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

I saw the author on CSPAN’s Book TV last month and found her interesting enough to purchase her book. When the book arrived, I opened it at random and began browsing. Coincidentally, I opened to something that I’m familiar with – the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident. Unfortunately, the first paragraph I read was startling in its inaccuracy and I can’t recommend this book to anyone unless you have the time to fact check every page.I’d like to believe this is just sloppy research on the author’s part and not part of her agenda in pushing a false narrative, but…Here’s the text from the paperback version, the last paragraph on page 197. I’ve numbered each sentence.“(1) On August 21, 1992, the Weaver’s Labrador retriever sensed intruders – federal marshals conducting routine reconnaissance of the mountaintop. (2) The dog ran toward the strangers, followed by Randy Weaver, Kevin Harris, and Sammy Weaver. (3) The marshals shot the dog, and the separatists returned fire, Harris killing marshal William Degan. (4) Marshals returned fire, killing Sammy Weaver with a shot in the back. (5) Randy Weaver and Harris placed his body in the birthing shed and took cover in the cabin. (6) They kept the rest of the agents pinned down with gunfire until nightfall, when the agents had to be rescued.” (1) This wasn’t “routine reconnaissance.” There were two groups of three marshals that day, and one of their objectives was to locate and kill the dogs to avoid future detection. The dog didn’t just “sense” intruders – the marshals lured the dog out by throwing stones at the cabin. The surviving marshals testified to this during the trial.(2) This sentence implies that all three were together during the confrontation – that’s wrong. The three “separatists” separated with Kevin Harris and Sammy Weaver going one way and Randy Weaver going another. Randy Weaver encountered the marshals and fled back to the cabin yelling for the others to flee as well. Coming from another direction, Kevin and Sammy ran into the marshals (dressed in camouflaged gear and not identifying themselves as LEOs) and saw their dog shot and killed.(3) “Returned fire” is somewhat misleading. If I remember correctly, Sammy Weaver fired 1-2 shots; Kevin Harris claimed he fired only one shot as he fled after Sammy was killed. It also is unclear that Harris killed Degan – the possibility exists that he was killed by friendly fire – this was also testified to at the trial.(4) OK, this sentence is accurate enough, although Sammy Weaver had already been shot in the arm and was running away when he was killed.(5) This sentence implies that everything occurred contemporaneously. It didn’t. Randy Weaver returns to the cabin and is met there by Kevin Harris who tells him that his son is dead. Later that same day, Randy Weaver, Harris, and Vicki Weaver return to the shooting site (there’s no marshals there at that time) and remove Sammy’s body to the birthing shed – and then, yes, they return to the cabin.(6) This is the most egregious misstatement in this whole paragraph. The remaining two agents may have had to be “rescued”, but no other shots were fired at LEOs by anyone up on Ruby Ridge after that first exchange of gunfire. The marshals lied about being pinned down for hours and taking sniper fire. Their lies set the stage for the government response and the FBI shootings that happen the next day. That the remaining five marshals were not “pinned down” is also part of the trial testimony and backed by physical evidence collected at the scene – there is no doubt this sentence is completely false and the author should know that.

This book is sound, powerful and important scholarship. I say that as an editor for a major scientific publisher who reads many manuscripts for work but also for pleasure. A very well crafted story is offered by this author who spent years researching the sources and living in proximity to key ones. It narrates an important but mostly unconsidered cause of much of today’s headlines in these United States.The public at-large would not trace the connections between, say, the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in my home state of Georgia, and the disappointment that was the Viet Nam War. On a collective scale, I too would not have so clearly linked the life trajectories of some of my high school friends who served in Nam with their, to me, aberrant distrust of contemporary government.Moreover, there are social echoes of would-be military service even among the college educated in this white power ideology. A sitting judge in GA, imbued with his father’s and his own later military experiences, argued me down a few years ago to never trust the government. And, moreover, the 2nd Amendment was our only defense against a corrupt “gubment”...even though he was a member of one branch of that local government himself!His cherished pictures of his father and himself in uniform were reminiscent of the era in the South with sitting rooms decorated in dusty oil paintings of Colonel Beauregard, a daft uncle who served in The Lost Cause of Northern Aggression. I forget that there remain such rooms in the Deep South. But they exist outside those geographic boundaries as well.Kathleen Belew tells us of other such rooms but decorated in GI Joe battle fatigues, Nazi symbols, Rhodesian flags, a brand of perverted religion called Christian Identity, and laced with racial hatred ever as much as was that proffered by the faded Uncle Colonel Beauregard. How these social dynamics wind their way toward the main stream today in political power and culture is a core outcome of this important new book. To understand the present, we must understand the past half century since the Viet Nam War was ended by politics but not victory.Professor Belew’s interview on Fresh Air by Terry Gross led me to her book. The interview exuded the air of scholarship by someone who fully understood the depths of the movement, it’s roots, and how it has wound its tentacles of racial animus into the 2016 Presidential Election. The read of the book after downloading to my Kindle app proved more than worth the price of admission! Well written, which can be challenging for contemporary history, the book leads the reader through the psychological chains that a critical segment of Vietnam Nam vets returned home with. They’ve not yet removed them. Indeed, many have died, often killing innocent bystanders as the point of their Rambo-style terrorism, rather than take them off. Indeed, Rambo’s cultural namesake, Bo Gritz, plays a central role in Belew’s narrative. But there are so many others that await the reader.Having the upshot of this “we didn’t get to finish our war” tirade gob-smack my personal life, which further validates the author’s thesis, was when the sitting Judge insisted to me that the murdered children in Newtown CT was just the cost of doing business in protecting the 2nd Amendment. And, yes, the Judge believes that it was a government conspiracy by President Obama and the Liberals to come for our guns. (I guess President Obama just forget to execute that order.) The sociologist C. Wright Mills once said that when history intersects your personal biography is when social science really becomes alive. And, to use a contemporary phrase, you can’t make this stuff up!Belew’s work, Bringing no the War Home, certainly lived up to its title. It touched me through personal relations with high school classmates and other acquaintances who served in Nam, whereas I did not as a college deferment recipient. They all brought home varying gauges of these mental shackles that Belew so vividly describes in this work. If you were born in the latter years of the Baby Boom, I’ll bet it will touch many of the relationships that you’ve had with Viet Nam vets too.

This was an absolutely fascinating book, so interesting and easy to read. I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed reading an academic book more!

Wonderful book if you are interested in politics/sociology.

The point of this book is to connect the so-called lone wolf actions by white supremacists with a larger movement which Ms. Belew does quite convincingly. She theorizes that the movement began with returning Vietnam War Vets. Wins in that war were determined by body counts and the enemy treated as vermin and not people. Their actions were vilified by many of their fellow citizens and the oil crises and resultant stagflation left them somewhat alienated. So, they joined the Klan for whom they provided military training. Their combatants were not a foreign nation but the federal government.A blueprint for their revolution was/is provided by The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of the violent overthrow of the federal government and the systematic elimination of all non-white races. Ms. Belew describes how soldiers acquired weapons from soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg. How they would weaponize the so-called innocence of the white women and her need for protection as the breeder for the future white race. She uses Ruby Ridge and Waco as examples of the militarization of police forces. At Ruby Ridge, this resulted in the unnecessary death of Vickie Weaver and one of her sons and the fiery death of members of the Branch Davidian at Waco.Ms. Belew argues that these actions led to the Oklahoma City bombing thought to be the actions of one man, Timothy McVeigh. She says that Mr. McVeigh had been part of the White Power movement for some time going to meetings with the Michigan militia and visiting the siege at Ruby Ridge.Overall, an interesting book and one that provides an interesting light on the attack in the Whitehouse back in January of 2021.

Astounding read on the White Power movement within America intentionally loosely interconnected in order to avoid detection. Fall 2020 you are starting to see them on the streets of America well armed and dressed as paramilitary claiming to be providing security even though they are outside of law enforcement band are generally funded through bank and armoured car robberies.The movement is based on the Turner Diaries and involves many ex military who, having been trained for combat, seek combat within America to establish a White-only sector within America.