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[SIZE=6]Q. and A.: The History of White Power[/SIZE]
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Skinheads at the Aryan Nations Church compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho on April 21, 1989, the centennial of Hitler’s birth. Gary Stewart/Associated Press
The modern white power movement is much more than a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. It emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and drew support from veterans and even active-duty service members. That provocative finding comes from a new book, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” by Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago. She spoke with Sewell Chan about her research.
How did you first become interested in the white power movement?
I was interested in the truth and reconciliation commission that examined the 1979 massacre in Greensboro, N.C., where a group of Klan members and neo-Nazi gunmen killed five leftist protesters. Perpetrators said things like, “Well, I killed communists in Vietnam, why wouldn’t I kill communists in North Carolina?” When I started to review records of other white power activists, I found an entire social movement animated by this idea.
White supremacy has been around for centuries. Why, in your view, was the Vietnam War so significant?
The Vietnam War created an opportunity for people and groups who had previously been at odds to unite in a common cause. And it provided a narrative — betrayal by the state — that structured the movement. The magnitude of military technologies available in that war — land mines, C-4 plastic explosives, anti-tank rockets, and AR-15s and M-16s — escalated the violent capacity of the movement, and the death toll
How has the white power activism since the 1970s differed from its predecessors?
Although it drew on previous Klan mobilizations, it united groups that hadn’t aligned before: Klansmen, neo-Nazis, radical tax protesters, skinheads. It was also revolutionary, in its relationship with the government. Earlier mobilizations — particularly the best-known and largest wave of Klan activity in the 1920s — had been vigilante organizations; that is, they had worked to support the state. Think of the famous image of Klansmen marching on the Mall in Washington — in robes and hoods, but with their faces visible. The ’20s Klan was very mainstream, and was aligned with all kinds of above-board politics.
The white power movement, on the other hand, declared war on the state in 1983. Its activists openly carried out violent actions aimed at infrastructure, currency and federal employees, and they did this to foment a guerrilla race war meant to overthrow the government.[/LEFT][/LEFT]
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The Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, after the 1995 bombing. The white power movement declared war on the state in 1983, which included attacks on infrastructure targets. Jon Hersley/American Experience Films
[B]What was the outcome of that self-declared war?[/B]
The war on the state led, most notably, to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 people, 19 young children among them. Along the way, white power activists also carried out assassinations, attacked infrastructure targets, formed and acted in leaderless resistance cells, attempted to undermine federal currency and stole military weapons from posts and armories.
Then what happened?
[LEFT][LEFT]The bombing generated a brief moment of public concern, but its legacy has been overwhelmingly one of misunderstanding. Even though it represents the largest deliberate mass casualty on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, most Americans don’t think of it as part of a long social movement, and as ideologically motivated. This is partly because the F.B.I. changed its approach after an earlier trial of 13 white power activists on charges including seditious conspiracy in 1987-88, in Fort Smith, Ark. The activists were acquitted despite overwhelming evidence. After that, the F.B.I. decided that white power violence would be prosecuted only at the scale of individual actions, rather than attempting to portray them as part of a social movement.
Who are some of the key figures in the post-Vietnam War movement?
Louis Beam was an architect of the movement, and furthered the idea of “leaderless resistance” — what we would now think of as cell-style terrorism — as well as pioneering Liberty Net, encrypted message boards that the white power movement started using by 1984, decades before Facebook.
Robert Jay Mathews was the leader of The Order, a highly skilled white terrorist group that carried out major armed robberies and assassinations, including the 1984 assassination of a Jewish talk show host in Denver. He died after a firefight with F.B.I. agents later that year, and is seen as a martyr for the movement.
David Lane was a member of The Order who while imprisoned wrote a slogan called the “Fourteen Words,” which has become a rallying cry and code of the movement. The words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — have been used to justify violence.
Frazier Glenn Miller (Frazier Glenn Cross) re-entered the news when he shot and killed three people in Overland Park, Kan., in 2014. A Vietnam veteran, he took part in the Greensboro massacre (but was never charged) and led the White Patriot Party in North Carolina, which acquired stolen weapons and matériel from Fort Bragg in the early 1980s.
Don Black, the founder of Stormfront — one of the most prominent white-power websites in the 1990s — appears in my book through his earlier movement activity, including an attempt to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica in order to funnel money to the Klan in the United States.
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White supremacists left Greenville Street Park in Newnan, Ga. after a rally last month. Bita Honarvar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
What are the biggest misconceptions about the white power movement?
The idea of “leaderless resistance” — intended to prevent infiltration by government operatives and prosecutions — allowed white power to sort of disappear as a movement. White power violence has too often been described as the disconnected acts of lone wolves or madmen, and this is precisely because people — the public, prosecutors, jurors, the government — haven’t understood it as a connected and coherent social movement. Relatedly, people often think of those involved in organized racist violence as uneducated, backward, or part of one class or regional identity. This is a misconception that really distorts the movement I study, which included people from all class backgrounds, from all regions of the country, from cities and rural areas alike. It also included rich people and poor people; high school dropouts and people with advanced degrees; religious leaders, along with felons; men, women, and children.
How would you characterize the white power movement today? Has it been emboldened by the Trump administration?
I should underline that I’m a historian, and my expertise ends in 1995. The kind of research I do won’t even be possible to pursue about our current moment for another five or ten years, because the archive simply hasn’t been compiled yet. But history shows that having an executive seen as sympathetic to the movement has not, in the past, worked to appease white-power activists or curb violence. The fact that the movement last turned violent during the Reagan administration — and at a moment of seeming state support for many of its goals — underlines the fact that this ideology was not aimed at electoral change.
Is the movement more, or less, powerful than it was in the mid-1990s, the endpoint of your study?
It’s difficult to say. Certainly we know from watchdog organizations that hate crimes and hate group memberships are rising. And certainly these ideas have entered the mainstream in new ways. I think the archives teach us that there has never been an effective stop delivered to this movement. The criminal prosecutions have been ineffective, there hasn’t been a turn in public opinion, and white power activity has been very effective at going underground, reforming and resurging.[/LEFT][/LEFT]