White Power

Yesterday I pointed to predictions of the possibility of increased US military engagements. Today I want to recommend some reading that spells out the consequences that wars brought to the US in their aftermaths: Kathleen Belew demonstrates in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, how each return of war personell led to a subsequent rise in violent White Supremacy movements.

This from the book review by Patrick Blanchfield, associated faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Justice, attached below:

Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Belew’s book isn’t only a definitive history of white-racist violence in late-20th-century America, but also a rigorous meditation on the relationship between American militarism abroad and extremism at home, with distressing implications for the United States in 2018 and beyond. Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a profound relationship between America’s military violence and domestic right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

https://www.thenation.com/article/declaration-of-war/

Belew argues that the (lost) Vietnam War triggered a shift in the goals of white-racist violence, goals that until then aimed to roll back gains in minority rights and preserving the hierarchical order of American society. Instead, white power, loosely comprising all the varieties of white nationalism, white supremacy or racist right, now pursued radical extremism, with a shared vision of ethnic purges and the establishment of an all-white homeland.

Here are some numbers (from the review): The sheer size of white-power extremism since Vietnam is frightening. Belew presents credible estimates that white power mobilized some 25,000 “hard-core” supporters in the 1980s, with 150,000 to 175,000 people buying its literature, donating to white-power groups, and attending events. Likewise, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands participated in militias in the 1990s. (“The John Birch Society, in contrast, reached 100,000 members at its 1965 peak,” Belew observes pointedly.)

Nonetheless, the nature of an organized, criminal movement is publicly played down or denied, and in Belew’s words “largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology but by madness or personal animus.”