"Like We're at War with a Foreign Nation" - How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Anti-Left Repression with Tariq Khan
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 04/19/2025
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
This is part two of a two-part episode. This part of the conversation deals more with the actions that led to Mann's political imprisoment and his experiences as a political prisoner. In this two-part episode, we are joined by special cohost PM, and we speak with veteran civil rights organizer Eric Mann about his journey from his upbringing in New York to his involvement in political struggles during the 1960s. Mann discusses his early influences, including his parents' activism. He reflects on his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...
info_outlineMillennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this two-part episode, we are joined by special cohost PM, and we speak with veteran civil rights organizer Eric Mann about his journey from his upbringing in New York to his involvement in political struggles during the 1960s. Mann discusses his early influences, including his parents' activism. He reflects on his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), highlighting key campaigns such as the Trailways boycott and the 1968 Columbia University student strike. Mann also recounts his time as a political prisoner, offering...
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In this conversation we talk with Garrett Felber about their latest book . In discussing this new political biography, we cover Sostre’s ideological and political journey, history as a jailhouse lawyer, his forms of organizing practice, and the ways that people supported his campaign for freedom from political imprisonment. We talk about the influence of Great Depression era Harlem, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, national liberation movements, armed struggle, Women’s Liberation, and Anarchism on Sostre’s political thought and practice. Although much of what...
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This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Tariq Khan on his book . In of the conversation we laid out many of the general dynamics between anti-indigenous settler colonial violence in the 19th Century and the development of the earliest iterations of anticommunism in the so-called United States, long before McCarthyism or even what’s recognized by historians as the first Red Scare. In this conversation we talk about some of the legal precedents that the Trump administration has dusted off for some of his attempts to remove or exclude people for political views. Because...
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In this episode, we speak with Edward Ongweso Jr about "artificial intelligence" and its implications, particularly concerning corporate interests and historical parallels with labor control. Edward critiques the term “artificial intelligence” for obscuring the underlying digital technologies and algorithmic systems that serve corporate agendas, emphasizing the narrow view of intelligence that excludes human cognitive elements. The conversation delves into the historical roots of computation, drawing parallels between modern AI and 19th-century plantation management techniques aimed at...
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In this episode, we speak with Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III about the increasingly repressive conditions on university campuses, particularly in the context of Columbia University's caving in to federal pressures under the thumb of Trump’s administration. We explore the broader implications of these concessions at the expense of liberalized notions of intellectual and academic freedom, student activism, and the role of universities as sites of political struggle. Dr. Davis highlights the historical and ongoing repression of student activism, particularly pro-Palestinian movements, and...
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In this episode we interview Tariq Khan on his book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. We’ll be releasing this conversation as a two part episode on this excellent book which studies how anticommunism within the US is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism, anti-indigenous thought, and genocidal violence. This helps us to reframe our often twentieth century centric view of anti-left repression in the US. Khan’s work on the 19th century in particular also helps us to see the ways things like race science, eugenics, and...
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In this episode, we speak with Khadijah Haynes about her recent piece, "A Fetus on the Dirt Road” which offers a sharp critique of Western feminism's complicity in imperialism and its historical roots in racial violence. Haynes argues that Western feminism often obscures the struggles of both Black women and men, relying on colonial and anti-Black logics that fail to address the broader context of sexualized, gendered, and racialized abuses of all Black African people. We discuss other historical and contemporary critiques of feminism, argue that feminism does not have a...
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In this episode, recorded mid-2024, we speak with Ted Rutland about the evolution of policing from the mid-20th century's professional model to the counterinsurgency urbanism that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Canada. Rutland discusses how community policing, initially intended to bring police closer to communities through multicultural training and social services, became a strategy to win over parts of the community while waging a larger war against the rest. We delve into some of the historical shifts in policing largely as a response to radical movements and urban...
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This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Among other things, in this conversation we talk about the impact and meaning of 1492 to the Muslim world. We discuss Kashani’s concept of the Blues Adhan by way of Clyde Woods. We discuss the experiences of women muslims, and women scholars in Kashani’s book. We talk about the two jihads and other Muslim practices such as zakat and the contradictions between Islamic thought and practice and those demanded by the capitalist and carceral state. It’s a rich discussion that I hope folks find as interesting...
info_outlineIn this episode we interview Tariq Khan on his book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression.
We’ll be releasing this conversation as a two part episode on this excellent book which studies how anticommunism within the US is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism, anti-indigenous thought, and genocidal violence. This helps us to reframe our often twentieth century centric view of anti-left repression in the US. Khan’s work on the 19th century in particular also helps us to see the ways things like race science, eugenics, and phrenology were formed a backbone of the original assumptions of US policing, anti-anarchist repression, lynching, and regimes of deportation. Alongside and related to settler colonial violence against indigenous people, and anti-Black violence, we also through this conversation really get into how central the repression of anarchists in the 19th century was to the development of logics and technologies of anti-left repression in the so-called United States.
It is also important to see the resonance between US genocidal violence and state repression and that of the so-called State of Israel on Palestinians, something we explore a little bit more in part two of this discussion along with delving into William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and more.
This conversation was recorded this past December so we don’t reference a lot of what has happened in the last couple of months, but pairing this conversation with a discussion we hosted on our YouTube channel a week ago with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (CBS) helps us to see how many things we are constantly told represent the crossing of new red lines, or the onset of a fascism that is foreign to the US, are actually foundational pillars of US statecraft, warfare and policing with very long histories.
On the subject of our YouTube channel, we have once again been very busy over there, releasing eight episodes over the last two weeks. We are only 13 subscribers away from 10,000 on our YouTube page, so now is a great time to sign up for free if you haven’t, and help us to hit that milestone. And you can catch up on all the conversations we’ve had over there recently and over the past year and a half if you’ve been following us there.
We also set-up a “Buy Me A Coffee” account which allows people to offer us one time support if they prefer doing that instead of the recurring contributions of patreon. You can support us in either place, and that is the only financial support we receive for these audio episodes, so we really appreciate whatever you can give to keep these conversations coming.
Music by Televangel
Guest bio:
Dr. Tariq Khan is a historian with an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intertwined forces underlying and shaping our social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. He has wide-ranging research, writing, and teaching experience in the fields of global capitalism, transnational studies, U.S. history, psychology, sociology, ethnicity & race studies, gender studies, colonialism & postcolonialism, labor & working-class history, radical social movements, history “from below,” public history, and community-based research and teaching. A few examples of his published works are his chapter “Living Social Dynamite: Early Twentieth-Century IWW-South Asia Connections,” in the book Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, his chapter “Frantz Fanon,” in the forthcoming anthology Fifty Key Scholars in Black Social Thought, and his new book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression