"Like We're at War with a Foreign Nation" - How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Anti-Left Repression with Tariq Khan

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 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