Editing Belew 2018 (section)

==Chapter 1: "The Vietnam War Story"==

'''Vietnam Veterans'''
*Louis Beam returned home from Vietnam, accounting for the killings of twelve to fifty-one "communists" in 1968.
*Beam logged more than a thousand hours shooting at the enemy and transporting his fellow soldiers during the eighteen months he spent in Vietnam
**Weaponizing his story from the war allowed him to spark a white power revolution by militarizing the renewed Ku Klux Klan.
*The war served to polarize political groups on both ends of the spectrum as veterans entered critical roles in organizing politics and culture.
*Beam pushed forth a story about government betrayal, soldiers left behind, and a nation that would never value his sacrifice.  
**Veterans within the white power movement thus signify a larger narrative regarding their claims on society and the aftermath of war.

'''Postwar Attitudes'''
*Resurgences for the Ku Klux Klan occur more in tandem with post-war effects than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism.
*The cooperation of veterans and civilian Klan members amounted to an overspill of state violence from the war into the threads of American culture, society, and politics.
*Veterans who joined the Klan after the war played instrumental roles in leadership, providing military training to other klansmen and carrying out acts of violence.
*War narratives that pushed an understanding of betrayal by the government and suffering laid the foundations of activism for white power. 
*People felt disenchanted from failures to achieve decisive victories after the extensive use of soldiers, bombs, and money. 
*Vietnam differed from other wars in its normal and frequent engagement with civilian violence, mutilation, sexual violence, and other crimes. 
*Defeat served to challenge the image of the American soldier, questioned the global political order, and intensified anti-communist sentiment.
*Vietnam Veterans Against the War lead anti-war demonstrations, denounced the war, and moved to provided assistance to those who had suffered physical effects from exposure to chemicals during the war
**During this period veteran groups such as prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) gained major political lobbying power. 
**Veterans who formed part of the white power movement used the Vietnam war to anti-government sentiment by telling stories of war soldiers who had met gruesome injury and death, faced hardship, insects, abandonment, rot, and disease.
**Many American soldiers who came home after the war were spat on and called baby killers. Their service was not appreciated and those that were left behind as prisoners of war were abandoned and forgotten. The ones who came home were denied homecoming parades and their place in public memory. 
**The Vietnam war story served a vital role in the white power movement although many things that were said regarding the war were contested
'''Reactions on the Home Front'''
*Martha Rosler made the series "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home," which combined war violence with suburban domestic spaces to highlight the dissonance between warfare and those calling for war from home.
*Other veterans led anti-war demonstrations and mobilized for better treatment of veterans suffering physical, psychological, and political detriments. 
*Mass attention shifted to veterans' poor treatment by society after returning home, further painting a narrative of betrayal and corruption by the American government.

'''Impact on White Power'''
*The war engendered a culture that became symbolically iconic for men to reference as a driving political narrative.
**Many who joined the white power movement but had not been directly involved with military service had gotten close to enlisting or had an intense interest in the military but had not enlisted because of frustration with how the war was unfolding.
*Many activists who came out of it pivoted to racist activities and activism for white power following their perception of betrayals by the government and adherence to a potent political rhetoric.
*Over a thousand occurrences of racial violence were recorded by 1970 both abroad and in the United States. 
*Military service could provide soldiers opportunity to work with diverse people, but nevertheless reinforced racist sentiment and laid the groundwork for racial violence.
*Rhetoric dehumanizing the Vietnamese resurged in white power groups at home.
*Anti-war protest contributed to a changing perception of the Vietnam war as one of shame and dishonor. This was supported by increasing media coverage and knowledge of wartime atrocities by American soldiers, flipping the narrative to be against war as a whole.

'''Beam's Writing'''
*Beam consistently called for violent infliction on civilians at home as a response to the government's abandonment of soldiers in Vietnam.
*His writing reflects a tension between a man wrestling with the violence of war and a leader of the white power revolution inciting further violence. 
*He claimed the war continued on long after its end, even as the rules and political landscape had evolved. He called for the violent murder of everyone that had sent soldiers to Vietnam, which appealed to greater audiences of the white power movement.