Table of Content
Of course, those eras also resulted from Radical Reconstructionand failed efforts to help the freedmen; a massive influx of immigrants, most of them Catholics and Jews, early this century; and the advances of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The residents were also converting semiautomatic weapons to illegal automatics, as had white power separatists belonging to the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord a decade earlier in Arkansas. Beginning in the early 1990s, the 1033 Program of the National Defense Authorization Act arranged for the free or low-cost transfer of surplus military weapons, gear, and other equipment such as vehicles to local police departments. Tanks, military assault rifles, grenade launchers, body armor, and more became routinely used in policing civilians at home. The war on drugs also promoted collaboration between the military and civilian police forces. The vast majority of SWAT team and other paramilitary police deployments responded with military force to nonviolent drug crimes.
Aryan Nations representatives visited the CSA convocation early, in 1981. Ellison, however, openly took a second wife and declared himself the divinely ordained King of the Ozarks. This turn, along with a practice called “Plundering the Philistines” that justified robbery and theft from non-Identity Christians as permissible, caused fractures within the group. The new movement used military weapons and manpower, having perfected an earlier strategy of recruiting active-duty military personnel to its cause. Mathews, eager to propagate the white race, had set up a second home with her 28-year-old daughter, Zillah, in Laramie, Wyoming, while still married to Debbie Mathews. In doing so, Mathews took part in a newly condoned polygamy within the movement, whose leaders put aside some ideas about traditional family structure in order to encourage the birth of white children.
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Sensational true-crime and undercover reporting in pulp magazines and one-source interviews in small-town newspapers kept activists safely ensconced within their cells and depicted every case of violence as uniquely senseless. Thus groups went undetected, and the motivations underlying violence were rarely taken seriously. It’s also difficult not to assume almost tacit approval and purposeful failure to intervene from law enforcement and the military, especially given the number of officers and personnel involved in the movement . In later chapters, Belew draws a distinct connection between the white power paramilitary movement and the militarization of civilian policing, with its domestic war on communities of color beginning in the 1990s.
The highs of Bring the War Home are – in my estimation – somewhat dampened by the flatness of the writing. At one point, she covers a criminal trial in which a number of white supremacists were acquitted by a jury. After the trial, certain members of the jury became romantically involved with the newly-freed defendants. While shocking and inappropriate, Belew keeps repeating this fact as though worried I couldn’t grasp the concept the first time she said it. This entry was posted in Authoritarianism & Facism, Social Uprising, Terrorism, Violence and tagged militia, right wing, terrorism, white power.
What to Read
An outspoken and confrontational commentator on KOA-AM radio, Berg was the kind of prominent Jewish and liberal voice that the Order sought to silence. In the Texas paramilitary camps before the fishermen’s dispute, Louis Beam had speculated to an undercover reporter about how he would use his paramilitary infrastructure for eventual race war. The camouflage fatigues later worn by members of the Order when training for overt race war were purchased at a Soldier of Fortune convention. There, Randall Rader, head of paramilitary training for the Order, said he spent between $10,000 and $15,000 obtained through armored car robberies on uniforms, boots, “military goods and sophisticated equipment of different sorts.… It all fell right into the military science and the guerilla warfare I was teaching. In El Salvador, Soldier of Fortune teams worked most closely with the Atlacatl Battalion.
In this respect, white power can be understood as an especially extreme and violent manifestation of larger social forces that wed masculinity with militancy, in the form of paintball, war movies, gun shows, and magazines such as Soldier of Fortune that were aimed at armchair and weekend warriors. Let's just hope the current, internet-enabled, low-intensity criticism-self-criticism sessions don't end up driving everyone into the arms of the usual political villains. According to the author, the student radicals eventually learned that the most effective way to attract attention and receive support was to use tactics that would make them victims of excessive government repression. For instance, police brutality and the violation of basic human rights during the Kent State shootings led a large number of people to mistrust the government, but when the Weathermen tried to provoke a similar reaction with the Days of Rage, Americans were not impressed. The Weathermen in particular made it their objective to prove that they were more Third Worldist and activist than everyone else. They armed themselves with a mutually opportunistic alliance with the Black Panthers and set about to show that they could do more than just speak at meetings.
Kathleen Belew
Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983. Varon compares the Weather Underground in the United States and the Red Army Faction in West Germany, as some who had come up in the New Left turned to revolutionary armed struggle through guerilla tactics, at a point of the New Left’s height but shortly before its decline. Groups like SDS and student unions in West Germany split over questions of mass organizing versus violence.
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. On July 27, 1996, Eric Rudolph bombed Atlanta’s Centennial Park in the middle of the Olympics. Because the bomb had shifted, orienting its explosion vertically rather than horizontally, its shrapnel wounded only 111 people and killed two; the bomb had been intended for a much higher death toll.
The Arizona Patriots had blueprints for two major dams and a power station, as well as a cache of weapons and explosives. White power migrants worked as loggers, in mines and cement plants, and in the small economy of publication, recruitment, and armament generated by the Aryan Nations compound itself. Yarbrough became fixated on the murder weapon, which had jammed, ominously, on the thirteenth round. He decided to keep it, leaving a trail of evidence for agents to follow later.98 The FBI got a break in the counterfeiting case in June 1984, the same month as the Berg assassination.
Then the government got involved in the Vietnam conflict, and the SDS leaders organized the first mass demonstrations against this involvement, which turned the organization into a student movement. It was this development that drew the attention of leftist groups and wanna-be charismatic leaders to SDS. Trotskyists, Communists, and others turned what should have been an organization dedicated to participatory democracy into a group of factions loosely connected by Marxist ideology and Third-World rhetoric. Deeply researched portrait of the evolution of the US white power movement in the 70s and 80s into highly organized cell-style domestic terrorism working to overthrow the American state and wage race war. Belew maps out the shift from pre-1983 white racist violence, which served to support both white supremacy and state power, to the post-1983 revolutionary white power movement, shaped by the disillusionment of Vietnam war vets and defined by antigovernment paramilitarism.
A definite must-read for anyone trying to make sense of the far-right in the U.S. Belew similarly declares that Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead, was “connected … directly to the highest levels of the white power movement’s war-on-the-government leadership and messaging” (p. 213). Another erosion of meaning arose from the lack of convictions in the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial, after thirteen white power activists were acquitted of charges including seditious conspiracy despite overwhelming evidence of their war on the state. This failure, along with the even more damaging public relations disasters of Ruby Ridge and Waco, caused the Department of Justice and some agents in the FBI to be reluctant to portray the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of a movement and hence reluctant to pursue investigative and prosecutorial strategies based on that view.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that this isn’t exactly what has happened. Al Qaeda is dead, but then there was ISIS and there will be more and more of these hate-filled extremists. We have to take the threat of these men and their ideas seriously and not rely just on the FBI to take them down, but also on the political systems in which both groups embedded themselves. Obviously, the US does a much better job at rooting out the violent psychos on our own soil and failed states in the middle east do not, but it's important for Americans to distinguish between the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and other Middle Eastern regimes that they don't like instead of lumping them all together. That's what gives rise to white hate groups here who think all people of color are commies.
He negotiated the buyout of the Georgio Armani North American license and was the mediator in the successful settlement of the Mitchell Brothers wrongful death suit. Stifle dissent and either harass or kill those who speak about the organization. The MASSIVE irony that the tactics and in many cases the violent, misogynistic worldview of these paramilitary groups on the alt-Right very closely mirror those of al Qaeda. The election of Barack Obama clearly galvanized (ever-present) racism in this country, as well as the paranoia that the government is "coming for your guns!" Trump famously rode the bogus Birther issue to the White House. Calls to lock up Hillary Clinton actually speak to a state with TOO MUCH power, but I guess that's obvious and these assholes aren't known for consistency. They've already arrived in my liberal town appearing en masse at a school board meeting, flashing their white power hand signs.
This is especially true of the period after 1983, when white power activists worked particularly hard to avoid being depicted as a coherent movement. They used old Klan strategies such as maintaining secret membership rolls, as well as new ideas such as cell-style organizing. Such strategies foiled government informants and forestalled public awareness of violence, obscuring the scale and intentions of the movement and limiting opposition. But when they felt it useful, they also overstated their influence and membership in order to boost their apparent strength. To confront this grave threat, activists organized as a paramilitary army and adopted masculine cultural forms.
Books by Kathleen Belew
When I pick up a nonfiction book, I am looking for a balance between content and literary execution. I expect that the research will utilize the appropriate sources, analyze those sources objectively, and draw conclusions based on the best evidence available. Readability is important, because if the pages don’t hold my attention, there is no way I’m ever going to get the message being communicated.
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