Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Though a relentlessly historical work, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home speaks powerfully to the explosion of white supremacist action during and following the 2016 presidential election. Far from a sui generis phenomenon, the Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally, rising rates of hate incidents on campuses and communities, and deadly “lone wolf” violence in Charleston and Pittsburgh all can be traced to a longstanding white power movement that has adapted to our nation’s post-civil rights climate. “In the late 1990s, the movement largely relocated into the online spaces it had begun to build more than a decade earlier,” Belew explains. “Even as prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped a new generation of white power activism, this new activity would largely continue to evade public understanding, despite the warnings of watchdog groups, until it broke into mainstream politics in the 2016 presidential campaign and election.” (237)
Up to now, the efforts of those watchdog advocates, along with social scientists and other activists, have gone a long way to exposing that transformation, though our understanding of the “what” has largely outstripped our grasp on the “how” of the movement’s evolution. Bring the War Home substantially rectifies that imbalance, filling prior gaps with a rigorous and compelling portrait of the white power movement that, through its consolidation in the 1970s and 1980s, provides an ideological, political, and social infrastructure for the current spate of white supremacist mobilization.
Belew offers a clear-eyed account of the foundation for this resurfacing. Her research traces the arc of the modern white power movement, offering a powerful and unsettling history of a recent past that–in startlingly immediate ways–continues to inform our present. Indeed, her ability to engage and wrest meaning from an archive associated with events whose significance remain far from settled represents Belew’s central challenge–and her key accomplishment. The textured account offered here is notable not only for its comprehensiveness, but also for its ability to assemble a clear rendering without the benefit of the historical distance that allows analysts to more definitively interpret less proximate eras.
The Vietnam War anchors this account of the near-past, providing both a point of origin and an organizing device for the developing movement. The war’s tortured and conflicted aftermath offered a foundation for white power adherents to build and maintain a sense of collective identity around white supremacy as patriotic and anti-communist mission. Having battled communists in Vietnam, white power activists such as American Nazi Party leader Harold Covington saw targeting “the home-grown product” (76)–a category that included a wide range of progressive activists–a patriotic duty that, in his view, served to continue the same overarching war.
The Vietnam War anchors this account of the near-past, providing both a point of origin and an organizing device for the developing movement. The war’s tortured and conflicted aftermath offered a foundation for white power adherents to build and maintain a sense of collective identity around white supremacy as patriotic and anti-communist mission.
Movement leaders regularly deployed such themes as framing devices, and more concretely drew upon their combat experience to disseminate both tactics and military equipment (Belew deploys the formal term matériel throughout to reference the latter) in the name of the white power cause. Later, when the movement subverted its über-patriotic stance to adopt a more revolutionary anti-state pose, military engagement in Vietnam and in ostensibly anti-communist mercenary campaigns in Central America and southern Africa provide a repertoire for advancing violent action. Most broadly, the enduring resonance of Vietnam should be understood, Belew tells us, as “part of a longer story about veterans’ claims on society, and about the expensive aftermath of modern war.” (20)
Tracing the contours of the white power movement in the post-Vietnam era, Belew adopts familiar signposts: the 1979 killings of five anti-racist activists in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building sixteen years later. But crucially, her account demonstrates the thickly-woven threads that linked these and other seemingly-disparate white power expressions. The anti-communist defense proffered by the killers in Greensboro, all of whom were associated with the KKK or other white power organizations, was celebrated on the Texas coast, where a Klan contingent headed by Army veteran Louis Beam terrorized Vietnamese refugees active in the local fishing industry. In 1981, Beam invited, as he put it, a “Greensboro hero from that shooting,” to one of his Texas KKK rallies, celebrating how “the Klan lawfully and with the will of God behind them executed five communists in Greensboro.” (51)
Early Reagan-era state policy aligned with Beam’s and other white power leaders’ rationale for engaging in supposed anti-communist violence, providing a political through-line connecting white power activists, in the guise of mercenary soldiers, to covert U.S.-sanctioned interventions in Central America. By 1983, however, the white power movement undertook a “tectonic shift.” “Rather than fighting on behalf of the state,” Belew notes, “white power activists now fought for a white homeland, attempted to destabilize the federal government, and waged revolutionary race war” (104). The precise origins of this pivotal swing remain murky but appear to surround an Aryan Nations World Congress gathering in July of that year. (On a recent episode of NPR’s This American Life, Belew offers an engaging account of the spaghetti dinners and volleyball games that accompanied speeches and strategic debates at this and other annual Congress meetings, which she importantly views as enabling solidarities and collective identities to cohere within the broader movement.)
The means through which the new white power agenda would be pursued emerged soon after that meeting, when activists adopted two innovative tactics: the use of incipient virtual computer networks to communicate and coordinate ideas and action, and the development of cell-style “leaderless resistance,” a mode of organization centered on quasi-autonomous action absent direct top-down coordination. The strategic import of these innovations cannot be overstated. The account of the Liberty Net platform’s development is especially surprising, given that its clear-eyed–if skewed–presaging of the social media revolution that would not occur for another two decades. “Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and joined to one computer,” Belew quotes Liberty Net architect Louis Beam evangelizing in 1984. “You are online with the Aryan Nations brain trust. It is here to serve the folk.” (120-121)
The virtual network served as a diffuse recruiting tool, and also allowed for coordinated action in the absence of direct communication among that brain trust leadership. In practice, this move online operated in concert with the movement’s emerging emphasis on cell-based organization. “The movement’s new strategy” of leaderless resistance, Belew explains, was “intended to conceal the movement’s organization and protect its leaders, make it difficult for agents provocateurs to infiltrate the movement, limit the government’s ability to prosecute movement members for incidents of white power violence, and forestall public opposition.” (108)
As the 1980s advanced, movement leaders increasingly emphasized white separatist migration to insulated enclaves in the Pacific Northwest, the strategic use of military enlistments to gain access to training resources and matériel, and the recruitment of additional “Aryan” adherents among incarcerated populations (most successful in this vein, the prison-based Aryan Brotherhood emerged as a sort of auxiliary branch of Aryan Nations). These moves culminated in a ramped-up vision of revolutionary action. By the early 1990s, Belew notes, the “guerilla war on the state” that the movement had promoted throughout the prior decade had given way to a campaign of “spectacular state violence” (188) whose impact would be felt far beyond the direct victims of the acts themselves.
McVeigh’s terrorism, she [ Belew] shows us, “represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing.” Ignoring that fact “not only worked to obscure the bombing as part of a social movement, but, in the years following McVeigh’s conviction, effectively erased the movement itself from public understanding.”
This evolution occurred alongside the rise of the Clinton-era militia movement. Critically, Bring the War Home shows that, far from a novel development, that ascendant movement was largely of a piece with the prior decade’s white power mobilizations, with overlapping leadership and evolving but internally consistent emphasis on conspiratorial opponents. (A case in point: prior anti-Semitic conceptions of the Zionist Occupational Government [ZOG] that white power leaders placed at the center of its seditious worldview had by this point been superseded by the “New World Order,” encompassing an anti-American international conspiracy of similar scope and motive favored by militia leaders). In so doing, the white power field drew on the same playbook that had long enabled the KKK to retain its relevance in a changing world–retaining continuity through adaptability that allowed the movement to “recalibrate to the prevailing public sentiment.” (195)
The contours of this shift also developed in concert with the changing terrain of mainstream policing, driven at least indirectly by a paramilitary turn that paralleled the evolution of the white power movement itself. One byproduct of this police orientation was two highly-pitched, and ultimately botched, efforts to apprehend separatist detachments in Ruby Ridge Creek, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. The former siege by federal marshals occurred in 1992, targeting a white separatist family, the Weavers, and resulting in the killings by government agents of two family members. A 51-day standoff the following year outside the Waco-based compound of the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic paramilitary cult, resulted in a fire that burned the entire compound and resulted in the deaths of seventy-six adherents inside. The government’s handling of both cases was subject to considerable public criticism, and, within the white power movement, interpreted as yet more damning evidence of federal oppression and overreach, reaffirming commitment to its war against the state.
Combined with a failed 1988 effort in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to convict fourteen prominent white power movement figures of seditious conspiracy associated with an organized act of war against the U.S. government, state policing agencies moved to an approach that viewed white power violence and terror as acts of isolated individuals. As a result, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which resulted in 168 deaths and more than five hundred additional injuries, perpetrator Timothy McVeigh was presented as a “lone wolf” rather than an activist participating in, and influenced by, the white power movement.
Belew carefully demonstrates how and why that fallacy emerged, and why it mattered. McVeigh’s terrorism, she shows us, “represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing.” Ignoring that fact “not only worked to obscure the bombing as part of a social movement, but, in the years following McVeigh’s conviction, effectively erased the movement itself from public understanding.” (210-211) Lone-wolf accounts were echoed and strengthened by the media, which sought to root the actions of McVeigh and like-minded compatriots in their idiosyncratic family or mental health backgrounds. The result: a strategic push within the movement to reconsolidate within online spaces, retreating from public view until the political winds shifted toward the hard right in 2016.
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Bring the War Home presents this portrait of the white power movement with exceptional care. Admirably, Belew’s orientation to her subject matter extends from the book’s opening “Note to Readers,” where she justifies her use of “white power” over other common labels–white nationalist, racist right, white supremacist, and so on–to describe the overarching movement here, to the manner in which she situates and often transparently adjudicates among her archival sources throughout. She draws prudently on theoretical frameworks–bolstering her consideration of what social movement scholars refer to as “claimsmaking,” “tactical repertoires,” collective identity formation, and the gendered frames and networks that characterize far-right organizing–without allowing them to overtake the story at hand. And she rarely overreaches when presenting the martial threads that render legible the seemingly disparate expressions that she argues represent the evolution of a cohesive white power movement.
We might, however, do well to consider exactly how military experience impacts subsequent radicalism. As the book’s core lens, “war” plays an expansive role in Belew’s explanation of white power organizing. Thus we see how our nation’s experience of Vietnam offer a lens through which to frame white supremacist ideas and build and maintain solidarity among adherents. Likewise, soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam offered exposure to military training, culture, and matériel that fueled the movement’s paramilitary character. But Belew also reaches further to advance a different and more ambitious kind of claim–that is, that war served as a primary driver of white power mobilization, “align[ing] more neatly with the aftermath of war than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism, to name a few common explanations.” (20)¹ This claim directly competes with a long line of social science literature on the topic,² and nowhere in the text or notes does Belew offer or engage data capable of supporting or assessing such an argument.
To be sure, a project that directly undertakes such an assessment would undoubtedly be fruitful. The manner in which the aftermath of war supplants–or, more likely, interacts with–broader structural drivers of racist mobilization seems pivotal to understanding the conditions that foster extremist violence. Belew’s associated claim that war drives paramilitary activism at both extremes of the political spectrum–that is, within the Black Panther Party as well as the KKK–is equally intriguing, and we might additionally consider how the culture and experience of war shapes the self-understandings of even those radical constituencies that do not themselves participate directly in combat or the military. Unpacking such diffuse effects would aid our understanding of the mobilization of militant factions of the New Left during this period (the Weather Underground in particular ³), alongside that of movements in which veterans serve as key constituencies. But in the absence of more rigorous treatments, such threads remain suppositions rather than definitive conclusions.
She [Belew] draws prudently on theoretical frameworks–bolstering her consideration of what social movement scholars refer to as “claimsmaking,” “tactical repertoires,” collective identity formation, and the gendered frames and networks that characterize far-right organizing–without allowing them to overtake the story at hand.
Bring the War Home does more fully serve as an effective antidote to accounts of the contemporary alt-right that present self-described white nationalists as a novel virtual phenomenon.⁴ Belew adds welcome texture to ahistorical portraits, identifying and unpacking the organizational base that has long undergirded the white power movement. She nicely emphasizes both continuity and adaptability within the movement–what she terms the “degree of ideological and rhetorical continuity” (16) between white power and earlier white supremacist waves. Such continuities become especially clear in her emphasis on the pivotal roles played by women in the movement. This aspect of white power mobilization harks back to the social, material, and tactical contributions women have always made to white supremacist organizing–often from adjacent spaces such as the Women of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the KKK’s “Ladies Auxiliary Units” of the 1960s. The standard-bearer in that area is sociologist Kathleen Blee. Placing her work in conversation with Belew’s offers interesting parallels, both in terms of how distinct forms of data produce different lenses on women’s roles and identities (Blee employs intensive interviews, in contrast with Belew’s archival approach) and as a means to highlight more clearly the specific continuities and divergences associated with white women’s service as symbolic motivations for male activism as well as direct participants in the movement.
Such links might also place the emphasis here on war in sharper historical relief. Just as nearly every twentieth-century generation was touched significantly by the experience of war and the military, prior white supremacist iterations not surprisingly drew closely on such experiences as foundations for training, culture, and iconography. While Belew offers isolated examples of the phenomenon, the largest and best-known civil rights-era KKK organization (United Klans of America [UKA]) prominently featured a paramilitary “Security Guard” force at nearly all of its nightly public rallies and marches throughout the 1960s. Security Guard members wore full military garb, complete with gold helmet and a complex array of patches signaling rank, and boasted a membership with close ties to the Korean War and, among more seasoned adherents, extending back to World War II.
That group’s membership in North Carolina, a UKA stronghold, also provided a more direct foundation for the military character of later white power mobilizations. In particular, Klan leader Glenn Miller and other participants in the 1979 Greensboro caravan that perpetrated the killings of anti-racist marchers had deep connections to the state’s KKK infrastructure, which–even in the midst of sharp decline following their mid-1960s heyday–pioneered many of the later tactics described by Belew, including the organization of patrols around desegregated schools, the airing of white power radio programming, and even the name of “new” KKK groups (Miller’s appropriation of the name Confederate Knights of the KKK stemmed directly from Greensboro-based KKK preacher George Dorsett’s FBI-bankrolled organization of the same name less than a decade prior). Just as what Belew shows holds true in later decades, these tactics and symbols endured across earlier movement generations, as they passed through networks that remained active in what sociologist Verta Taylor calls the fallow “abeyance” periods between movement waves.⁵
She [Belew] nicely emphasizes both continuity and adaptability within the movement–what she terms the “degree of ideological and rhetorical continuity” (16) between white power and earlier white supremacist waves. Such continuities become especially clear in her emphasis on the pivotal roles played by women in the movement.
In a similar vein, the sharp repression of KKK organizations in the later 1960s–when both the FBI and state policing agencies infiltrated Klan groups and, under pressure from the federal government, took action to reduce their capacity to organize–contributed to an earlier iteration of what Belew presents as a mid-1980s shift toward cell-based leaderless resistance tactics. Eastern North Carolina KKK leader Raymond Cranford pioneered one such move in 1968, referencing the “game of ones” that replaced the more centralized decision-making that had long characterized Klan terror in the region.⁶ Louis Beam’s orientation was forged in the same besieged KKK crucible, as he joined and quickly exited the UKA’s Texas realm, citing his frustration over “government subversion” of the KKK (34). Recognizing such precursors underscores the unintended ways in which the policing of organized vigilantism can spur more insidious forms of violence. They also highlight the manner in which such dynamics drove the murky (re-)taking of this strategic mantle by Beam and other attendees of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations World Congress convenings in the early 1980s as well as the move later that decade toward spectacular state violence in response to the shifting paramilitary orientation of the police.
But full treatment of each of these aspects certainly exceeds any reasonable expectation of what a single volume–even a fine one like Belew’s–might encompass. The main takeaway here should properly not center on aspects that might be extended by adjacent work, but rather on the fact that, with Bring the War Home, we have been graced with a new go-to account of the contemporary white power movement. Rooted firmly in the archival record, it offers an insightful and clear-eyed portrait of where that movement has come from, and–in so doing–provides an indispensable record of how we have arrived at our current moment.
