The "Communist" Boogeyman
White America's Excuse for Violence and Tool for Silencing the Left
Reece Brosco
Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America presents a sobering picture of American history over the last half-century. She tells the history of the white power movement, from its rise after, and in response to, the Vietnam War, through to the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma by Timothy McVeigh on April 19th, 1995.
Her work teases out the paramilitary nature of the white power movement, its leaderless resistance strategy, and the antistatist leaning which characterized the movement and still exists in contemporary white nationalist and white extremist dialogue. Despite her focus on the extremist right, there is much to be gained in Belew’s analysis of the white power movent which sheds some much-needed light on the conceded effort of the United States, right-wing forces, and neoliberal corporate establishment to push back against progressive popular movements at home and abroad, ultimately informing our current political discourse on progressive and democratic socialist politics.
U.S. leftist groups of the post-Vietnam era, often referred to as the New Left, undoubtedly failed, but not all on their own. The United States government and the white power movement contributed to this failure. Although Belew correctly presents the white power movement’s understanding of themselves as antistatist, when it came to defending the United States form the specter of “communism,” they had full state support.
Belew demonstrates an understanding of the 1970s and 1980s which situates the United States as complacent and contributory in the silencing of leftist popular political movements at home and abroad. This silencing was achieved by playing on Cold War tensions, as well as fears of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China and their rising power in relation to the globalist, neoliberal, and neo-colonial world order the United States hoped to perpetuate. Fears of “communism” were also born out of the legacy of the First Red Scare of the 1920s and the more recent McCarthyism and Second Red Scare, both leaving their own legacy of political persecution.
These factors, paired with the political messaging, organizing, and violence carried out by the white power movement lead to the creation in the national imagination of the “communist” boogeyman which served to discredit any leftist and or black organizing efforts during this period, a reality that continues to plague progressive and democratic socialist politics. As these establishment and right-wing powers cry “communism” over progressive policy proposals, Trump Era political discourse has proven that the words “communism” and “socialism” are politically meaningless and impotent in the United States.
Belew shows the creation of this “communist” boogeyman in three different phases. In the first phase, the Vietnam phase, Belew presents the war in Vietnam and how it impacted soldiers and civilians toward different understandings of that conflict. Vietnam built white supremacists in the jungles by forcing young men to kill brown bodies, but it also built doubt about the war and a country’s role in it for civilians at home.
In the second phase, the homefront phase, Belew shows the rise of the white power movement and their resurgence of anti-“communist” rhetoric, which served as misdirection to demonize Americans fighting for change.
The final phase, the Reagan phase, is characterized by Belew as a neo-colonialist effort to control Central America, South America, and the Carribean, where the U.S. government worked in covert and overt ways to contain and topple leftist governments in the global South.
Belew powerfully demonstrates how Vietnam shaped the white power movement and the veterans who supported it. Their tours of duty informed the identities of individual activists within the white power movement, making them soldiers, “veterans”, and in their eyes anti-communist fighters. It also provided them with their military training which served as the grounding for the movement’s paramilitary and militia bent.
Vietnam also had national implications, as it created general polarization concerning the marital role the U.S. was playing in the world via its “foreign policy” of containment. War is hell, and the same was true for Vietnam. For white power proponents, Vietnam was a “story of soldiers’ betrayal by military and political leaders and of the trivialization of their sacrifice”.¹ Soldiers fighting felt they were not being allowed to win the war. The soon to be white power activists among them felt like they were being limited, that more destructive power should be unleashed.
After their service, they returned to a country that was war-weary and regretted U.S. involvement. Upon returning they felt they were met with disdain and disgust from the public. Homefront views on the war had shifted. Belew continues, pointing out that “defeat in Vietnam represented a cataclysmic break in several registers: it upended notions of the triumphant American warrior, presented a perceived threat to the balance of world power, and, for some, intensified fear of communism”.²
This intensified fear of “communism” was reignited in the popular consciousness by the conflict in Vietnam. “Communists” were the enemy and as such there had to be a narrative that justified the death tolls. “Communism” proved itself a significant driver of hysteria during the Red Scares. To build the same fear of “communism” in the Vietnam moment required the demonization and dehumanization of the North Vietnamese. Belew explains that “dehumanizing descriptions of the enemy [that] broadly applied to the Vietnamese during the war… would reappear in white power rhetoric at home. The widespread use of body counts as a marker of success in the Vietnam War encouraged soldiers to think of the enemy as numbers or vermin, not people.”³
“Body counts” marked individual soldiers’ success slaying their nonwhite “communist” enemies and death tolls appeared in newspapers daily during the war showing the stark disparities of this conflict. Clearly, “communists” were dying in bulk, and war crimes were being committed against them. As these facts became apparent patience for the war waned, and public sentiment shifted at home. Upon their return, soldiers felt “the nation had wrongly rejected, failed to honor, and impugned veterans.”⁴ Veterans in some cases returned home to less than warm welcomes from leftist antiwar activists.
In the mind of the Vietnam vet, he had gone halfway across the world to face the evil of “communism” and he returned to his country hated by those he labeled as “communist”. He also found them to have been the loudest voices in public discourse while he was gone. He brought the war home, and he intended to continue to kill “communists” wherever they decided to present a “danger” to America.
Labelling the enemy as “communist” in Vietnam gave these budding white power activists free range to commit autocities aganist non-white bodies. However, after arriving home to find the New Left and its critiques of their service the only clear answer was to attack the “communist” threat white power activists found at home after their service. Labelling your ememy as “communist” justified the horrors of Veitnam and white power organizers bet on that strategy again to justify the racially motivated violence they desired to carrry out at home.
This was useful to the far-right, both as a means of stirring up confusion and as a means of discrediting progressive and socialist politics. Phase two of creation of the “communist” boogeyman is the homefront phase and it is characterized by the rise of the white power movement, its public violence, and its interactions with the New Left. The white power movement united disparate Klan and neo-Nazi factions “around white supremacy and anticommunism, and sustained the groundswell by circulating and sharing images, personnel, weapons, and money”.⁵
This approach worked for the movement and it found some traction. Belew points out that “the Klan had been 6,500 strong in 1975 but by 1979 has increased to 10,000 active duty members plus and additional 75,000 active sympathizers”.⁶ This is quite an impressive feat by any standard, but particularly in its pre internet organizing context is made all the more impressive. As the movement gained traction, demonstrations and counter-demonstrations became the literal and metaphorical battlefield for the white power movement in its conquest against the “communists” at home.
One of the first clashes between the white power movement and leftist activists occured at China Grove, North Carolina in July 1979. The counter-protest was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP), and some of its members were not opposed to political violence. While this mindset was held by some, Belew warns that while “the left advocated radical activism in the name of anti-colonial self-determination… many wavered on the use of violence”.⁷ This unsteadiness among the left to commit to either a violent or non-violent approach is important to keep in mind, especially as white power violence increrased and with it, media coverage, white power activists were able to project their platform of white supremacy and racism under the guise of taking an “anti-communist” stance.
After China Grove, and taking the lead from national leftist organizing groups, “the CWP took the official position that the organizing against the Klan required aggressive confrontation. They mobilized against what they called a southern Klan resurgence, and against the impact such a movement might have on unionizing and racial cooperation”.⁸ This organized white power event was one of the first in North Carolina. The left was convinced it had to meet this threat with “aggressive confrontation”.
Little did they know that in a few months it wouldn’t have mattered, whether or not they were non-violent organizers because they would be framed wrongly, as Belew points out, for inciting the violence on that day. “On November 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired upon a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina… Five protestors died — four white men and one black woman — and many more were injured”.⁹
This event was shocking and saw fourteen white power organizers stand trial for murder and riot, among other charges. None were convicted, but this news-worthy event began to shape a national and regional anti-communist narrative. The national press “perceived people on both sides of the Greensboro confrontation as dangerous and violent extremists, they also remained deeply engaged in the anticommunism of the Cold War”.¹⁰ The pervasive power of the “communist” boogeyman was used by the establishment media since before Vietnam and has been used since.
The national narrative was one thing, but the CWP faced a harsher reality on a local scale. Belew uncovers that “the Greensboro community, including local media, saw the Klansmen as local boys defending the status quo and the communists as anarchist outsiders who came to town to make trouble. The communists, with their openly revolutionary agenda, were understood as traitorous, radical, and dangerous in a way that Klansmen were not”.¹¹ It is not surprising that the CWP were seen as outsiders, particularly since many white Southerners held Klan or at least Confederate sympathies.
Many white power activists held a shared since that there were two unfinished wars in American history; Vietnam, and the Civil War, and things would be better if only they could get rid of the “communists”, the blacks, and the Jews in the case of neo-Nazis. Such an attack on the newly won strides toward racial justice which came out of the Civil Rights era would have to be worded in a coded way. Belew explains that the white power movement backed away “from the openly segregationist language of the civil rights era to a discourse in which anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism, Klansmen spoke publicly about race as a secondary concern.”¹²
This is one of the most crucial points Belew makes. She is saying that this is the creation of the “communist” boogeyman. Where the term communism or socialism loses its meaning and transforms into the American concept of “communism” framed in an anti-communist context. The label “communist” was taken by the far right and used as a scare tactic and a not-so-subtle code for black people, labor organizers, progressives, or anyone who might stand in the way of the white power movements goals for a free white republic or stand in the way of the U.S. goverments neoliberal and neo-colonial international interests.
As the public involved itself more in the white power movement — founded on genocide and slavery — the United States goverment could not pass up the opportunity to partake in further violence. This served to preserve both the national and international neo-liberal economic order. Belew points out the “fundamental contradiction of the Cold War was that the United States frequently allied with antidemocratic governments to carry out a foreign policy that purported to protect freedom and democracy”.¹³ This is the lie of containment and under Presidents Nixon and Carter the policy sought to limit the spread of “communism” abroad.
The third phase, the Regan phase, completed the idea of the “communist” boogeyman by stripping away any meaning from the words “communism” and “socialism” in American politics. Belew comments that in contrast to previous policies of containment “President Ronald Reagan adopted a more aggressive roll-back policy that sought to unseat communist and leftist governments where they already held power. In practice, it meant opposing anticolonial revolutions and struggles for self-determination that swelled through the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s”.¹⁴
The violence born out of this time of American interference in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean as a whole was a savage massacre. From Nicaragua to El Salvador the United States opposed popular progressive and left wing movements for independence and self determination. The School of the Americas and its impact as a training site for mercenaries, both American and foreign, who carried out acts of political violence in South and Central America should not go unmentioned here. Neither should the Regan administration’s Iran Contra scandal be forgotten.
This not-too-well-hidden ruse played by the U.S. government under the Regan administration, and since, was to present the United States as a benevolent actor securing the global South from the danger of “communism”. In actuality the United States was protecting its own neo colonial and capitalist interests. The stain of U.S. meddling (and the continued U.S. meddling) in South American, Central American, and Caribbean affairs brought about authoritarian dictatorships, massive wealth inequality, and violence. This happened under the false guise of containing “communism”, a lie proppted up by the right-wing and the white power movement.
Thus Belew connects past to present as she shows the creation of this “communist” boogeyman in its three differnet phases. The Vietnam phase, where soldiers were ordered to kill “communists” only to arrive home and feel that “communists” and other progressives at home disrespected their sacrifice. The homefront phase, where using the label “communist”, to describe leftist forces, proved useful for the white power movement as a way to discredit progressive arguments and take lives.
And finally, the Reagan phase, where the U.S. goverment followed the lead of the white power movement and claimed “commusim” and its supposed “threat to America” as justifcation to play king maker in the global South. This investigation is not to say that communism or socialism are by default good. Rather that can’t be said because as has been established they mean nothing and are instead written of as “communism” thanks to the power of the boogeyman created by the right.
The left has been and still is stifled because of the meaninglessness of these words and how they are being mobilized against progressive and social democratic political thought. The legacy of this damage to poltical discourse is grounded in the history of the white power movement and the scars of its violence. Showing yet another example in American history that the power of white supremacy is that it is so closely linked to capitalism and the so-called battle for its preservation.
Works Cited:
[1] Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home. Harvard University Press, 2019. 3.
[2] Belew, 22.
[3] Belew, 29.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Belew, 56.
[6] Belew, 58.
[7] Belew, 63
[8] Belew, 58.
[9] Belew, 59.
[10] Belew, 58.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Belew, 54
[13] Belew, 56.
[14] Belew, 83.
