# Bring the War Home  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Kathleen Belew]] - Full Title:: Bring the War Home - Category: #books ## Highlights > about living people involved in the movement I describe. I use “white power” to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995. ([Location 57](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=57)) > Therefore, the encompassing term “white power,” which was also a slogan commonly used by those in the movement, is the most precise and historically accurate term. ([Location 64](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=64)) > “Revolutionary violence” here refers to violence directed at the overthrow of the state (or components of the state); I use the phrase to distinguish white power violence from earlier vigilante violence, which usually worked to reinforce state power. ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=72)) > 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. The militant rallying cry “white power,” which echoed in all corners of the movement, was its most accurate self-descriptor. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=94)) > Essays of a Klansman, movement leader Louis Beam ([Location 117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=117)) > With the 1983 turn to revolution, the movement adopted a new strategy, “leaderless resistance.” Following this strategy, independent cells and activists would act without direct contact with movement leadership. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=152)) > However, five million places the militia movement in line with the largest surge of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership peaked in 1924 at four million.16 ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=162)) > 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. ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=163)) > part in a coming end-times battle that would take the shape of race war.22 A war of this scale and urgency demanded that partisans ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=187)) > Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=204)) > 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. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=269)) > The Turner Diaries, which channeled and responded to the nascent white power narrative of the Vietnam War.45 The novel provided a blueprint for action, tracing the structure of leaderless resistance and modeling, in fiction, the guerrilla tactics of assassination and bombing that activists would embrace for the next two decades. Activists distributed and quoted from the book frequently. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=288)) > 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. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=423)) > Television broadcasts of wartime violence created what the writer Susan Sontag called a “new tele-intimacy with death and destruction.” ([Location 456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=456)) > The move to the all-volunteer force in 1973—the army abolished the draft in part because of mass opposition to the Vietnam War—was followed by several years of crisis for that institution as measured by public perception, levels of enlistment, and the percentage of recruits that met the army’s racial, class, and educational preferences.19 ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=464)) > 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. Black soldiers received the fewest promotions and the most courts-martial.41 Racial tension permeated military installations at home and in Vietnam. While white and black soldiers faced combat together, the rear echelon was intensely segregated: one black soldier described Saigon as “just like Mississippi.” ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=562)) > 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. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=587)) > During World War II, soldiers had trained and served with one group, communalizing the experience of combat with a long boat ride home; in contrast, most soldiers were deployed to Vietnam with disquieting speed and upon leaving their units, rapidly returned home. ([Location 599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=599)) > 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.62 Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong. In the lack of welcome home and shortage of jobs when they returned, they found grist for a yearning for a time of easier economic opportunity for white men, and grounds for condemning economic threats such as the farm foreclosure crisis, stagflation, and job loss. The impact of the Vietnam War was inextricably linked to all the threatening changes of the 1970s that had turned their world upside down. ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=637)) > Klansmen would shed their white robes to don camouflage fatigues, neo-Nazis would brandish military rifles, and white separatists would manufacture their own Claymore-style land mines in their determination to bring the war home. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=680)) > He quickly grew frustrated by “government subversion” of the Klan, however, and began looking for other opportunities. He tried the anticommunist John Birch Society, a local anti-integration Citizens Council, the anticommunist Minutemen, the American Nazi Party, and the National States Rights Party, but he bristled at the overemphasis on secrecy, “ridiculous” tactics, and extreme antisemitism that occluded what he saw as larger, common issues affecting all white people. Soon Beam set out to form his own group. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=715)) > Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=733)) > Beam’s proposal was further evidence of his view that the conflict on the Texas coast restaged the Vietnam War.83 As Fisher put it in an April 21 press conference, Viet Cong and communist spies had infiltrated the Vietnamese fishermen. Another white fisherman chimed in, “North Vietnamese communists are infiltrating the ranks of the Vietnamese relocated in the Kemah-Seabrook area whose sole purpose is to cause discontent, create fear and conflict among the Vietnamese and stir up incidents with the American fishermen.” ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=1023)) > An FBI background memo filed in May 1981 further noted that the U.S.-born fishermen “only selectively obeyed some of the laws and some of their own customs.” Anticommunism, racism, and invocation of the lost Vietnam War fueled the white community’s resentment of the refugees—not failure to follow fishing laws.90 ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=1047)) # Bring the War Home  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Kathleen Belew]] - Full Title:: Bring the War Home - Category: #books ## Highlights > about living people involved in the movement I describe. I use “white power” to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995. ([Location 57](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=57)) > Therefore, the encompassing term “white power,” which was also a slogan commonly used by those in the movement, is the most precise and historically accurate term. ([Location 64](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=64)) > “Revolutionary violence” here refers to violence directed at the overthrow of the state (or components of the state); I use the phrase to distinguish white power violence from earlier vigilante violence, which usually worked to reinforce state power. ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=72)) > 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. The militant rallying cry “white power,” which echoed in all corners of the movement, was its most accurate self-descriptor. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=94)) > Essays of a Klansman, movement leader Louis Beam ([Location 117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=117)) > With the 1983 turn to revolution, the movement adopted a new strategy, “leaderless resistance.” Following this strategy, independent cells and activists would act without direct contact with movement leadership. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=152)) > However, five million places the militia movement in line with the largest surge of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership peaked in 1924 at four million.16 ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=162)) > 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. ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=163)) > part in a coming end-times battle that would take the shape of race war.22 A war of this scale and urgency demanded that partisans ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=187)) > Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=204)) > 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. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=269)) > The Turner Diaries, which channeled and responded to the nascent white power narrative of the Vietnam War.45 The novel provided a blueprint for action, tracing the structure of leaderless resistance and modeling, in fiction, the guerrilla tactics of assassination and bombing that activists would embrace for the next two decades. Activists distributed and quoted from the book frequently. ([Location 288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=288)) > 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. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=423)) > Television broadcasts of wartime violence created what the writer Susan Sontag called a “new tele-intimacy with death and destruction.” ([Location 456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=456)) > The move to the all-volunteer force in 1973—the army abolished the draft in part because of mass opposition to the Vietnam War—was followed by several years of crisis for that institution as measured by public perception, levels of enlistment, and the percentage of recruits that met the army’s racial, class, and educational preferences.19 ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=464)) > 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. Black soldiers received the fewest promotions and the most courts-martial.41 Racial tension permeated military installations at home and in Vietnam. While white and black soldiers faced combat together, the rear echelon was intensely segregated: one black soldier described Saigon as “just like Mississippi.” ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=562)) > 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. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=587)) > During World War II, soldiers had trained and served with one group, communalizing the experience of combat with a long boat ride home; in contrast, most soldiers were deployed to Vietnam with disquieting speed and upon leaving their units, rapidly returned home. ([Location 599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=599)) > 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.62 Embattled white power activists saw the Vietnam War as emblematic of all that had gone wrong. In the lack of welcome home and shortage of jobs when they returned, they found grist for a yearning for a time of easier economic opportunity for white men, and grounds for condemning economic threats such as the farm foreclosure crisis, stagflation, and job loss. The impact of the Vietnam War was inextricably linked to all the threatening changes of the 1970s that had turned their world upside down. ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=637)) > Klansmen would shed their white robes to don camouflage fatigues, neo-Nazis would brandish military rifles, and white separatists would manufacture their own Claymore-style land mines in their determination to bring the war home. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=680)) > He quickly grew frustrated by “government subversion” of the Klan, however, and began looking for other opportunities. He tried the anticommunist John Birch Society, a local anti-integration Citizens Council, the anticommunist Minutemen, the American Nazi Party, and the National States Rights Party, but he bristled at the overemphasis on secrecy, “ridiculous” tactics, and extreme antisemitism that occluded what he saw as larger, common issues affecting all white people. Soon Beam set out to form his own group. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=715)) > Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=733)) > Beam’s proposal was further evidence of his view that the conflict on the Texas coast restaged the Vietnam War.83 As Fisher put it in an April 21 press conference, Viet Cong and communist spies had infiltrated the Vietnamese fishermen. Another white fisherman chimed in, “North Vietnamese communists are infiltrating the ranks of the Vietnamese relocated in the Kemah-Seabrook area whose sole purpose is to cause discontent, create fear and conflict among the Vietnamese and stir up incidents with the American fishermen.” ([Location 1023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=1023)) > An FBI background memo filed in May 1981 further noted that the U.S.-born fishermen “only selectively obeyed some of the laws and some of their own customs.” Anticommunism, racism, and invocation of the lost Vietnam War fueled the white community’s resentment of the refugees—not failure to follow fishing laws.90 ([Location 1047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07B88JC5K&location=1047))