From a supporter of Refuse Fascism
“I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” — Trump directly threatening his political opponents with violence.
“Folks keep talking about another civil war. One side has about 8 trillion bullets while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.” — Rep. Steve King (Iowa)
Introduction
The Refuse Fascism Call To Action states:
“Fascism also mobilizes mobs of vicious thugs as we’ve seen with Nazis marching and murdering in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
There is an urgent need to confront the reality of the fascist paramilitary gangs and thugs that have been built up for years, the role they are playing in relation to a consolidating fascist regime and the grave danger they pose to humanity. This includes increasingly unleashed killers, who have gone into synagogues, mosques, black churches and slaughtered people.
These are the people Trump called “fine people” after they marched through Charlottesville with torches chanting “You Will Not Replace Us” and then murdered Heather Heyer.
There is a lot of deliberate mystification spread by political figures and the media about all this, aimed to keep people in denial in the face of these outrages.[i] These are not just “lone wolves” or “sick people being triggered by hate speech”. It is not extreme to say these are the brownshirts of America who are increasingly being whipped up and unleashed by the Trump/Pence regime.
In this context, Kathleen Belew’s book “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” is an important contribution that punctures these myths and gives people a clearer picture of who these thugs are as well as a deeply researched historical picture of the development of this fascist white power movement as it developed from the post-Vietnam war 1970’s up through the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
In the epilogue of the book, Belew very briefly sketches developments from the 1990’s up to today (the book was published in 2018) including the development of the alt-right and the election of Trump.
Important Points Brought Out in the Book
Belew doesn’t cover the present period (except in a very brief epilogue), the election of a fascist Trump/Pence regime and its escalating moves to consolidate a fascist America, yet there are still important lessons that can be drawn from what is revealed in this book. Belew spent 10 years studying archival materials from and about the white power movement. I want to highlight a few things.
Over a period of decades, these fascists have developed a cohering ideology based on white supremacy, misogyny and xenophobia adaptable and adapting to changing conditions in the U.S. and the world – centered on fighting against the “extinction” of the white race
Belew makes clear that the white power movement is united based on a coherent, if insane, ideology. This movement in the post-Vietnam 70’s was initially made up of very disparate and sometimes conflicting groupings.
“A war of this scale and urgency demanded that partisans set aside their differences. The movement therefore was flexible in its adoption of racist symbols and beliefs. A Klansman in the South might participate in burning crosses, wear the white robe and hood, and embrace the Confederate battle flag alongside a Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. A neo-Nazi in the North might march under the banner of the swastika and don an SS uniform. But the once-disparate approaches to white supremacy represented by these symbols and ideas were drawn together in the white power movement. …Activists circulated among groups and belief systems, each of which might include theological, political, and pseudoscientific varieties of racism, antisemitism, and antifeminism” (p.6)
What consistently has been able to weld them together is exactly an American fascist program of white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia that Refuse Fascism identifies in its Call to Act.
They feared that the government would eradicate the white population through interference with the birth of white children—through interracial marriage, rape, birth control, abortion, and immigration. The antisemitism long espoused by the Klan was reinforced by neo-Nazis. And the movement adopted a strict set of gender and familial roles, particularly regarding the sexual and supportive behavior of white women and their protection by white men.” (p.7)
They also targeted liberals, Jews and communists who in their view, are all working together to wipe out the white race. They considered themselves patriots fighting on behalf of the U.S. state. Later for a period after the Soviet Union collapsed in the late ’80’s and communism was no longer seen as such a threat, the white power movement adapted and increasingly targeted the federal government itself, especially as Democrats gained the presidency during the Clinton years.
Belew does not go into this, but people must confront the implications of the fact that now, with the fascist Trump/Pence regime in power, these forces are back “in the fold”, mainly serving as Trump’s brownshirt “fine people” and violently targeting Jews, Muslims, Black and Latino people, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people and all those (in or out of government) who oppose Trump/Pence.
Misogyny – White Women Reduced to Breeders of the “endangered” White Race
Hard core patriarchy was from the start a core part of this movement, integrated into the whole ethos of fighting against white extinction.
“As bearers of white children, women were essential to the realization of white power’s mission: to save the race from annihilation.” (p.8)
Belew points out that these groups have stated that any woman that didn’t bear at least 3 white children was contributing to white genocide. This is considered so vital that some of the groups practiced polygamy, supposedly to increase the white birth rate.
Xenophobia and Targeting of Immigrants as Enemies of the White Race
Core to their world view, their strategic view, their organizational means and methods and their plans was fighting against what they considered the extinction of the white race. They viewed the combination of growing numbers of Latinos and other non-white immigrants (the “others”) as existential threats. Right after the Vietnam war, they viciously targeted Vietnamese fishermen who had immigrated to Louisiana. And from there they have specially targeted immigrants from Mexico and Central America, forming armed border patrols against immigrants as well as attacking Muslim people.[ii]
Fascist Organization and Leadership
Belew traces in detail how the white power movement has had real leaders who wrote extensively, led the formation of groups and organized them. Some of their most influential writings were distributed in the hundreds of thousands including “The Turner Diaries” (over 500,000 copies had been sold as of 2000).
“The novel provided a blueprint for action, tracing the structure of leaderless resistance and modeling, in fiction, the guerrilla tactics of assassination and bombing that activists would embrace for the next two decades. Activists distributed and quoted from the book frequently. It was more than a guide, though. The popularity of The Turner Diaries made it a touchstone, a point of connection among movement members and sympathizers that brought them together in common cause.”(p.11)
These forces were drawn heavily from former and even current military personnel and police. They used their military training to form militias and train others, stole many of their weapons from military bases, and robbed banks and armored cars gaining millions which were then distributed to groups all over the country. After the Vietnam war, as police forces across the country were being equipped with advanced military weaponry, these fascist para-military groups were also able to arm with many of the same weapons and equipment.
These forces used computers and networks in the early 1980’s, well before the internet became popular to facilitate their communication. This early experience made it easier for the alt-right to use the internet to spread its influence and help bring Trump and Pence to power.
Some Important Weaknesses in the book
I think it’s a real problem that she does not attempt to identify that what we face today is a fascist regime and what role these fascist para-military gangs are playing, serving this rapidly consolidating regime, including carrying out murderous attacks, assaulting campuses and bookstores and working to intimidate and silence all opposition to the Trump/Pence regime as it consolidates a fascist America. It is very important that as someone with historical context, she use her public platform to speak out about this – to help others to understand this and to help figure out how to act to drive this regime out.
Related to this problem, Belew continues to analyze the white power movement as if it is more or less separate from this government. Her book has plenty of important exposure of how much the federal and state governments infiltrated these fascist groups, but she hesitates to draw conclusions about what role that infiltration played. What stands out when the evidence is looked at carefully is that over years the government has both nurtured and facilitated these forces, while at the same time keeping them under observation and “on a leash”, sometimes holding them back, even arresting and trying a few – and other times letting them loose to do their horrific work all while keeping everything “plausibly deniable” for those on the top of government.
And today is one of those “other times” on steroids. One key element of the Trump/Pence fascist regime is its very open embrace and open incitement of these thugs. This has escalated further in recent days since the collapse of the Mueller report and moves by the regime to as its allies put it “go full animal”.
Despite these weaknesses, I want to stress that this book is important, a valuable contribution and I strongly encourage people who want to understand what we are facing today to study it.
[i] Here’s one (of many) examples of this smug self-delusion: referring to Trump’s above quote about the “right being tougher”, a recent New York Magazine article says, “Trump laments that his opponents are treating him unfairly, praises the toughness and strength of his supporters — a category that combines the police, military, and Bikers for Trump, which he apparently views as a Brownshirt-like militia — and a prediction that his supporters will at some point end their restraint.” (my emphasis) (see http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/trump-threatens-violence-if-democrats-dont-support-him.html) In other words, nothing to worry about here people, this is just Trump’s delusion. But who is really deluded here?
[ii] Belew gives a sample from one of the recorded hate messages of these gangs in the 1980’s that brought all these themes together:
“The government] forced integration, forced white boys to fight in the Viet Nam war, allowed aliens into the country, allow[ed] Jewish abortion doctors to murder children, and allow[ed] blacks to roam the streets robbing, raping and murdering.”(p.146)