Bring the War Home
The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
-
- £12.99
Publisher Description
A Guardian Best Book of the Year
“A gripping study of white power…Explosive.”
—New York Times
“Helps explain how we got to today’s alt-right.”
—Terry Gross, Fresh Air
The white power movement in America wants a revolution.
Returning to a country ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of Vietnam veterans and disgruntled civilians who shared their virulent anti-communism and potent sense of betrayal concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. The command structure of their covert movement gave women a prominent place. They operated with discipline, made tragic headlines in Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, and are resurgent under President Trump. Based on a decade 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.
“A much-needed and troubling revelation… The power of Belew’s book comes, in part, from the fact that it reveals a story about white-racist violence that we should all already know.”
—The Nation
“Fascinating… 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.”
—Slate
“Superbly comprehensive…supplants all journalistic accounts of America’s resurgent white supremacism.”
—Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, delivers an engrossing and comprehensive history of the white power movement in America, highlighting its racism, antigovernment hostility, and terrorist tactics. This impressively researched work looks into, first, the Vietnam War's influence on the movement's earliest leaders, such as Vietnam veteran Louis Beam, who equated the Vietnam War with American decline and wanted to reclaim a time before civil rights, legal abortion, birth control, immigration of nonwhites, and interracial marriage. Then, Belew investigates the movement's evolution: its call for "leaderless resistance" and war against the government in the 1980s; the growth of its militia phase that led to the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho, the Branch Davidians in Waco, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and its shift to online platforms in the late 1990s. She also studies the movement's paramilitary training camps, the role of women in the movement, its push to respond in kind to the militarization of police departments, and the difficulties of prosecuting its leaders due, in part, to its strategy of decentralization and the groundswell of support for militias in the mid-1990s. Belew presents a convincing case that white power rhetoric and activism continue to influence mainstream U.S. politics.
