Posted by pancho from pool0114.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.114) on Saturday, January 11, 2003 at 10:06AM :
Trying to understand this muddle about us being Assyrians...trying to figure if it's really important. If it is important how come only our lunkheads talk the most about it? How come we haven't managed to "save this dear language" in the West, where no Saddam is trying to Arabize us...denying us language or culture class? Who stands in our way in the West EXCEPT other Assyrians?
It's a bizarre phenomena...like living in the MidEast is like being in a prison...a prison where you're denied what you claim all the while you're behind bars is the dearest most precious thing to you...like taking a hot shower...not allowed. And when you're finally realeased...set free...you still don't take a shower, though they're everywhere around you...but spend your days beating on the prison walls from the outside, yelling and complaining about how the people inside can't take hot showers, how terrible it is that when you were inside they didn't allow you to take a hot shower...all the while getting stinkier and dirtier yourself...crying to the press about how much you value hot showers, how much you yearned to be free to take one all those years you were denied by the Warden.
Someone is eventually going to suggest you shut up, quit your bawling, and go take your friggin hot shower...that the opportunity is everywhere present... and that you really DO need one!
These patriots display their Assyrianism by demanding Saddam do things they can't manage to do for themselves here in the West. They claim Saddam is Arabizing their children...while in America they don't seem to mind the Americanization of their children. I still say it's far more damning that where you're free you do nothing...than it is surprising that where you're forced into it, you comply.
Who gets our sympathy more...the man forcibly raped or the one who rejects all other paths BUT prostitution? You can understand our not having language or culture classes in Iraq...though I don't believe for a minute anyone stopped us...just tried to unify the school system and the people...like they do in America where it's been almost impossible to hear ONE voice of dissent on the "free" press...governments like to foster unanimity, sameness, heterogeniety...they don't like forces that pull their people apart. Iraq wasn't going to make separate classes available to our students...but nothing stopped us from having our own...informally if need be...the Jews certainly kept their culture alive inspite of the heaviest burden anyone faced...ever.
But how come in America where anything goes, haven't we been interested in this "dear" language enough to create classes in language and culture? When we've managed it, and I don't mean god classes taught in our languge...who attends? A few dispirited souls there because of a historical interest in something pretty much obsolete.
Everyone here wants to get ahead...wants to streamline, fit in, make it. Just as they do in Iraq. No one wants to stay behind and be a purist, not here and not in Iraq.
But just because it is "denied" to us back there...we clamor for it...while when we're free to do it here...we run the other way. Why do our brightest and best dump Assyria as if a Saddam ordered them to...here in the West? Why do only our idiots become zealots for Assyria...once they get to Turlock and Chicago?
The only answer I come up with is religion, the destructive force of this Christian one...not evil in itself...but A religion that made a silly and unprovable promise,ie, that we're going to go get a reward somewhere ELSE, the hell with this world. Our zealots are Christian Fundamentalists who want to fight Islam...from a safe distance. Who want to show the world that Saddam wont run language classes...yet who show no interest in running some themselves...who also can't manage to stimulate any interest out of their own children...for anything BUT Christianity.
These patriots of ours are wetting themselves in their eagerness to be of service in the destruction of Islam and even Iraq, if they can't get it "for Christ".
There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with an Assyrian Christian kid getting Americanized or living and dying for Christ...yet there is everything wrong with her doing the same for Muhammad...Even though she is "forced" into it by a Saddam...while no one forces the Assyrian Christian kid into assimilation. Seems understanding and sympathy should be on the side of the kid who is coerced...and not on the side of the one eager to be assimilated.
It seems selling your soul isn't the issue...just how much of what kind of coin you get for it.
-- pancho
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