Republic Shall Be Kept Clean

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.

“This provocative account finds that long before overseas military endeavors affected local policing, violence against the Indigenous people of North America shaped the repression of proletarian insurgencies in the United States. It reveals how animosity toward ‘savage reds’ linked colonialism to anticommunism from the nineteenth century onwards.”--Kristin Hoganson, author of The Heartland: An American History

Tariq D. Khan is a lecturer in the history of psychology at Yale University.