Revolutionaries of the Right: Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Violence in the Cold War by Kyle Burke (review)

The presidency of Donald Trump has focused considerable attention on the rise and mainstreaming of the far right in the United States. Many historians view its emergence as a domestic phenomenon embedded in reaction to the New Deal and the labor, civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements of the latter half of the 20th century. Kyle Burke argues that such explanations are incomplete. In Revolutionaries of the Right, he documents the transnational dimensions of the far right and explores how U.S. conservatives forged ties to anti-Communist forces abroad during the Cold War. These connections shaped how they viewed both foreign and domestic events. Driven by the belief that indecisive members of Congress, out-of-touch intelligence agencies, and weak-kneed liberals impeded the U.S. government’s ability to defeat Communism, a mosaic of far-right groups and individuals advocated for private money, private groups, and mercenaries to fill the void. Although the enemy that united them disappeared with the end of the Cold War, their legacy continues to shape the present.

Revolutionaries of the Right explores the growth of the extreme right—what Burke calls the “anticommunist international”—during the Cold War. The book focuses on far-right U.S. citizens—wealthy conservative activists, retired military personnel and intelligence officers, and mercenaries—and their collaboration with like-minded individuals and movements abroad, from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America to Southern Africa and the Middle East. The book opens in the 1950s, during the early Cold War, and proceeds through the anti-Communist campaigns directed at Eastern Europe, which were primarily propagandistic, to later support for paramilitaries in Southern Africa, Central America, and Afghanistan. Throughout the narrative, Burke introduces the reader to a variety of individuals and organizations that played key roles in knitting together a transnational movement. The World Anti-Communist League acted as a clearing house for private funds and drew in members from around the world, and the magazine Soldier of Fortune marketed the mercenary life to readers, sponsored conventions and camps for soldiers-for-hire, and ran anonymous advertisements from aspiring mercenaries who sought wealth and adventure overseas.

Retired Major-General John Singlaub, a 30-year veteran of U.S. special operations, supported far-right causes for many years during the Cold War. Angolan paramilitary leader Jonas Savimbi, Salvadoran death squad organizer Roberto d’Aubuisson, columnist William Buckley, and Soldier of Fortune editor Robert Brown are some of the more prominent individuals in Burke’s anti-Communist international. Burke argues convincingly that the rise of the far right was less a conspiracy than a mobilization that must be understood within the global Cold War context and the historical processes that facilitated connections between heterogenous rightwing groups and individuals during a period of intensive conflict and social transformation. Members of these shadowy networks, especially in the United States, believed that the U.S. government was failing in its mission to fight Communism. Some even felt betrayed by it. All were convinced that the private sector could do a better job. By the late Cold War, they had turned to paramilitary warfare as the primary means of overthrowing pro-Soviet governments. Paramilitarism was a style of combat that aimed to beat leftwing guerrillas at their own game, embodying a toxic masculinity that glorified heroism, individualism, daring, and toughness and came packaged in beliefs about the virtues of free markets and privatization.

Yet, as Burke makes clear, these webs of far-right warriors were never as removed from the state as their most articulate representatives liked to claim. The book documents the numerous linkages—direct and indirect—between them and state officials in the United States and abroad. Close ties to state security forces enabled paramilitaries and their supporters around the world to carry out the most despicable acts of dirty war with impunity. State security forces, in turn, could...