n the spring of 1975, as America’s between them, Belew and Burke have il- war in drew to its grim conclus- White Power luminated a set of elective afnities be- Iion, a new magazine targeted readers tween the partisans of white power and the who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune heirs of free-market a nti- communism – was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Thomas Meaney afnities that continue to produce explosive Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, results. who made the proftable dis covery that his Bring the War Home: The fused white power and publication could double as an employ- The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America anti-communism together. Shared wartime ment agency for mercenaries and a weap- by Kathleen Belew. experience dur ing World War Two seems to onry catalogue. The magazine’s classifed Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8 have reduced in the ranks – Truman ads ofered an eclectic menu of ‘profess- went on to desegregate the military in 1948 ional adventure’. You could enlist in Port- Revolutionaries for the Right: Anti-Communist Internationalism – but Vietnam did the opposite. For the frst ugal’s war against anti-colonial guerrillas and Paramilitary Warfare in the time in any American war, black troops in Mozambique or sign up for the sultan by Kyle Burke. were over-represented in the ranks. Their of Oman’s counterinsurgency against the , 337 pp., £36.50, June 2018, 978 1 469 64073 0 presence became a galvanising political com munist Dhofar rebellion. More sedent- issue for the civil rights movement, whose ary readers could buy a ‘Free Cambodia’ act ivists to the and white ive members. But the type of free-market activities in turn became a political issue T-shirt, donate to an anti-Sandinista relief power terror cells, could share a common creed that most mainstream conservatives for many serving white soldiers, who fund, support the search for POWs, stock enemy. For much of the 20th century, the espouse has long been reconcilable with came to view black soldiers as unreliable or up on Confederate paraphernalia, get a struggles against communism and black white nativist priorities. The Canadian hist- worse. As US forces evacuated Saigon, the TEC-9 assault pistol, hire a hitman or order pro gress were close to indistinguishable. orian Quinn Slobodian has recently lab el- more conservative among them felt that dynamite by the truckload. In the late 1930s, local law enforcement led this apparent ideological mongrel they had lost one war only to return home The popularity of a magazine like this, waged war on the Alabama Communist ‘xenophobic libertarianism’, pointing to to lose another: the civil rights movement which at the height of its circulation in the Party and the 12,000 black members of the fact that the American right has consist- had put black rights on the national agenda early 1980s had 190,000 subscribers, test- the Sharecroppers Union; in the 1970s, ently paired the demand for an absolute in a way that imperilled the white future. ifes to the global reach of the paramilitary right-wing US politicians actively support- right to free movement of capital with ever Riots broke out on bases and aboard ships. American right. You could learn more ed white supremacist Rhodesia and South more biologised criteria for the exclusion At Cam Ranh Bay naval base, black serv- about certain corners of the world from its Africa against anti-colonial insurgencies, of people. icemen revolted when white soldiers celeb- pages than you could from the Economist. which were simultaneously demonised as Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home rated the death of Martin Luther King by Soldier of Fortune featured ‘participant’ des- black uprisings bent on white submission and Kyle Burke’s Revolutionaries for the Right raising the Confederate fag. The US mil- patches from unofcial war zones, inter- and as communist movements in hock to are complementary accounts of the white itary leadership fumblingly tried to ac- views with European colonial rogues, and a the Sov iet Union. When Dylann Roof murd- power movement, with Belew con centrat- commodate the growing number of Black sense of drama that cast the US as the last ered nine black Christians in Charleston, ing on white power at home, and Burke on Power activists in Vietnam – military bur- bulwark against the communist tide. Con- South Carolina in 2015, he demonstrated anti-communist co-ordination abroad. To- eaucrats started investigating commanders federate ‘lost cause’ pathos alternated with the continuing overlap between white power geth er, they show how the American move- who did not allow black troops to wear a buoyant sense of America’s chosenness. at home and pro-colonial anti-communism ment was nurtured by its foreign exper- Afros and slave bracelets – but many troops Brown himself led death squads in El abroad: in his profles online he could be iences and how the global anti-communist returned from the war committed to a Salvador and tours with the mujahideen in seen proud ly displaying Rhodesian milit- movement made use of its services. Almost struggle between races. Afghanistan. By the late 1970s, Amer ican ary regalia. all white supremacists are anti- commun- The Vietnam War had a further per- mercenaries were advert ising their ser vices For the wider American conservative ist, though far from all American anti- nicious efect: it helped make possible the in Rhodesian phonebooks. Twenty years movement, white power may have been a commun ists were white supremacists.1 Yet paramilitary expression of racist sentiment. later, a handful were serving in Croat ian useful dog of the leash when it came to In the frst half of the 20th century the nationalist battalions in the Yugoslav wars, unofcially fghting far-fung communist 1 The designations ‘white nationalist’, ‘white American far right had conducted a cam- with underground American white power insurgencies, but it has also been a liabil- separatist’ and ‘white supremacist’ are ofen paign of violence against blacks and others, confated – even by proponents of each – but organisations promoting wider recruitment ity. Faced with the reality of a multiracial especially in the South. But while they they can refer to diferent worldviews. A white – and seeking out and funding East German America, the mainstream Republican Party nationalist demands at a minimum that a nat ion- could rely on the support of large sect ions neo-Nazis. More recently, some 15 Amer- has mostly been wary of making explicit state – such as the US or Rhodesia – have as its of society for their cause, their main aim ican freelancers have joined gonzo-fascist appeals to , much less white main purpose the interests of white citizens. In was to instil fear rather than to try to real- Ukrainian units in the Donbass to fght power. The dozens of American right-wing some variations, has implicit- ise fant asies of extermination or separat- ly genocidal ambitions, but in others, as in South ‘Putin’s communists’, though others see paramilitary groups that started appearing ism. The capacity for more directed viol- Africa and Rhodesia, non-whites would remain the Russian president as a knight for the in the 1970s and 1980s – from the Aryan in view, or in separate zones, as inferior citizens. ence among white power groups that be- white power cause. Nations and to the White separatists are typically interested in creat- came evident in the 1980s would not have For more than a century, anti-commun- Brüder Schweigen and the Phineas Priest- ing white societies, without much or any state been possible without their Vietnam train- ism was a reliable binding agent on the hood – have been treated as aberrant out- capacity, in new territories. They see themselves ing and access to weapons stolen from as latter-day white settlers. White supremacists American right. Disparate factions, from growths by Republican lawmakers: it helps military bases. Faced with an economic believe that the white race is in her ently superior tax protesters and libertarians to fund- that the hardcore white power movement to all other races, a suppos it ion ofen – but not re cession exacerbated by the war’s vast amentalist Christians, from anti-abortion in America has no more than 25,000 act- always – shared by white nationalists. expenditures, many veterans believed they

Rights as Weapons Active Defense Instruments of Conflict, China’s Military Strategy Tools of Power since 1949 Clifford Bob M. Taylor Fravel

An in-depth look at the historic and What changes in China’s modern military strategic deployment of rights in political policy reveal about military organizations conflicts throughout the world and strategy

“Timely and important. . . . Clifford Bob “The most important study of Chinese masterfully documents the ways in national security to appear in a decade.” which actors in conflict use rights as — Minxin Pei, weapons to amplify their own power. Claremont McKenna College This book is a must-read.” Cloth £27.00 | $35.00 — Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Princeton Studies in International History University of , San Diego Established in 1905 and Politics Celebrating 20 years in Europe Cloth £24.00 | $29.95

Social icon Rounded square

Only use blue and/or white.

For more details check out our Brand Guidelines.

5 review of books 1 august 2019 non-patriarchal capitalism is possible in When DDT Was Good would never fnd ordinary employment, local police informants who had guided the principle, but that merely hypothetical Raymond Clayton rightly states that DDT which led some to gravitate toward the assailants to the march. possibility will not save us now. played a valuable role in controlling in- fringes of American society both lef and Then, in 1980, arrived. Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser sects for several years afer the Second right. Here was a president who quoted Rambo, The New School for Social Research, New World War (Letters, 4 July). But by omit- John Rambo, for his part, did both. In referred to the Vietnam War as ‘the noble York ting to mention the main reason it is no First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s char- cause’ and told veterans that they had been Tithi Bhattacharya longer used, he may inadvertently have ac ter is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veter- ‘denied permission to win’. Reagan not Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana fed the myth, still actively propagated by an, traumatised by the war, who arrives in only made it clear that he intended to open libertarians, that by encouraging a ban on a small town to pay his respects to a new fronts in the Cold War, he even ap- Lorna Finlayson writes: Cinzia Arruzza, DDT Rachel Carson was guilty of causing black comrade killed by exposure to Agent peared to some on the far right to be paying Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser read immense human sufering and loss of Orange. Mistaken for a hippie grafer, he is tribute to their tactics. In 1981 a motley me as denying the need for feminists to life. The real reason DDT is no longer em- hounded by the local police and struggles group of a dozen mercenaries in Louisiana challenge capitalism. In fact, I share their ployed is that its very success and conseq- to fnd work: ‘There [in Vietnam] I few – Klansmen, neo-Nazis, arms smugglers – view that ‘sexism is deeply entrenched in uent overuse gave rise to DDT-resistance helicopters, drove tanks, had equipment were caught by the FBI hatching a hare- capitalist society’, and that this entrench- in the insect species it was targeting. This worth millions. Here I can’t even work brained scheme to topple the government ment manifests itself not least in the sub- efect was already evident in 1962, when parking!’ But in Rambo: First Blood Part II of the Caribbean island of Dominica and ordination of those forms of labour, such Carson wrote Silent Spring, in which she (1985), Rambo turns right, fghting the restore a puppet dictator through whom as care work, disproportionately perform- provided detailed evidence of the rapid Vietnam War all over again single-handed. they would launder funds to the KKK and ed by women. I also believe that capital- build-up of resistance not only to DDT, ‘Sir,’ he asks, ‘do we get to win this time?’ prepare a staging ground to conquer Gren- ism is generally bad for humans and for but also to the substitutes developed to ada. The press mocked their failure as ‘the the rest of life on the planet. I there- overcome it. ring the war home’: what began Bayou of Pigs’ (the plan to collaborate with fore oppose it not only as a feminist, but Rory Allen as an anti-war slogan on the a splinter group of local Rastafarians to as a human being and living creature. York ‘BAmerican lef was appropriated take down what was already a right-wing What seems to have given rise to the by the extreme right as a proclamation of government strained credulity). But as misunderstanding is the passage in which The Bloodstains Never Dried intent. Louis Beam – one of the major Belew notes, the US invaded Grenada I argued that the analysis of the role of Mike Jay’s engaging account of the exec- strategists of the paramilitary right and a two years later and justifed its coup with women’s ‘reproductive’ labour in capital- ution ritual of Colonel Despard includes central fgure in Belew’s book – was a lang uage remarkably similar to that of ist society by socialist and Marxist femin- the claim that he was the last felon con- decorated veteran who had logged more the Domin ican plotters, who, like Reagan, ists of the 1970s does not ground, and victed of high treason who was ‘drawn’ to than a thousand hours as a door-gunner on referred to the island as a ‘Soviet-Cuban probably was not intended to ground, the his scafold on a carriage or sled (LRB, 18 Huey choppers. Back home he promptly colony’. conclusion that capitalism and gender July). In fact, 14 years afer Despard, the joined the Louisiana chapter of the KKK, The paramilitary right had a tense but ult- equality are strongly incompatible, in the three ringleaders of the Pentrich Rebel- beginning a career that seamlessly com- imately productive relationship with Reag- way that capitalism is incompatible with lion (the so-called ‘Derbyshire Rising’) bined white power fanaticism with anti- an. In 1979 the anti-communist Georgia the overcoming of class exploitation, for were drawn around the prison yard at communism. In 1977, Beam received a grant congressman Larry McDonald established example. In retrospect, I think I dwelled Derby’s Nun Green before mounting the from the state of to build a simulated the Western Goals Foundation, a privately too long on this point, and may have scafold for execution. Like Despard, the Vietnamese rice paddy in swamp land near funded version of the House Un-American created the impression that I look to the men were spared quartering – an act of Houston: here, he trained recruits as young Activities Committee, which had been possibility of a non-patriarchal capitalism ‘clemency’ by the prince regent – but went as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four wound up four years earlier. Like HUAC, for salvation. In fact, I agree with Arruzza, through all the other parts of the sent- years later a promising opportunity present- McDonald’s database stored fles on thous- Bhattacharya and Fraser that this poss- ence. Their bodies were decapitated with ed itself. A number of South Vietnamese ands of Americans deemed ‘subversives’, ibility is at present largely hypothetical. an axe on an executioner’s block which is refugees had been resettled on the other especially those who – it was imagined – And to the question I raise in the essay, of still held by Derby Museums; contemp- side of Galveston Bay, and local shrimp might be agitating on behalf of communist whether a gender-equal form of capital- oraries claimed that the bloodstains never farmers didn’t want the competition. Beam movements in . The inform- ism would be worth fghting for, my own dried on the block but such remains are seized on these fears and gave a speech to ation the foundation gathered was shared answer would in any case be ‘No’. My invisible to the modern eye. Like Despard, a crowd of 250 white farmers. Shortly with the FBI and other state agencies, point was that this is the really important the heads of the three men, Jeremiah aferwards a group of them set out and burn- along with the recommendation that the question, and not the question of wheth- Brandreth, William Turner and Isaac Lud- ed two Vietnamese boats, torched crosses gov ernment outsource the work of counter- er capitalism could or could not eventual- lam Senior, were displayed to the assem- on their lawns, and patrolled the bay on insurg ency to the very same private secur- ly be purged of patriarchy. bled crowd with the exhortation ‘Behold a ship equipped with a small cannon and ity frms that were helping to fund the In so far as the view I advanced difers the head of a traitor,’ but unlike him they a mannequin hanging from a noose. The foundation. The increased privatisation of from the one taken by Arruzza, Bhatta- were buried in a common, unmarked campaign of intimid ation was ended by the US state violence under the Reagan admin- charya and Fraser in their book, it is per- grave at St Werburgh’s churchyard, which Southern Poverty Law Centre, which won a istration ftted neatly with the president’s haps only in our relative measures of opt- is now lost to view (archaeologists may court order to disband Beam’s group and more general anti-statist rhetoric. imism and pessimism about the present consider exploring the adjacent multi- close his training camps. Kyle Burke provides a guide to this and future. I did have some pangs of guilt storey car park, described as ‘the safest in Crucially, as Belew shows, most Amer- dark underground territory of the Cold over my seemingly rather dismissive treat- England’, as their possible resting place). ican paramilitary groups in the years afer War. Just as the civil rights movement span- ment of the Women’s Strikes. I did not Like Despard, the three men formed part Vietnam considered themselves vigilantes. ned the globe, so too did the reaction mean to indicate that I don’t support and of E.P. Thompson’s ‘heroic age of radical- They were taking up the fght themselves against it. In some regions it was the re- participate in them – I do – but merely ism’. However, perhaps the most telling because they believed the state was too action that proved more enduring. Burke de- that I have less confdence than some in link between events in 1803 and 1817 is cowardly or too paralysed to defend itself votes space to the largely neglected World their prospects, their cohesiveness and the fact that Brandreth, who went to his against Judeo-communist usurpers: the lib- Anti-Communist League, founded in Tai- strength; naturally, I hope I am wrong doom demonstrating the same sort of in- eral establishment was infltrated, or naive, wan in 1966. The league was remarkable about this. scrutability that characterised Despard’s or merely weak, unable to contend with for its fusion of Eastern and Western anti- conduct on the scafold, claimed to have a communist agenda that sought to destroy communist funding and expertise. The US Casualties been in the crowd that witnessed Desp- white nativist values and identity. In this branch was organised by a gay ex-socialist Didier Fassin states that during the recent ard’s execut ion. conspiracy, blacks ofen featured as unwit- from , Marvin Liebman, who had protests in France ‘dozens of peaceful de- Richard Gaunt ting pawns, but that did not spare them converted to anti-communism afer read- monstrators, journalists and medics have University of Nottingham from being targeted. In 1979, nine vehicles ing Elinor Lipper’s Gulag memoir. Having lost an eye or had a hand ripped of’ (LRB, carrying Klansmen and neo-Nazis – most recruited the US congressman Donald Judd 4 July). While numbers vary considerably Mistake of them veterans – drove to the site of a and the Catholic priest Daniel Lyons, between sources, on 28 April Le Monde Owen Bennett-Jones’s piece on Pakistan’s march in Greensboro, North Carolina, Liebman travelled to Taipei and helped reported an announcement from a col- nuclear weapons programme in the issue where members of the Communist Work- draf the league’s agenda; at the league’s lective of those who had sufered serious of 18 July cited tweets from what we were ers’ Party were protesting against the Klan’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the injuries at the hands of the French police too late to recognise was a fake account. attempt to sabotage their organising of keynote address. And then there was John that 22 had lost an eye and fve had lost a Apologies: we should have realised. The black textile workers. Five of the protesters Singlaub, a retired general and another of hand. opening of the piece has been altered in were killed in a shoot-out; 12 were wound- the league’s main organisers, who thought John Krige the version that appears online. ed. The trial that followed resulted in ac- the US government had fumbled the urban Atlanta, Georgia The Editors quittals for all of the accused, including the counter-insurgency against the Black Pan-

6 london review of books 1 august 2019 thers and other radical groups, and that right-wing church in Indiana were arrested Weems’s anti-capitalism marks the point and a ‘swarthy’ man of questionable racial lessons should be learned from the admir- at Harare airport while apparently engaged where antisemitic white power and the make-up. able ruthlessness with which Latin Amer- in a plot to assassinate Mugabe. (His para- wider anti-communist movement parted The second seriously considered option ican and East Asian authoritarians had noia wasn’t always unjustifed.) ways on questions of principle. But this was what became known as the Northwest crushed their lefist opponents. One lingering puzzle in the history of the should not lead us to dismiss the wide areas Territorial Imperative, the aim being to In its early years the league stirred with paramilitary American right is why, in the of common cause between white power consolidate the white race in the already impossible ambitions, such as winning back early 1980s, a small but signifcant part of fellow-travellers – whom Belew estimates very white Pacifc Northwest, where an China for the Kuomintang. By the early the movement began to rebel against the at around 450,000 Americans – and today’s ‘Aryan homeland’ would be established. 1970s, however, it had narrowed its focus. US state itself. During Reagan’s frst term a most prominent inheritors of the anti-com- The ‘imperative’ appears today merely like League afliates in Chile and Argentina few thousand members of the KKK and munist trad ition: free-market internation- an extreme form of gerrymandering. Afer were considered to have helped score maj- various ersatz militias started down a path alists, or ‘globalists’, as their enemies call years of infghting and lost lawsuits, or successes – including Pinochet’s coup that would eventually lead to serious them. The current US president’s appeal to its latter- day incarnation is the Northwest and the Dirty War. But as Burke shows, the clashes with federal authorities. In 1984, white nat ivists – the manna raining daily Front, which operates an innocuous-looking league and its ofshoots’ activities gradual- the white nationalist Robert Jay Mathews from Twitter – is in this sense hardly con- website that displays real- estate advice for ly became too radical for most of its Amer- founded Brüder Schweigen, also known as tradicted by the fact that he surrounds him- white patriots and sells the Front’s tri- ican members: too many of those involved, The Order, a group that sought to bring self with veterans of Wall Street. colour fags: ‘The sky is the blue, and the such as the Ukrainian nationalist Yaroslav down the US government. Afer robbing a land is the green. The white is for the Stetsko, open ly faunted their fascist pedi- series of banks to secure funds for the ow, then, could white nationalism people in between.’2 grees, while groups such as Tecos in Mex- cause, Mathews was killed in a shoot-out further its aims in the post- There was, however, a third option for ico, which had once been recruited by the with federal agents on in HVietnam era? One possible avenue white power activists, originating with Nazis to fght on the US-Mexico border, Washington State, though his co-conspir- was through the democratic system. In Louis Beam and William Pierce, a.k.a. waged an open campaign of terror against ators were acquitted of sedition by an all- 1984, the racialist lobbyist Andrew Macdonald, the movement’s bard. Castro-inspired rebels that included bomb- white jury. Even if we grant Belew’s point founded the Populist Party, which bundled Together they concocted the most infuen- ings, assassinations and kidnappings, all that members of the American right had together ideas of racial purity, anti-Jewish tial and enduring of the white power pro- barely countered by the Mexican security periodically risen up against the US gov- conspiracy thinking and concerns about jects. In Essays of a Klansman, published in forces. ernment, Reagan’s election was in part the money supply – in particular any kind 1983, Beam advocated an all-out race war. One of the league’s main purposes was an expression – and a vindication – of an of infationary monetary policy that might The civil rights battles, he argued, had al- to serve as a headhunting and stafng explicitly anti-government creed. So why beneft the wrong kind of poor people. ready been lost. But the best response was agency for anti-communist operations. Lieb- did elements of the paramilitary right turn The party appeared on ballot papers in 14 not to make a bid for a return to segreg- man and Singlaub – whom Reagan com- against the government during his frst states, yet Carto’s eforts amounted to little ation: that was far too moderate an ambi- mended for giving him ‘more material for term? more than a publicity vehicle for fgures tion. What was called for instead was white my speeches than anybody else’ – became Part of the answer seems to be that such as the Klansman and national liberation of the entire US main- middlemen for right-wing networks that Reagan was simply too little, too late. The Green Beret vigilante Bo Gritz. In a bout of land. The real culprit was ‘communist- channelled millions of dollars from re- most extreme wing of the radical right was white power infghting, the neo-Nazi fac- inspired racial mixing’ and the real en- spect able sources (the beer magnate Joseph already strongly critical of some of his tions of the white power movement hound- emies were the ‘white racial traitors’ who Coors was a major donor) to anti-commun- appointments, especially of ‘international- ed Carto as a swindler of right-wing funds, had allowed it to happen. Beam wanted ist causes and counter-insurgency oper at- ists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James ions around the world. Their largesse was Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger spread wide. Liebman founded the Friends was one of the few fgures in the admin- of Rhodesian Independence, which led istration to show concern about white ex- tours for US government ofcials and pro- tremism. Reagan only made matters worse fessors, while Singlaub helped fund arms by allying himself with Jewish neocon- shipments to groups like the Contras in Nic- servatives, who his far-right critics believed aragua. Special interests sometimes clash- controlled the ‘Zionist Occupation Govern- ed. In Angola, Chevron managed to forge ment’. The spectre of the ZOG had emerged an oil exploration agreement with the com- in mid-1970s American neo-Nazi literature, munist MPLA guerrillas, just as Singlaub which updated the Protocols of the Elders of and others – including a young consultant Zion for a new gener ation. It was a case called Paul Manafort – successfully lobbied of badly dashed expect ations: Reagan was to get the Reagan administration to back sur rounding himself with neoconservatives their client, Jonas Savimbi. That the US who purported to share the paramilitaries’ government would hinder American com- anti-communist passion while secretly they panies from operating in South Africa, an were scheming to divert American power to anti-communist ally, but allow them to their own cabalistic hyper-capitalism. By work with a communist regime in Angola elevating the identity-erasing power of the outraged Singlaub and his colleagues. They purely rational market place they were really soon called for a boycott of Chevron and en- instituting a form of communism under a couraged Savimbi to attack the company’s diferent name. Angolan properties. So from the vantage point of white pow- In Rhodesia, the interests of American er, the Reagan ‘revolution’ was anything white power internationalism and Amer ican but. ‘We spent ffy years trying to elect a anti-communism dramatically con verg ed. conservative and what have we got?’ Robert In 1965, Ian Smith’s white supremacist Weems, a former KKK chaplain, asked at a reg ime unilaterally declared Rhodes ian in- rally of paramilitaries in 1984. The Reagan dependence from Britain, emboldened by administration, Weems declared, doesn’t support from across the US political estab- ‘take on the international bankers and the lishment, from Dean Acheson to Bob Dole. ; they think that’s part of When Reagan, as a presidential candidate, our glorious capitalist heritage . . . They began firting with the idea of backing don’t take on the Zionists at all because white Rhodesians against Robert Mugabe’s they are the Chosen and our Number One growing insurgency, several hundred Amer- ally in the Middle East . . . [and they won’t] ican mercenaries were already fghting take any stand for the white race and its there. Congressional attempts to establish preservation either.’ The extremism of the exact number – let alone stop them – made little progress. Not-so-covert action 2 The main and most efective strategy against in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) continued white power movements has been the Southern even afer Mugabe came to power in 1980. Poverty Law Centre’s strategy of bankrupting As late as 1999, three Americans from a them with lawsuits.

7 london review of books 1 august 2019 to redirect the energies of white power as their enemy.3 At , in against those elements of the federal gov- 1992, the Vietnam veteran ernment which he believed had betrayed and his family exchanged fre with federal Have you noticed the its original constitutional mandate to pro- forces; Weaver’s wife and son were killed tect the white race. in paradigmatic displays of white martyr- Beam’s most inspired innovation was dom. During the Waco siege of 1993, fed- older you get the more his blueprint for ‘’, a eral agents stormed the compound of the model of guerrilla warfare, borrowed from Branch Davidian religious sect and 76 light you need to read? communist and anti-colonial partisans, in people were killed. Despite the sect’s lack which small cells operate in concert but of connection to the white power move- without knowing the leaders of the other ment, the siege became a rallying cause cells, removing any chance of their inform- for paramilitary groups that feared state ing on one another. The move away from overreach. bands of local vigilante groups to anonym- One television viewer galvanised by the ous, spread-out terror cells marked a ma j- Waco raid was Timothy McVeigh, then 24 or shif in the white power movement – years old. A veteran who had refecting an understanding that it was no seen sustained combat and been exposed longer operating merely in local contexts. in training to the same cyanocarbon tear Beam himself, Belew stresses, was an early gas used by ATF agents at Waco, McVeigh and ard ent adopter of the internet, making was an ideal candidate for Beam’s ‘leader- use of codeword-accessible message boards, less resistance’. In 1995, afer he bombed By the time you reach 60 pen pal programs and online advertising to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in spread the word of white power. Oklahoma City – until 9/11 the deadliest your eyes need 3 TIMES terrorist attack in US history – he was tried as much light to see f Beam was known as the ‘general’ of as a ‘lone wolf ’ killer, despite his connect- the white power movement, Pierce – ions with wider paramilitary networks, clearly as they did who had taught physics at Oregon State such as the Michigan Militia and the ‘Viper’ when you I– was the ‘strategist’. In 1978 he published militia of Arizona, and his stash of white Introducing , a novel that went on to sell power literature (he was a steady consumer were 20. half a million copies. The book purports to of right-wing ‘zines’). In his case, the tac- the Serious be the diary of a bygone racist revolution- tics of leaderless resistance paid of. In- Readers HD ary who helped to overthrow the US govern- stead of hunting down the co-conspirators ment; the civil war begins when Congress and publicising the networks, information Light. passes the ‘Cohen Act’, banning the use and material that McVeigh had relied on, of all frearms. But a small patriotic ‘org- the media in general presented him as an As you age, less light reaches the retina and it is this anisation’ eventually prevails against this isolated psychopath. tyranny. Blacks in the South are bombed But McVeigh should interest us perhaps that transmits the visual image to the brain. So whether into oblivion with nuclear weapons, the Jews more for the person he became in prison. you wear glasses or not, reading for any length of time can experience another Holocaust and women By the time of his execution, in 2001, he become a struggle without the right amount and type of light. become a servant class. The US dollar is had begun to sound like a contributor to abolished, the calendar is set back to zero Counterpunch. Here he was, cogently, in 1998: Conventional reading lights just aren’t powerful enough and the federal government goes down in If Saddam is such a demon, and people are and provide a poor quality of light. Our top of the range fames when a biplane with a sixty-kiloton calling for war crimes charges and trials warhead fies into the Pentagon. against him and his nation, why do we not High Def nition Light has been specially designed to The collapse of the in 1991 hear the same cry for blood directed at those closely mirror the same spectrum of light as daylight. presented more favourable conditions for responsible for even greater amounts of Beam and Pierce’s fantasies to be put into ‘mass destruction’ – like those responsible Because of this, the light of ers superb clarity and action. Their views were now echoed in and involved in dropping bombs on [Iraqi] cities. The truth is, the US has set the stand- colour rendition transforming your ability to read main stream culture. Pat Robertson’s best- ard when it comes to the stockpiling and use in comfort once more. selling The New World Order (1991) claimed of weapons of mass destruction. to unveil a vast Jewish-capitalist conspir acy, while Charles Murray and Rich ard Herrn- The connections between American viol- stein’s pseudoscience blockbuster, The Bell ence abroad and American violence at home Curve (1994), laboured to justify America’s seemed self-evident to McVeigh, but for racial hierarchy. In 1989, Beam had already the majority of Americans even to hint at put the question to his brethren: ‘Now that such connections remains taboo. the threat of communist takeover in the Donald Trump has been the most signi- See the is non-exist ent, who will be fcant benefciary of the hypocrisy of difference the enemy we all agree to hate?’ Highly American foreign policy as described by for yourself publicised stand-ofs in the 1990s seemed McVeigh. Before the last presidential elect- to confrm that his faction had been right ion, no other candidate, Bernie Sanders in- risk free to double down on the federal government cluded, was so savage in his reckoning of for 30 days America’s recent foreign ventures. ‘A com- 3 It has been argued by many that, since the end plete waste,’ he called the country’s longest of the Cold War, there has been a need – both on war. ‘Our troops are being killed by the the part of the US state and on that of white nat- ionalists – for a new enemy to replace commun- Afghanis we train and we waste billions Special Offer ism. Islam is ofen profered as the replacement there.’ Nor has any other president in rec- in both cases, but it has never come close to fll- ent memory capitalised more on the humil- Purchase a Serious For advice or to request a brochure ing the space lef behind by communism. Some iation of those who fght in, or traditionally Light by 22.08.19 nativist terror groups do take Muslims as their support, America’s wars. Winning for the Call Free 0800 085 1088 primary target. The Council on Islamic-Amer- & get a FREE Serious president pertains to more than trade. Compact Light worth £150. or visit seriousreaders.com/5700 ican Relations estimates that nine mosques are targeted each month in the US. Other attractive Whatever the ultimate fortunes of the QUOTE PROMOTION substitutes have included people on the south- combined forces of American reaction, the CODE 5700. WHEN ern border, as well as China. The last pages of ‘leaderless resistance’ is likely to continue. ORDERING ONLINE The Turner Diaries describe a race war in the Urals, It has rarely been clearer that those who ENTER 5700 AT where the Chinese, like the Turks before them, cheer on American interventions abroad THE CHECKOUT. attempt to conquer the West, and this time are only stopped by ‘chemical, biological and radio- should be prepared for more ferocious logical means, on an enormous scale’. nativist terror at home. c

8 london review of books 1 august 2019