Content Warning: Written depictions of violence.
The full title of Kathleen Belew’s book is Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018). Like my summary of Jane Mayer’s book “Dark Money,” I wrote this summary to spread information that I think others should know.
Belew’s book is a history of the white power movement’s “groundswell” in the United States, between 1979 and 1995, culminating in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier. Among the book’s other accomplishments toward the historical record, Belew permanently dispels the “lone wolf” narrative about the bombing, a narrative which McVeigh himself tried to perpetuate after his arrest.
Grounded in years of archival research, Bring the War Home offers a powerful critique of the lone wolf narrative more broadly. One of the book’s central arguments is that the white power movement is indeed a real social movement in the United States with a history and strategy, a strategy which relies on decentralized, cell-style organizing. Lone wolves are creatures of the white power movement.
The movement “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” (ix). What was it about the movement that brought these ideologies together?
The promise of violence — rather, the promise that members would get to inflict violence on other people. Belew writes that as the white power movement matured, it became more violent, and “[as] violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away” (60). Belew calls this process “violent community formation” (34). Yet as a social movement, Belew makes a distinction between the white power movement’s “revolutionary violence” and the Ku Klux Klan’s “vigilante violence.”
Vigilante violence “served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power” (106). Given that the U.S. government has a long history of “defending vigilante violence by refusing to enforce the law” (99), law enforcement inaction and vigilante violence may be understood together as a case of one hand washing the other. Revolutionary violence, however, sought to overthrow the state. It is the white power movement’s goal of overthrowing the federal government that sets it apart in the history of white supremacy in the U.S.
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Bring the War Home is divided into three parts. Each part corresponds to a different phase of the white power movement. Part 1, “Formation,” as its title suggests, is an account of the early years of the white power movement when it emerged from within and then splintered off from the KKK, when the KKK had some 10,000 members and more than 75,000 “active sympathizers” (58).
The “formative” years of the white power movement, between 1979 and 1983, are defined by experiences of the Vietnam War (the “War” in “Bring the War Home”). Belew calls the Vietnam War “the first real test of an integrated army” for the United States. The test’s failure was marked by “racial violence that plagued soldiers of color in combat and at home” (22). She writes that: “Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong” (30). What had “gone wrong” in this case was, to be sure, found in the psychological trauma and violence of combat experience, as well as the kind of society white, racist Vietnam War veterans returned to in the United States.
Belew refers to the farm foreclosure crisis, stagflation, and job loss as some of the “threatening changes of the 1970s that had turned their world upside down” (20), which, combined with anti-war protests and the civil rights movement, unmoored the white supremacist’s perceived position atop the state-backed racial economic hierarchy in the United States. Although the exact symbolic meaning of the Vietnam War shifted among white power activists over time (cf. 24), the war acted as the “principal signifier of the movement’s paramilitarism” (32). Veterans were among the white power movement’s key organizers, including Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Tom Metzger (who popularized the phrase “lone wolf”), Robert Miles, Glenn Miller, and Tom Posey.
Louis Beam returned from the Vietnam War, where he served as a Huey door gunner, and pinned his field medals onto his Klan robes. When Beam called on fellow white power activists to bring the Vietnam War back home, “he meant a literal extension of military-style combat into civilian space” (3). Beam became the Grand Wizard of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before organizing his own “Texas Emergency Reserve, a Special-Forces-style Klan unit with extensive weaponry and rigorous training” (37).
Beam and other white power activists organized paramilitary training camps believing that they would begin society anew after a final clash with communism.
Beam’s Camp Puller prepared white power activists to “wage a race war” right at the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union would bomb each other with nuclear warheads. The “white separatist army” would take control of territory in the nuclear-torn United States under the assumption that the nuclear-torn Soviet Union would not have the strength for a land invasion, leaving territory in the United States open for capture. Beam would tell recruits (and an undercover reporter): “‘We’ll set up our own state here and announce that all non-whites have 24 hours to leave’” (40). By 1980, 500 men had trained at the camp.
Groups like the California KKKK, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the Invisible Empire KKKK, and the Covenant, Sword, and the Arm of the Lord organized paramilitary camps all across the country (51). Beam built “at least” 4 paramilitary boot camps in Texas: Camp Puller near Houston, Camp Bravo in Liberty, Camp Winnie in Winnie, and Camp Alpha, “location unknown” (53). The camps “emerged directly from the combat experiences of key activists in Vietnam” (34), meaning that the camps “sought to remake recruits and inculcate a disposition toward violence” (36).
The camps were not just for show. Belew details three frightening examples of early white power organizing: The Greensboro massacre and subsequent acquittal of 14 Neo-Nazis and Klansman, which “had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement” in 1979 (75); Klan Border Watch patrols along the US-Mexico border, which culminated in July 1986, when Tom Posey “detained sixteen men, women, and children, forcing them to stand at gunpoint for ninety minutes with their legs spread and their hands over their heads” (97); and the Texas KKKK’s terrorizing of a Vietnamese refugee fishing community living on the coast of Galveston (45).
Belew calls the KKKK’s campaign in Galveston a “bellwether” of the white power violence to come. After Galveston, a federal judge ordered “ the Klan to ‘stop paramilitary training,’ in Texas entirely, and permanently enjoined the Klan from combat, combat-related training, or parading in public with firearms” (53). The camps moved to Idaho. The ease with which organizers relocated paramilitary compounds to another part of the country goes far to demonstrate the national reach of the white power movement’s ideology.
Some of the people who trained at white power paramilitary camps were in fact mercenaries. And the U.S. government put their military training to use. For example, Tom Posey and the white power group Civilian Military Assistance supported the Contras and “acted covertly [in Nicaragua] on behalf of the U.S. government — it was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military” (78). Mercenaries like Posey and, notably, members of the editorial board of Soldier of Fortune played an important role in creating paramilitary training camps in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica on behalf of the U.S. government.
Belew details Operation Red Dog, when, in 1981, 10 mercenaries planned to overthrow Dominica, a country in the Caribbean.
The FBI and the ATF arrested the mercenaries and seized “eight Bushmaster automatic rifles, ten shotguns, five rifles, ten handguns, ten pounds of dynamite, 5,236 round of ammunition, Nazi and Confederate flags, the neo-Nazi newspaper National Vanguard, and various military manuals” (86). With the weapons, the men wanted to install a “puppet regime that would funnel millions of dollars to the Klan in the United States” (86).
They were charged with violating the Neutrality Act. 7 pleaded guilty while 2 were found guilty by jury. Michael Norris, however, was acquitted on grounds of gullibility: “He claimed he didn’t know any better and stumbled into mercenary action by accident” (87). Emphasis mine.
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In Part 2, “The War Comes Home,” Belew identifies the white power movement’s “revolutionary turn” to a single moment in time: The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, when, during a “private, heavily guarded meeting,” the white power movement went from carrying out paramilitary actions on behalf of the United States to carrying out paramilitary actions to overthrow the United States.
It is unclear who exactly attended the meeting. Belew notes that Richard Butler convened the meeting and Louis Beam, Robert Miles, Robert Mathews, David Lane, and Bruce Pierce were at the World Congress. Whoever attended came out of that meeting with a new plan:
“Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and ‘leaderless resistance,’ cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders” (105).
How does a cell-style organizing strategy sustain itself? Belew describes how the “recruitment efforts, publications, and training infrastructure” of the white power movement’s formative years “paved the way” for the long-term success of resistance cells. White power activists created a shared culture by training together and consuming the same media.
The Turner Diaries, a racist novel by William Luther Pierce published in 1978, is the key to understanding the strategy of the white power movement. The post-nuclear-fallout plot that Beam shared with new recruits at Camp Puller was taken directly from The Turner Diaries.
In addition to The Turner Diaries, pages 319–321 of the book are a list of 32 sources that make up an archive of white power literature. These include newspapers, newsletters, and periodicals published in print, while other images and symbols were disseminated over an online message board called Liberty Net. Liberty Net is still active. White power organizers were early adopters of social media.
Shared symbolism helped drive the white power movement’s strategy, but symbolism by itself couldn’t sustain a movement. That said, it is telling that Belew does not reprint images that are still under copyright by white power groups, as purchasing permissions “might constitute a financial contribution to their cause” (x).
Shared kinship networks were established and kept intact with extremist, separatist religious beliefs that dictated the roles of women and the family. Belew calls the extent of intermarriage between white power groups “startling” and finds evidence for the widow of a member of the Order getting passed to another member (180). Founder of the Aryan Nations, Richard Butler, developed religious commitments in the white power ideology (116). The white woman was the focus of worship. Belew dedicates a chapter of Bring the War Home to the role white women played in the movement:
“Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children” (160).
Control over white women’s reproduction worked as a “unifying force” between white power activists. Birth announcements were a regular feature in white power literature and infants were an important symbol for the white power movement.
For example, Members of the Order traveled to Robert Mathews’s farm to take their oath, where they surrounded a white infant girl, “raised their arms in a ‘Hitler salute,’” and “pledged their lives to race war until victory or until death” (116). Members of the Order modeled their name and their strategy directly from the Turner Diaries and planned to establish a “white separatist nation” in the Pacific Northwest. If David Duke represents the public-facing side of the white power movement, the Order represents an underground “paramilitary strike force.”
Shared training, shared media, and shared families tied white power activists together. As did violent crime. Ultimately the material conditions of the white power movement depended on stealing cash, weapons, and ammunition. One armored car robbery in 1984 may have sustained the movement for years. Twelve Order members stole $3.6 million in Ukiah, California and then, according to a federal indictment, distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to other white power organizers in North Carolina, California, Arkansas, Virginia, Idaho, and Michigan (133). A document likely authored by David Lane was discovered after Lane was arrested in connection to the assassination of radio personality Alan Berg. “Lane’s Laws” described a plan to arm each Order cell with “two .308-caliber automatics, two rifles, and two .45-caliber automatics” (131). The FBI seized four such caches in the mid-1980s. Belew claims that the “archive supports” the picture that the Order was then in a “phase of major expansion.”
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If law enforcement inaction is a pattern during the formative years of the white power movement, catastrophic law enforcement action defined the later years. The rest of Belew’s history describes escalating white power violence in the wake of law enforcement sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Among some white power activists, Ruby Ridge and Waco represented the fulfillment of an apocalyptic vision that had become the focal point of their ideology. The title of Part 3 of Bring the War Home is “Apocalypse.”
Both Louis Beam and Timothy McVeigh were present at the Waco police line. McVeigh was selling bumber stickers that said “When Guns Are Outlawed, I Will Become an Outlaw.” When the siege finally ended, McVeigh watched on television “with tears streaming down his face” (206).
The passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, however, was the final motivating force behind the Oklahoma City bombing plot (221). The white power activists behind the plot — McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier — staged their actions from a compound in Elohim City, Oklahoma. The truck bomb was prepared from a design described in The Turner Diaries. The explosion killed 167 people, including 19 children.
The final chapter of Belew’s book is a deep chronological account of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. The 1995 bombing marks the culmination of the white power movement’s groundswell. All that comes after remains to be seen.
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An historian, Belew says there is “insufficient historical distance or archival material to offer large-scale interpretations of the present moment” (239), although her book exposes the “genealogical through-lines” that link the early days of the white power movement to white power violence today. As such, Belew’s history describes important aspects of the white power movement’s current strategy.
To be clear: The white power movement’s goal is to incite a “race war” and then overthrow the U.S. government. Over the decades, the movement built an underground network of cells by training together, reading the same literature and sharing it over social media, by inter-marrying and enforcing religious control over women’s bodies, by stealing weapons and cash, counterfeiting money, and committing acts of violence. The success of this strategy depends in part by staying invisible to the public.
So remember that when the lone wolf narrative talking point is used to explain away the white power movement’s bloodshed, it should be counted as a small victory for the white power movement itself — a success in which speakers of the lone wolf narrative become complicit.
To learn more about this important part of U.S. history, I recommend you go check out a copy of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew.
