Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is an unquestionably powerful, well-researched and must-read addition to the post-2016 upsurge in analysis and investigation of the foundations of modern fascism. Anyone seeking to understand the origins of the modern far right in the US should include this work at the top of their reading list.

The backbone of Belew’s argument is that the roots of the modern white power movement, as it is understood today, can be found in a myth that emerged in the US right in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. This story claims the US lost the war because of betrayal at home by incompetent, unpatriotic politicians, as well as the “traitorous” antiwar movement which was widely claimed to be riddled with communist agents. This narrative eerily parallels the claims made by German fascists to explain defeat in the First World War, which adherents to this myth used to scapegoat Jews and leftist Germans, and recruit disaffected veterans to their cause. This argument is not new, having been previously suggested in Alexander Reid Ross’s Against the Fascist Creep and other anti-fascist works.

But what sets Belew’s work apart from previous discussions of this theory is how […]