To: Hon. Gilad Cohen, Israeli Ambassador to Japan From: Charles Douglas Lummis, Veterans For Peace – Ryukyu/Okinawa Chapter Kokusai (VFP-ROCK)
Subject: Holocaust
Dear Ambassador Cohen,
VFP-ROCK, which I represent, is a Peace organization located in Okinawa, composed of members who are US military veterans, and associate members who are Okinawan or Japanese supporters. The latter have in their historical memory a time when war became something worse than war: for the Japanese, the carpet bombing of cities culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; for the Ryukyuan people, the Battle of Okinawa; each in its own way, a horror of holocaust proportions. As for the US military veterans, while they rarely have suffered large-scale massacres of this nature, they have been taught the distinction between war and war-crimes, and have from time to time been ordered to carry out the latter.
After World War II ended and the world began the long process of seeking to recover from its horrors, the worldwide Jewish Community played a vital role in recording what had happened, how it had happened, and how it could be prevented from happening again. Analyses of the nature of totalitarianism, the techniques of propaganda and brainwashing,
the deep psychology of prejudice, the economics of the war machine – in all these fields we owe an immense debt of gratitude to Jewish historians, political and social theorists, psychologists, economists, philosophers and activists. The Jewish intelligentsia appeared as a great barricade against fascism and all forms of prejudice. And the absolute worst case, the very model of what must not be, was the Nazi Holocaust.
This is why the launching of the Zionist Holocaust is so devastating, leaving us stammering, – “So . . .they didn’t really mean it?” Here one needs to be careful. The great Jewish scholars of the Post-War Enlightenment were as sincere as sincere gets, and we were lucky to live as their contemporaries. (My own mentor was the great Sheldon Wolin). But it seems that some part of the Zionist community decided to re-evaluate the Holocaust. In this new understanding, the Nazi’s crime was not their use of the Holocaust model, it was their mistaken choice of the people to use it against. Against the Jews it was a monstrous crime. Against the Palestinians it makes perfect sense. But if the Israeli Government hoped thereby to make this evil seem “banal”, they have failed. This will probably go down in history as one of the greatest betrayals ever; a betrayal that is breaking the hearts of common-sense people everywhere, Jewish or whatever.
You may want to say, “But it’s totally different. For example, we don’t use gas chambers.” No, you don’t, and I don’t encourage you to do so. But as people with military experience, we know that military action – war – does not produce multitude corpses each with a single bullet wound in the head. That’s mass murder. Also deliberate starvation is probably as efficient as, and surely less expensive than, gas chambers as a way to exterminate people.
Which brings me to my suggestions:
First, before it’s too late, contact your superiors in the Government, and urge them to call off this genocide. For the survival of Israel it may already be too late, for the dead it is certainly too late, but for the living it is not.
Second, as I write a large flotilla of small boats carrying food, medicine and brave, well-intentioned people is approaching Gaza. Advise your government to do the smart thing: let them in. Doing that could be the first step in bringing this nightmare to an end.
I wish you good health.
Charles Douglas Lummis Discharged as Captain, USMC Director, Veterans For Peace-Ryukyu/Okinawa Chapter Kokusai (VFP-ROCK) Author War is Hell: Studies in the Right of Legitimate Violence, Rowman and Littlefield, 2023
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