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

by Kathleen Belew

Sensational reports on Vietnamese refugees in white power publications highlighted radical cultural difference to foment violent responses. Such stories consistently described the refugees as a “flood” that threatened to wipe out white jobs, and claimed refugees were eating neighborhood pets. In one 1980 National Association for the Advancement of White People News—the mouthpiece of the new eponymous organization led by David Duke—an article accused the refugees of destroying a San Francisco park by eating its plants and animals, claiming that the refugees ate rats caught in peanut-baited traps.

This stuff never goes away. It's Trump's rhetoric, too. But why? I never figured him as a white power guy, despite his racism and awfulness. How does he manage to reproduce their rhetoric so well? Is it just the way all white supremacists end up talking? Do they teach each other? Was it Bannon or Miller or some of the other racists Trump had/has advising him?

The most damaging rumors, however, alleged that the refugees were welfare cheats and wards of the state. Anger at these supposed freeloaders provided a bridge between Klan and neo-Nazi publications and a strongly anti-statist current of anti-welfare discourse in the mainstream New Right.

At first, some local authorities, including Seabrook police chief Bill Kerber, seemed to blame the Vietnamese fishermen, attributing the fires to insurance fraud.

Of course. Police acting pro-Klan is as old as the Klan.

However, these media portrayals fundamentally misconstrued the situation, in which the violence went in only one direction, from white fishermen and Klansmen to the Vietnamese refugees.

Another prop for the Klan and the white power extremists: a news media afraid to say one side is wrong.

and with a lynched Vietnamese refugee hung in effigy on the rigging.

The boat patrol signaled a move from paramilitary preparation to action by an emboldened white power movement prepared to publicly threaten violence. Months before, a caravan of Klan and neo-Nazi gunmen had opened fire on communist demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina—an event that signaled the unification of Klansmen with other white power activists. Now the Greensboro gunmen were rising to celebrity status within the solidifying movement, with one participant joining the armed boat patrol in Texas.

Neighbors knew the camp was open by the bullets flying past their doors. A community of black families lived on one side of the camp, and the white trainees aimed their guns in that direction during target practice, although white neighbors on the opposite side of the camp also reported errant bullets. The local sheriff said that none of the trainees came from the area, and that they were “mostly ex-Marines and all ex-military.” The sheriff said his hands were tied. “No one has filed a complaint,” he said, “they won’t file complaints because they fear reprisal, or potential reprisal.”

Anticommunism, racism, and invocation of the lost Vietnam War fueled the white community’s resentment of the refugees—not failure to follow fishing laws.

“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.”103 However, the white power movement had already garnered too much momentum to be slowed by one court decision. Camps were still up and running in Florida, North Carolina, Idaho, Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, West Virginia, and other states.

Idaho

ON NOVEMBER 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired upon a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five protestors died—four white men and one black woman—and many more were injured. Fourteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis faced murder, conspiracy, and felony riot charges. Although three news cameras captured the identity and actions of the Klan and neo-Nazi shooters, all-white juries acquitted the defendants in state and federal criminal trials. A civil suit returned only partial justice. The Greensboro confrontation heralded a paramilitary white power movement mobilized for violence, and also revealed a legal system broadly unprepared to convict its perpetrators.

both sides

The Greensboro community, including local media, saw the Klansmen as local boys defending the status quo and the communists as anarchist outsiders who came to town to make trouble.

The communists, with their openly revolutionary agenda, were understood as traitorous, radical, and dangerous in a way that Klansmen were not.

The irony

rising tension between the left and the nascent white power movement.

This intense armament foreshadowed another burgeoning paramilitary culture in the escalating militarization of civilian policing.

regularly prepared for violent confrontation at public events.

Eerie how similar this is to today's Nazis and Antifa.

Klansmen and neo-Nazis united against communism at the same moment that elements of the left fractured and collapsed under the pressure of internal divisions and government infiltration.

In contrast, white power activists bound by paramilitarism also developed a cohesive social movement managed through intimate social ties. Intermarriages connected key white power groups, and Christian Identity and Dualist pastors provided marriage counseling. White power activists, who often traveled with their families, stayed at each other’s homes and cared for each other’s children. They participated in weddings and other social rituals and depended on others in the movement for help and for money when arrested. They founded schools to teach their ideas.

Shifting from the openly segregationist language of the civil rights era to a discourse in which anticommunism was used as an alibi for racism, Klansmen spoke publicly of race as a secondary concern.

This strategy drew on a long history of Klan rhetoric that intertwined racial equality, communism, labor organization, immigration, anti-imperialism, and internationalism as threats to the “100 percent American” nationalism early Klans sought to defend.

Significantly, although the Vietnam War had also impacted the left, the militarization of the left never matched that of the paramilitary right, in part because of the right’s cultural embrace of weapons and in part because of the matériel and active-duty personnel that the white power movement continued to draw from the U.S. Armed Forces.

While some on the left advocated radical activism in the name of anti-colonial self-determination, however, many wavered on the use of violence.

And, due to a series of command decisions and miscommunications, local police had not provided on-site protection, but instead stationed their cars and personnel several blocks away.

Doesn't sound accidental to me

within the white power movement, Greensboro served to energize activists.

Griffin saw the Vietnam War not only as a war between nations but also as a universal, man-to-man conflict between communists and anticommunists. He had tried three times to enlist, he said, but doctors declared him unfit for duty because of his asthma. Griffin’s Vietnam War, real to him, was in the realm of a popular narrative. Within that story, he equated all antiwar protestors with the CWP and all veterans with the Klan.

He implied that the CWP had staged the November 3 altercation with the intention of getting one of its members killed in order to bring attention to its cause.

Seems to be a page in the white racist propaganda binder.

The basic point, that a court had effectively condoned the intentional killing of communists, rang true.

Indeed, the white power movement took the acquittal as a green light for future action.

The City of Greensboro paid the full amount of the settlement, covering the costs for Klansmen and neo-Nazis.83 Once again, the white power movement took the settlement payment as endorsement of violent action.

The Greensboro shooting had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement.

Under President Ronald Reagan, the state’s semi-official interventions would swell into a bustling, multilayered network of mercenary soldiers, CIA operatives disguised as rogue mercenaries, and civilian veterans doing the work of state military advisors, all participating in a frenzied effort to circumvent public opinion and congressional checks, to contain or roll back communism, and to redeem the loss in Vietnam.

Posey’s engagements are one example of the complex interconnections between U.S.-sanctioned covert intervention in Central America, white power activism, and the actions of independent mercenary soldiers.

For Posey, as for the Greensboro shooters and others in the white power movement, killing communists provided an opportunity for like-minded combatants to join forces. Mercenary soldiers—civilians who fought for money and for free in the anticommunist skirmishes of the Cold War—honed an antidemocratic praxis some would later use to structure acts of violence on U.S. soil.

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.

White power activists focused keenly on Central America, traveling there with frequency.

Although the number of veterans who became mercenary soldiers represents a very small percentage of the men who served in the Vietnam War, their activities made a profound impact—both in politics and in violence—in countries throughout the Third World. Veterans who used their combat training in Vietnam to act as mercenary soldiers elsewhere brought the war’s violence to new battlefields and new enemies. 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. Some traveled back to Southeast Asia, where they supported anticommunist actors and regimes, and to Angola and the Congo, where they augmented U.S. support of guerrilla factions that opposed the Soviet Union.

An estimated 15,000 mercenaries accounted for as much as 60 percent of Rhodesia’s white army, and included soldiers from around the world.

Similarly, Posey’s stance reflected not only the thoughts of mercenaries on the fringe but an interventionist current in mainstream conservatism that gave rise to increasing paramilitarism within the Reagan administration itself. In the 1980s, Central America became the testing ground for an escalation in anticommunist foreign policy pursued through a series of brutal covert interventions.

A fundamental contradiction of the Cold War was that the United States frequently allied with antidemocratic governments to carry out a foreign policy that purported to protect freedom and democracy.

Reagan adopted a more aggressive rollback policy that sought to unseat communist and leftist governments where they already held power. In practice, this meant opposing anticolonial revolutions and struggles for self-determination that swelled through the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s. Increasingly, America’s attempt to protect democracy at home by preventing communism from approaching its borders resulted in the violent suppression of democratic and popular political change abroad.

This contradiction employed a definition of democracy that broke a long bond between the notions of liberty and social responsibility. Instead, liberty was linked with free enterprise.

the School of the Americas,

Black frequently spoke of the similarity in rhetoric and objectives that he thought connected the Klan with the Reagan administration, always claiming that he had acted patriotically even when he broke the law.

In other words, white power mercenaries positioned themselves within a state ideology of covert action that itself constituted a form of paramilitarism.

Reagan would later describe the Grenada invasion as the beginning of the end of American “self-doubt and national confusion” in the wake of the Vietnam War.

Norris’s acquittal revealed a legal system unprepared to understand or curb the white power movement’s paramilitary violence.

The presence of mercenaries in Central America often correlated with violence against civilians.

“Remember, when it comes to police brutality, that’s the fun part of police work!” Kokalis joked.

The Reagan era fostered a rise in special-operations-style units in all branches of the military as well as civilian police forces, and CMA actions showed the easy slide from Special-Forces-style units to paramilitary CIA missions to rogue mercenary involvement in the Third World.