Tariq Khan

Khan's dissertation is a study of the development of US political repression, counterinsurgency, and anticommunism. It argues that US anticommunism did not begin with what historians call the "First Red Scare," but is much more deeply rooted in the United States' history of settler colonization and enslavement. What historians refer to as the First Red Scare was preceded by over half a century of red scares. Those earlier red scares played out directly within the larger context of US “frontier” militarization and war. Internal repression against proletarian insurgency was colonialism turned inward: meaning the tactics, weapons, mythology, and ideology the state wielded to control the “foreign,” migrant, multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic urban “rabble” were developed and refined in the “Indian wars” and other outward imperialist invasions and occupations. US anticommunist rhetoric emerged out of the context of settler-colonial militarism and war – the US invasion of Mexico and the “Indian Wars” – as a ruling-class defense of enslavement and a justification for genocide. Anticommunist/anti-anarchist rhetoric goes hand in hand with the state turning its external “frontier” violence – which the state developed for ethnic cleansing, to expel, control, contain, or eliminate racialized “enemies” and assert/control borders – on its internal population.