Reddit reviews Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

If you want to understand racists, read one of the really great critical scholarly histories of their movement, some of the rich political psychology work on white identity and racial attitudes, or work on the politics of ethnocentrism. All of these will help you understand real white bigotry and white nationalism in the world, and crucially none of them is white-nationalist propaganda that claims something wild like that white nationalism is some kind of perfectly valid alternative interpretive frame for looking at consensus reality.

It's pretty well laid out in ProPublica & PBS Frontline's Documenting Hate: New American Nazis. It dives into the history of white supremacy which led up to the relatively recent Heather Heyer murder in Charlottesville and Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting. Most of it comes back to James Mason and his SIEGE newsletter, which advocated for white supremacists to operate as lone-wolf terrorists in, at most, decentralized cells. Kathleen Belew's work, referenced in the documentary, details the connections between those leaving the military and white-power paramilitary movements. Mason's ideas and propaganda are still strong currents in the generalized modern white-supremacist movement, which have carried forward and gestated in works like the Turner Diaries, and Atomwaffen's entire MO. I don't feel super comfortable linking directly to works like Siege, but there's a good study by Geoff Ward titled Living Histories of White Supremacist Policing, which details the history of white supremacy across police forces. There's also a strong report from Humanity in Action, The Kerner Report 50 Years Later. I know these aren't exactly white supremacists saying "get into law enforcement!", but we can see policies and actions that white supremacists would be likely to take if they were in that position, while simultaneously lying about their goals. It's not too dissimilar from Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy, most infamously quoted as saying "Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."


There is a disgustingly rich history to the white supremacy movement in the US, which carries through to the modern age. But, given our history (Ruby Bridges is only 64 years old today!), it's really more disappointing than shocking.




edit: formatting