Subliminal Delusion

I am Armenian. I was death-marched
raped, strangled, tortured, hanged and
mutilated and crucified. I witnessed mass
slaughter. I watched as my children died
of deliberate violence done them, and of
disease and starvation. But I am of course
delusional since offended Turkey denies
the Ottomans ever harboured malice
toward Armenians, they just died.It was
wartime, after all, the Great War to end
all wars, so dreadful it would never recur.

I am a Jew. I was first subjected to a 
campaign of relentless dehumanization
then herded into closed ghettoes after 
Nazi authorities convinced the world I 
represented a pestilence on Earth. Packed 
into cattle cars I was railed to work camps
concentration camps, death camps where 
medical experiments were performed and 
I was directed to the line where showers 
would wash away the lice I harboured
where I struggled to breathe, clawing 
hopelessly for air. My flesh and my bone
incinerated, fertilized Europe's arable lands.

I am Ukrainian and died of starvation
in a deliberate withholding of food so
inconveniently required elsewhere in the
USSR. I am Cambodian and there was no
hope for me under the Pol Pot tyranny
that took my life. I am Rwandan and my
misfortune was that I was a Tutsi when
my presence infuriated the Hutus in a tribal
competition for power. I am Bangladeshi 
and my yearning for independence
infuriated Pakistan after its nationhood.

I am a Kurd and my geographic heritage
and human rights to self determination
meant nothing to the Baathists in Iraq who
gassed me, destroyed my villages, and my
farmlands and my dignity. I am Yazidi and
my birthright and religion has made me a
target for extermination by death-loving
life-destroying hordes of Islamofascists.

I am a Darfurian, a black Sudanese farmer
eking a living on the land, confronted by
herders whose animals destroyed my crops
and my livelihood and as punishment to me
Janjaweed, mounted Arab Sudanese were
dispatched by my government to rape, displace
and murder me even as gunship helicopters
dropped bombs and shot me as I ran to the forest.

As a Jew I should take comfort that when
the world confronted my skeletal remains it
was horrified and proclaimed that never again
would such an insult to existence be perpetrated
on innocent people. My sacrifice as a human
being would ensure that no others would ever
be threatened and suffer malign deadly assaults
taking the lives of the young and the old, the
malformed and the hale, for being human.