BRING THE WAR HOME
The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
By Kathleen Belew… Kathleen Belew’s gripping study of white power, “Bring the War Home,” was written before the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with activities from the 1970s and ’80s. But it is impossible to read the book without recalling more recent events. Her activists — for indeed, these were activists building a grass-roots movement — consolidated power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the book’s explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing emerged as a radical reaction to the war. …
In Belew’s telling, a radical disillusionment with a governing elite that oversaw a losing war led some veterans (and others who did not serve but who were shaped by the war) into a militant rejection of the government, refracted through the lens of racism. Used, betrayed, discarded, these veterans would eventually take up arms against their own country, bringing the war home in defense of white America. CONT.
Nicole Hemmer (U. of Virginia), New York Times