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

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is a 2018 book by historian and professor Kathleen Belew. It offers a history of the extreme right wing in the United States, particularly its segment of racists who take up arms to ensure or restore what they regard as a proper social hierarchy with white Christians on top. The book spans from the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973 to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, an act committed by white power extremist Timothy McVeigh that marked the deadliest act of terrorism in US history prior to 9/11. Belew shows how the previous generation of white power activism established a narrative, social connections, and tactics that appeared to recede after public revulsion to the Oklahoma City bombing, but was merely awaiting the proper conditions for a reemergence. The book established Belew as a leading expert on the white power movement, a subject she argues has not received enough attention from scholars. She now makes frequent appearances in print, radio, and television connecting recent events, such as the January 6 insurrection, and explaining their historical origins.

This guide is based on the first hardcover edition published by Harvard University Press (Cambridge: 2018).

Content Warning: This guide and the source text contain accounts of racism and racial violence.

Summary

Belew identifies the foundation of the modern white power movement as the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Veterans were shocked by defeat, particularly against a seemingly inferior communist enemy, and angry at a civilian population that had largely turned on the war. In addition, veterans faced the enormous social and economic dislocations of the 1960s and 1970s. All these factors led a group of veterans, and people who identified with those veterans, to seek revenge in the United States for what happened in Vietnam. The white power movement capitalized on widespread public fear of communism, and a suspicion that the government was giving preferential treatment to non-white peoples, to make a push for mainstream support. In Galveston, Texas, for example, the Ku Klux Klan championed a harassment campaign against Vietnamese fishermen, blaming the government for selling out US soldiers in Vietnam and then selling out US workers to the Vietnamese in Texas. The Klan and other white power groups also developed ties with one another through confrontations against leftist groups, most notoriously against the Communist Workers’ Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, where a November 1979 shootout led to the deaths of five left-wing protestors, and zero convictions for the killers.

Having brought the war home from Vietnam, white power activists exported it once again, this time targeting left-wing governments and insurgencies in Central America, where they sometimes overlapped with or even worked with the CIA and other US government agencies pursuing the same essential goal. The Reagan administration ultimately curtailed their activities, and shortly thereafter, the various factions of the white power movement formed a World Congress and declared war upon the state itself, having concluded that the United States had fallen under the control of Zionists and other shadowy global forces. They adopted a strategy of leaderless resistance, operating a large number of mostly independent cells, so that the movement itself would survive the prosecution or killing of any specific members. They also developed ties with active-duty soldiers, particularly at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, for training and access to high-grade weaponry and explosives. A male-dominated movement, it nonetheless relied heavily on women as both organizers and symbols of a vulnerable white race.

White power activism reached a fever pitch after the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, where federal marshals killed the wife and son of a white power activist, and then the 1993 Waco raid resulting in the deaths of dozens of cult members suspected of harboring a large weapons cache. A white power activist named Timothy McVeigh had traveled to Waco during the siege, and vowed revenge against a government he believed was on the verge of imposing a tyrannical new order. On the second anniversary of Waco, he parked a Ryder truck filled with explosives next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but was apprehended very shortly after the explosion. The government was able to prove McVeigh’s guilt, but largely failed to identify him as part of a broader movement, so his imprisonment and later execution appeared to mark a major setback for the white power movement—until it came roaring back only two decades after the bombing.