Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

After a meeting among white power factions in Hayden Lake, Idaho, in July 1983, the movement held a World Congress and decided to wage war on the US government, and to adopt a strategy of “leaderless resistance” whereby a vast network of semi-autonomous cells would operate independently of one another to confuse and misdirect federal surveillance and prosecution. In the past, white supremacist groups such as the Klan had worked closely with state and local authorities to terrorize Black political activists and their white allies, although this put them at odds with the federal government. Now, the movement would directly wage war upon that government. Beam declared that the communist threat was dead, replaced by the prospect of federal tyranny, but since the war effort was composed of many small cells (he envisioned as many as 600), they would need some connective tissue even as they worked mostly independently. One critical source of unity was The Turner Diaries, a novel doubling as a “how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war” (110). It records the work of Earl Turner in joining an all-out terrorist campaign against a Jewish-dominated US government, precipitating a nuclear war, the establishment of an all-white homeland in California, and the eventual eradication of all non-white peoples.