Contemporary Authors

• Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2018

1. Bring the war home : the white power movement and paramilitary America LCCN 2017041043 Type of material Book Personal name Belew, Kathleen, 1981- author. Main title Bring the war home : the white power movement and paramilitary America / Kathleen Belew. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780674286078 (hardcover : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER HS2325 .B45 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Department of History, University of Chicago Website - https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/kathleen-belew

  Assistant Professor
  of US History and the College

  Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

  PhD 2011 Yale University

  Department of History
  University of Chicago
  1126 E. 59th Street
  Chicago IL 60637
  belew@uchicago.edu

  Website

  Field Specialties
  Twentieth-century United States, violence, militarization, women and gender, cultural history, race and racism

  News
  —Publishes Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018)
  —Q&A with the New York Times on "The Secret History of White Power," May 19, 2018
  —Speaks with CBS News on cell-style terrorism in the white power movement, May 2018
  —Discusses "How America's White Power Movement Coalesced after the Vietnam War," with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, April 25, 2018
  —Speaks with NPR Books, "Lone-wolf Terrorists Are Really Part of a Pack," April 22, 2018
  —Writes Op-Ed for the New York Times on the Oklahoma City Bombing, April 18, 2018
  —Vox Q&A, "How the Vietnam War Created American's Modern 'White Power' Movement," April 13, 2018
  —Slate Q&A, "The Secret Cohesion of White Supremacists,"April 11, 2018
  —Political Reserach Associates in-depth Q&A, "White Revolution and the Legacy of the Vietnam War," April 11, 2018
  —Discusses [at 34:10 mins] "leaderless resistance" on This American Life, September 22, 2017

  —Discusses teaching histories of violence for Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians, March 31, 2015
  —Writes Op-Ed for the New York Times on "Veterans and White Supremacy," April 15, 2014

  Biography
  Belew specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare. Her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (under contract with Harvard University Press), explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about the Vietnam War and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that ricocheted through Latin America, southern Africa, and the United States, revealing white power as a transnational phenomenon. Bring the War Home shows how this paramilitary fringe movement augmented, clashed with, and challenged other militarizations in the same time period, including paramilitary foreign policy and extralegal intervention, militarized policing, and the growth of the carceral state. White power activists often collided with refugees displaced by US warfare, and reinforced state border patrols at home and covert interventions abroad. While some have understood these actors as part of a culture of masculinity, white power paramilitarism was also a cohesive social movement comprising a wide range of activists and supporters, including women and families. This account connects the overtly racist organizing of the 1980s with the militia movement, culminating in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
  Before coming to the University of Chicago, Belew held postdoctoral fellowships from Northwestern University and Rutgers University. Her research has received the support of the Andrew W. Mellon and Jacob K. Javits Foundations, as well as an Albert J. Beveridge and John F. Enders grants for research in Mexico and Nicaragua. She earned her AB in the comparative history of ideas from the University of Washington in 2005, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities. Her MPhil (2008) and PhD (2011) in American studies are from Yale University.
  Belew is at work on two new projects, one focusing on processes of militarization in the domestic United States and the other on ideas of the apocalypse in American history and culture. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war.

  Publications
  "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, under contract.
  Review of David Kieran's Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory. Journal of American History 102, no. 3 (Dec. 2015): 953–54.
  "Lynching and Power in the United States: Southern, Western, and National Vigilante Violence from Early America to the Present." History Compass 12, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 84–99.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/kathleen-belew/

  Kathleen Belew is assistant professor of History at the University of Chicago. She unearthed the lives of her white power militant subjects in previously classified FBI documents, newspapers published from Nicaragua to New York, and vivid testimony, writings, and illustrations.

• Amazon -

  Kathleen Belew unearthed the lives of her white power militant subjects in previously classified FBI documents, newspapers published from Nicaragua to New York, and vivid personal testimonies, letters, and illustrations. Tracking the path of violence through thousands of pages of documents over more than a decade of research and writing, her work provides an insight and authority rarely seen in such accounts. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago and has appeared on Fresh Air, Weekend Edition, and CBS, among others.

• Fresh Air, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/04/25/605661710/how-americas-white-power-movement-coalesced-after-the-vietnam-war

  < How America's White Power Movement Coalesced After The Vietnam War April 25, 20181:39 PM ET Listen· 37:24 37:24 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Many people were surprised seeing neo-Nazis and white nationalists marching in Charlottesville last September. My guest, Kathleen Belew, has written a new book that helps explain how white power has never really gone away, although the movement has changed over the years. Her book about the white power and militia movements in America is called "Bring The War Home." The book begins in the '70s when some Vietnam War veterans applied their military experience to acting on their extremist views. The book ends with the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Belew writes that the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing. Belew has been researching the white power movement for 10 years. She's an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Kathleen Belew, welcome to FRESH AIR. How do you think the history that you're telling from the '70s through the mid-'90s connects to the alt-right of today? KATHLEEN BELEW: I think the most critical thing that this history can show us about the present moment is that what seems new in our present is not new. That is to say I think there's been a lot of feeling of shock and surprise around some of the events fomented by the alt-right and around some of the discourse put into the public sphere by the alt-right, but none of these things are new. So to take one example, last week, there was something circulating about a swastika burning, I believe in Georgia, which is sort of like a cross burning that people are more familiar with as an action of the KKK. That has actually been part of this movement for decades. And to take an example, Aryan Nations in Idaho had frequent ceremonies of lighting both a cross and a swastika as a way of demonstrating alliances between neo-Nazis and Klansmen. So these sorts of events are not new. This history can show us a lot about how they formed, why they took the directions they did and the things that have and have not worked to respond to them. GROSS: You also say that some American terrorists from the racist wing of the far-right, who we may see as lone wolves, might not really be lone wolves. Is there a recent example of that? BELEW: Sure. I think one good example in the present moment is Dylann Roof, the gunman in the Charleston shooting in 2015. So Dylann Roof is an interesting example because he's someone who didn't need to meet these activists in real life in order to be radicalized and to see himself as part of a movement. And we can see in his manifesto that he's using a lot of the rhetorical framing that was common in the white power movement earlier. But I think even more clear is just in the way he presented himself. So Roof posted pictures to social media wearing not only the 14 and the 88, which are sort of classic white power symbols that we can talk more about, but he also posted pictures of himself wearing the Rhodesian flag. So the Rhodesian flag is something that refers to a white power issue that wasn't even an issue during his lifetime, right? Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe by the time that Dylann Roof was born, I believe. But Rhodesia, as a white-minority-ruled government, was really important to white power activists in the 1980s. And it's a way that we can see how this movement is continuing to shape politics in the present even about issues that aren't live anymore. GROSS: And with people like Dylann Roof, I don't know if he had associations with other white racist groups, but through the Internet, you don't have to show up in a physical space to feel a connection to them and to learn the rhetoric, to learn the symbols and to feel a part of it. BELEW: Exactly. And it's this sort of powerful connection to a whole world of symbols that has worked to bring people into this kind of activism at least since the 1980s. The white power movement pioneered some of the early Internet social network connection that we see now as early as 1983-84 with a series of computer message boards that were password protected and weren't decrypted by the FBI for several years. So they used that series of message boards for all kinds of activism. GROSS: So they had an early infrastructure in place for organizing on the Internet? BELEW: Yeah, that's right. It was called Liberty Net, and it was founded in 1983-84. Liberty Net was a series of computer message boards that put forward everything from sort of common ideologies of the movement to personal ads to connect activists with one another in romantic and other kinds of social relationships to hit lists of targets for that movement violence. And the movement matched that kind of activism with actually distribution of funds to buy a computer. So there was a targeted effort to distribute the movement's resources around the country so that everyone could get onto these early message boards. GROSS: Your book is subtitled "The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." So your umbrella phrase is the white power movement. Why have you chosen that as the description that you're going to use? And I'll use it too in keeping with your book. BELEW: Sure. So I think it's important to call this the white power movement because I think that the alternative is confusing. I think that when people hear the phrase white nationalism, what they think of is nationalism and the nation. And I think that there is a way that that allows people to think of - sometimes without even realizing it - the American nation as the unit of nationalism. And that lets people sort of think of this as a overzealous patriotism, but it isn't that. White power activists who were white nationalists in this period were imagining a transnational racial nation that would unite white people across national boundaries and would create, eventually, a white nation and a white world. So when we think of it as white nationalism, sometimes there's a slippage that lets people think of it as being continuous with a sort of patriotism or populism that's more mainstream. And I think that that's not what this movement really was. White power also is what they use to describe themselves, and it's a label that reached across a lot of different belief systems. Which is kind of how this movement worked was to unite many different belief systems within a common ideology. GROSS: So you describe a major shift as happening in the white power movement during and after the war in Vietnam as vets start returning home to the U.S. What's the shift? BELEW: So one thing that happens after the Vietnam War is broader than just its impact on the white power movement but impacts the whole of American society, and that is that people start to think about the Vietnam War in a different way, or they begin to use a different narrative structure for talking about the war. So this happens throughout the 1980s. And you can see this kind of narrative in many popular accounts of Vietnam. Any Vietnam War movie, memoir or novel from the '80s usually is using this kind of a narrative frame. It has to do with betrayal by authority, intense violence, gore, individual sacrifice and the sense of sort of not being allowed to win. And we see this idea in everything from Hollywood movies to the speeches of President Reagan. Now, this idea of the war as a moment of betrayal or frustration is also fueling a huge surge in paramilitary culture in the United States, which appears in everything from paintball courses to gun shows to camo fatigue clothing to armchair warrior magazines. So that is happening in the mainstream. GROSS: I will say, you know, a lot of vets return from the war with a narrative of the war was bad, the war had no meaning, it shouldn't have been fought. People died who needn't have died. So let's end the war. Let's work toward more peace. So that's one narrative. What's the narrative on the far-right from the vets returning home who belong more to a white power point of view? BELEW: So white power veterans are using this surge of paramilitary discourse to figure out their own narrative of the Vietnam War that does several things within this movement. Now, to be clear, I'm not arguing that this is at all representative of Vietnam veterans. This is a tiny, tiny percentage of returning veterans. But it is a large and instrumental number of people within the white power movement, and they play really important roles in changing the course of movement action. The Vietnam War narrative works, first of all, to unite people who had previously not been able to be in a room together and to have a shared sense of mission. So, for instance, Klansmen and neo-Nazis after World War II had a very difficult time aligning because Klansmen tended to see neo-Nazis as enemies - right? - the people that they were confronting in World War II. But after Vietnam, they see common cause around sort of their betrayal by the government and around the failed project of the Vietnam War. So that's one function. Another function of the Vietnam War is to sort of provide a narrative that shapes the violence itself, and this is partly material in that veterans who are trained in Vietnam War boot camps come back and create boot camps to train other white power activists. People who didn't serve in Vietnam War combat even use U.S. Army training manuals and other kind of paramilitary infrastructure to shape white power violence. And they even choose Vietnam War-issue weapons, uniforms, and materiel and even obtained stolen military weapons to foment activism. GROSS: So you write that unlike previous Ku Klux Klan interactions, after the war in Vietnam, white supremacists and the white power movement didn't claim to serve the state. They actually declared war on the federal government. What's the distinction that you're making there? BELEW: So the turn on the state happened in 1983, and it happened at the Aryan Nations World Congress, which was sort of a meeting of many different factions of the white power movement. And the thing that's important about this turn on the state is that it's openly anti-state for the first time in the 20th century. So prior Klan mobilizations had really been organized about maintaining the status quo or maintaining what historians would call systemic power, which is to say state power and all of the other kinds of power that are bound up in state power. So if you think about the Klan in the 1920s, which is the example that most people are familiar with, it's very overtly and properly nationalist. You can think of the famous pictures that are available for free at the Library of Congress - maybe people want to go look them up - of Klansmen marching down the National Mall in front of Congress unmasked but wearing their hoods and robes. It was out in the mainstream. It was very social. It was very overt. It was very for - purported to be for America. And their slogan, indeed, was 100 percent Americanism. So fast-forward to 1983, and we're looking at something completely different. This is now a coalition of united racist groups that is openly anti-government, that is focused on a transnational white nation and that is using texts and ideologies that call for an apocalyptic confrontation with everybody else. So it's aimed at unseating the federal government. It's aimed at assassination of people involved in the federal government, including judges and state troopers. It's aimed at undermining infrastructure and currency to foment race war. And it's really angled in a much different way than those earlier moments of vigilante activism. GROSS: In 1984, a group called The Order actually declares war. BELEW: Yes. GROSS: What was that? BELEW: So The Order was a white terrorist group that carried out a series of robberies, assassinations and infrastructure attacks attempting to foment race war - and a counterfeiting operation, I should add. The Order - I think the most famous of these actions was the assassination of a Denver radio host named Alan Berg in 1984 who had called out the Klan in several public forums. The Order ended up being pursued by the FBI. And the declaration of war was almost an afterthought, penned as its leader was sort of huddled in a safe house in Whidbey Island, Wash., as federal agents got closer and closer. But that was certainly not the only white power group in this moment to declare war. Other activists also went on the run and went underground and often, as part of their going underground, would pen a declaration of war. Typically, these documents called for an overthrow of the federal government on the grounds that the white race was in danger of being annihilated and described actions as self-defense and as simply, like, the only course of action left. GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kathleen Belew. She's the author of the new book "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Kathleen Belew. We're talking about her new book, "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America," and it's a history of how the white power movement changed after the war in Vietnam. So, you know, we've been talking about how some of these white power groups declared war on America. So this starts happening in the 1980s during the Reagan presidency. So how did the white power groups see themselves in relationship to President Reagan? Because President Reagan kind of declared war on the government in his own way. I mean, he's famous for saying, government isn't the solution to the problem, it is the problem. And he tried to limit the power of agencies and decrease their budgets. He, you know, named as the head of agencies people who were opposed to some of the work the agencies were doing. So I'm not saying that he was, you know, at all down with the white power movement, but I'm just wondering how the white power movement saw itself in relationship to President Reagan because he marked a turning point in government's relationship to itself. BELEW: Certainly he did. And that - the white power movement saw the second Reagan term as a moment when electoral politics was no longer an option is really important to understand as context for our present moment. So the white power movement turned against the state in 1983 partly because they saw Reagan as too moderate compared to his campaign promises. And white power activists saw this as the moment when electoral politics would no longer be a avenue to action. This is significant not only because it reflects a larger sort of dissatisfaction with Reagan that was expressed all through the right but particularly among evangelicals in 1983-1984 but also because this happened at a moment when, you know, to an outsider, white power activists seemed to have, you know, the ear of the executive in some important ways. They seemed to stand to gain a lot from the Reagan presidency. GROSS: So as the white power movement turns, like, anti-government, you start seeing these conspiracy theories about like ZOG, the Zionist-Occupied Government. Tell us about ZOG. BELEW: So ZOG refers to the Zionist Occupational Government, and it's a conspiracy theory that imagines that not only the U.S. government but international forces are sort of controlled by a cabal of internationalist, Jewish and duplicitous malevolent actors. So the idea is that the federal government is the enemy because it is controlled by outside and usually Jewish forces. This idea also has some sort of flexibility into future mobilization. So you see people who believed in ZOG in the '70s and '80s begin to use the idea of the New World Order to signify something similar in the late 1980s and 1990s. And the New World Order has much more sort of recruiting power than ZOG does as a label because it's picked up in different ways from the mainstream right. So the New World Order is the idea that there is a super state that's controlled by internationalist forces. And you can see how ZOG kind of slots into that idea and works to recruit from the mainstream right by using that. GROSS: So you've written about how, in the '70s and '80s, the white power movement described the American government as the Zionist Occupational Government and later started to think of the government as part of the New World Order, which was a way of - both of those were ways of demonizing the American government. Now you hear a lot of talk about the deep state. Do you see any connection between the New World Order and the Zionist Occupational Government and what is now called the deep state? BELEW: I think so. I think - so one way to understand this is that the white power movement - and I think this is true of the alt-right - is using a set of tactics pioneered by the earlier Ku Klux Klan. So if you think about the Klan in the '20s, it's a very opportunistic belief system. That is to say that it is somewhat flexible. People can take or leave parts of it that work for them, right? So the Klan in the '20s was classically anti-black in the South, and that's what people usually think about when they think about the Klan. But the Klan was also anti-Mexican on the border, anti-labor in the Pacific Northwest, which was having a lot of union activity in that time period, anti-immigrant in the Northeast and even anti-Catholic in Indiana because Notre Dame was seen as a threat to sort of the Klan power structure in Indiana. So if think about that sort of opportunism, I think that's what's happening with the way that these conspiracy theory beliefs sort of morph and reshape themselves over time. So the Zionist Occupational Government works really the same way as the New World Order within this belief system. But the Zionist Occupational Government, as you can see even as we're saying it out loud, is sort of unwieldy. It's less outward-facing. It's less useful as a recruitment mechanism than is the New World Order, which is, you know, short and succinct and works better in the '90s to affiliate with other popular concerns. So I think that's what's happening with the deep state too is sort of a way of reformulating the same idea that can work in the present moment. GROSS: My guest is Kathleen Belew, author of the new book "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." After a break, we'll talk about the role of women in the white power movement. And rock critic Ken Tucker will review several current hip-hop hits. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "TWENTY YEARS") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Kathleen Belew. We're talking about the white power movement and how it consolidated and expanded after the Vietnam War. Belew's new book, Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America," begins in the '70s and ends with the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. She's been studying the white power movement for 10 years. She's an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. When we left off, we were talking about the white power movement in the '80s. You know, along with the reshaping of the white power movement, you have some groups forming into militias. BELEW: Yes. GROSS: How do the militias start organizing, and when do they start organizing? BELEW: So the militias begin to organize in the late 1980s. I think that the best way to think about this is that the militias are not the same thing as the white power movement, but they are an outgrowth of white power activism. So many militias share personnel, funding, strategy and even the same weapons as the white power movement of just a few years earlier. GROSS: Who did they intend to fight with their weapons? BELEW: I think that the militias are usually talking about self-armament as being able to one day fight the government, which brings us to a common question about this whole ideology, which is, how did they think that this war could ever succeed? War on the state in the 1980s or 1990s seems like a losing proposition, given the staggering power of the state itself and the militarization of the United States that continued through the Cold War, after the end of the Cold War and into the 1990s. I think that many people in this movement believed that they needed to arm themselves either for their own survival or to help foment a guerrilla war that would eventually wake up the masses of white people and raise a more persuasive army. GROSS: Right, because even if you couldn't defeat the United States of America, you could try to kill some federal agents. Was that the philosophy? BELEW: Yes. And the idea was that those actions wouldn't just be sort of, like, a thorn in the side of the state, but would awaken other white people to this idea of imminent, apocalyptic danger. So this feeling of, you know, being on the brink of annihilation is all through the movement documents. It's also important that a lot of people in the movement believed in Christian Identity, which was a political theology that held that white people were the true lost tribe of Israel and that people of color and Jewish people were descended from animals or Satan, but that white people would be in charge of clearing the world of nonwhite people before the return of Christ. So critically, unlike evangelical Christianity, which has a view of the end of the world that includes rapture, rapture being the peaceful transport of the faithful to heaven before the sort of tribulation, end of days battles, Christian Identity doesn't give any kind of guarantee of safety at the end of the world. Christian Identity adherents are supposed to stay and clear the world of nonwhite people before Christ can return. So this ideology requires people at least to be survivalists, prepared to withstand this horrible time that they think is pretty near and in many cases, also called people to arm themselves as combatants for this, you know, apocalyptic holy war that would also take the shape of a race war. GROSS: And this leads to a survival movement within the white power movement. BELEW: Yes. GROSS: So is the survivalist movement within the white power movement a kind of small faction or does it have a lot of - does it get a big foothold within the white power movement? BELEW: I think survivalism is a very important current within white power activism. And it's also one of the ways that women form their activism as distinct within the movement. So if you see, for instance, a leaflet about an apocalypse sort of training camp - there's one called the End Time Overcomers Training Seminar (ph). Women in that seminar would be looking at, like, soap making, and survival medicine, and how to deal with radiation poisoning and things like that while the men are doing paramilitary parading and urban warfare and things like this. GROSS: But you describe them as survivalist housewives in the book. BELEW: Yes. GROSS: Yeah. So it's interesting. Instead of, like, learning to bake or something, it's, like, learning to deal with radiation poisoning. Is that what you said? BELEW: Yes. GROSS: Right. BELEW: So before 1989, the way that the end of the world is imagined is always sort of as the eventual outgrowth of a Soviet nuclear attack, which, you know, aligns with how most Americans probably think about the apocalypse in the 1980s, and many Americans are thinking about the apocalypse in the 1980s. So it's of a piece of the preparation culture that drives many people to, like, stock food and figure out where they're going to go in the event of nuclear blast. Some people build shelters. But it's specialized in that these activists think they have to survive and then go to war. GROSS: Is the survivalist movement within the white power movement one of the reasons why some groups locate to fairly remote regions in the Northwest? BELEW: So the Northwest migration is partly about survivalism, but it's also partly about white separatism. So there is - there are several mapping projects in the '80s thinking about, where could be a white homeland? They write a lot about, you know, migrating to the Northwest and populating the Northwest with white children in order to create a white homeland there. And again, that's where women are really important to the movement. They need white women to move to this area, to have lots of children, to raise these children, to be within the movement and to kind of form this community. One leader writes, we will win this territory with our love for each other. We will outbreed the enemy. GROSS: Yeah, and the idea of women having a really important role as, you know, giving birth to white children, that relates to one of the symbols in the movement, which is 14 words. Would you describe what those 14 words are? BELEW: Sure. The 14 words, which I am not going to read here - I think I won't... GROSS: Do you want me to read them? BELEW: Uh, sure. GROSS: Is it that you don't want to say them or that, like, you don't have... BELEW: I would prefer not to say them. GROSS: OK. BELEW: The 14 words are a slogan penned by David Lane, who is an incarcerated member of The Order, that lay out the activism of the movement in a 14-word slogan that places the entire movement in perspective in terms of securing a future for white children. So it's a slogan that really pulls together this fear of annihilation with the revolutionary character of the movement. GROSS: You're reluctant to actually say those 14 words. Why are you reluctant to say them? BELEW: I am. You know, a lot of this work for me has been about how to create a historic - you know, a historical account of this movement that doesn't further the movement. And this comes up in interesting ways as you pursue the scholarship. I had - so there are many, many ephemera publications of this movement. They've been housed at University Archive (ph). And I have found a trove of interesting visual materials of this movement, including pen drawings, comic books, sketches and things like this, that I had hoped to include in the book and then realized in the permissions process that doing so would mean paying permissions to some groups that are still around. And I decided in the end that I didn't feel ethically comfortable with contributing money to these groups in order to get the images out there. So I am - I'm always aware of sort of how my scholarship might impact the movement in the present. GROSS: Are you afraid if you say those 14 words and you recite them, it'll sound like an endorsement or that you'll be furthering the work of the white power groups? BELEW: I suppose I would just prefer not to say them. GROSS: Right. 'Cause - is it, to you, like saying the N-word or something - just, like, so offensive you don't want to say them? BELEW: I wonder. I'm reluctant to have a sound bite of me saying those words. GROSS: Like, it could be used in the wrong way. BELEW: Yeah. GROSS: Then I will not say them either. BELEW: OK. (LAUGHTER) BELEW: I think it's very easy to Google what they are. But I think, you know, the 14 words and the number 14 are important to the movement because it is a - you know, it's a catchy slogan that has to do with the future of white children. And I think it's important to the movement because it really shows how all of these social movement issues that are so critical to white power activists and that often, you know, have a crossover appeal to the mainstream right, at bottom for these actors really are about the potential annihilation of the race. So when white power activists worry about - you know, when they oppose abortion, when they oppose LGBT rights, when they oppose immigration, when they oppose interracial marriage - all of these things for them, at bottom, are about the annihilation of the race. GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Kathleen Belew. She's the author of the new book "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF JOAN JEANRENAUD'S "AXIS") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Kathleen Belew. She's the author of the new book "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." It's a history of how the white power movement changed after the war in Vietnam. One of the books that's really important to the white power movement, you know, especially in the '80s and '90s, is "The Turner Diaries." I had heard about "The Turner Diaries" in the '80s and '90s. And this is a story that you describe as being about Earl Turner, a soldier in the racist movement, attempting to overthrow the government. This part I did not know. At the end of the novel, Turner prepares to fly a small plane loaded with a 60-kiloton nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. I mean, without the warhead, that's 9/11. BELEW: Yes. GROSS: Flying a plane into the Pentagon - and it just made me think about the parallels. BELEW: That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it quite in those terms. I think - yeah, I think one way that "The Turner Diaries" is really helpful for understanding this movement - and perhaps terrorism writ large - is the way that these activists imagine that these lone actions, you know, and scattered actions can one day lead to a real change. I think when you look at even an event like the Oklahoma City bombing, which is huge and cataclysmic, it's hard to really see how this movement thought that would change anything without the road map provided by cultural texts like "The Turner Diaries." GROSS: You mean the - what do you mean by that? BELEW: So "The Turner Diaries," which includes an event very much like the Oklahoma City bombing - in which Earl Turner bombs FBI headquarters in that case - gives sort of a series of diary entries that - the frame of the book is that it's a diary that is, quote, unquote, "found" after this revolution has succeeded. So it ends in Earl Turner's suicide mission flying this warhead into the Pentagon. But it shows an entire arc of activism that starts simply with him being, quote, unquote, "awakened" to the truth of white peril, all the way through the different kinds of actions that he takes that lead up to that big, final action. And then there's, like, an endnote that explains how he succeeded and how, you know - it explains everything that happened after that action, including, you know, the clearing of the United States of populations of color and the eventual nuclear bombing of non-white people such that they achieve a white world and, you know, restart the calendar at Year Zero and start over. I think that this question of how such a thing could possibly succeed is a really poignant one within the movement and is a really important thing to understand in terms of how people could imagine this activism in the real world. GROSS: When you look at the white power movement now, do you see a bunch of small, unaffiliated groups each going their own way with their own membership and their own website? Or do you see them all being under the same umbrella and sharing similar goals and actually communicating with each other in some kind of united way? BELEW: So my study of this ends with the Oklahoma City bombing. And in fact, the kind of study that I'm doing, which is drawing on archives and previously classified government documents and deep reading of what the movement members themselves were talking about, won't be possible for our current moment until several years from now. But I think what the history can tell us about this is that, like any social movement of the late 20th century, white power appeared to be fragmented at moments when it was actually very much united, at least in ideology - even when it had sort of squabbles between main leaders, which was a feature of white power activism throughout its, you know, long history. There are a lot of misconceptions about this because people haven't really seen it as a social movement. And part of that is because white power itself was attempting to disappear. So beginning in 1983, at that same moment that the movement made a turn against the state and became revolutionary, they also picked up a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is what we might understand now as sort of cell-style terrorism. The idea is that activists can be coordinated in common cause without receiving direct instructions from leadership. So within the frame of leaderless resistance, there's a lot of room for misconceptions about what exactly it is that people are doing. And one way we also might think about that in the present moment is that leaderless resistance also totally changes what it looks like to operate a social movement because if your goal is to recruit a small number of totally dedicated activists, then you're going to have smaller numbers than if your goal is to turn out, you know, hundreds of people for a cross burning. But it doesn't - it means that the number of people is less important than the amount of dedication to the movement. Does that make sense? It means that membership numbers are really a bad way to estimate how important and how influential a movement is. GROSS: You don't need a lot of people to blow up one building. BELEW: Exactly. GROSS: You know, what you're describing is really terrorist cells, right? BELEW: Yes. GROSS: And I'm wondering if you think we in America take the white power movement seriously as terrorists. BELEW: I think people are really reluctant to use that word for white power violence. And we see this in the way that the journalistic coverage unfolds of white power violence and in sort of the reluctance to label things as an ideology when, I think, comparatively, people are very ready to think about - you know, I - there's a loose category that's called, like, ISIS affiliated or ISIS sympathizer, right? But we don't see that readiness to label white actors that are doing similarly politically motivated acts of violence. GROSS: You've been researching the white power movement for 10 years. So when you started, we were either about to have or we already had our first African-American president - our first and only. And now our president is somebody who is seen as having empowered the alt-right. So, you know, things have changed in the period that you've been researching the white power movement, so I'm wondering if the real-time events you've lived through in the past 10 years affect how you see the past that you're writing about or if the past that you've been writing about has affected how you've seen the political changes you've lived through in the past 10 years. BELEW: Yes. One of the things that that has happened just in the last few years is that this book moved from being about a sort of niche story about political extremism to a book that has become really important to how we see the mainstream. I think that the way that I've come to understand this since that change happened is that we - many people thought that they were living through a real progress moment of American history. And we had this idea, even as historians, of sort of a post-racial moment or a colorblind moment or a multicultural moment. And I think what this story shows us is where overt racism and violence went during the time that we thought of as peaceful and race-neutral and that instead, we were looking at sort of this submerging and resurging story. GROSS: Kathleen Belew, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. BELEW: Thank you very much. GROSS: Kathleen Belew is the author of the new book "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." After we take a short break, rock critic Ken Tucker will have a roundup of hip-hop hits he's been enjoying. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF DIGABLE PLANETS SONG, "REBIRTH OF SLICK (COOL LIKE DAT)")

• Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/04/22/604319422/bring-the-war-home-shows-lone-wolf-terrorists-are-really-part-of-a-pack

  < 'Bring The War Home' Shows 'Lone Wolf' Terrorists Are Really Part Of A Pack April 22, 20187:40 AM ET Listen· 7:02 7:02 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Last year when neo-Nazis and members of the so-called alt-right demonstrated in Charlottesville, Va., many Americans evinced shock that such a thing could happen in 2017. But Charlottesville is only the latest in a history of white-power activism that goes back decades. And as Kathleen Belew argues in her new book, "Bring The War Home," we ignore that history at our peril. In it, she explains what many disparate events have in common, from Ruby Ridge to the Oklahoma City bombing. Many of those threads go back to the Vietnam War. KATHLEEN BELEW: It's called "Bring The War Home" because that provided the clearest way of thinking about a problem I ran into in the archive, which was that Klansmen and neo-Nazis committing violence in the United States, ranging from veterans to those who didn't serve in the war, commonly understood the Vietnam War and invoked the war to describe why they chose the activism they did and to frame their tactics and their uses of violence in many different contexts. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kathleen Belew says the terrorism that arose in the 1980s within the white-power movement came in the form of small cells of just a half a dozen men, creating what she calls a leaderless resistance. BELEW: Leaderless resistance first of all made it less important to recruit large numbers of people because now the movement was focused on smaller, totally committed activists rather than turning out a bunch of weekend activists for a rally. It made it really important for the activists to have enough in common culturally to understand their shared goals. And that's another place where the narrative of the Vietnam War became very important to them. And it also made it very difficult to prosecute white-power violence or to understand it as a social movement because its actions could be more readily understood and dismissed in both courts and in media portrayals as the acts of one or a few individuals. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, I'd like to touch on that last thing that you just spoke about. You write about this particular period where there was a huge increase in domestic terrorism. And the media, law enforcement, government agencies kept on portraying these acts as isolated as - as the work of a fringe element or a lone, disturbed wolf. To this day, the myth that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber - persists that he acted alone. What did that get wrong? What was problematic with people seeing it as isolated events as opposed to part of a big movement? BELEW: Portraying the Oklahoma City bombing, particularly, as that - as the work of one or a few actors worked to totally erase what the country had understood about white-power violence before that event. One of the misconceptions is that Timothy McVeigh acted alone or with the help of a few conspirators. But McVeigh - a simple social geography of Timothy McVeigh shows that he was involved in this movement for years before the bombing. So this points to a motivated and ideologically framed attack. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You say that the fact that we see the Oklahoma City bombing through this lens as an individual actor, and we don't see it as part of the white power movement and its capacity for violence - you say that that's remarkable. What is the problem with that? BELEW: I think the main thing is that what seems new and alarming in our current moment is not new. These events were covered in the front pages of national newspapers, on morning news magazine shows. And yet somehow we lost the understanding of this movement such that the altercation in Charlottesville can seem astonishing to people without this history. But this history shows us that what seems new is not new. GARCIA-NAVARRO: As you point out, we are in a period where two long wars are taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan that have sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to battle. And those men and women have been coming home. And you link this with the 2016 election as well, with the rhetoric of the so-called alt-right that has become mainstream. You see this as part of the continuum. BELEW: Yes. The history shows us that this movement never received a definitive stop in court or in public opinion. In every surge of Ku Klux Klan activism in American history, there is a strong correlation with the aftermath of warfare. The aftermath of warfare has correlated with widespread violence across all groups of American civilians - not just veterans but throughout American society. And in those searches of violence, groups like this have found resurgent memberships. GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that really concerns people nowadays after the 2016 election and the rise of the alt-right and some of the demonstrations we've seen by white-power groups in different parts of the country is that their sort of insidious messaging of white power has entered the mainstream, in some ways, in political discourse and in just personal discourse in the way that people talk about certain issues. Is that a victory of sorts? BELEW: If you look at the '80s, which is sort of the peak moment of membership, you can think of in concentric circles. There's sort of an inner circle of around 25,000 hardcore activists. Those are people that really live the movement and who have their whole social lives organized by the movement, who would sooner die than abandon their beliefs. And then outside of that, there is a broader circle of like 150,000 to 175,000 people who are not as dedicated but who show up to rallies, buy literature. Then outside of them, there's a bigger circle of 450,000 people who don't themselves buy the literature but who read the literature. And you might imagine that this goes on and on, right? Outside of the people who read the literature are people who would never read a Klan newspaper but might agree with an idea that appears in one if it's brought up to them by a friend in some particular context. So the way that these ideas travel from that hardcore fringe to the mainstream is something that deserves a lot of thought and attention because this movement of very extreme activists had a lot of social issues in common with the mainstream right in the 1980s. So by the time David Duke was running on presidential campaigns, the platform issues that he advocated would make their way from the David Duke platform to the Pat Buchanan platform to the George H.W. Bush platform. In the period of my study, I think what's interesting is that this ideology is very flexible and very opportunistic such that people can take or leave various parts of it in order to allow for broader recruitment. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kathleen Belew is the author of "Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America." Thank you so much. BELEW: Thank you.

• Kathleen Belew Website - https://www.kathleenbelew.com/

  Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor of U.S. History and the College at the University of Chicago. She specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare.
  Her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, Spring 2018), explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
  Belew has held postdoctoral fellowships from Northwestern University and Rutgers University. Her research has received the support of the Andrew W. Mellon and Jacob K. Javits Foundations, as well as Albert J. Beveridge and John F. Enders grants for research in Mexico and Nicaragua. She holds a doctoral degree in American Studies from Yale University (2011). She earned her undergraduate degree in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2005, where she was named Dean’s Medalist in the Humanities.
  Belew is at work on two new projects, one focusing on processes of militarization in the domestic United States and the other on ideas of the apocalypse in American history and culture. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war.

  1. Why should readers learn about the white power movement?
  White power is a fringe movement that has been largely ignored throughout its history, but its legacy continues to shape American life in profound ways. Even after acts of mass violence like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, public understanding about the movement was nebulous as white power activists attempted to portray their activity as the work of lone actors and disconnected groups. The result? The movement was never curbed because people were not aware of it. Bring the War Home is intended to make people aware.
  2. How is white power related to the self-described “alt-right” in the present moment?
  Bring the War Home is the backstory to the movement that has called itself the “alt-right.” This book will help people to understand where that movement came from, who it includes, and what its goals and objectives might be. It also offers a full accounting of the violence inherent in white power activism, even when this activism has purported to be directed only at electoral politics and political change.
  3. Who was involved in the white power movement?
  White power was a movement of people: men, women, and children. They came from all regions of the country. They were rich and poor, educated and uneducated, young and old. They were not lone actors, but part of a social movement, one that unified its members through racism, shared acts of violence, stories about war, and belief in an apocalyptic future.
  4. What does war have to do with white power activism?
  The title “Bring the War Home” is taken from a popular Klan essay about using a shared narrative of the Vietnam War to shape violent activism in the United States. The Vietnam War story brought previously disparate activists together—like Klansmen and neo-Nazis—and shaped the kinds of violence they carried out.
  5. Why does the author argue that wartime experiences are connected to later racist violence at home?
  Bring the War Home is a work of history that draws on more than a decade of extensive archival research. The historical record clearly shows that vigilantism has corresponded with the aftermath of war throughout U.S. history. The book concludes that war doesn’t stay in the time and space designated for it by the state—instead, it spills over into other times, and other terrains. History reveals that violence continues long after the official end of war.
  6. Does this book disparage American veterans?
  No. The purpose of Bring the War Home is to shed light on a specific group of individuals who were involved in the white power movement, and who attempted to wage race war to create an all-white nation. While some of the individuals who joined the white power movement did serve in Vietnam and other wars, they are in no way representative of the Vietnam veterans who made valuable sacrifices for their country.
  7. What research is behind Bring the War Home?
  Bring the War Home was researched and written by the historian Kathleen Belew, an educator and expert in paramilitarism. Dr. Belew spent a decade collecting, reviewing, and connecting common threads between thousands of documents related to the white power movement, including original correspondence and ephemera of activists themselves, records from the FBI, ATF, and Department of Justice, court records, and newspaper stories from the United States, Mexico and Nicaragua. All sources appear in the book's endnotes.
  8. What names are omitted from Bring the War Home?
  All activists involved in the movement are identified. The book preserves the anonymity of some bystanders who were not involved in the movement, or who were children at the time of the events described.

• Political Research Associates Website - https://www.politicalresearch.org/tag/bring-the-war-home/

  White Revolution and the Legacy of the Vietnam War
  Posted on April 11, 2018 by Steven Gardiner

  Bring the War Home (Harvard University Press, 2018).
  Drawing on government documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and multiple archives of White Power publications, Kathleen Belew has written a comprehensive history of White Power vigilantism, paramilitary training, and revolutionary violence in the United States. In her new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), Belew focuses on the pivotal time between the mid-1970s and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: the period that witnessed the rise and fall of the White Power terrorist organization the Order. Founded and led by Robert Mathews in 1983, and seeing itself as the vanguard of a White revolution, members of the Order committed a string of robberies and in June 1984 assassinated Jewish radio host Alan Berg. Belew makes the connections between the violence of the Order and the other factions—Klan, neonazi, Christian Identity, and paramilitary militias—that comprise a full-blown social movement.
  Perhaps the most interesting argument in Bring the War Home is the idea that it was the American experience in Vietnam that radicalized White Power activists. It was that, Belew argues, that created the frame within which they moved from more-or-less “patriotic” vigilantism in defense of Jim Crow and its sensibilities—such as violent voter suppression in the South, or Klansmen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border—to revolutionary efforts to disrupt or even overthrow the state to establish a new White dominated, or all-White territory. Woven through Belew’s narrative is the role of both crucial movement activists’ direct experiences in Vietnam, and the broader consciousness of the American war machine’s humiliating loss in that country. For White Power activists, losing a war to dark-skinned Vietnamese enemies echoed what they saw as the capitulation at home of federal and state governments to the Civil Rights Movement.
  Belew traces the continuity between the Klan of the late ‘70s, the spread of paramilitary training camps run by Vietnam veterans, the Order, through the armed militias of the ‘90s leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing. Along the way, she points out how law enforcement has consistently underestimated the threat of White Power violence, often while misunderstanding its implacable opposition to the idea of a multi-racial state. This March, Belew talked to Steven Gardiner for The Public Eye:
  PE: Early in the book you describe the moment in 1983 when what you call the White Power Movement declared war on the United States. In a closed-door meeting at the Aryan Nations World Congress, movement leaders seem to have decided that the time for racist vigilantism was over and all-out White revolution was called for. What factors made 1983 the breaking point?
  Kathleen Belew: In a lot of ways, the White Power Movement mirrored what was happening in society at large. This is true of the movement’s revolutionary turn in 1983, which mirrored the feelings of people across the Right, particularly evangelicals, who were beginning to express frustration with what they saw as the moderation of the Reagan administration. Social issues like abortion were beginning to galvanize people. But the White Power Movement represented a much more extreme reaction to this moment. Its members saw the distance between Reagan’s campaign promises and his administration’s action as proof that electoral politics would never deliver the changes they wanted. White Power activists came to see a war on the federal government as the only option.
  Typically, the phrase “bring the war home” is more associated with the Left, with the Black Power Movement and anti-war veterans. The link between Vietnam and the racist Right—though it seems intuitively powerful—is not one I have seen treated at length before. How did you come to see it this way?
  The White power movement cohered around a common narrative of the Vietnam War, emphasizing gore, horror and an intense sense of betrayal by politicians, military leaders, and even civilians back home.
  The White Power Movement cohered around a common narrative of the Vietnam War, one that emphasized gore and horror and, perhaps more than anything else, an intense sense of betrayal by the government, politicians, military leaders, and even civilians back home. This story created both an entry into the movement for a small but influential cohort of veterans and active-duty personnel and a performative identity for those who had not served. This is evident in the materials produced by the movement. They portray people in camouflage fatigues, marching in military formations, and armed with military-grade weapons. In one image taken by an undercover informant, a Klansman poses in a hood made out of camouflage material. This paramilitarism within the White Power Movement was far more than performative, though: it worked to escalate movement violence, pave the way to race war, and dramatically increase the civilian casualties that resulted from White Power actions.

  KKK members and a white supremacist group the America First Committee, hold a rally in Marquette park, Chicago, Illinois, 28th June 1986. Photo: Mark Reinstein / Alamy.
  In a remarkable speech to police chiefs in 1982, Ronald Reagan lamented the moral decline of America, suggesting that the growth of government and spending on the public good undermined individual responsibility. His speech was part of the New Right’s systematic attack on the idea of government as an agent of the public good. To what extent was the White Power Movement’s turn to fomenting revolution bound up with this more general attack on government?
  Although anti-state ideas appeared in both mainstream conservatism and the White Power Movement in the 1980s, the people I write about were not conservative. They typically did not believe their goals could be achieved by simply maintaining existing order, or by turning the clock back to Jim Crow segregation or even slavery. They thought they would have to use more violent methods to achieve their ends. However, anti-state ideas sometimes connected White Power activists to the New Right, and even occasionally provided recruitment opportunities that appealed to that group.
  Following the terrorist attacks of the Order and the Whidbey Island confrontation with founder Robert Mathews in 1984, federal law enforcement seemed to recognize that elements of the Far Right had turned from patriotic vigilantism to sedition, and reacted accordingly. Even so, in the early 1990s, there was another round of paramilitary training and organizing that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Do you see a tendency on the part of federal law enforcement to minimize the threat posed by White Power terrorists?
  The successful prosecutions of Order members in the mid-1980s were achieved under anti-racketeering laws, whereas a major federal seditious conspiracy trial failed to convict White Power activists in 1988. Further, the prosecution of the Order was piecemeal. Only a fraction of its members ever stood trial. Historically, although some federal agents have worked arduously to prosecute White Power activists, their efforts have often been stymied by a lack of understanding about the scope and nature of the movement. White Power activism is often depicted as the work of “lone wolf” terrorists, rather than as part of a wide-reaching social movement. But this movement reached across all regions of the country, included men, women, and children, and bridged urban and rural divides. My hope is that a more complete history of this movement will reveal these interconnections and enable more coherent opposition.
  As you note, there seems to be a reluctance among both scholars and journalists to understand the political activity of the White Power Movement and the Hard Right more generally as constituting a social movement. Why is this and what are the consequences for our understanding?
  The historical archive shows over and over again that the White Power Movement attempted to avoid being understood as such. Through strategies like leaderless resistance, which called for cell-style violence without direct command from movement leadership, the activists attempted to hide that they were a movement. The archive that disproves this idea is only recently available and Bring the War Home is the first to make use of it in full. Thousands of pages of government surveillance documents and previously unavailable movement publications make clear what these earlier accounts missed: that White Power was a social movement bound by networks.
  Through strategies like leaderless resistance, which called for cell-style violence without direct command from movement leadership, the activists attempted to hide that they were a movement.
  Following the Oklahoma City bombing, a combination of public revulsion and increased law enforcement crackdowns dampened the movement’s revolutionary activities. The center of gravity seemed to shift—away from trying to either carve out a White racial homeland or overthrow the United States government and toward pressuring the Republican Party, particularly on immigration. Do you see in today’s climate any indications of a new move toward revolutionary violence on the part of forces analogous to the ‘80s and ‘90s White Power Movement?
  The historical record shows that in the absence of decisive prosecution, the White Power Movement has retreated, regrouped, and reemerged after moments of public backlash. While the Oklahoma City bombing did result in public attention and some new enforcement efforts, its investigation was limited only to the bombers and a few co-conspirators, with a more sweeping effort deliberately prohibited by investigative policy. The White Power Movement was not publicly confronted. Perhaps now, with a full archival history of the movement available and at another moment of intense public interest, we might hope for a different result.
  What drew you to write about the White Power Movement and more particularly the revolutionary turn in the aftermath of the Vietnam War?
  “I killed communists in Vietnam, why wouldn’t I kill them here?”
  I was drawn to this topic through research on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held in Greensboro, North Carolina, to explore the 1979 shooting of five Leftist protestors by Klan and neonazi gunmen. The commission sought to understand how the gunmen were acquitted in state and federal trials despite extensive video footage of their actions. Although it had no subpoena power, several perpetrators and other White Power activists chose to testify, and many of them repeated a similar story that went, basically, “I killed communists in Vietnam, why wouldn’t I kill them here?” I found this intriguing because it represented such an intense collapse of enemies, and of battlefield and home front. As I began to review the writings of key White Power activists, this idea came up over and over again and gave rise to the book.

• Slate - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/our-failure-to-understand-white-power-as-a-broader-social-movement-has-prevented-us-from-combating-it.html

  The Secret Cohesion of White Supremacists
  Our failure to understand white power as a broader social movement has prevented us from combating it.
  By Rebecca Onion
  April 11, 20181:51 PM

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  Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Jerome Pollos/Getty Images, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Underwood & Underwood/U.S. Library of Congress, and Victoria Johnson Photography/Wikipedia.
  In Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979, neo-Nazis and Klansmen attacked an anti-racist rally convened by Communists, who were in town to support striking textile workers. The Nazis and Klan members killed five people in 88 seconds of gunfire. The ensuing trials of the white supremacists by all-white juries “didn’t return justice,” Kathleen Belew told me. “People said things like, ‘I always thought it was less of a crime to kill a Communist,’ ” Belew said.
  The Greensboro massacre is one story Belew tells in her fascinating new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, a history of the white-power and militia movements of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Belew connects seemingly disparate events like the killings at Greensboro, the persecution of Vietnamese fishers in Texas in the early 1980s, and the siege at Ruby Ridge. She shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.

  Belew spoke to Slate about the lasting impact of Vietnam on white supremacists, the secret cohesiveness of the white-power movement, and the many ways women in the movement acted as social glue, connecting factions and groups. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
  Rebecca Onion: I had not thought that preoccupation with Vietnam—Vietnam angst?—might have a direct connection with racism. How widespread is that connection?
  Kathleen Belew: Well, let me say this first. I’m not trying to argue that the experience of war necessarily drove people to the white-power movement, especially because the people I’m talking about represent such a small percentage of returning veterans. And it’s not a statistically significant number in that direction. But the thing that kept emerging for me out of the archive was how much white-power activists who did serve talk about that experience as being formative, both personally and for their white-power worldview.

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  The narrative that the white-power movement tells about the war is very similar to what you see in a lot of memoirs, in most movies, and in the betrayal narrative of the war that rises across American society in the 1980s. So I think the difference is that this is a place where you can see it crystallized. Where in many instances there’s sort of a subtext about defending whiteness, it’s overt [in these cases]. And it’s a place where you can sort of see how racism and anti-communism and anti-statism come together in that feeling of betrayal that really works for recruiting.
  I can hear from your explanation that it’s sort of difficult to frame this project in a way that doesn’t accuse Vietnam veterans of being racist.
  Exactly! Also, frankly, I don’t have the source space to even get into the causes of people’s racism. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t have psychological records. I don’t have enough confessional materials from these people to pinpoint exact causal force in that way. What I’m looking at is how do people describe their own activism, and how do we take seriously what they say their motivations are.
  The book is making an argument, but it’s also a collection of stories. How did you choose your characters?
  One of my central characters is Louis Beam, who returns from the Vietnam War in 1968, founds his own paramilitary training camp, and the book ends up following him as a central actor partly because his biography is so accessible and his writings are so prolific that I can actually follow what he’s doing from site to site. But partly because he’s so involved in the movement for his entire life. It’s really from 1968 up to the time I conclude my study in 1995, and he continues his activism well into the late 1990s and early 2000s.
  Beam founded his own paramilitary camp to train Klansmen and a group of white fishermen in the early 1980s, in order to carry out a campaign of harassment against Vietnamese refugees. And then when a court injunction stopped that activity, he moved to Idaho part time to be involved with Aryan Nations. And in Idaho he formulated a strategy called leaderless resistance, which we might recognize today as cell-style terrorism, or terrorism without direct orders from a central leadership but instead actions connected in common cause. So he pioneers this theory, then travels around the country setting up white-power groups on early computer message boards.

  “People really want to make sense of violence and hate by sorting it into neat groups.”
  — Kathleen Belew
  That fascinated me.
  It was sort of a proto-internet called Liberty Net. And it takes the FBI a few years to crack the code, and in that time, these guys are using this infrastructure to coordinate with one another, to connect with one another and cement their social ties, and in order to circulate hit lists and other plans for action.
  So Beam is involved through all of that, then appears again in the early 1990s as a public figure, responding to the siege at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing.
  One of the revelations of the book for me was the connection you made between the 1980s and the 1990s. Without having thought about it too much, I construed the ’80s white-power movement and the ’90s militias as separate. And you’re arguing that they’re connected.
  There are a lot of misconceptions about this, and I think our failure to understand white power as a social movement more broadly is what has prevented a coherent public response or decisive victory against this kind of a movement. So one of the problems in the scholarship is what I would term overcategorization. People really want to make sense of violence and hate by sorting it into neat groups. So a lot of the scholarship has divided the skinheads from the Klansmen from the Aryan Nations from the militias.

  And there are differences between those ideologies. There are different symbols. There are finer points of doctrine. There are different cultures. But the thing that emerges from the archive is that this is a movement with flexible ideologies and a ton of interpersonal circulation. So it’s very likely that somebody who’s in the movement in the 1980s would circulate between Klan meetings, neo-Nazi meetings, early militia activity. And once you have an archive that shows the actions of these figures rather than just what they say they are doing at a given point, it’s clear to trace the connections one to another.
  So what you see is that in funds, in the movement of weapons, and in the people involved, there is a direct link between white power in the 1980s and the militia movement in the 1990s.
  The other part of that has to do with a sort of popular idea that militias are somehow less racist than the white-power movement. And this is a misconception that persists into the present day, I think. The clearest way to understand it is that the militia is an outgrowth of the white-power movement. So, it’s not a one-to-one historical transition, it’s that the people who are in white power in the 1980s have moved into militias in the 1990s. As have the weapons and the money.
  How are you, as the historian, making these connections?
  Actually, the movement has a huge archival footprint. I’m looking at previously classified government documents, from the FBI, ATF, and U.S. Marshals. I’m looking at newspaper reporting from all of the places that white-power violence is reported at the time that it happened in the United States, Mexico, and Central America. Then I’m looking at this huge groundswell of production of white-power printed materials. Newspapers, zines, newsletters. There are women’s publications, men’s publications, things produced by prisoners … and it really is a huge amount of material.
  So when you were doing the actual work of reading this stuff, were you keeping lists of people? Or did you have a giant pinboard with a bunch of strings tied together?
  I have often thought that a pinboard would have been appropriate! I didn’t. I had a note-taking system. I did track interpersonal connections. That actually led me to one of the breakthroughs of this study, which is the extent to which alliances between these groups were held together by marriages and other social relationships that depended on women. And one of the things I tried to trace was the way marriages connected people across ideologies and across geographies, so you can see how this movement worked as a national and transnational force.

Belew, Kathleen: BRING THE WAR HOME

Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
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Belew, Kathleen BRING THE WAR HOME Harvard Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 4, 9 ISBN: 978-0-674-28607-8
Belew (History/Univ. of Chicago) pieces together evidence from primary and secondary sources to argue that the racist, anti-government, heavily armed white power movement is not what it seems.
As the author shows, many government agencies, law enforcers, and individual citizens have fallen for the myth that the lethal domestic terrorism carried out in the name of white supremacists is the doing of angry lone wolves. On the contrary, she writes, the movement is well-organized and thus more dangerous than previously understood. Belew places these types of individuals under the umbrella of sometimes-violent white power, a group that includes neo-Nazis, radical tax resisters, self-proclaimed Klansmen, members of local militias, separatists who oppose racial integration, and believers in white theologies such as Christian Identity. Although violent white supremacists have never been absent in American history, the author pegs the contemporary movement as growing from the discontent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a war that not so incidentally trained young men filled with racial hatred how to kill efficiently, not only with rifles, but also with powerful explosives. Before the war, white supremacists believed they were supporting governmental authority via vigilante justice, meant to marginalize undesirables. But the current white power movement members would prefer to overthrow governments, even at the cost of lives taken. A key concept in understanding the overall movement, writes Belew, is the concept of "leaderless resistance," as exemplified by Timothy McVeigh's insistence that he acted almost entirely alone in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing despite evidence that he considered himself a soldier in a coordinated cell-style underground. The near invisibility of the movement leaders has led directly to the proliferation of the public's belief in the phenomenon of lone wolves, which helps protect the movement from a coordinated takedown.
Belew's impressive research effectively supports her hypothesis. A good launching point for even further intensive study.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Belew, Kathleen: BRING THE WAR HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461526/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c4e3cbd0. Accessed 28 May 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461526

"Belew, Kathleen: BRING THE WAR HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461526/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c4e3cbd0. Accessed 28 May 2018.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-674-28607-8
  Word count: 245

  Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
  Kathleen Belew. Harvard Univ., $29.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-674-28607-8

  Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, delivers an engrossing and comprehensive history of the white power movement in America, highlighting its racism, antigovernment hostility, and terrorist tactics. This impressively researched work looks into, first, the Vietnam War’s influence on the movement’s earliest leaders, such as Vietnam veteran Louis Beam, who equated the Vietnam War with American decline and wanted to reclaim a time before civil rights, legal abortion, birth control, immigration of nonwhites, and interracial marriage. Then, Belew investigates the movement’s evolution: its call for “leaderless resistance” and war against the government in the 1980s; the growth of its militia phase that led to the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, the Branch Davidians in Waco, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and its shift to online platforms in the late 1990s. She also studies the movement’s paramilitary training camps, the role of women in the movement, its push to respond in kind to the militarization of police departments, and the difficulties of prosecuting its leaders—due, in part, to its strategy of decentralization and the groundswell of support for militias in the mid-1990s. Belew presents a convincing case that white power rhetoric and activism continue to influence mainstream U.S. politics. (Apr.)
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  Reviewed on: 04/30/2018
  Release date: 04/01/2018

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