Posted by pancho (148.244.221.189) on October 26, 2001 at 12:23:19:
One could well ask what the point to all these posts are and are they just an exercise in word play and a contest between formal education and informal ignorance. There are stereotypes people maintain about themselves as well as others. White Anglo Americans not only have stereotypical views about Blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Arabs and everyone else, they also have some pretty standardized views about themselves. These views can be summed up as…we are good and they are bad, or bad enough, or not as good as we are.
There have been damaging stereotypical views about Jews for centuries and only recently have Jews been able to add to the depressing characteristics they supposedly have, some new ones, some of them quite good. Moslems are watching now as a whole new set of stereotypes are being manufactured before our eyes. Moslems are ignorant fanatics, they stole their culture, they are a jealous and envious people, they like to kill innocent people, their religion is a political movement etc. Stereotypes tell much more about those making them than they do about the object they supposedly reveal. It isn’t the truth about a group that stereotypes reveal, it’s what those seeking to put them into that box need to believe about that group.
Christian Assyrians also have their stereotypical views of others…they believe the white Western man is good and the Moslem no good…and can recite characteristics about each one they’d swear are objective facts based on direct experience…a sort of shorthand one can refer to so as not to bother to look too closely at individuals from those or any group. But Christian Assyrians have stereotyped views about themselves as well, one being that they are Christian in any sense of the word, the other that they are Assyrian.
If they see themselves as Christian it seems to me they are a particularly virulent type. Not that there aren’t bloodthirsty Christians, lord knows every religion has its butchers…it’s just that they believe they are people of Christ, people of peace because they don’t lift a gun themselves. That they cheer others on and pay them to kill innocent children doesn’t bother them in the least. There are plenty of Assyrian Christians in the United States military who have not hesitated to kill, and would not hesitate to kill, Assyrians in Iraq or anywhere else this country told them to. But they think of themselves as Christian and Assyrian too and only sort of American…when they are Americans all the way and in every way.
It’s a favorite fantasy of ours as it is of many Christians, that we have a religion of peace, that we only defend ourselves…that America has been defending itself for generations now from the jealousy and envy of the world. Christianity is what it always was, a nice enough delusion taken over by the most brutal Empire of its day and used as a smoke screen and pretense to continue for several hundred years business at the old stand…the robbing and raping and enslaving business only with better public relations. There’s a good reason Byzantine means what it does.
In their stereotypical view of themselves Christian Assyrians insist they are Assyrian, although which comes first in their own minds isn’t clear, but that should come as no surprise. Let’s allow that they are indeed Christian for the sort of hypocrisy that allows priests to pray over bombs destined for villages is typically Christian, so they’re safe on that score…they can be Christian.
That leaves their claim that they are Assyrians. The first question that arises is why they should make that claim at all. They’ll tell you that they are and that’s all there is to it. In their eagerness to be anything but Arab I suppose they’d claim to be anything, Polynesian would do just as well, but then they live closer to the Assyrian Holy Lands and so Assyrian they become. It’s true there is a resemblance to the features found in the sculptures there but Arabs and Italians look Assyrian as well and Assyrians are easily mistaken for many other groups so that isn’t exactly proof positive. But even if you grant that there’s some sort of connection it doesn’t follow that these people are Assyrian in the same way someone else is Italian or French. You need a settled country and a vibrant culture to maintain a national or even ethnic identity. The characteristics of being English can change wildly, as no Englishman today would be recognized as such by anyone from 14th century England, but still, that is England, and the person born and reared there today is as much English for this day and age, as the one then was.
The exception to this are the Jews who managed to maintain a core group whose identity has changed little in two thousand years, when you consider how difficult a thing it must be to keep any continuity when sent to wander the earth among hostile Christians, saved only by tolerant Muslims, but even then, subject to random maltreatment from time to time. We all know that the Jews managed this by remaining true to their traditions, their religion above all, so that wherever they went, their rituals and customs varied as little as could be expected of any group on earth…except of course that ritual sacrifice had to end, which turned out to be a good thing.
There is no other instance of a people being so violently uprooted and sent out to be hated and harried and murdered and robbed and periodically torn up by the roots down to the final solution of the Christian Nazis who ended up inflicting the final phase of that solution on the very Moslems who’d been the only friends the Jews had throughout history. Assyrian Christians claim to be the other people who have gone forth to roam the world taking their essential characteristics with them. This, I think, is the stereotype they have of themselves, that no matter what, no matter that unlike the Jews, they tossed their ancient ways out and adopted new ones, ones which promised them something the Jews had rejected, something which was supposed to take the place of the humiliation and suffering this very same new religion preached to them was a wonderful thing and something they could expect to see plenty of…in spite of turning away from the one thing that made them essentially Assyrian…the belief in their own namesake Ashur, and in spite of being welcomed in Christian countries where the temptations to conform and blend in were to be so great that they have become increasingly Westernized and Christianized…they still maintain the fiction that they are essentially Assyrian.
Besides being hard to swallow there is the glaring fact that Christian Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not things to be proud of, not in the success oriented West anyway. Recountinn Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not things to be proud of, not in the success oriented West anyway. Recountinn Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not things to be proud of, not in the success oriented West anyway. Recountinn Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not things to be proud of, not in the success oriented West anyway. Recountinn Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not things to be proud of, not in the success oriented West anyway. Recountinn Assyrians display none of the characteristics known to be Assyrian, certainly none anyone would brag about or which were instrumental in building their reputation and grandeur in the first place. Today anyone wishing to succeed feels compelled to drop any association with those who call themselves Assyrian and indeed there seems little to brag of or relate with pride…suffering passively and being chased from pillar to post are not thingtheir country, as everyone in history has been, took on a national name of Assyrian to distinguish themselves from the Arabs or Iraqis or Muslims. It wasn’t enough to be Christian for that still left you without a national identity, so they invented a nation in exile and called it Assyria, just so they could have a rival national identity. When you have no recognized country of your own and are sent to wander where you will, and are taken in or taken over by those who do have a country, a nation… and no matter how they came by it, as America and Iraq both stole their lands…you become a citizen of that nation…take whatever religion you care to. To maintain otherwise and to add to that all the other fictions and wild claims of our Christian Assyrians makes you in time as loony as a jaybird which is what they have become as you can plainly see by the ridiculous claims and discussions that go on in what amounts to a Christian rest home for deranged Assyrian wannabes.
There is real work for real Assyrians to do, and anyone who helps us in this work can be as Assyrian as any Christian, more if they put their shoulder to the wheel. The rest of them are caught up in the Christian dance of death and destruction and if they had their way would turn BetNahrain into a killing field to the greater glory of their jew god and his holy land of Israel, in accord with their new nationality of American.