Bring the War Home

The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

By: Kathleen Belew

Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin

Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out - with military precision - an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse.

In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

Returning to an America ripped apart by a war that, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists.The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and giving birth to future recruits.

Belew's disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.

©2018 Kathleen Belew (P)2018 Tantor

The reader

I have not seen a more robotic story teller than this woman. Great information, however.

Get the print version

The information in this book is worthwhile. The narrator makes it impossible to absorb as an audiobook.

Unknown

The book explains many things about this period of US history that were seen yet not fully understood by many who lived through it.
Everyone who lived during these years should read this book. Those who are too young to have experienced the Vietnam era should read this book — to understand how we are still living with many of the same challenges and hope they will learn how to recognize propaganda that distorts reality from fiction.

Why so much violence?

I find this book useful in trying to understand the crazy and seemingly random violence we are trying to extinguish. Documented facts are the basis of the book and they are covered and organized to show how seemingly isolated events are actually interrelated. I'll probably also get the book to use as a historical reference.

Great book, bad narration

I really enjoyed the content. Excellant subject and ability to connect dots. I really struggled to finish due to the narrator. The performance was cold and robotic with an odd accent that made it challenging to follow.

Well researched a must have a copy type book

I am glad I run into this book. I just order a copy for reference.
It is a must read for all politicians at all levels.
A require read for children
Just Read It.

Blown Away

Totally amazing how Belew restores the perspective and clarity of the history of white power. A horror told very smoothly.

Harrowing

This is a book that if I could do it over again, would probably read, rather than listen to, because there are a lot of dates, names, abbreviations, and locations involved. I think in order to get the most of this book, you should read with your eyes, and maybe even a map, for reference.

Other than that minor point, I am very glad to have read this book, despite it being a profoundly unpleasant experience. The author carefully dissects the white power movement, its relationship to the wars we fight, and how it benefits from our misunderstanding and underestimation of it. This book is an important challenge to anyone who understands American politics in terms of intellectual abstractions and debate, and ignores the role of bloody violence in shaping our history.

White Supremacy uncovered

This is a fact-filled and frightening story. It took me a while to get used to the narration. It seemed like it was done in the verbal intonations of a continuous news report.

Informative and disturbing

Could not be more relevant right now in America during fuhrer Trump's white power driven administration.