Who's Extreme? Our Response to Greg Landsman
Cincinnati Socialists protesting outside of the downtown Federal Building on November 16, 2023.
Cincinnati Socialists would like to express their appreciation to CityBeat for their fair and accurate article about our political action calling for a ceasefire in Gaza at the John Weld Peck Federal Building on 17 November. It is a testament to their professional ethics that CityBeat is willing to continue to do objective and open-minded journalism about Palestine in an age of increasing censorship and misinformation.
However, we are dismayed by Rep. Greg Landsman’s response to our action. Disappointingly—but perhaps not surprisingly—Landsman employed the shopworn and vapid Cold War rhetoric of opposing “the more extreme folks, on the far right and the far left” in his comments. What does it say about Landsman’s politics that he finds it “extreme” to call on Israel to stop killing children in Gaza?
The historically revisionist claim that there are two “extremes,” left and right, sometimes called horseshoe theory, has a long and ignoble history of excusing and minimizing far-right violence. To draw an equivalence between left and right “extremism” is to say that there is no difference between the Nazis who sent millions to die in the camps and the Red Army who liberated the camps. It is to say that Tsar Nicholas II, one of history’s most vicious antisemites, was no different from the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 who rid the earth of him. We remind Rep. Landsman that the Europeans who fought the Third Reich were often Marxists or communists, many of them Jews. We remind him that one of the greatest insurrections against fascism in human history—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943—was planned and carried out in large part by Jewish communist partisans.
In this country, horseshoe theory has mainly been used to justify US collaboration with oppression and even genocide in the Global South. The Indonesian butcher Suharto slaughtered one million of his own communist countrymen, the Argentine dictatorship of 1974-1983 killed thirty thousand leftists, and right-wing death squads in Central America murdered thousands (including five American Catholic nuns)—all under the banner of eliminating “extremists on the left.” In fact, it’s safe to say that the canard of “extremists, both left and right” has led to many orders of magnitude greater death and suffering than Hamas could ever dream of. When Rep. Landsman speaks of “extremists on the left,” he is using the McCarthyite language of violent and autocratic demagogues like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. When he uses horseshoe theory to defend his genocidal position on Palestine, he is showing us where his loyalties really lie—with reactionaries, warmongers, and the capitalist ruling class.
Cincinnati Socialists would never make common cause with the far right, as Landsman did when he voted alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene to censure Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Moreover, when Landsman glibly dismisses calls for a ceasefire in Palestine, he brazenly ignores the will of a majority of Americans, and, in fact, many in Israel itself. This demonstrates not only a failure of capitalist democracy to respond to the people’s wishes, but also the unprincipled and cynical nature of Landsman’s supposedly “progressive” politics. Rep. Landsman may perceive himself as a man of goodwill and peace, but in actual practice, he is an undemocratic reactionary ideologue and an apologist for militarism.
The world’s working and oppressed masses cannot depend on people like Landsman for peace, prosperity, or freedom. They must seize these things for themselves. And the first step in doing that is to declare independence from the capitalist parties, including their risibly corrupt and inept liberal wing. The working and oppressed people of the world should and must unite against the Landsmans as well as the DeWines and Vances. They have nothing but their chains to lose, and a world to win.