The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression

by Tariq D. Khan

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.

407 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 5, 2023

Reviews

[Lorelei O'Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spotlight on uncovered history. Very specific and important links between anti communism and the anti labor movement directly evolving from the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Indigenous peoples on the frontier, what are now the Midwest states. So much of our history is is compartmentalized and decontextualized. This book is an incredible work of reorienting how policing evolved from armed white settlers, how they perceived the Indigenous governance as too democratic and communal, arriving at labeling it communism, and how those people and forces turned their attention to fight early labor unions, for similar reasons. We desperately need more understanding of where our institutions’ ideologies stem, and the roots of the violence, and fear.