Book review: Beat back the white supremacists

In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew exposes the broad, coordinated nature of the U.S. gutter racist and fascist “white power” movement and its responsibility for many killings by so-called “lone wolves.” The white supremacist movement itself is a loose collection of many racist, nationalist and anti-communist groups from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to neo-Nazis to militias and is a part of how U.S. capitalism maintains control over the working class through racism.
Federal agencies in the U.S. have long known of the white supremacist movement’s mass base, but they have not responded proportionately. Although Belew sees violent fascism as a consequence of a violent U.S. foreign policy, she does not consider that the growth of extreme racism is useful to the ruling class or contrast their undersized response with the aggressive targeting of foreign-inspired terrorism and antiracists.
She also does not discuss anti-racist opposition to white supremacists, much of which has been led by the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for decades all over the country. Communists fight to unite the entire working class to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system and build a communist world, run by the international working class. This proudly makes the communist PLP the sworn enemy of racists everywhere!
History of white supremacists
While gutter racist mass movements have been nurtured by the U.S. ruling class since the 1860s U.S. Civil War, the latest surge in racist activism began after the 1960s Vietnam War. Some veterans resented racial integration in the army and bought the U.S. government lies about fighting communism. The post-Vietnam racists built paramilitary camps in nine states and launched many attacks, while suffering few arrests or convictions. In 1979, they killed five leftist anti-KKK demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, while the cops did nothing. Belew attributes this only to poor command and miscommunications.
By 1993, white supremacist groups unified and started getting out of the U.S. government’s control, declaring their goal of eventually seizing the government for themselves. They began to counterfeit and steal money and encouraged attacks on infrastructure and the assassination of federal agents and judges. Tactically, they developed a terrorist model of small leaderless cells of one to five persons, with communications through print media and the internet.
When the increasingly militarized U.S. police of the 90s attacked two white supremacist centers with tactics previously limited to poor Black communities, and killed women and children, the racists had another surge in membership. One recruit was a terrorist named Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people. Belew fails to consider that extreme racism has a value in this nation birthed in slavery and still home to massive racial discrimination.
The U.S. depends on racism to keep workers divided and save trillions on lower wages and social spending in non-white communities, which in turn lowers standards for all workers. Not only do these extremists help keep racist ideas and practices alive, but they allow the more liberal politicians to be mildly critical and so appear less racist themselves. And, while the history presented by Belew is important, the author fails to contrast this picture of a growing white supremacist movement only occasionally facing police opposition with the intense police efforts to infiltrate and control antiracist and leftist organizing.
In 1967, the FBI Counterintelligence Program began COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE, which focused on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and many antiracist groups with Black workers. The FBI’s Ghetto Informant Program disrupted or discredited similar antiracist organizations, and similar programs still exist today.
What of the antiracist opposition?
There have been many instances of successful antiracist actions against white supremacist groups, many led by PLP. Throughout the 1970s until today, among many confrontations, PLP has invaded the Nazi headquarters in Chicago, disrupted racist radio broadcasts in Kansas City and KKK demonstrations in Texas. We smashed the Klan in Boston, stood up against armed Klansmen in Mississippi, and infiltrated and attacked the racists in downtown New York City and Morristown, New Jersey, among a proud and militant history of other actions. Klan leader Bill Wilkerson even declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement.
Yet if law enforcement is present at white supremacist events, those injured or arrested are more likely to be antiracists than racists. This was the case in 2016, when PLP demonstrators were injured and arrested in Anaheim, California while knife-wielding racists went free.  In 2017, a massive group of racists was met by an even larger group of protestors in Charlottesville, and the police did little. One racist was convicted later for killing a white woman anti-racist, an act too despicable to be ignored.
The ruling class needs racists
Although the fascist right accounts for 73 percent of extremist murders, they are rarely labeled hate crimes or terrorism; unlike how the racist capitalist media regularly portrays Muslim workers. Trump has rescinded grants to organizations countering white supremacy, and the Department of Homeland Security has disbanded its analyst group on domestic terrorism.
Now that the U.S. is closer to fascism, the President can openly embrace racist thugs. Even if liberal Democrats win the presidency in 2020, the history of all politicians, even Black ones, should not give us hope that violent racists will be made to account. Only by building multiracial relationships and struggles ourselves and vigorously opposing the ideas and actions of white supremacy and nationalism can we defeat racist divisions and violence. Only by making a communist revolution can we guarantee that racism will be eliminated once and for all!