Kathleen Belew
Autor(a) de Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
About the Author
Image credit: By Christopher Michel from San Francisco
Obras por Kathleen Belew
Associated Works
Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (2022) — Contribuidor — 178 exemplares
The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (2022) — Contribuidor — 19 exemplares
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Data de nascimento
- 1981-11-11
- Sexo
- female
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- Ocupações
- Associate Professor of US History
- Organizações
- University of Chicago
Membros
Críticas
Listas
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 3
- Also by
- 2
- Membros
- 375
- Popularidade
- #64,333
- Avaliação
- 4.1
- Críticas
- 9
- ISBN
- 11
To an outsider, the attack on the US Capitol looked like a cross between the storming of the Bastille and the burning of the Reichstag with some crazy costumes. It was tragic that four Capitol policemen lost their lives defending the seat of American democracy, and it could have been much worse had the legislators not gotten out of the building ahead of the mob.
What is equally crazy is the stonewalling by the Republican Party over efforts to get the bottom of such pressing questions as:
1) Why was there insufficient policing of the Capitol even though the FBI and the Capitol police knew something was underfoot?
2) Who were the organizers and what were their ultimate objectives?
3) Was Donald Trump actively engaged in an attempted coup-d’état?
4) Is another event brewing and if so how can it be stopped?
This brought me to Kathleen Belew’s excellent sociological study “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
As Belew sees it there are distinct contributors to domestic terrorism in America:
- there are the garden variety racists, amply represented by the Klu Klux Klan and their derivatives,
- there are the more generalized racists, alt-right, skinheads and easily identifiable neo-Nazis, anti-semites, and groups like the Proud Boys
- there is the stream of anti-communists stretching back to the Red Scare originating at the turn of the 20th century reaching its summit in the McCarthy Hearings of the 1950’s. Belew tracks a new variant of this epidemic in soldiers returning from Vietnam, and crazies who want us to believe they defended America even though they never did.
- there are groups of unmoored religious cults who variously believe in the Second Coming of Christ and where the men hate Arabs but conveniently believe in the Arab custom of polygamy.
- there are the contemporary and un-sanctioned militia groups who believe the right to bear arms means carrying around semi-automatic rifles to the neighbourhood grocery store. America is unique in having about 300 million licensed firearms in the hands of ordinary citizens.
- there are the anti-taxers, anti-abortionists, anti-unionists, anti-vaxers, and anti-maskers.
You could easily confuse these groups but they represent unique challenges to law enforcement.
In the 1990’s law enforcement took far too extreme measures to disarm a white separatist family in the hills of Idaho. Google Ruby Ridge and you’ll see what I mean. Then there was David Koresh and the Waco Texas standoff.
The ultimate expression of the paranoia was undoubtedly Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a government building in Oklahoma. McVeigh conspired with militarists, white power, and anti-taxers.
McVeigh did not act alone. There were plenty of weapons and bomb-making expertise in the hands of white power groups. A lot of weapons had been stolen from US military bases. They were used to terrorize minorities, commit murder, and rob banks.
I was less familiar with the Greensboro massacre in 1979 where white power factions attacked and killed members of the Communist Workers Party who had organized a “Death to the Klan” march. The white-power attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury.
We can all see how the current partisan political environment played into the events on Capitol Hill. Donald Trump tried everything to reverse the results of the election with the help of Republican legislators, FOX News, and Vladimir Putin’s troll farm.
The question remains what are the sources of these extremist views? Many are not solely American-made behaviours. Colour-based prejudice, anti-semitism, nativism, and separatism go way back before the founding of the American Republic.
Of course, America was founded to some degree by religious separatists, anti-taxers, and grew up on a dangerous frontier. The historical frontier is long gone, but the frontier as a paranoid fantasy lives on.
And there is plenty of venom and envy to go around.… (mais)