The book entitled Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew features the white power movement in the USA and shows how this movement was born out of people’s grievances in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. While the movement is radical and uses violence to achieve its aims, people readily condemn it. However, they fail to trace its connection to the Vietnamese war that taught people cruelty, out of which the ideas of white supremacy were born. The author reflects on the unwanted consequences of any war and claims that wars cannot be finished as quickly as they are started. The author hypostatizes that, once unleashed, the war sets the cycle of violence that sooner or later comes to one’s own home to destroy the peaceful lives of people who believe the war will never touch them.
Kathleen Belew is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago who analyzed many documents and letters to determine the effect of war on people’s beliefs and values. The author’s background helped her to make the book highly credible due to the number of sources and evidence she used. All the statements she makes are well grounded in the research and rich in details, such as can only be gotten from historical documents. The author claims that the war cannot be finished at will, and its aftermath, such as a significant increase in cruelty, criminal practices, and weapons trafficking, is to beset a country that lets its citizens take part in military actions. Thus, the author says, “War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected” (p. 5). Therefore, people who do not want to have a war on their territory should not engage in military actions elsewhere.
In Bring the War Home, Belew features how the white supremacy movement consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s when the veterans of the Vietnam War felt cheated by the government that, in their opinion, failed to let them be winners. The so-called’ justice’ movement was born from this grievance, combined with cruel practices that soldiers and officers adopted during the war. While popular opinion holds that criminal acts committed by white men in those years were acts committed by individuals, Belew shows the organization that stood behind each act of terror. Leaderless as it was, it still had “organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations” (Belew, p. 17). Thus, every individual or small criminal cell was guided and organized by the program of Leaderless resistance that instilled people’s minds with the ‘right’ course of action. This point proves that those people who took part in the Vietnam War did manage to act as a cohesive whole and bring terror to their territory in an unending cycle of death and violence unleashed by the war.
Belew’s other argument to prove her point is the utter individualism that reigned within the Leaderless resistance. Thus, the author says, “You are the organization. You alone. You with others. It all begins with you. You are the keystone, the nucleus and intersecting point in the web” (p. 39). Indeed, war veterans were not connected by any special bonds; however, they all had the experience of taking part in military actions, grievances, and disappointment the war brought. Therefore, individual violent actions were the only possible way to unleash one’s frustration on one’s country. At the same time, it was the best option to ensure that the war was not ended and extended to territories previously considered safe from violent actions.
Finally, Belew shows how the violence brought by the war penetrates society, ensuring the violent cycle is never ended. The author underlines that the white supremacy movement cannot be seen as isolated from society, and its ideas of violence and hostility penetrate all realms of social life. Thus, Belew says that “white power should be recognized as something broader than the Klan, encompassing a wider range of ideologies and operating simultaneously in public and underground” (p.48). Moreover, it seriously impacts mainstream society, instilling ideas of racial supremacy, intolerance, and violence as a way to problem resolution.
While the analysis is rich in detail and credible in showing how war is transferred into one’s territory, it lacks an understanding of what can be done not to let it happen. Though it is generally believed that war veterans need rehabilitation programs and various supportive measures to get used to the peaceful way of life around them, the author does not provide details on whether these measures can help stop the cycle of violence. Moreover, though the author speaks on the impact of the white supremacy movement on society, she does not cover the reverse influence the community has on war veterans’ outlooks and values.
Providing rich detail on the process of formation of the supreme white movement and its impact on social life in the afterwar US, Belew shows how the lives of ordinary people can be transformed by the echoes of war waged thousands of miles away from their homes. The author sees war as a never-ending cycle that unleashes violence that cannot be contained within certain borders or limits and is sure to affect everyone directly or indirectly involved in military actions. In a complex mix of individualism with an underlying leaderless structure, violence takes root in people’s minds and penetrates the society that believes itself to be free of it.
Work Cited
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home. Harvard University Press, 2018.