Kathleen Belew

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

From her interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So in your work, what strikes me as the sort of most important point that we should understand is that these [white supremacist mass murders at El Paso, Oklahoma City and elsewhere] are not isolated attacks by loners who are motivated by a particular animus against a particular group. But there is something broader tying it all together.

BELEW: Absolutely. The movement that I study is called the white power movement. It's a group of Neo-Nazis, skinhead, Klansmen and other perpetrators that came together in the '70s and early 1980s, and beginning in the early '80s began to use a strategy called leaderless resistance. Now that strategy is essentially what we think of today as cell-style terror or the idea that people are working in small groups without communication with other small groups and without direct orders from movement leadership.

And while that strategy was implemented to sort of stymy prosecution, the larger legacy has been to stymy public understanding of this as a social movement, such that we don't connect these acts of violence into one common story.

ZAKARIA: And what is animating them? What is it that they are reacting to? What is it that they fear?

BELEW: So white power activists understand a whole nexus of issues, such as immigration, abortion, racial integration and other issues as being fundamentally about threats to white reproduction. And what I mean by that is in order to sort of continue a majority white nation, these activists believe they have to...[read on]

Visit Kathleen Belew's website.

--Marshal Zeringue