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

by Kathleen Belew

“white power,”

“neo-Nazi”

“revolutionary”

“activist”

“Revolutionary violence”

Though often described by others as “white nationalist” and by its members as patriotic, this movement did not seek to defend the American nation, even when it celebrated some elements of U.S. history and identity. Instead white power activists increasingly saw the state as their enemy. Many pursued the idea of an all-white, racial nation, one that transcended national borders to unite white people from the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and beyond.

A holistic study of the white power movement reveals a startling and unexpected origin: the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The story activists told about Vietnam and the response to the war on the right were major forces in uniting disparate strands of American white supremacism and in sustaining that unity.

“leaderless resistance.”

Popularized throughout the underground, leaderless resistance changed recruitment goals, emphasizing the importance of enlisting a small number of fully committed activists rather than large groups of the less committed.15 This is another reason membership counts alone could not accurately convey the movement’s impact, activity, or capacity for violence.

While white power activists held worldviews that aligned or overlapped with those of mainstream conservatism—including opposition to immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights—the movement was not dedicated to political conservatism aimed at preserving an existing way of life, or even to the reestablishment of bygone racial or gender hierarchies. Instead, it emphasized a radical future that could be achieved only through revolution.

While increasingly politicized evangelical congregations espoused belief in the rapture—a foretold moment when the faithful would be peacefully transported from the world as the apocalyptic end times began—Christian Identity and other white theologies offered believers no such guarantees of safety.20 Instead, they held that the faithful would be tasked with ridding the world of the unfaithful, the world’s nonwhite and Jewish population, before the return of Christ.21 At the very least, the faithful would have to outlast the great tribulation, a period of bloodshed and strife. Many movement followers prepared by becoming survivalists: stocking food and learning to administer medical care. Other proponents of white cosmologies saw it as their personal responsibility to amass arms and train themselves to take part in a coming end-times battle that would take the shape of race war.

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.

However, the white power movement departed from mainstream paramilitary culture in carving out an important place for women, relied on as symbols of the cause and as activists in their own right. As bearers of white children, women were essential to the realization of white power’s mission: to save the race from annihilation.

White power should be recognized as something broader than the Klan, encompassing a wider range of ideologies and operating simultaneously in public and underground. Such an understanding is vital lest we erroneously equate white power with covert violence and thereby ignore its significant inroads into mainstream society, which hardly came under cover of night.

While white power featured a diversity of views and an array of competing leaders, all corners of the movement were inspired by feelings of defeat, emasculation, and betrayal after the Vietnam War and by social and economic changes that seemed to threaten and victimize white men. White power also qualifies as a social movement through its central features: the contiguous activity of an inner circle of key figures over two decades, frequent public displays, and development of a wide-reaching social network.

The Turner Diaries,

The bombing destroyed an edifice, lives, and families, but not only those. It also shattered meaning, wiping out a public understanding of the white power movement by cementing its violence, in public memory, as the act of a few men. Despite its many attempts to disappear, and despite its obscurity even at the height of its strength during the militia phase, the movement left lasting marks on mainstream American politics and popular culture. It has continued to instigate and shape violence years after the Oklahoma City bombing.

On both the right and left of the political spectrum, the war worked to radicalize and arm paramilitary groups in the post–Vietnam War period.

Throughout the twentieth century, many veterans of color understood their postwar activism as an extension of their wartime combat.

Just as some veterans fought for racial equality, others fought to oppose it. Indeed, Ku Klux Klan membership surges have aligned more neatly with the aftermath of war than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism, to name a few common explanations.

The effect of war was not simply about the number or percentage of veterans involved, but about the particular expertise, training, and culture they brought to paramilitary groups.

Narratives of the war as a government betrayal and as a source of grievance laid the groundwork for white power activism.

The United States and its people had understood the wars of the first half of the century as shared civil projects, but the Vietnam War undermined this notion.

The idea that the nation had wrongly rejected, failed to honor, and impugned veterans created an emphasis on healing and memorialization. This discourse papered over a critique of the war itself by foregrounding the wounded and wronged veteran.23 Meanwhile, a systematic accounting of wartime atrocities—including official apologies for events such as the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai—came to be seen as an open threat to an ascendant neoconservative worldview. For the war to be remembered as a “noble cause,” as presidential candidate Ronald Reagan called it in 1980—or even to sustain the narrative that its veterans had been honorable men “denied permission to win,” as he said after he became president—required the systematic exclusion of an antiwar critique and transformed what appeared to be an apolitical, intimate style of memoir and narrative into a conservative political project.

Popular accounts of the Vietnam War continue to take as fact that soldiers were spat upon by protesters as they returned home, that the war could have been won if not for the betrayal by corrupt or cowardly politicians, and that politicians abandoned large numbers of living prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. Yet all of these claims have been challenged in the historical literature.

As historians have shown, the draft disproportionately targeted poor black communities, and was also used as a punitive measure to send black race rioters to war in order to quell domestic dissent.

By 1970, the Marine Corps recorded more than a thousand incidents of racial violence at installations both in Vietnam and back home.

While military service could foster opportunities for soldiers to encounter people from different backgrounds, leading to friendships that would outlast the war, it could also harden prejudices and set the stage for racial violence.

Beam’s narrative turned on stymied grief, constant danger, fixation on weapons, and betrayal, all elements that he believed were shared by fellow white Americans.

Sounds like a certain president we know.

Beam understood the Vietnam War as the catalyst for American decline and yearned to reclaim a time before social and political changes had transformed the nation.

He wanted to "Make America Great Again"

The impact of the Vietnam War was inextricably linked to all the threatening changes of the 1970s that had turned their world upside down.

Beam’s writings departed from a mainstream sentimentalized veterans’ discourse in openly calling for violence.

However, he consistently used the horror of blood, death, and mutilation to argue that the government and civil society had betrayed and abandoned soldiers in Vietnam, and, therefore, that civilians should face the violence of war at the hands of white power activists on the home front.

On a landscape that recalled the rice paddies of Vietnam, Beam built Camp Puller, a Vietnam War–style training facility designed to turn Klansmen into soldiers.

Is there any evil in the modern world that white Americans didn't think of first? We're so used to seeing ISIS and al Qaeda training camps, but here are these white power shits and they look just the same.

Beam would implement a Klan Border Watch to target undocumented immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and he would recruit active-duty military personnel.

Pre-Trumpian

but the strategy of warfare honed from this frustration would inflame the white power movement and further shape the history of domestic terrorism.

How do you end such a movement? Shutting them down just makes them more desperate and violent.

In each case, charges against him were dropped or never filed.

Why?!?!?

but once more he was not charged.

Why not???

“Over here, if you kill the enemy, you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal,” Beam said. “I couldn’t see the difference.”

Duke advanced a new public image of the Klan, one that was better-educated and genteel. He gave witty talk-show interviews wearing a suit and tie, claiming to be not racist but “racialist,” and advocating separatism rather than violence.

Although this group discussed such issues through ideas of consumerism and meritocracy—for instance, arguing that their hard work and success should allow them to maintain their property values through neighborhood segregation and opposing school integration through busing—they accorded with white supremacist political goals.

Public interviews, mainstream outreach, and political campaigns represented only one arena of Klan strategy. Even as they presented a softened public front, the same activists built an underground of violent, overtly racist activity utterly at odds with many of their public statements.

Massive bait and switch.

the first Ku Klux Klan

The Klan’s second

The third Klan resurgence,

Paramilitarism

However, not only did some veterans participate in the third-era Klan, but a number of those, according to an undercover reporter observing one group, wore their military insignias and made up a higher percentage of paramilitary Klan units, such as the elite “storm troopers,” than the general membership. This, too, would recur in the white power movement. Wearing their military uniforms, such units carried out anti-black and anti-civil-rights violence.

The year Camp Puller opened, Beam also created a Special-Forces-style Klan Border Watch, with elite training, to intimidate undocumented immigrants.

Klansmen had used the facility to instruct a group of high-school-age Explorer Scouts on strangulation, decapitation using a machete, hijacking airplanes, and firing semiautomatic weapons.

WHAT?!?!?

To Stanfield, the actions of the refugees in securing their livelihoods constituted a sexual violation of American territory.