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    Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
    Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
    Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Written by Kathleen Belew

    Narrated by Jo Anna Perrin

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out—with military precision—an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.



    Returning to an America ripped apart by a war that, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty 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. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and giving birth to future recruits.



    Belew's disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 29, 2018
    ISBN9781977383785
    Author

    Kathleen Belew

    Kathleen Belew is a historian of the present and leading expert on the white power movement, vigilante violence, and political extremism. Her first book, Bring the War Home, has been discussed on Fresh Air, Newshour, Frontline, and in the New York Times.   Ramón A. Gutiérrez has written extensively on the history of race, gender, and sexuality in Latin American and among Latina/os in the US, offering courses on these topics at the University of Chicago.

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    Reviews for Bring the War Home

    4.5/5

    78 ratings9 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be very informative and scholarly. The author maintains a dispassionate, objective tone throughout. It is a crucial read to understand the dangers of our judicial system giving organized white supremacists free rein for decades. Although it deals with radicalization post-Vietnam, it felt timely to read after the US pullout of Afghanistan and the internal fallout that may take place again. The recording drops off suddenly at several places, which is why it received a 3/5 stars rating.

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    • 3/5
      The content was excellent, but the recording drops off suddenly at several places, like the end of chapter 10. I'm not sure I was actually able to listen to the whole thing, which is why I only gave it 3/5 stars.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Chilling to discover that WE in the US live in a well developed dystopian - like world with the rights of many being redefined by the few. A MUST READ.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Is there a problem with the ordner of the chapters? The last chapter suddenly came in as number 10.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This dissertation is very informative and scholarly. The author maintains a dispassionate, objective tone throughout. My only criticism is that when mentioning the John Birch society she did not make clear that it is not a white power group. It is law-abiding and non-racist, and does not deserve to be lumped in with criminal, racist, disloyal individuals and groups.
    • 5/5
      Crucial read to understand the dangers of our judicial system giving organized white supremacists free rein for decades. Although it deals with radicalization post-Vietnam, It felt timely to read after the US pullout of Afghanistan and the internal fallout that may take place again.
    • 4/5
      A readable, detailed chronology of the rise of the White supremacy movement in post-Vietnam war America. Thus is a detailed account, but quite engaging.
    • 5/5
      With the mid-term political elections on the forefront and the horrific memory of the January 6 insurrection at the Nation’s capital the detailed account of the White Power is particularly helpful. The author spent ten years compiling her extensive documentation. Like deadly a deadly fungus in the forest America was suddenly confronted by an organized and armed citizenry under the cloak of “Save America”. The presence of the Alt-right was not unknown but operated under the radar of inappropriate surveillance. Its rhetoric struck a chord with disgruntled veterans and others. Many were well trained in the military or recruited from prisons across the United States. Time and again its leaders escaped juridical penalty. It is clear from the author’s extensive journalistic presentation that the danger still exists. It is not easy reading but crucial to be informed in this age of the “Big Lie”.
    • 4/5
      Important, deeply researched for the timeframe she chooses to cover. Not a boffo dramatic read, but the people and the story are eye-opening, appalling, and very frightening. The scariest part is just how long these folks have been at this, the technology they have amassed, and the fact that the current iteration - as only the last of many over decades - is emerging as a public force, no longer just hunkered down in the woods of Idaho playing with their guns (and armored vehicles, and grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive, and in one case, enough cyanide to kill more people than have died of Covid in the US), but now marching down our streets with Congresscreatures in their pockets. I found the description of how these groups set up a communication system via "Liberty Net" before the internet was even a thing fascinating - they were decades ahead of Facebook, Parler and Gab. She plays fair by also tracing the intense militarization of the police and how it contributed to the atrocity of Ruby Ridge and the Waco debacle. For those of us waking up to the terrors and new prominence of the white power movement (her chosen term to encompass the Klan, Aryan Nations and other white supremacists, which eventually folded in the modern militias), this is a useful and cautionary work of history and background with an urgent currency.
    • 4/5
      Terrifying book, well researched but sometimes repetitive and badly written, about white power activism and organizing from post-Vietnam until now. The “leaderless” strategy that spurred acts like the Oklahoma City bombing has paid off in significant part by convincing journalists and most law enforcement officers that people like Dylann Roof and Timothy McVeigh were “lone wolves” rather than embedded in a larger network that trained and encouraged them. Belew’s thesis that the Vietnam War fundamentally reshaped the white power movement would have been strengthened by more contrast with the pre-Vietnam configurations, and it’s not clear that “Vietnam” structures the current movement’s understanding of its relationship with America and America’s government as it did twenty years ago. Her argument that post-Vietnam white power movements understood themselves as fundamentally in opposition to the federal government, as opposed to enforcing a racial hierarchy with which the government agreed, also needs some revisiting post-Trump. (I also wonder how much this is really a change—the KKK members and other racists who terrorized people in the first half of the twentieth century, in North and South, probably also thought that their local governments were really on their side, and they were almost certainly right. Hmm, this makes me think about Arendt’s argument about anti-Semitism’s inherent link to opposition to the modern state, and whether it could be extended to African-Americans’ relationship to the federal versus local governments.)