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

     I picked up this book because I wanted to know more about the origins of the paramilitaries and white supremacist groups that exist today, and I was curious to learn more about Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. But that's not really what this book was about. It was very good, and touched on those subjects at the end, but it was really about the 1970s and 80s and the impact of the Vietnam War on the white power and militia movements. I'm feeling lazy, so this is a much-reduced blog.

    One of the more appalling themes in the book was the presence of serious white nationalist behavior in the military, especially in the Army and Marine Corps. Belew writes that, "by 1970, the Marine Corps recorded more than a thousand incidents of racial violence at installation both in Vietnam and back home." In 1964, four Klan members murdered a black Army lieutenant colonel near Fort Benning. At Camp Pendleton, active-duty Marines organized on-base Klan activity and had over 200 members in the Camp Pendleton chapter of the Klan. These racist Marines had even kidnapped, shot, firebombed, tortured, beat, and harassed black Marines. Six Klanmembers in the Marine Corps even received special clearances from superiors based on their membership, and two hundred racial incidents were reported at Camp Pendleton between 1973 and 1976. In 1981, there was a protest attended by hundreds of Marines in Jacksonville, North Carolina, against the new prohibition on open racism.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Belew cites Jerry Lembcke and writes that there is no real evidence that any veteran of the Vietnam War was ever spat on. It's a small line in the book but I thought that was interesting and Lembcke wrote a whole book discrediting the spitting in The Spitting Image.
• The Aryan Nations World Congress "declared war" on the US government in July 1983 after having been a more pro-government movement historically. This may reflect a lag in developing anti-government sentiment after the shift in the 1960s to promote civil rights for minorities.
• There were some interesting characters I'd never heard of before like Glen Miller and Louis Beam, among others. It seems like there were a lot of people popping up on the neo-Nazi world who disappeared again, as I think that they would need to do lots of dangerous and illegal things to gain notoriety, which would then naturally end their careers.