Kathleen Belew: "Who would want war at home? They want it!"

She carries her home in her WhatsApp photo. The house, or her childhood. The thing is, she has a selfie where you can see, in the background, the place where she grew up, a suburb of Denver, in Colorado. Today she lives a 15-hour drive from that photograph, in Chicago, where she teaches history at Northwestern University and where she has established herself as one of the great experts on the white power movement. Her book Bring the War Home (Capitán Swing) was in the proofreading phase when a white supremacist rally caused serious incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those racist slogans have returned to occupy the political center and the book is a good example to understand who these groups are and how they hope to shape the United States.

You say that white power has its origins in Vietnam. Why?

— Because a great cultural history was generated of how the soldiers were betrayed by the government. We could argue a lot about the arguments they used, but what is important is that it is not necessary for what they said to be true, but rather that it allowed them to deploy the narrative of how white people had to unite against the government and thus attract people to their movement.

The key, therefore, is resentment?

— And also the large number of paramilitary opportunities that existed. That is to say: training, weapons of war… they even wore Vietnamese-style uniforms while they carried out their actions.

Tell us about Lewis Beam.

— He was a soldier in Vietnam, and he was already involved in white supremacism before going there, but it seems that the war was a very traumatic experience. And upon returning he joined the Ku Klux Klan, got involved in the harassment of Vietnamese refugees in Texas and ended up becoming a kind of leader of the movement. But he is important to history because he was the author of an essay titled Leaderless Resistance which explains a way of operating that has had a great impact on the white power movement.

What does it mean?

— It is what we would now call cell-style terrorism. The idea was for activists to work towards common goals but without direct communication, because this way they avoided problems if investigators decided to infiltrate the movement.

I think about the shooting against Latinos in El Paso, or against African Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo…

— Or to the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh. They are perpetrated by people who have the same manifestos, write the same things on their weapons, share information about target selection. But we explain them as isolated events, when in reality it is a coordinated social movement. And that has limited our social response, because it did not seem that there were so many of them or that they had coordination among themselves.

You say that the Oklahoma bombing –the most serious in the USA until September 11, 2001– was explained as the work of a lone wolf, and it was not like that.

— I think the most important thing to understand is that the lone wolf is a deliberate strategy that this movement invented to go unnoticed, and when we use the term lone wolf, or we do not connect these acts of violence, we are helping them achieve what they wanted to do.

But you talk about the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, militiamen, radical anti-tax protesters… What do they all have in common?

— It is a diverse movement in every sense, except in race. And they are united by a sense of emergency. They have built a kind of apocalyptic story. They consider that the white race is being attacked and threatened with extinction. You can see today how they speak about immigrants, as if they were overrunning the white race and destroying the country. Many of them believe that if they do not cleanse the world of non-white people, Christ will not be able to return in the apocalyptic end of days. So it is an ideological battle, but for many it is also theological.

But why would anyone want war at home?

— There are two important things. One, the men who fought in Vietnam and those who adopt their history find it unfair that they have experienced this betrayal by the state and the people back home have not. It is about equalizing the betrayal of the state. And two, they seek a race war to provoke the collapse of American society and then create an all-white nation. This comes from a book called The Turner Diaries. I ask, please, that you do not buy it, because the money goes to these groups.

We will not buy it, but tell us what it says.

— It is an apocalyptic novel that imagines how a splinter group can bring down the superstate that is the United States: they expose a kind of cell-based terrorism to achieve it. It is interesting how they imagine the world once they have succeeded. After a genocide across the entire planet, they have created a refuge for the white race. Who would want war at home? Well, they want it. In the Oklahoma City bombing, they accepted the death of 19 white children in a daycare center as collateral damage. Because they understand that we are in a state of emergency and the racial apocalypse is imminent.

But why is the threat the migrant, who is often poorer and disadvantaged?

— I think it helps to study how they have constructed and spread the idea of the great replacement, the risk of being demographically overtaken, not as an abstract change but as an emerging criminal change. And this extends the idea that the existing culture cannot hold up if all these new people enter. And I think many people share these concerns in a way much less…

...without being openly racist?

— Exactly. What happens to a democracy if a large population of people who do not share these values is added to it? These are real and legitimate questions. But this ideology takes these questions, imbues them with apocalyptic-level emergency rhetoric, and then arms people to create radical change. And I believe that once people get into it, it is very difficult for them to get out.

In the post-Vietnam years they were against the government… And now?

— They turned violent in the eighties because they believed that the government could never give them what they wanted and the door to conventional politics was closed. This is no longer true. There are white power activists who are elected as public officials. And we have an administration that does not want to investigate this power, so we do not know what is happening. For example: we do not have public lists of the members who are tasked with law enforcement for ICE arrests in the United States. But it is almost certain that many white power activists now receive money to carry out violence that they used to do for free. There is no need to go underground to carry out a revolution if you can do it in the public eye as part of a political movement.

What relationship does this movement have with Donald Trump?

— At the very least, he is welcoming these actors into his political coalition. What we have seen, regarding the enforcement of immigration law, has followed exactly the white power movement's playbook. He has supported the white power movement. He has elevated its activists. He has allowed white power policies to exist.

Why did you decide to write this book?

— No one had linked these groups in a single story. When I discovered it was a social movement and that they were so deeply interconnected, it seemed important to document it so that we would understand that there was a continuous threat. And it has taken shape after the book was published. Today it is a movement that is shaping our political life.