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

by Kathleen Belew

Such descriptions of absence serve as an apt metaphor for the way the bombing distorted, or even destroyed, what had been a popular awareness of white power activity. From Klan paramilitary camps to the Greensboro shooting, from the Order to the Fort Smith sedition trial, white power actions made the news. Although the connections between such episodes were not always made clear, they nevertheless appeared in mainstream newspapers, on morning newsmagazine and afternoon talk shows, in movies and television miniseries, and even on the late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live.2 But Timothy McVeigh’s execution cemented a perception of the bombing as unconnected to the events that came before, as an inexplicable act of violence carried out by one or a few actors. This idea threatened to occlude the white power movement altogether. Leaderless resistance had triumphed as a strategy to hide the broader movement in the bombing investigation and prosecution, and in the journalistic and scholarly accounts as well. They have portrayed white power movement violence as isolated, rather than a series of coordinated acts, and its activists as madmen rather than as part of a movement.

This seems like a more important take-away than the Vietnam thing.