Name: Lindy's review of Bring the war home by Kathleen Belew
Item: Bring the war home
Rating: 3
Author: Lindy

Kathleen Belew

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 Oklahoma City. Returning to an America ripped apart by a war which, 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 bearing 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.--

the white power movement and paramilitary America

Bring the war home

Cindy Lieberman

Lindy

The book's purported thesis is that the Vietnam war and associated rhetoric is essential to the white power movement. There is a second thesis, not explicitly stated, that the white power movement's structure of 'leaderless resistance' obfuscated and minimized to outsiders the movement's level of organization and connection. The book is well researched and cited, but the way in which it's written makes it difficult to track individual figures or understand which events were happening concurrently.

Cindy Lieberman &
Bring the war home by Kathleen Belew

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Cindy Lieberman &Bring the war home by Kathleen Belew

Reviews

Join the club

Cindy Lieberman &
Bring the war home by Kathleen Belew