These are most of the lines out a genocide denier’s playbook, with a special nod in the title toward the Palestinian genocide going on right now. As an Armenian, we’ve been hearing this crap for going on 110 years now. I did it as a freeform poem, so there’s no inherent structure or rhyme scheme.
Never Again (to us)
It’s not a genocide if they deserved it.
They were killing each other before we civilized them.
They worshipped Satan and sacrificed humans,
All we did was save them from themselves.
That group of people over there did worse crimes.
What about the crimes your country committed?
Go pay for that and then we’ll talk.
It wasn’t a genocide, but they deserved it,
And we would gladly slaughter them again.
Their history is a lie, their land was ours to take.
We’ve always been here longer than them.
Why not go get mad about this unrelated issue?
We had to do it to them before they did it to us.
Might makes right, it’s the nature of humans.
The genocide never happened, but they deserved it.
It happened so long ago, why not get over it?
We had to build a nation and you got in our way.
It was committed by the old government,
the new government isn’t accountable.
It was your fault for starting it, and we had to finish it.
It was all in self-defense, we are the real victims.
The excuses are always the same,
The bigots need someone to blame,
The weak-minded can’t face their own shadow.
And when victims become oppressors,
what lesson did they learn?
Never again (to anyone), or never again (to us)?
