Synopsis:
"Belew's book helps explain how we got to today's alt right."-Terry Gross, Fresh Air The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump. Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of brokering alliances and birthing future recruits. Belew's disturbing and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
Review:
This is a work of fierce intelligence. In a breathtaking and wholly convincing manner, Belew shows how white power activists used their view of the Vietnam War to advance every element of their reactionary agenda and to justify domestic terrorism. A book of signal importance and urgency, it provides a haunting vantage point on contemporary American political culture.--Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Kathleen Belew's vital new book begins in the belly of a Huey helicopter somewhere over South Vietnam. From there she follows with unflinching honesty the violence that violence begat, from the tiny cadre of veterans who decided to bring the war home through Ruby Ridge and Waco to the horror of the Oklahoma City terrorist attack. Over the years I've read any number of exemplary histories. Never have I read a more courageous one.--Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
Bring the War Home is a fascinating account of right-wing white power extremists in the United States. Kathleen Belew illuminates this history through staggeringly broad research. A compelling and sometimes shocking read, it is an outstanding contribution to the history of violence.--Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences
Belew...counters the treatment of white terrorists as 'lone wolves' by tracing the contours of an organized white power movement that connected radical white extremists from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and from Waco, Texas, to Oklahoma City...Belew does the hard work of restoring those connections, revealing how white supremacists built a coalition of rural survivalists, urban skinheads, and anti-Semitic Christian Identity believers.--Joseph Darda"Los Angeles Review of Books" (04/09/2018)
Bring the War Home is a tour de force. An utterly engrossing and piercingly argued history that tracks how the seismic aftershocks of the Vietnam War gave rise to a white power movement whose toxic admixture of violent bigotry, antigovernmental hostility, and racial terrorism helped set the stage for Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and, yes, the presidency of Donald Trump.--Junot Díaz
This necessary work reminds readers that white violence--on behalf of, and against, the state--has a long and deep history.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook"Library Journal" (04/01/2018)
In this major work of scholarly synthesis, Kathleen Belew uses letters, ephemera and 'zines' as well as newspaper reports and official documents to reconstruct a dark chapter in American history that has chilling echoes for today.--Matthew Reisz"Times Higher Education" (04/26/2018)
Fascinating...Belew connects seemingly disparate events like the killings at Greensboro, the persecution of Vietnamese fishers in Texas in the early 1980s, and the siege at Ruby Ridge. She shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.-- (04/11/2018)
The connection between hate groups and the military is not new... Bring the War Home charts the path of radical white supremacists from the end of the Vietnam War to the 1995 bombing of a Federal government building in Oklahoma City.--CBS News
Belew...traces the origins of the white power movement to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. She examines how various racist groups--skinheads, Klansmen, white separatists, neo-Nazis, militiamen, and others--united under a common banner and took the movement in a violent and revolutionary direction...Belew also argues that the anti-government sentiment created by the Vietnam War helped consolidate and radicalize the white power movement in ways we haven't fully understood.-- (04/13/2018)
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