary violence, however, sought to overthrow the state. It is the white power movement’s goal of overthrowing the federal government that sets it apart in the history of white supremacy in the U.S.
The “formative” years of the white power movement, between 1979 and 1983, are defined by experiences of the Vietnam War. Belew writes that: “Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong.” Veterans were among the white power movement’s key organizers, including Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Tom Metzger, Robert Miles, Glenn Miller, and Tom Posey.
Beam became the Grand Wizard of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before organizing his own “Texas Emergency Reserve, a Special-Forces-style Klan unit with extensive weaponry and rigorous training.” Beam and other white power activists organized paramilitary training [that] prepared white power activists to “wage a race war” right at the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union would bomb each other with nuclear warheads
Groups like the California KKKK, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the Invisible Empire KKKK, and the Covenant, Sword, and the Arm of the Lord organized paramilitary camps all across the country (51). The camps “emerged directly from the combat experiences of key activists in Vietnam” (34), meaning that the camps “sought to remake recruits and inculcate a disposition toward violence” (36).
The camps were not just for show. Belew details three frightening examples of early white power organizing: The Greensboro massacre and subsequent acquittal of 14 Neo-Nazis and Klansman; Klan Border Watch patrols along the US-Mexico border, and the Texas KKKK’s terrorizing of a Vietnamese refugee fishing community [near] Galveston.
After Galveston, a federal judge ordered “ the Klan to ‘stop paramilitary training,’ in Texas entirely, and permanently enjoined the Klan from combat, combat-related training, or parading in public with firearms.” The camps moved to Idaho. The ease with which organizers relocated paramilitary compounds to another part of the country goes far to demonstrate the national reach of the white power movement’s ideology.
In Part 2, “The War Comes Home,” Belew identifies the white power movement’s “revolutionary turn” to a single moment in time: The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, when, during a “private, heavily guarded meeting,” the white power movement went from carrying out paramilitary actions on behalf of the United States to carrying out paramilitary actions to overthrow the United States.
“Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and ‘leaderless resistance,’ cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders.”
The Turner Diaries, [a 1978 novel of violent government overthrow, revenge mass executions, and removal or racial minorities] by William Luther Pierce, is the key to understanding the strategy of the white power movement. In addition to The Turner Diaries, Belew’s book includes a list of 32 sources that make up an archive of white power literature. These include [many print sources and] an online message board called Liberty Net.
Belew dedicates a chapter of Bring the War Home to the role white women played in the movement: “Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children” (160).
Members of the Order traveled to Robert Mathews’s farm to take their oath, where they surrounded a white infant girl, “raised their arms in a ‘Hitler salute,’” and “pledged their lives to race war until victory or until death” (116). Members of the Order modeled their name and their strategy directly from the Turner Diaries and planned to establish a “white separatist nation” in the Pacific Northwest.
Ultimately the material conditions of the white power movement depended on stealing cash, weapons, and ammunition. One armored car robbery in 1984 may have sustained the movement for years. Twelve Order members stole $3.6 million in Ukiah, California and then, according to a federal indictment, distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to other white power organizers in North Carolina, California, Arkansas, Virginia, Idaho, and Michigan (133).
If law enforcement inaction is a pattern during the formative years of the white power movement, catastrophic law enforcement action defined the later years. The rest of Belew’s history describes escalating white power violence in the wake of law enforcement sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Among some white power activists, Ruby Ridge and Waco represented the fulfillment of an apocalyptic vision that had become the focal point of their ideology. The title of Part 3 of Bring the War Home is “Apocalypse.”
The passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, however, was the final motivating force behind the Oklahoma City bombing plot (221). The white power activists behind the plot — McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier — staged their actions from a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma. The truck bomb was prepared from a design described in The Turner Diaries. The explosion killed 167 people, including 19 children.
Belew’s history describes important aspects of the white power movement’s current strategy. To be clear: The white power movement’s goal is to incite a “race war” and then overthrow the U.S. government. Over the decades, the movement built an underground network of cells by training together, reading the same literature and sharing it over social media, by inter-marrying and enforcing religious control over women’s bodies, by stealing weapons and cash, counterfeiting money, and committing acts of violence.
