Aryan Nations

• For decades, the white power movement has gained steady momentum in the U.S. Kathleen Belew is an expert on the history of the white power movement and its current impact on American society and politics.
• Her book “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” examines how the aftermath of the Vietnam War led to the birth of the white power movement.

What is the white power movement?

• The white power movement is an array of activists that is, in all ways but race, remarkably diverse.
• Since the late 1970s, it has convened people of a wide variety of belief systems, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, white separatists, proponents of white supremacist religious theologies, and, starting in the late 1980s, racist skinheads and militia movement members.

How has the legacy of US warfare fueled white power groups?

• In each example, these groups also adopt elements of military activity, like uniforms, weapons and the latest military tactics.
• Groups like the Ku Klux Klan have been able to use this postwar opportunity for their own purposes: recruitment and radicalization.

When and why did the white power movement emerge in the US?

• The white power movement came together in the late 1970s around a shared narrative of the Vietnam War.
• This disaffection allowed for the white power movement to recruit in two different ways: narrative force – the story that was used to hold these activists together; and contextual force – the social grievances many of them had in common.

What role do women play in the white supremacist movement?

• But this is a movement that has relied in extraordinarily heavy ways on women.
• Women have been tasked with normalizing and legitimating violence, orchestrating recruitment and maintaining the relationships that allow this movement to operate as a social network.
• Take, for instance, the Aryan Nations World Congress, a 1983 meeting in which the white power movement declared war on the United States.

Where do US veterans fit in?

• Veterans have tactical training, munitions expertise and weapons training that the white power movement wants because it is trying to wage war on the American government – in fact, this movement has directed recruitment specifically aimed at veterans and active-duty troops.
• While very few veterans returning from war join white power groups, the groups still feature an enormous percentage of people who are veterans or active duty – or falsely claim to be.

How can the US address its lack of care toward veterans?

• Before the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, my undergraduate students at Northwestern and the University of Chicago had been at war for their entire living memory.
• And yet that war has not featured prominently even in the list of the top five or 10 crises facing our nation.
• We don’t reckon with the massive impact the people who serve in our armed forces shoulder for the nation.

What are you working on now that people might not be aware of?

• There were mass shootings at schools and elsewhere before Columbine.
• But Columbine really marks the moment when mass shootings became normalized.