JS: Donald Trump is categorically wrong when he says that white nationalism is a “very small group of people.” The data that we have available from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, or the U.S. government’s own numbers, all point to significant increases in extremist violence against minorities across the board. Assaults in 2016 against Muslims in the United States far surpassed the 2001 level. Most terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2017 were motivated by right-wing ideologies. These right-wing extremist attacks are on the rise globally as well, and the ideologies that connect these seemingly disparate violent incidents need to be understood as part of the dominant narrative. That history and context is in desperately short supply in the broader media and political discourse.
With our next guest, historian Kathleen Belew, we’re going to get into the rise of the white power movement, and why she draws a distinction between white power and white supremacy. Belew has traced the history of white power groups from the end of the Vietnam war, through the decades, to the climactic bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. She has an important new book out on this subject. It is called: “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” She is also an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. Kathleen Belew, welcome to Intercepted.
Kathleen Belew: Thank you.
JS: Did you read the manifesto of this individual in New Zealand?
KB: I did, yes.
JS: Describe how he talks about Donald Trump in that manifesto.
KB: He basically says he doesn’t agree with Trump kind of as a political leader and he doesn’t see himself as a conservative but that he does see Trump as sort of a symbol of renewed white identity. On the one hand, I think Trump is a symbol for many of these forces because of his sort of, unapologetic embrace of some of the issues that they hold in common.
DJT: We’re going to be signing today and registering national emergency and it’s a great thing to do because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable.
KB: On the other hand, I think that the manifesto shows us that this isn’t a conservative movement and that sometimes, I think, this is confusing because the white power has so much ideological common ground with conservatism that people incorrectly lump them all together. But I think, one way to think about this is that some of the social issues that conservatives and white power activists agree on simply mean different things to those two groups. So, if you take, for instance, issues like opposing abortion, opposing LGBT rights, supporting white separatist or white kind of freedom of association policies or opposing immigration — to white power activists, these issues all have to do with a looming fear of racial annihilation. The idea that white people will produce insufficient numbers of children, that they are threatened by a hyper-fertile population of people of color in and outside of the United States or their home nation, and that they’re under threat by immigration because of this fear of being overrun. Now, it’s not difficult to see how that ideology can find kind of a sympathetic set of words and phrases in the more mainstream conservative movement where we see people talking about invasion, about fears about maintaining the white race and white culture in direct and indirect ways.
Tucker Carlson: The left is fighting for an all-powerful state. A state that is so powerful that you couldn’t really responsibly give it over to your political opponents. Democracy is a threat to their plans. Add new voters and replace the old ones. That is the plan. They’re saying it out loud. What Democrats overtly want is the votes of non-citizen children and criminals. They say that.
KB: But the thing is that white power activism is not interested in conserving an existing way of life or even turning back the clock to something further back. I think the radical nature of what these activists would want to achieve could not be accomplished in any electoral politics that I could see from the present.
JS: Are all of these incidents, movements, the rise of some politicians in Europe and then this increase that we’ve seen in hate crimes in the United States — anti-Semitic attacks, white supremacist attacks — are they all bound by some common thinking? Do they coordinate or is it that they share parts of an ideology that results in the kinds of overtly violent acts that we see in Christchurch or in the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh? What links them together?
KB: I think what I would say that the history can show us about this particular moment is that in the earlier period that I study, we can see two concurrent kinds of mobilization coming out of this movement. One of them is above ground, public facing, very performative. We can think about things like David Duke wearing nice suits and going on talk shows.
Phil Donahue: What is your title?
David Duke: Grand wizard and national director.
PD: You are grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan?
DD: Right.
PD: He’s such a nice looking boy.
KB: People sort of mounting political campaigns successfully and unsuccessfully, those draw in a lot of members. And then, at the same time, those same activists were also involved in fomenting a violent underground that included Klan paramilitary training camps, assassination of enemies, the theft and distribution of millions of dollars to groups all around the country, and getting online on early computer network message boards in order to sort of begin the work of social network activism even before the rest of us figured out what that was.
So, in the archive what we can see is that those two waves of activity happened concurrently and included the same people. The other thing is that this movement has been using a strategy since the early 1980s called leaderless resistance and the idea there is to organize in cells that can act in common cause and towards the same sort of targets without ties with one another or ties with movement leadership.
Now, that strategy was implemented in part because activists were really frustrated with how many undercover ATF and FBI agents infiltrated the movement in the civil rights period and in part, to stymie court prosecution. But the longer legacy of leaderless resistance has been that this movement has disappeared as a movement. It’s been able to present itself in many cases as the work of one lone gunman here, a lone wolf there, a few bad apples over there. And what happens is that we’re not able to sort of create a public understanding of this as a coherent, connected set of events with a coherent political ideology. You can think of an act like the bombing of Oklahoma City which is the largest mass violence on the American mainland between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and still is understood by most people as the work of one or a few actors rather than as the coordinated violence that is the execution of this long and broad-based social movement.
JS: In this so-called manifesto that this shooter released, he expressed hope that the massacre would spark a gun control movement in the United States to intensify its actions and that it could ultimately lead to a civil war. And you point out that that’s an idea that is torn directly from the pages of “The Turner Diaries.” Can you explain “The Turner Diaries” and the significance that it has within the white power movement?
KB: It’s a dystopian or utopian novel that imagines how a small number of dedicated white power guerrilla warriors could sort of unseat world powers and eventually seize control of first, the nation and the world. And the novel sort of puts forward a bunch of strategies about how to do this.
William Pierce: Hello, I’m William Pierce and I’ll be reading my book “The Turner Diaries” to you: “Today, it finally began. After all these years of talking and nothing but talking we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the system and it is no longer a war of words.”
KB: It becomes sort of a manual, an ideological text, and even a lodestar of the movement that really does join a lot of people together. It came out in the late 70s and early 80s and appears in a whole bunch of significant places within the history of this movement including things like Timothy McVeigh had it with him.
WP: I’ve said that over and over again that I do not approve of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Interviewer: Why not?
WP: It does not make sense under the present conditions that we have when there is no group capable of actually taking on the federal government and defeating it. But I do not believe that we are in a revolutionary phase yet. I believe that the people have a lot of waking up and understanding to do first. And perhaps if the people do wake up and understand what’s happening and decide to take a hand to halt this process, to change the course of history, we may be able to avoid the sort of unpleasantness that I imagined might take place in “The Turner Diaries.”
KB: Now, this book answers one fundamental question that many people have about this movement which is: how could a very small number of people possibly hope to overthrow the most militarized superstate in the history of the world being the modern United States and then also hope to kind of foment this transnational white power movement? And it lays out a number of strategies by which this might happen. But the novel opens with exactly the scene that this gunman references which is the kind of aftermath of a mass seizure of firearms which people see as kind of a moment of awakening for a broad white populace. So, this is the fundamental thing to understand about “The Turner Diaries” and about actions like the one in Christchurch.
The violence itself is not supposed to be the end point of this kind of a political action. The violence is supposed to awaken a broader white public to rise up in guerrilla race war against first, the nations and then, kind of, the rest of the world. And we should be really clear that the future envisioned by “The Turner Diaries” is fundamentally exceedingly violent. What happens in the book eventually is that the white revolution seizes control of the United States and from there is able to seize control of the world and the end game of this, in the novel, is imagined as a total annihilation of all racial others, all of who they call race traitors who are people who are in interracial marriages and other enemies and then, annihilation of all populations of color around the world.
JS: Why do you make a point to call it white power movement versus white nationalism or white supremacy?
KB: So there’s a couple of distinctions. The first one is that white supremacy is much bigger and much more common than what I’m calling white power activism. People might argue that huge percentages of our kind of systems of governance, our distribution of resources, different kinds of mechanisms that are routine in the United States are fundamentally white supremacist because of our nation’s history. White supremacy is also an ideology that’s shared by many people who don’t have extremist violent activism as their way of operating. So, we need a word that’s more discrete than that. And then the problem with white nationalism, white nationalism is correct from a technical standpoint. But the problem is that when you say white nationalism, I think a lot of people imagine a sort of overzealous patriotism and that comes from the idea that the nation that they’re talking about when they say white nationalism is going to be the United States or New Zealand or Australia. Actually the nation imagined by white nationalism is all white people who are kind of racial compatriots. They mean the Aryan nation, the transnational white polity that they want to achieve first, by seizing white homelands and then, by race war.
JS: In the 1990s, there was a lot of attention being paid to these militias whether it was in Idaho or the Michigan militia and you also had this rise in what came to be known as the radical religious right. We just had eight years of the Barack Obama presidency and now you have Trump who on the one hand is advocating policies that are in sync with a lot of these white power movements not just in the U.S. but elsewhere — whether it’s his border wall or the way that he talks about how police should treat suspects, the way that he talks about gun violence in Chicago. But can we draw a connection between a rise in interest in these groups or activity by these kinds of individuals and the presidency of Clinton or the presidency of Obama and then being followed up by Donald Trump? Is there any historical pattern that you’ve noticed in the context of U.S. politics that we can say well this seems to be the breeding ground for then an uptick in stories or reporting or activity about these groups and individuals?
KB: Yes, and I think actually where we need to look is the second term of the Reagan administration.
Dan Rather: CBS News estimates that Ronald Reagan has been re-elected president. The question remains: how big a mandate is he likely to get?
KB: The last time we saw this big turn against the state was not under a Democratic president but was under a Republican president who arguably stood to bring some benefits to this movement. I mean, these were people in the movement who would benefit from many of Reagan’s policies and shared many components of worldview in common with him and with various parts of his constituency. So, the fact that that turn against the state happened during a conservative executive I think is very concerning for the present moment. And again, what we’re seeing now is not the kind of endpoint of what I would think of when I think about a wave of white power violence. I think we are seeing a sort of beginning point. I would expect larger and more coordinated attacks as we move forward.
JS: What have been the key moments that have reignited the white power movement outside of the United States?
KB: So, this is now a bit outside of my area of study. I think what I could tell you from the U.S. side is that I am seeing very clear moments where the U.S. movement as it formed in the 1980s and early 1990s is shaping the way that this activism is being carried out abroad. To that extent, I think it’s very important to note the extreme violence and paramilitarism of the movement in the United States as the form that we’re now seeing appear elsewhere. So, when you look at things like the Christchurch gunmen using the 14 words, which is the slogan about racial apocalypse, and the need for race war that is written by the former member of The Order, David Lane, who is a white power actor in the United States, things like that moving abroad have a very specific kind of meaning. Now, with all transnational flows this goes both into the United States and then out again so we can think about this as sort of, a complex process that is bringing people, information guns, tactics and of course, websites in and out of the country. But I think there’s something about the paramilitarism of the style of attack and the intensity of the weapons chosen that strike me in a way as very symbolically American.
JS: New Zealand’s political leaders including the head of state say they’re going to take drastic action to stop the access to the kinds of high-powered weaponry that were used in this in these shootings in Christchurch. What about the role of for lack of a better term the gun lobby in the United States and how it is viewed, the NRA specifically, by white power movements in America?
KB: This is such a great question and sadly, the evidence for writing that book is not available to historians. So, the NRA has not made its archives public. I hope that future historians would be able to look closely at that and think about the intersection between the NRA and the white power movement much like we’ve thought about the intersection between say the farms crisis and the white power movement or the evangelical groundswell and the white power movement. The NRA has cultural and rhetorical and personnel overlap with the white power movement but it’s impossible to sort of figure this out without the archive.
JS: You’ve said that by looking at far-right attacks or white power attacks as part of our larger movement rather than the lone wolf narrative that is constantly reinforced in the broader media when these shootings and massacres happen. How could that reframe public discourse and response if we look at it as you’re arguing as sort of part of a broader movement of a leaderless resistance? What would the response to a transnational white power movement look like?
KB: Here’s the thing that we could do: If we are able to say, OK, in the last six months, I see three similarly framed attacks, right? There’s the Tree of Life shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue. There is this attempt by the Coast Guard officer to carry out this assassination list on political enemies. And now, we have this horrible event in New Zealand. The thing that unites them is the study of the perpetrators. But the thing that could happen if we understand them as connected is a unification of the people who are impacted and the different groups who are concerned about anti-Semitic violence, Islamophobic violence, political violence, and kind of the degradation of our civil discourse. If those communities all come together in understanding, I think that there is a profound hope there in uniting people and figuring out a different kind of response.
Now, I think that response would have to include everything from a fundamental change in our public understanding of what this is and how we understand the ideology that motivates it. It would have to include things like imagining how these people view the future and articulating some alternate visions. And I think it would also have to include things like juror education and prosecutor education and thinking about things like military policy and our definitions of terrorism and how we allocate resources to all of those different projects.
JS: From what you’ve studied about white power movements and the way that the state has responded to them or mass media respond to them, what lessons have you learned about the way that Islam is talked about in our society or the notion that we’re in this borderless global war on terror?
KB: So actually I have to go full historian on that question and take us all the way back to the 1920s because I think this is the easiest way to understand this particular thing. So, the Klan in the 20s is the kind of classic mainstream Klan. It’s the one with the well-known pictures of Klansmen marching down the National Mall wearing their robes and hoods but with their faces uncovered. It was mainstream and properly national. Their slogan was 100 percent America, right? So, people think about it as being anti-black and anti-Semitic, right? And it is that but if you look at the Klan in the 20s it’s also anti-immigrant, if you happen to be in the Northeast where there are a lot of immigrants. It’s anti-Catholic in Indiana because Notre Dame is in Indiana. It’s anti-Mexican on the U.S.-Mexico border and then, it’s anti-labor in the Pacific Northwest where there’s a lot of labor union movements.
So, what we learned from this and what white power activists learned from this too as they’re kind of using Klan strategy in formulating how they’re going to respond to threats of their moment, is that the Klan has always been organized around tacking to the prevailing public sentiment in order to mobilize people into joining. They’re willing to use this kind of flexible and opportunistic ideology to mobilize the prevailing public hatreds in order to bring people into their movement and foment violence. So, in the period of my study, you see a lot of anti-communist violence, a lot of anti-LGBT violence, a lot of anti-feminist discourse, right? Because those were kind of the mainframes available in the 80s. It makes perfect sense to me that now Islamophobia would be a popular kind of current to mobilize. But that to me, is actually the thing in common again is the perpetrators. And if we can focus there I think that’s where things could change.
— source theintercept.com | Mar 20 2019