Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

by Kathleen Belew

A holistic study of the white power movement reveals a startling and unexpected origin: the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

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.

War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

After the Civil War, the Confederate veterans who formed the first Klan terrorized both black communities and the Reconstruction-era state. World War I veterans led second-era Klan efforts to violently ensure “all-American” racial, religious, and nationalist power. Third-era Klansmen who had served in World War II and Korea played key roles in the violent opposition to civil rights, including providing explosives expertise and other skills they had learned in the military.7 After each war, veterans not only joined the Klan but also played instrumental roles in leadership, providing military training to other Klansmen and carrying out acts of violence.

The most damaging rumors, however, alleged that the refugees were welfare cheats and wards of the state.

Colorado. Near Cullman, Alabama, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan ran Camp Mai Lai, named to laud the notorious massacre of civilians in Vietnam.

Camp Puller and the Klan harassment of Vietnamese refugees were a bellwether of a broader paramilitary turn.101

unknown. “Regardless of whether it is called ‘defense training’ or ‘survival courses,’ ” McDonald told the Houston Chronicle, “it is clear to this court that the proliferation of military / paramilitary organizations can only serve to sow the seeds of future domestic violence and tragedy.”

At the same moment, an attack waged by Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan upon black civil rights marchers in Decatur, Alabama, modeled a Klan strategy of forming armed caravans to carry out violence.5 The Decatur altercation wounded four black demonstrators and resulted in a local ordinance prohibiting guns within 1,000 feet of public demonstrations. The Invisible Empire responded by driving a caravan of vehicles past the mayor’s house: “If You Want Our Guns, Come and Get Them,” one sign read.

As violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away. Klansmen and neo-Nazis set aside their differences, which had been articulated largely by World War II veterans with strong anti-Nazi feelings, as the Vietnam War became their dominant shared frame.

In Alabama, for instance, the Communist Party attempted in the 1930s to mobilize the same groups targeted by Klan vigilantism and harassment. Communists called the Jim Crow South an oppressed nation, pushed for black self-determination, decried lynching, and defended black men accused of rape. They organized for shorter workdays, better labor conditions, and the right of tenant farmers to engage in collective bargaining.

White supremacy has long deployed violence by claiming to protect vulnerable white women.

“Greensboro 14

In parallel with the way white power activists in Greensboro understood themselves as participating in a global war against communism, mercenaries such as Posey expressed approval of acts of white power violence at home.8 Links between white power activists and mercenaries were strong and sustained. In Rhodesia, where between 1965 and 1980 as many as 2,300 American mercenaries defended the white minority-rule government, soldiers for hire included John Birch Society members and neo-Nazis.9 One gun dealer and former Klansman who later sold a cache of fourteen AR-15 assault rifles to the white power terrorist group the Order claimed to have been “approached by people in Alabama who I am now told were undercover agents for the government about engaging in gun running to South America,” presumably CMA. Although he declined the sale, the attempt reveals continued interconnection between the CMA and the white power movement.

Between the 1960s and the end of the Cold War, American mercenaries fought to preserve white minority-rule governments in Rhodesia and South Africa, and in Latin America and the Caribbean they propped up U.S.-supported regimes, opposed leftist movements, and attempted to overthrow leftist governments.

The government also failed to take seriously the links between American mercenaries and the white power movement. One example of this is the story of Operation Red Dog. On April 27, 1981, FBI and ATF agents arrested a group of ten men on their way out of New Orleans. Authorities seized their cache of weapons and supplies: eight Bushmaster automatic rifles, ten shotguns, five rifles, ten handguns, ten pounds of dynamite, 5,246 rounds of ammunition, Nazi and Confederate flags, the neo-Nazi newspaper National Vanguard, and various military manuals. Investigation eventually revealed that the men were participants in a plan to send mercenaries by boat to the small Caribbean island of Dominica to overthrow the government there and set up a puppet regime that would funnel millions of dollars to the Klan in the United States.

Black said he planned to send 125 Klansmen to advise the Contras. Black intended to name them the Nathan Bedford Forrest Brigade, after the Confederate lieutenant general and first Grand Wizard of the Klan, who “pioneered guerrilla warfare.” To train them, Black promised to reopen a defunct Klan paramilitary facility—Camp Mai Lai, named for the My Lai massacre—near Cullman, Alabama.83

“If the Communists consolidate their power, their campaign of violence throughout Central America will go into high gear, bringing new dangers and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming toward our 2,000-mile long southern border,” Reagan told the nation in a 1986 radio address. “We cannot and we must not permit this to happen.”92 Here, Reagan interwove anti-immigration rhetoric with fears about communism and race.

While migrants from Mexico were still largely impelled by economic inequality, most other immigrants to the United States in these years came from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, and other countries where the United States had carried out military actions.101

The Vietnam War was the major frame that organized these narratives and the ensuing campaign of violence.

Vigilantism should be understood as violence that served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power, that is to say, not only overt power wielded by the state, but also the many informal structures that upheld law and order. Because white supremacy undergirded state power throughout U.S. history, vigilantes most often served the white power structure.17

The Turner Diaries worked as a foundational how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war. Presented as a diary found and published after a white racist revolution has overthrown the U.S. government, it describes an all-white utopia. It recounts a series of terrorist attacks leading up to the partitioning of a white homeland in California and the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations. In the future world, in which the diary serves as a historical artifact of the revolution, the white supremacist army, called the Organization, has abolished the dollar, started a new calendar at year zero, and made women subservient. At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California, the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships.

As did the Organization in The Turner Diaries, the Order regarded counterfeiting not only as a source of income but also as a way to wage war on the Federal Reserve by flooding the market with fake money. Eventually the Order hoped to undermine public confidence in paper currency, fomenting revolution.

It would take until 1996—after Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Oklahoma City in April 1995, and after the December 1995 murder of two black people by a group of active-duty skinheads at Fort Bragg—for the military to forcefully prohibit active-duty personnel from joining white power groups.6 Even then, the effort to bar active-duty troops from participating in the movement was not wholly successful.7 The reluctance of the military to take rapid and decisive action regarding either the theft of military weapons or the recruitment of active-duty personnel showed an inability to accept that the white power movement was no longer a collection of hate groups but rather an organized war on the state.

The WPP would eventually disintegrate under legal pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a watchdog organization that hoped to cripple white power movement activity by filing civil suits.

“The federal government abandoned the white people when they rammed blacks down the throats of white people,” Miller said on the recorded message. “[The government] forced integration, forced white boys to fight in the Viet Nam war, allowed aliens into the country, allow[ed] Jewish abortion doctors to murder children, and allow[ed] blacks to roam the streets robbing, raping and murdering.”35

“Our forefathers shed some to make our country,” he said, “and we’re going to have to shed some to keep it, and we will.”

Despite the impending threat documented by the FBI, active-duty soldiers remained free to participate in a movement involved in the sustained theft of military weapons and matériel, and dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government.

Regarding the law prohibiting paramilitary groups that intended to injure others, various sources reported that Glenn Miller planned, once racists had taken control of the United State of Carolina, to conduct “murder and treason trials of selected defendants,” including abortion providers, “ultraliberal federal judges, neo-communist congressmen and senators, communist professors and neo-communist newspaper and television magnates.” He presumed these people guilty and proposed their execution “in the tradition of the South—public hanging from a sturdy oak tree.”

An FBI investigation, aided by the Naval Investigative Service and the Marine Corps, resulted in the conviction of 134 Marines and weapons dealers in “a national network trafficking in stolen military gear.”

narratives of the defense of white women and, by extension, white children and domestic spaces have been deployed to justify violence throughout U.S. history.3 That two defendants formed romantic relationships with jurors after the trial indicates that white power rhetoric held a romantic appeal for some people in broader American society.

Ideas about women, sexuality, and birth in this period were deeply intertwined with racial ideology, and not just on the fringe. American white supremacy had long depended upon the policing of white women’s bodies. In order to propagate a white race, white women had to bear white children. While white men’s sexual relationships with nonwhite women mattered less to white supremacists, especially if such activity was secretive, profitable, or part of systematic violence against communities of color, for a white woman to bear nonwhite children was tantamount to racial annihilation.

Anxieties about rising nonwhite birth rates mingled with those about school desegregation and the sexual revolution.

Apocalyptic rhetoric augmented violence and separatism within the white power movement, but also worked as a bridge issue with the evangelical right, creating opportunities for recruitment. Both constituencies had been preoccupied with the idea of apocalypse following Soviet nuclear attack. People in both groups after the end of the Cold War were, in a way, in search of a new enemy to fight in their foretold end-times battle.2

The Weavers

For many militiamen, antigovernment paramilitarism was rhetorically distinct from overt racism. A recruit could, theoretically, participate in a local militia without deliberately participating in the white power movement. Nevertheless, the actions of local militia groups remained framed by the same worldview, logic, and symbols that had long structured white power activism and violence.

As anti-abortion fervor, resistance to gun control laws, and anger over big government grew among mainstream conservatives during the 1990s, the white power movement leveraged these issues for recruitment.

While the Vietnam War story as lived experience and cultural force receded with time, the war remained relevant. New generations of activists participated in a movement with direct genealogical through-lines to the post-Vietnam white power unification, sharing organizational strategies, ideologies, resources, and personnel with the 1979–1995 groundswell. Stormfront, for instance, was founded in 1995 by Dominica mercenary Don Black; much of the contemporary “alt-right” posture was modeled on earlier political campaigns by David Duke; the acquittal of militants at Malheur Wildlife Reserve in Oregon at their 2016 trial echoed the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial, and the action of those militants may have been an attempt to provoke federal violence reminiscent of Ruby Ridge. Consciously or not, all of these actions referenced decades of white power movement history, and several continued to employ movement networks.

But this attention provoked a substantial backlash and may have further galvanized and emboldened a segment of the electorate that identified more closely with white power ideologies around such symbols, and around white supremacy, revanchist notions of gender roles, belief in the inherent corruption of the federal government, and an apocalyptic future.