April 16, 2014 - Recently, the Veteran community has been forced to fight back on a disturbing narrative: Veterans are dangerous, violent people that society should be wary of. It doesn’t take much for some media outlets to push this agenda either. It seems all they need is one person, who happened to serve in the military at any time, to commit a heinous act, and the sensationalist headlines driving high ratings start pouring in.
Today, The Opinion Pages of the New York Times posted a story by Kathleen Belew that claims “the return of [Veterans] from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor,” and linked the murder of three innocent people in Kansas by one man to a generation of Vietnam Veterans.
Even though she admits “the number of Vietnam [Veterans] in that movement was small” and “a vast majority of veterans are neither violent nor mentally ill” she continues disparaging Veterans in general. Ms. Belew interprets information from a nine-page Department of Homeland Security report, which essentially connects extremist views to disillusionment and warns that people who feel ostracized by society can be susceptible to recruitment by radical groups (something we see in other aspects of society), and uses it to promote her view that Veterans are inherently volatile due to their military service and have contributed to the growth of white-supremacist groups in the United States.
Of course hate groups with paramilitary ambitions seek out those with military experience to swell their ranks. I suppose it’s also worthy to mention that large corporations seek out IRS trained accountants to help them with taxes, or political lobbying firms recruit former government executives to help them pass legislation.
The question that Ms. Belew doesn’t ask is why these Veterans felt disillusioned in the first place, and were vulnerable to predatory recruitment. She ignores the social climate around them at the time of their return. She’s been studying these radical groups since 2006, but as a historian she should have dug deeper to find the root cause of this anomaly. Instead she opted for an alarming story.
Imagine, for a second, if she had done the same thing to any other group of people. What would that look like? read more>>>
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