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Reviewed by:
  • Political Repression in U.S. History
  • Gary Roth
Political Repression in U.S. History. Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton. Amsterdam: VU University Press. 2009.

This collection of well-written and informative essays presents a damning view of the pervasive character of political repression in the United States. Topics range from efforts to suppress political opposition on the national level in the newly-founded republic to the current remixing of the legal system in order to give security agencies a freer hand. Together they provide a wide-ranging assessment of governmental campaigns, popular appeals to racist sentiments, and the self-censorship that accompany crusades against so-called alien individuals and groups. Racial exclusion, anti-radical hysteria, and the urge to suppress internal dissent in times of war form their own version of U.S. history.

But what does one make of editors who distance themselves from the essays in their own collection? Uncomfortable with the tone and conclusions of the volume's contributors, Minnen and Hilton produce a guarded, defanged taxonomy of the many forms that repression has taken. They are quick to assure us that "the existence of political repression in the United States does not necessarily mean that democracy has failed" (7). While the cautious nature of their introduction is an artifact of its academic rather than activist orientation, it also blunts the book's potential impact. "A case might even be made," they tell us, "that repression is not only an inherent and therefore inevitable part of any state, but that it might serve an essential role in creating and maintaining the political system" (8). Issues are pursued in the manner of imponderables: "what for some people constitutes political repression, for others might merely be the legitimate exercise of government authority in the better [End Page 157] interests of the majority" (9). By relegating political repression to the realm of reified discourse, Political Repression in U.S. History is thus oriented on the part of the human rights community that aims at excess, rather than the existence per se, of political repression.

Two major themes are never clearly differentiated. Political repression, as the editors and essayists emphasize, has been directed against radicals and disenfranchised groups who have campaigned for equality. Political exclusion, on the other hand, is never quite acknowledged as a separate, even if at times overlapping, dynamic. In the latter, heightened levels of economic exploitation (particularly of immigrants from agrarian backgrounds) are reinforced through political corruption (with the political and legal systems used to maintain inequalities) and a manipulated racism that is expressed in terms of ethnicity, religion, and race.

All the essays tend to conflate rhetoric with reality. Pro-democratic sentiments are accepted at face value, rather than seen as the peculiar form of expression used to prevent exclusive domination by any particular group or clique within the political realm. The espousal of democracy is itself a form of competition within the market economy.

Nonetheless, this collection provides useful background information with which to understand the current campaigns for greater levels of political repression and political exclusion in the United States, with its openly encouraged racism directed towards Muslims and Mexicans alike.

Gary Roth
Rutgers University, Newark
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