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The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression
The long relationship between America’s colonizing wars and virulent anticommunism The colonizing wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Tariq D. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonizing wars to repress anarchists, labor unions, and a host of others labeled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practiced counterinsurgency rhetoric and tactics against the movements they perceived and vilified as “anarchist.” Original and boldly argued, The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean offers an enlightening new history with relevance for our own time.
272 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 12, 2024
A very comprehensive analysis of American anti labor movements and it's tie to the native American genocide. Kahn proves that each wave of anti anarchist "red scares" are really just a continuation of the American founding mythology of "manifest destiny." It is a profoundly enlightening and depressing book that every member of the working class should read.
June 18, 2024
A fascinating read on how right wing vigilantism against Native Americans and people of color feeds into right wing vigilantism against Anarchists/Communists/labor unionists which feeds into government systemized policing against all of those groups into today.
July 27, 2024
The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean is written by leftist author Tariq D. Khan, who immediately claims intersectionality: “This study rejects both a class reductionist and a race reductionist approach to US history. It recognizes that race and class are not separate categories, but are thoroughly entwined, as global capitalism, racial notions, and empire developed together, as part of the same whole,” (p. 11). Accordingly, Khan situates himself in the line of thought on “racial capitalism” by Frantz Fanon, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and Charisse Burden-Stelly (pp. 11–12, 154). However, in providing examples of racial capitalist and intersectional thought, he contributes to political homogenization he acknowledges is counterproductive, markedly cherry-picking examples of queer and feminist anarchists when plenty were queerphobic and misogynist. Additionally, his characterization of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai as “a socialist and an anti-imperialist” who “the liberal establishment turned into a symbol of Western liberalism” (p. 28) aged poorly with the 2024 broadway musical she co-produced with Hillary Clinton. However, the epilogue, where these issues would likely repeat, was good.
The material contained within the book is succinctly conveyed in its title and cover. The former is a quote from Coloradan congressman William Vaile celebrating the December 1919 Palmer Raids: “the Republic shall be kept clean and in its cleanliness shall endure,” (p. 65). The latter is an illustration originally published in the article “The Modern Madusa” of Punch, or the London Charivari by wood engraver Joseph Swain in December 1893 (pp. 48–49); it reflects the era’s common dehumanization of anarchists, specifically anarchist women as “Medusas”, “squaws”, “savages”, and “anarchist queens”. Khan’s thesis is centered around these discursive translations, best summarized as: "What better racial template for organized labor than a race that whites characterized as incapable of submitting to management? What better template for anarchists than a race that, in white imagination, was incapable of government? In white imagination, Indigenous peoples and anarchists both rejected the state. The nation’s leading Indian haters became the nation’s first outspoken anti-anarchists, and the language of Indian hating became the language of anticommunism. This is not to say that anticommunism replaced anti-Indigeneity or that anarchists became the “new Indians.” Indian hating and US anti-Indigenous policies and practices never disappeared, continuing unabated even into the present. This is to say that anti-Indigeneity and settler colonial ideology and culture were so pervasive and so formative to US institutions, politics, and culture that they informed and shaped internal political repression even when that repression targeted non-Indigenous groups and social movements," (p. 90).
The material contained within the book is succinctly conveyed in its title and cover. The former is a quote from Coloradan congressman William Vaile celebrating the December 1919 Palmer Raids: “the Republic shall be kept clean and in its cleanliness shall endure,” (p. 65). The latter is an illustration originally published in the article “The Modern Madusa” of Punch, or the London Charivari by wood engraver Joseph Swain in December 1893 (pp. 48–49); it reflects the era’s common dehumanization of anarchists, specifically anarchist women as “Medusas”, “squaws”, “savages”, and “anarchist queens”. Khan’s thesis is centered around these discursive translations, best summarized as: "What better racial template for organized labor than a race that whites characterized as incapable of submitting to management? What better template for anarchists than a race that, in white imagination, was incapable of government? In white imagination, Indigenous peoples and anarchists both rejected the state. The nation’s leading Indian haters became the nation’s first outspoken anti-anarchists, and the language of Indian hating became the language of anticommunism. This is not to say that anticommunism replaced anti-Indigeneity or that anarchists became the “new Indians.” Indian hating and US anti-Indigenous policies and practices never disappeared, continuing unabated even into the present. This is to say that anti-Indigeneity and settler colonial ideology and culture were so pervasive and so formative to US institutions, politics, and culture that they informed and shaped internal political repression even when that repression targeted non-Indigenous groups and social movements," (p. 90).
June 26, 2025
Riveting exploration of the ways settler colonial rhetoric and tactics were directly implicated in the political repression and demonization of the American left from the late 19th century to the early 20th
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews