Brian M Downing
The images are fresh in our minds: angry marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, and heavily-armed men in tactical gear standing outside and sometimes in state capitals. This book, though published between those two events, scrutinizes the white-power movement which comprises neo-Nazis, KKK members, private militias, and a miscellany of related groups.
Belew, a University of Chicago professor, sees the Vietnam era as a crucible for the development of a new, more widespread white-power movement than antecedents after the Civil War and during the 1920s. The SE Asian war brought turmoil and political engagement, often quite heated. Liberal and leftist movements came about pressing for civil rights, women’s rights, fairer labor laws, and social equality. Vietnam veterans had prominent roles.
But right-wing extremism throve as well, and war veterans composed the vanguard. Defeat in Vietnam brought shame and dishonor to the nation. Government was hopelessly inept and corrupt, veterans were poorly treated, the nation was in a shambles. Networks arose, trading camps sprouted up, veterans served as mercenaries in anticommunist conflicts in Africa and Latin America, armed bands patrolled the Mexican border, military bases were robbed of arms and explosives to continue the war at home.
The new movement did not seek to preserve traditional America or restore a mythic past. It aimed at bringing about a new order, not through electoral politics but through the same violent means used by insurgents in SE Asia and elsewhere. Not even the Reagan years could alter their determination. In fact, Reagan’s lack of radical beliefs and actions made it clear the movement had no alternative to violent revolution.
The author gives detailed accounts of the movement and Vietnamese refugees, the Sandinistas in Central America, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing. There is no leader, only a handful inspirational figures and martyrs, often Vietnam veterans. They have organized, they have killed.
Expanding the Vietnam context
One can agree with Belew’s attachment of importance of the Vietnam war on the white-power movement, yet feel there was a larger context. The turmoil of the war and its aftermath delivered a devastating blow to American life which it’s never recovered from. We live in its shadow.
There was once a widely-held consensus on social norms, religion, understandings of history, and political institutions and leadership, Most Americans believed that were part of an honorable tradition stretching from a colonial past to the present and a promising future. A national community gave way to indulgence, confusion, nihilism, and anomie.
Such beliefs were discredited and discarded. Today, fifty years later, they seem like a system of folkways, myths, and prejudices. In the absence of consensus, an array of subcultures, sects, cults, myths, and identities popped up – many of them mutually antagonistic, aberrant, and hateful. The paranoid style that Richard Hofstadter called our attention to, enjoyed a resurgence.
White-power groups are only one part of fragmented America. Assimilation, once a hallmark of American life, was disparaged and replaced by tribalism, Manson-like cults, millenarian groups, the Black Liberation Army, eco-terrorists, AIM, the Symbionese Liberation Army. More benignly, mystic sects, the LGBT movement, communalism, and hi-tech culture also came on the scene.
White power could also be looked at as akin to the secessionists, Freikorps, and ultra-nationalist groups that arose after Germany’s defeat in World War One or to the welter groups of violent, militant groups such as Memory (Pamyat) that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. They all offered an organic alternative to an anomic, collapsing society.
Past is prologue, but to what?
It’s difficult to determine the danger posed by the movement. There are government bureaus and watchdog groups that try to gauge the danger and because their assessments are aimed in part at maintaining their funding, they are given to overstatement. Belew herself cautions that watchdog groups overestimate the movement’s influence and organization (p 13).
The Oklahoma City bombing led to dire warnings of right-wing militias, but on closer inspection they comprised eccentrics and military enthusiasts who stayed within the law. One outfit was initially vilified for contact with Timothy McVeigh but it turned out the leadership found him too extreme and rejected his application.
In recent weeks events have taken place on many cities that shocked mainstream Americans and must have seen by the movement faithful as justification of their dark vision of the future and as a call to arms – literally. Leftists and minorities have risen up, looted and burned, and defaced or brought down statues of figures revered by white nationalists.
The movement’s response has been negligible. Vigorous defense of statues in Portland was unlikely, even though it’s not too far from ultranationalist bastions in Idaho. But what about the monuments in Richmond? A violent counterstrike may still come on the uprising’s leaders and passive politicians, but white-power adherents have been armed and trained for many years and hardly seem the sort who would stand by as statues of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest tumble. For now, it’s the groups that purport to oppose fascism who are breaking shop windows and leaving shattered glass on sidewalks.
Perhaps the movement simply isn’t the danger it initially seems. Perhaps it’s been paralyzed by informers. Or maybe 9/11 redirected its energies away from domestic enemies to foreign ones. Better to serve in the military and fight al Qaeda, ISIL, the Taliban, or Islam itself. At the very least, it’s good training.
However, these long, unsuccessful wars may resonate with events and sentiments of the post-Vietnam crucible Belew describes. New myths of betrayal, dishonor, and irremediable government may be circulating again and gaining virulence, in part because of ongoing civil disturbances and an impending change of administration. And casualties today fall far more heavily on Red America than they did fifty years ago when conscription was in place and military service was an essential and honored part of American life.
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018).
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.