For reasons I cannot explain, I fell a bit behind with my book reviews here. Granted, I tend to read multiple books at once, so I tend to finish them in a more spread out manner than if I read them one at a time. But the bottom line here is I fell behind and have a couple book reviews I should get written up hopefully soon. Besides, I won’t have time to get the review for the movie I am watching tonight in time to get the post ready for its morning slot.
Anyway, here’s a review for a potentially frightening look at recent history, Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.
Belew, a history professor from the University of Chicago, connects the rise of white supremacy in the United States to the Vietnam War. Many Veterans (though not all of them by a long shot) returned from the war disillusioned, convinced there were POWs left behind and the only reason they didn’t win the war was because the government somehow restrained them in their actions. These men were all strongly anti-communist, but also as white men were highly suspicious of minorities. Many of these men would then use their military experience to train up groups like the Klan in the cause of “taking the country back” from liberals, minorities, and the like. Though initially using their experience in the name of state, claiming they were fighting for what the nation wanted by going off to fight communists at home or especially abroad in Latin America, they would eventually decide the government itself was too far gone and became anti-state as well. The end of the Cold War saw the movement morph into the militia movement, and they’d been around ever since.
Belew’s work is taking a lot of public knowledge work from history, public trials, arrests, and the like, and showing basically that racist attacks on others or militia movements were not one-offs or the work of lone wolves, including Timothy McVeigh. Many times these men and women (and the women were often overlooked) had connections to each other, used common language and tactics, and pulled plans straight from the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, all while planning to create some sort of white homeland. Government attempts to bring them down were either too heavy-handed in some cases or stifled by other factors, and even getting many of these individuals into a courtroom wasn’t a guarantee of anything, even when they defended themselves, because they would often play off jury sympathies, citing their military experience or the idea of protecting their wives and daughters as justification for whatever they were charged with.
Essentially, what Belew did is draw lines between figures who were often not exactly hiding what they were doing. The ideology was often similar, and men like Louis Beam were often involved in different situations, either directly or indirectly. These were people who figured there was no harm, say, in committing armed robbery if the victim somehow “deserved” it. Inspired in part by their enemies in Vietnam, Belew’s thesis is these are dangerous people and they are still out there. Even if the organizations change names, the ideology and the tactics remain the same.
Works like this are both relevant and scary. This isn’t a matter of just taking care of veterans, a problem the United States has had since the days of George Washington. It’s about understanding that there are forces out there that see themselves as gearing up for a war against the American government and anyone they see as “undesirables” in their quest to establish a white homeland with very traditional values. What, if anything, can be done about that is beyond the scope or purpose of Belew’s book. But the first step would be recognizing that they exist. Her book makes a credible case that they do.
Grade: B+
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