Though the book by Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,Harvard U Press: 2018, focuses mostly on the time period from the late 1970s to the 1990s, and ends with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, its relevance to today is quite clear both from her last chapter and her Epilogue. So let’s take that last chapter first. It recounts the horrifying events of April 19, 1995 when a Ryder rental truck “filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City” (211). The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in the day care center, and wounded more than 500. Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, was quickly found, tried and convicted, and sentenced to death. McVeigh took pains to claim that he did it on his own, though a few others were found who had helped him. But the press took him at his word, characterizing McVeigh as a “lone madman,” who therefore could be dismissed, along with his action, as outside any organized plot or movement. He fit the profile of those, like Lee Harvey Oswald, whose fevered, wounded brain led him, on his own, to a crazy, violent act.
Here is where Kathleen Belew’s whole book and thesis comes into play. She immediately counters the accepted version as follows:
However, in no sense was the bombing of Oklahoma City carried out by one man. The hell McVeigh described represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing. McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing. The plan for the bomb came directly from The Turner Diaries, the book that had structured the activity of the white power movement since the late 1970s (210).
Belew goes on to point out that, in fact, the Murrah Building had previously been cased by members of CSA (the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord), who then attempted and failed to blow it up with rocket launchers in 1983. But wouldn’t the FBI have known this? In fact, they did, but given the horrible publicity they had garnered for the killing of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge (more on this later), and the deaths of 76 people at Waco, TX in the fire that concluded the long siege against Branch Davidians there, government agents were “reluctant to portray the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of a movement,” so the FBI decided not to pursue movements of white power violence, but only “individual actors” (211). The result, as seen in Belew’s Epilogue: the white power movement was allowed to grow explosively and fester while the federal government kept its distance and focused almost exclusively on “crazy” individuals—leading, almost inexorably, to the movement’s encouragement by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and its prodigious growth under his leadership. Indeed, to read the entire book by Belew is to begin to better understand how a fraud like Donald Trump could be elected and supported by his “base,” many of whom no doubt support white power’s aims.
But to get back to some of the stunning particulars amassed by Belew—let us go back to the Vietnam War and its aftermath, for in Belew’s telling, the alleged failure of the U.S. in that war, coupled with racist remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, led directly to the white power movement—most of whose members were, in one way or another, veterans of that war. One such character was Louis Beam. A Viet war veteran and member of the Klan, Beam was a gifted speaker and writer (Essays of a Klansman), who saw the Vietnam War as “emblematic of all that had gone wrong” with the country: shortage of jobs, no welcome for vets when they came home, stagflation, and a host of other ills that marginalized them. Beam openly called for violence to cure these ills. In 1982, he wrote: “You’re damn right I’m mad. I’ve had enough! I want these same traitors to face their enemy now, the American fighting man they betrayed, all three million of us” (31). He mentioned the tools available to such vets to fight their war in the homeland: “ an M-16, three sticks of dynamite taped together, a can of gas,” adding “Over here, if you kill the enemy you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference” (35). Beam began by forming his own Texas chapter of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), training recruits in paramilitary violence. One of their first targets were Vietnamese refugees who had settled in Galveston Bay as shrimp fishermen, often outcompeting locals. Along with neo-Nazis, Beam’s group began to intimidate the Vietnamese outsiders, firebombing homes, beating shrimpers, and firing guns at boats in the Bay. White power publications characterized the refugee influx as a “flood” and tried to characterize the alleged invasion of Galveston Bay as a kind of rape: “Galveston Bay is just like a fine woman…If you rape her, she’s never good anymore” (44). White activists also alleged that Vietcong spies had infiltrated the fishermen, thus justifying them to fight against ‘communist infiltration into the U.S.’ Eventually, a lawsuit in Texas led to an injunction against such Klan militarism, and the forced disbanding at Beam’s Camp Puller and elsewhere in Texas. But Beam was by no means finished: claiming that he was going to Idaho on vacation, he linked up with Aryan Nations members there, and focused much of his efforts with several white power groups, setting up his “cell-style” strategy of “leaderless resistance.” He became a leading member of The Order, seeking to make the Pacific Northwest their center of white power, and eventually a separate nation.
Meantime, neo-Nazis and Klansmen elsewhere were proving that, to some extent, they could be immune to the law because much of America supported their racist aims. An action in Greensboro, North Carolina illustrates this dramatically. A group called the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in November 1979 decided to stage a “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project. Having heard about this, neo-Nazis and Klansmen formed a caravan and headed to Greensboro to confront the rally. These confrontations had been increasing in the years leading up to Greensboro, with both sides making clear their intention to fight, with arms if necessary. In Greensboro, the Klan’s car caravan arrived loaded with armed men, and after some initial screaming and racial slurs, Mark Sherer, hanging out the window of a pickup truck, fired the first pistol shot into the air. More shots were fired, fighting broke out at an intersection, and then shotguns, rifles, and semiautomatic weapons were distributed to the fourteen Klansmen, one of whom, Jerry Paul Smith, dropped to one knee and fired into a now panicked crowd. Others followed suit, one bragging “I got three of ‘em,” another with a 12-gauge shotgun claiming “I hit four of the five that were killed and wounded six more” (63). Within minutes the Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove off, and well after that, the police arrived to find five protestors dead, and many more wounded. The local DA pressed charges against fourteen of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who had been arrested. In the trial, begun on Aug. 4, 1980, the defense alleged that the attackers were “fighting communism,” and only fired in “self-defense.” And with peremptory challenges allowed in North Carolina, all black jurors were dismissed, so the jurors were white and Christian and sympathetic to any fight against commies and/or blacks.
Perhaps predictably, on Nov. 17, 1980, the Greensboro jury unanimously delivered a not-guilty verdict. As Belew summarizes it, “a court had effectively condoned the intentional killing of communists” (71). And because of the Iran hostage crisis, news coverage was spotty enough that few, including this writer, ever heard of the Greensboro Fourteen (as they were christened by the white power movement, which took the acquittal as a green light for more violence) until reading about it here. Two more Greensboro trials followed, one in 1984 under civil rights laws in federal court, the other by widows of those slain seeking monetary damages. In the first, though FBI informants proved that “self-defense” was nonsense due to foreknowledge of the caravan’s intent, the defendants were again exonerated, this time of the charge that their action was racially motivated. The court ruled their action not racial but political, and they were freed. In the second case, several gunmen were found jointly liable for one of the five deaths, but the City of Greensboro paid the settlement, covering costs for both Klansmen and neo-Nazis.
Up until this point, Belew makes clear that the rationale for white power activists was defending their country against outsiders, radicals, communists. Many even joined mercenary armies and fought against alleged ‘commies’ in Rhodesia, Central America, and the Caribbean, partly to redeem the American defeat in Vietnam. But in 1983, all that changed. In what Belew calls a “tectonic shift” for the movement, the white power movement declared war on the state. They would now fight for a “white homeland,” trying to destabilize the federal government which seemed to protect outsiders, and waging revolutionary race war (104). Three major figures led this new anti-government movement: the aforementioned Louis Beam, Richard Butler and Robert Miles (both of whom claimed to have fought in WWII). All three were talented speakers and writers and in their publications outlined the white power movement’s new strategy of “cell-based organization” with no leaders. This, first, made it more difficult for provocateurs to infiltrate, and second, would protect leaders like Beam, Butler, and Miles who could no longer be charged with giving orders for actions. Henceforth, as Beam wrote, “all members of phantom cells or individuals will need to react to objective events…No one need issue an order to anyone” (108). Why? Because all individuals would hold common ideas and values, most of them laid out in the aforementioned Turner Diaries. First published serially, this novel literally worked as a “how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war”. It actually presents
“the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations…At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California (the all-white home after the revolution), the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships (110).
In real life, Beam and his associates hoped that a campaign of violence could “sway a white public in their favor,” allow them to implement movement objectives from a “white homeland in the Pacific Northwest…to a white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color” (113). Shortly thereafter, in November 1984, another major step was taken when The Order was founded at Hayden Lake, Idaho by Robert J. Mathews. Steeped in paramilitary training, and funded by robberies and counterfeiting, the Order’s ultimate goal was the familiar one: create a white separatist nation in the Northwest, and later the entire north American continent excepting Mexico. Order members “pledged themselves to race war until victory or death” (116). At about the same time, the Order’s Declaration of War against the government named “congressional betrayal of soldiers in the Vietnam War as a key justification of their violent campaign” (117). Needless to say, one of their major efforts involved amassing arsenals of all kinds of weapons. Another was amassing money with which to buy weapons (those they didn’t steal), land, and publicity. Their main effort was armed robbery. The first caper was a porn shop that netted them only $369, but they soon aimed at banks, one in Seattle netting them $25,000, and then the big hit, also in Seattle, of an armored car from which they stole more than $500,000. Assassination was also on their agenda, the most famous of which was the killing of Alan Berg, a Denver talk-show host for KOA-AM radio. Berg was a Jewish liberal who spoke out against white power. On June 18, 1984, an order member named Bruce Pierce fired a machine gun at Berg standing in his driveway, cutting him to pieces (123).
The FBI tracked several members of the hit squad. First they raided the house of Gary Yarbrough in Sandpoint, Idaho, finding the MAC-10 machine gun that had killed Berg, plus assorted weapons, 100 sticks of dynamite, and a shrine to Adolf Hitler. They then tracked him and Mathews to Portland, and took Yarbrough, though Mathews escaped to a safe house on Whidbey Island in Washington. Agents finally found him there, he chose to fight, and died when the house caught fire after illumination flares from a helicopter ignited the house, with him in it. Yarbrough was tried and convicted in 1985, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The following year, he and other members of the Order were convicted of racketeering charges due to armored truck robberies, and Yarbrough got another 60 years added to his sentence. He died in a hospice center in Pueblo, CO in 2018.
Finally, another trial, this one in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1987, fits the paradigm outlined earlier. After failing to produce a case that could net the leaders of the white power movement, the government finally initiated Operation Clean Sweep that culminated in the April 21, 1987 Fort Smith trial alleging that “the white power movement had attempted to overthrow the government through outright revolution” (171). This was the only real try at prosecuting white power as a movement. Fourteen men were indicted on charges that ranged from conspiracy to manufacture of illegal weapons to conspiracy to murder federal officers. Among them were Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, plus Richard Snell (who blew up a natural gas pipeline and killed a state trooper), and Order members Pierce, Lane, Barnhill, Lane and Scutari. Two apprehended members of CSA testified forthe government under plea bargains. In the face of the indictments, Louis Beam decided to flee the country, though, before fleeing, he married a 19-year-old, Sheila Toohey, his fourth wife. Together, they took up residence in Chapala, Mexico, until agents apprehended Beam, while his wife looked on from their house. Claiming that she thought her husband was being robbed, she used her husband’s rifle to shoot a Mexican officer three times. While her husband was extradited to the U.S., Sheila Beam was tried, but a Mexican judge found her not guilty by reason of self-defense, and deported her to the U.S. Her story, as a frail white woman needing a white male to defend her, but willing to kill for him and their child, greatly affected the trial’s outcome. In the trial, Beam defended his actions and ideas as a vet having come home from war believing it was his duty to kill enemies. He also made it clear that he would continue his fight, including killing “if so directed.” Then, after three days of deliberation, the jury delivered “not guilty” verdicts for all fourteen defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government. All the men were not only free, but the judge ordered “the firearms in question returned to the person who turned them over to the government” (183).
The entire white power movement celebrated yet another court victory. The FBI agent in charge, Jack Knox, by contrast, resigned from the FBI in frustration. This, and the negative publicity about the FBI’s handling of both the deaths at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the Waco, Texas assault, led directly to Timothy McVeigh and his deadly bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
The conclusions of Kathleen Belew’s riveting book are clear. First, the fallout from the Vietnam War has proven to be far more lethal than even those who protested it thought. That is, to the carnage in Vietnam itself must now be added the roots of a lethal movement of returning vets bringing the war home that still operates in the white power movement. Second, though evidence has piled up for decades that this movement is highly organized and deadly serious, the courts and American juries seem generally unable to take it seriously and instead have consistently demonstrated sympathy for white defendants and their rationalizations for murder and plans for mass murder. Third, due to the parallel militarization of government forces in combating white power, the public’s sympathy, especially after the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco, has remained with the perpetrators rather than with law enforcement. And finally, the successful characterization of violent perpetrators like Timothy McVeigh as “nut cases acting alone” has meant that no organized government response has been able to put a halt to what can only be seen as organized white terrorism. In short, there is no doubt about the aims of this movement: the writings and testimony and actions of its leaders are crystal clear. What is in doubt is how long it will take the U.S. government to take organized and serious action against it. This is especially so since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and his comments about the organized mayhem and murder that took place in Charlottesville in August of 2017. Any look at the hyper-drive that organizing and a huge internet presence for white supremacy received from such comments should persuade anyone of that. What is needed is for Americans to become more aware of the threats that still remain—and a reading of Bring the War Homeis almost a must here—and make it clear to their elected representatives that racism, Nazism, and white supremacy may once have been acceptable in some regions of this country, but can have no place at all in a genuine democracy. Period.
Lawrence DiStasi
