[From the publisher] “Belew’s book
helps explain how we got to today’s alt right.”―Terry Gross,
Fresh Air
The white power
movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone
wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply
troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent
anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen
Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the
1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War
and made tragic headlines in Waco and Ruby Ridge and with the
Oklahoma City bombing and is resurgent under President Trump.
Returning to an
America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win,
a small group of veterans and active-duty military personnel and
civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country
was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups,
including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and
white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated
independent cells to avoid detection. The white power movement
operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations,
armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command
structure gave women a prominent place and put them in charge of
brokering alliances and birthing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing
and timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time
and space: grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course
of action. Based on years of deep immersion in previously classified
FBI files and on extensive interviews, Bring the War Home tells the
story of American paramilitarism and the birth of the alt-right.
