[Peace-discuss] NYT op-ed on shootings etc.

[David Green]

I read this historian's book a couple of times earlier this year, perplexed
by her recognition that "the war comes home" but her lack of clear
recognition that our warmaking and USFP are problematic for that reason.
Thus, it's all about white nationalism. Her description of Ruby Ridge
places no responsibility on our government's (FBI) aggressive policies. She
had no particular critique of the FBI's criminal behavior at Waco, where
many non-whites were killed by the government. Thus, her understanding of
Timothy McVeigh is lacking; not that such an understanding serves in any
way to excuse his crime. I fear that the foundational emphasis on white
nationalism betrays a lack of analytical integrity, similar to the manner
in which anti-semitism is used. While U.S. warmaking and general gun
culture provide the context for mass shootings, not to mention the entire
neoliberal disaster, our mainstream media and historians such as Belew seem
much more fascinated by the perversities of ideology. That's how you make a
name for yourself as an establishment historian in this political context,
and get yourself published in the NYT.


*The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism*

Attacks like that in El Paso are not an end in themselves. They are a call
to arms, toward something much more frightening.

By Kathleen Belew

Dr. Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement
and Paramilitary America.”

Aug. 4, 2019

Like a number of recent mass shootings, the one in El Paso on Saturday came
with a manifesto. While authorities are still working to verify that this
document explicitly was indeed written by the attacker, the evidence seems
clear: It was posted to 8Chan minutes before the attack, by someone with
the same name.

By manifesto, I mean a document laying out political and ideological
reasons for the violence and connecting it to other acts of violence. We’re
familiar with those. We can recite them. And yet our society still lacks a
fundamental understanding of the nature of this violence and what it means.

Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than
interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too
much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or
anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also
connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.

Likewise, too many people think that such shootings are the goal of fringe
activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much larger slaughter
by “awakening” other people to join the movement.

The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the attacker into the
mainstream of the white power movement, which came together after the
Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists. That
movement, comparable in size to the much better known John Birch Society,
never faced a major prosecution or crackdown that hobbled its activity. As
a result, it was able to sink deep roots into society, largely under the
radar of most Americans.

This movement is often called white nationalist, but too many people
misunderstand that moniker as simply overzealous patriotism, or as
promoting whiteness within the nation. But the nation at the heart of white
nationalism is not the United States. It is the Aryan nation, imagined as a
transnational white polity with interests fundamentally opposed to the
United States and, for many activists, bent on the overthrow of the federal
government.

The white power movement imagines race war, incited by mass violence among
other strategies. The core texts of this movement, like “The Turner
Diaries” or “Camp of the Saints,” aren’t just quaint novels, but rather
provide a road map to how such violence could succeed. To call them manuals
is too simplistic: They provide the collective ideas and vision by which a
fringe movement can attempt a violent confrontation that could lead to race
war.

These ideas run from the earlier period directly into today’s manifestos.
Dylann Roof’s document discussed his desire to provoke race war. The
Christchurch manifesto used images and phrases from the earlier movement.
In the El Paso manifesto, the anti-immigrant rhetoric is thoroughly
ensconced in other white power ideas.

To be sure, mass attackers today have a new set of coded phrases, such as
“replacement,” as a code for racial annihilation through intermarriage,
immigration and demographic change. But the idea of that threat has been
central to white power activism for decades.

To people in this movement, the impending demographic change understood by
many commentators as a soft transformation — the moment when a town, a
county, or a nation will no longer be majority-white — isn’t soft at all,
but rather represents an apocalyptic threat.

In a decade of studying white power movement activism, I have learned that
much of this follows a strategy. First, it claims a state of emergency and
gives a rationale for the act of violence.

But critically, it also issues a call to action for others. The El Paso
manifesto does so overtly, and offers tactical details about the attacker’s
weapons, meant to instruct others. It has specific advice about how to
choose targets. It has paragraphs that give rote gesture to not being white
supremacist, even as the document invokes phrase after phrase, ideological
marker after ideological marker, of the white power movement. These are all
markers of the genre.

As horrible as the El Paso attack was, this movement is capable of even
larger-scale violence. The Oklahoma City bombing, its most horrific act to
date, was the largest mass murder on American soil between Pearl Harbor and
9/11. Not only do we still lack a widespread understanding of that bombing
as an act of political violence, but we fail to reckon with the many
activists that create shrines to Timothy McVeigh and hope to follow in his
footsteps.

The history of the white power movement shows us that what seems new in El
Paso is not new at all. This movement is not newly dangerous because of
social media; it has been using the internet and its precursors in
precisely this way since 1984.

Neither is this movement newly anti-immigrant, despite the current politics
that have inflamed anti-immigrant fervor. White power activists have been
mapping white homelands and attempting migrations to and defense of those
spaces for decades.

What is new here is the widespread effectiveness of these actions, the
technologies of killing that increase the body count and the frequency of
mass violence.

It is not enough to dismiss mass shootings as horror beyond our
comprehension. It is our duty to understand their meaning and confront the
movement that relies upon them.

Kathleen Belew is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and
the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and
Paramilitary America.”
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