The Vietnam War left nobody happy, least of all those who actually risked their lives fighting a protracted war with shifting goals and no front line. Hundreds of thousands of young American men internalized messages of anti-communism, moralized violence, and implicit (and sometimes explicit) racism. Then the war ended without victory, and those men returned to an America as unprepared for them as they were for it.University of Chicago history professor Kathleen Belew’s first book seeks to contextualize America’s White Power movement in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century. From the beginning, that context is Vietnam. The military’s hard-right rhetoric, and the constant paramilitary fight, trained young men, and some women, to live in constant fear of incursion and instability. Former soldiers mustered out, and too many transitioned into something new: White Power.
America’s cultural milieu in the 1970s provided constant fodder for White Power activists. The political left continued shattering, and Communist, socialist, and reformist factions squabbled internally, while right-wing groups which formerly hated one another, particularly the Klan and neo-Nazis, began finding common ground. Vietnamese refugee resettlement gave White Power a ready-made enemy. The criminal justice system wasn’t prepared for war on the home front.
Belew repeatedly makes reference to what she calls “the Vietnam War narrative.” This concept holds that history isn’t simply what happened; history is the narrative we use to organize past events into comprehensible nuggets. Some veterans, like the Brown Berets, returned home and organized for left-wing causes, Belew writes. They used Vietnam’s narrative to advocate greater equality. But the Vietnam narrative gave bigots a story of top-down betrayal, racial animus, and anger.
Bringing that narrative home, some White veterans saw a government which hadn’t permitted them to win; a judicial system which appeared, through their lenses, to favor minorities and immigrants; and a political system uninterested in hearing their stories. They thought they’d lost at home, too. So they repurposed the war’s anti-communist rhetoric, gathered among their fellow true believers, and did what America trained them to do: organize for war.
Before 1975, White supremacist organizations, like the original Klan or the John Birch Society, presented themselves as allies of America, preserving the state against degradation and decline. White Power, however, considered the state an enemy. They openly presented themselves as revolutionaries prepared to combat an occupying tyrannical authority. The answer, they believed, lay in overthrowing the state… then killing everyone whose skin wasn’t completely white.
Until this happened, White Power groups like Christian Identity and the nascent Militia Movement practiced placeholding maneuvers. They organized against Communists and the Civil Rights left. They shot organized Communists in North Carolina in 1979, killing five, and juries refused to hold them accountable; similarly, juries ignored reams of overwhelming evidence in 1988, and refused to convict one of the most robustly documented conspiracies ever exposed.
Narrative looms large in Belew’s telling. Not only the war, but the narrative of American history; the narrative of gender roles; the narrative of apocalypse. Works of fiction, like The Turner Diaries, drove White Power as much as military procedure guides. White Power leaders, Belew writes, knew they couldn’t win revolution outright; but they attempted to control America’s storytelling environment, and thus win countless eventual converts to the cause.
This storytelling became increasingly important as the revolution kept not happening. The White Power “movement” descended into nickel-and-dime Mafia behavior, but required constant fresh blood. So the narrative evolved. “As younger activists joined the white power movement in this period, the Vietnam War narrative became increasingly unmoored from a lived experience of combat,” Belew writes. Control of the story, official or otherwise, became as important as control of guns.
Reading Belew’s account, I recalled two other narratives originating among losing armies: the Lost Cause narrative after the American Civil War, and Germany’s Stab-in-the-Back narrative after World War I. Both posited that they could’ve won, under idealized circumstances, and thus felt morally justified in preparing for another war. This created the first Klan and the Nazi Party. Which brings us full-circle to the groups which allied to form White Power.
Belew’s account stretches from 1975 to 1995, ending following the Oklahoma City bombing (which Belew contends, with evidence, was a White Power action, not a lone-wolf attack). Anything after 1995, she says, is too recent for context. But by organizing seemingly far-flung events into a digestible story, she provides current anti-racists with a persuasive counter-narrative of how we reached the present. Because, deep down, she’s right: control of the story matters.
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