Bringing The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America, Belew - B

  This is the history of the white power movement from  the mid-70's to its high point - the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1994. "It united a wide array of groups and activists previously at odds, thrown together by tectonic shifts in the cultural and political landscape." Loss of faith in the government in the tumultuous 1970's, particularly the country's failure in Vietnam, led to its formation. "The movements religious extremism was integral to its broader revolutionary character." 

  Countless people on the right viewed the US's failure in Vietnam as directly attributable to the weak-willed federal government. Based on their experiences in the military, many whites who fought there came away with a strong dislike for African-Americans. "The Vietnam War signaled a divide between the America of the past and one transformed by antiwar protest and the (civil) rights movement.."  After his tour, Louis Beam, a combat veteran living in Texas, began organizing and training Klansmen to be soldiers at a fifty-acre camp in south Texas. They harassed the Vietnamese fishermen on the Gulf coast and conducted patrols along the US-Mexican border. Significant tensions and violence followed. White anger escalated because of a fallacious belief that the Vietnamese fishermen were also receiving welfare. They began to burn Vietnamese boats in the Galveston area. Texas police, judges and the legislature shut down the white power training infrastructure in 1981.  

  In North Carolina, Klansmen and neo-Nazis began to work together toward the common goal of defeating communism. In Greensboro, the Communist Workers' Party organized an anti-Klan demonstration that led to violence on Nov. 3, 1979. Five demonstrators were killed by the supremacists. A year later, the prosecution of the 14 vigilantes led to state and local verdicts of not guilty. Greensboro garnered support around the country for the supremacists as they portrayed themselves as the righteous, and only, fighters against pernicious communist infiltrators, and anyone who didn't agree with them was  a communist. Some Vietnam vets engaged in armed conflict around the world, particularly in Central America and Africa. Rhodesia attracted Americans, but it was Nicaragua that became their focus because Nicaragua had actual, and successful, communists. The Sandanistas were a threat to the American-backed Samoza dictatorship. Similarly, El Salvador reminded them of another Vietnam. The CMA, an organization founded by a Marine vet from Alabama was actually the entity through which Iran-Contra funds and equipment flowed. 

  "In 1983, The White power movement declared war on the state." Instead of fighting for the US, they decided to destabilize it. The preferred method was to use cells that operated without a top-down system, thus requiring a common cultural narrative and assuring some insulation from the police. The movement featured ex-cons, as well as veterans and was centered in the Northwest, especially in  Idaho. The FBI engaged the movement vigorously and around the country, but was never able to convict more than a handful. The movement was armed to the teeth because of its effectiveness in stealing materiel from the military. With the end of the Cold War, the supremacists simply left behind their anti-communism and focused on anti-semitism and race-hatred of people of color. More people joined organized militias. But they now faced a state that had militarized policing and which crushed them at Ruby Ridge and Waco. At Ruby Ridge, the government used excessive force and broke its own rules of engagement to capture a man who had sold two illegally modified weapons, killing his wife and son in the process.* "It (Ruby Ridge) codified an alliance of tax protesters, radical ant-abortionists, militiamen, racists, Identity Christians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who simply believed the US government had grown too large." The following year, seventy-six Branch Dividians, violent cultists building a fort with a vast amount of weapons, died in a fire at their compound in Waco when it was stormed by agents of the ATF. Both events inflamed and further grew the movement.   

   The 1995 OKC bombing killed 189 and wounded over 500.  "McVeigh acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives."  The movement fully supported his act of terror against a symbol of the state. "Indeed, the  bombing launched an almost immediate and widespread wave of violence as the militia movement, and the broader white power movement, took action around the country." Nonetheless, the FBI vigorously tamped down white power activity. The movement disappeared from public view until it re-appeared in the 2016 election. The inability of the state to prosecute and contain the white power movement or resolve the issues that led to its existence provide it with an opportunity to resurface once again.

    This is not an easy book as the prose is somewhat turgid  and the topic altogether frightening.  I do believe the author makes her case throughout. As the movement was extremely vibrant, I'm inclined to not believe it went on a twenty-year hibernation, but that today's vitriol and violence is a different offshoot that the author cannot yet diagnose.                                     

*The FBI agent in charge was demoted and Randy Weaver's family was awarded $3.1M in damages.