Timely history

Kathleen Belew, whose bio at the University of Chicago charmingly describes her as a "historian of the present," provides a window into the obscure byways of some U.S. rightwing violent extremists in Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. She's adopted some explicit definitions of her subject, which many writers have only murkily defined. She rejects such labels as "radical right" in favor of using

the term 'white power' to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies, such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995.

I've no quarrel with that. She's nailed these people. In the aftermath of the January 6 Trump coup attempt, knowledge of their origins becomes ever more significant.

Belew dates the beginning of this iteration of U.S. right wing violence to the concurrence of U.S. failure in Vietnam with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s which left some white men frustrated and more than a little lost.  

As narrated by white power proponents, the Vietnam War was a story of constant danger, gore, and horror. It was also a story of soldiers' betrayal by military and political leaders and of the trivialization of their sacrifice.

Returned conscripts who felt burned by a bad war and hippies at home were easy pickings for recruitment to violent right wing extremism. It wasn't hard for them to believe they were still righteously fighting communism, whether as American Nazis and KKK members shooting up Communist Worker Party demonstrators in Greensboro NC in 1979 or as mercenaries in US covert wars in Central America in the 1980's.

Although these men called themselves "patriots," a decade after Vietnam they came to see themselves as "at war" with the U.S. government. (They were mostly toxically masculine men though Belew tries hard to insert some reference to the women who attached to them.) They hoped the election of Ronald Reagan would restore the sort of white country they sought, but he disappointed them.

White power activists responded to Reagan's first term with calls for a more extreme course of action.

From here on out, these loosely networked terrorists saw themselves as operating underground as a "leaderless resistance" performing occasional spectacular assaults on enemies such as the assassination of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg. They funded themselves with bank robberies and retreated to rural compounds in white areas such as Idaho. From these developments came the U.S. government's lethal effort to arrest one adherent, Randy Weaver. Their image of the government as implacable foe was only strengthened by murderous siege of the Waco Branch Davidian cult compound. The white power movement was an early adopter of the emerging web, creating by the mid-1990s connections that escaped the expectations of authorities.

Rejection of the legitimacy of U.S. government by this movement reached a peak according to Belew with some 5 million members and sympathizers. Out of this milieu came the Oklahoma City federal building bombing of April 19, 1995 which killed some 168 people, injured at least 680 others, and before 9/11 was the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Belew's account left me with the question: did right wing extremist violence recede after Oklahoma City? And if so, why? As far as I can discern from this book, Belew is arguing we stopped looking for it, it hibernated underground, and perhaps can be said to have had a resurgence from similar roots when pulled into view by the honest foul racism of Donald Trump.

White power should have been legible as a coherent social movement but was instead largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology, but by madness or personal animus. It might have been treated as a wide-ranging social network with the capacity to inflict mass casualties, but was often brushed off as backwardness or ineptitude. It should have been acknowledged as producing, supporting, and deploying a coherent worldview that posed radical challenges to a liberal consensus around racial and gender equality and support of institutions including the vote, courts, the rule of law, and federal legislation. Instead, the disappearance  of the movement in the years after Oklahoma City -- engineered by white power activists but permitted and furthered by government actors, prosecutorial strategies, scholars, and journalists alike -- left open the possibility of new waves of action.

Well maybe. But from my vantage point, plenty of organizations have been digging into this nasty swamp of hate during my entire conscious political life. There's the Anti-Defamation League, Political Research Associates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Western States Center and many more. Brave researchers including Sara Diamond, David Neiwert and Vegas Tenold have been on the job. Belew has organized the same knowledge and added recently available FBI documentation to provide a solid overview of one period of the terrorist right.

I find one of her conclusions poignant as we watch the U.S. Afghanistan adventure stumble to its terrible conclusion.

The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about the war itself. War is not neatly confined in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and last long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

May war's residue of brokenness not come home yet again ...