by Chloe Landen
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is a narrative history of the white power movement beginning in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and concluding with Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Rather than focusing on one specific faction of the white power movement or one particular region of the United States, author Kathleen Belew tells the story from the perspective of several key leaders across the country such as Louis Beam of the Texas Klan, Richard Butler of Aryan Nations, Robert ‘Bob’ Mathews of the Order, and Glenn Miller of the White Patriots Party. In doing so, Belew seeks to make three interventions.
The first is that the paramilitary white power movement had its origins in the Vietnam War. Belew argues that activists around the country were united by themes drawn from the Vietnam War, such as violence as a measurement of success, combat training as a revolutionary method, war as righteous rebellion, government betrayal, and minimized sacrifice. Even decades after the War had ended and its power faded from the American cultural memory, Belew asserts that it remained central to the white power movement and became codified as myth—so much so that even those who had no experience in and/or memory of the Vietnam War could adopt the narrative as their own. Belew’s second intervention is that we should understand the white power movement as a social movement with an intricate network of leaders and supporters around the country, tied together by key ideologies, values, important texts, and internet use. Here Belew pushes back against the popular characterizations of white power activists as a few ‘lone wolves,’ instead arguing that activists worked within a grassroots ‘Leaderless Resistance’ framework that centered family-like bonds while simultaneously promoting an individualistic ideology. For Belew, this was an intellectual and purposeful social structure that allowed groups to collectively avoid prosecution and be downplayed in public perception. Belew’s third and final intervention is that there was a critical juncture at the Aryan Nations World Congress in 1983. Whereas prior the white power movement had fought to reform the state from within, the 1983 Congress represented a shift in which the movement became revolutionary in tone, demanding that the only way forward was to overthrow the government and institute the utopic white society outlined primarily within the novel The Turner Diaries. For Belew, this moment should be understood as nothing less than a declaration of war on the United States federal government and further demonstrates how Vietnam was brought home.
Belew’s book is structured chronologically and divided into three parts. The first part examines how narratives of the Vietnam War contributed significantly to the early formation of the white power movement, and how acts of violence further united factions across the country. Part I concludes with a brief transnational perspective as Belew follows various movement leaders to Central America, illuminating the violent role white power activists held abroad. Part II begins with the critical juncture at the 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress, emphasizing the advent of a ‘Leaderless Resistance’ framework. Perhaps most poignantly, Part II emphasizes the centrality of white women to the movement, not only in how they physically contributed to its operations but also in how men theorized about their bodies and wombs. The final part, ‘Apocalypse,’ concerns the lethal conflicts between white power activists and the FBI, such as those at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and concludes with Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. Though McVeigh arguably represented a new generation of white power, Belew compellingly demonstrates how his act of violence expressed a continuation of ideological themes, utilization of key texts, and reliance on communal ties that persisted among white power activists since the Vietnam War.
Perhaps incidentally, Bring the War Home contributes significantly to the study of religion as there is ample room for a scholar to use Belew’s work to approach the white power movement as a religion itself. For instance, Belew arguably positions the Vietnam War narrative as the origin story and creation myth of white paramilitary power in the United States. There is also a consistent heavy reliance on sets of texts throughout the movement’s formation, none with greater authority and impact than the novel The Turner Diaries—a revolutionary and incendiary text that Belew positions as the movement’s ‘bible’. Several fascinating rituals deserve further scrutiny, including induction oaths involving the encirclement of a white female infant as members pledge their lives to race war. And, finally, there is a persistent emphasis on martyrs, chosenness, and reproduction, as well as sets of values held so sacred they sometimes demand sacrifice.
Bring the War Home also makes several indispensable contributions to scholarship on the whole. In focusing on several movement leaders around the country, the centrality of shared texts, and the eventual utilization of the internet, Belew effectively conveys that the white power movement should be understood as a national social movement. In doing so, readers gain a wider historical understanding of white power in the United States between the 1970s and 1995, one that purposefully diverges from common tropes associated with activists. Moreover, in emphasizing the centrality of the Vietnam War, Belew further depicts a compelling logic for the prevailing paramilitary nature of the white power movement. Lastly, readers are invited to grapple with the concept of war and probe into how war has come home throughout United States history. In doing so, Belew’s epilogue leaves open to investigation of how the ‘forever wars’ of the new millennium will ‘come home’ and shape new iterations of white power.
There are other avenues Belew’s work leaves open for scholarly exploration, including an analysis of the U.S. white power movement that emphasizes web-based activism over textual influences. This is certainly a task for a future scholar as internet archives remain undeveloped; yet, in briefly touching on how the white power movement transitioned to operating covertly online in the late nineties, Belew summons a reflective gaze that centers on internet archives as primary sources—one that may ultimately challenge the timeline of the movement and alter the thesis’s emphasis on war. At the very least, Belew bids readers to consider the social worlds of online communities when confronting the supposed ‘lone’ white power activist galvanized by an internet forum to commit an act of violence. Additionally, Belew’s brief transnational turn toward Central America may leave some readers wanting more, opening up a realm to examine more comprehensively the role of the United States white power movement abroad. Despite these open ends for further inquiry, Belew accomplishes the scope of her own research exceptionally well. Bring the War Home is a must-read for all who seek to understand the United States paramilitary white power movement of the late twentieth century, and for anyone who desires to speculate about white power activism today.
Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas. Her work specializes in U.S. Protestantism within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with particular interests in the social gospel movement and religious nationalism, as well as the intersections of gender and race in constructing narratives of nationhood.
