Posted by Jeff from pcp01169382pcs.roylok01.mi.comcast.net (68.62.14.216) on Tuesday, September 24, 2002 at 11:17PM :
Assyrians on the decline
Posted By: Anonymous (cache-dq08.proxy.aol.com)
Date: Tuesday, 24 September 2002, at 2:37 a.m.
Good Morning:
I have read your publication along with others and have come to the understanding that no matter how hard we try we will always be a divided people.
Look at the terms we use to show these divisions: Assyrian, Chaldean, Maronites, Chaldo-Assyrian and Syriac are the five names just for our national identity. Assyrian, Assyriac, Chaldean and Syriac are another four names just for our language.
I am not concerned with what political affiliation anyone chooses to be a part of whether it is AUA or whatever else is out there. The problem is how we classify ourselves just to appease the people who we don't necessarily want
to educate but rather muffle their arguments.
The Chinese used to say, "The wise learn more from fools than the fools learn from the wise." We have use this and then some by dumbing things down so much to appease the fools that we lost track of who we are rather than educating
them in a united lesson plan.
The academic world separates us during ancient times as Assyrians, Akkadians, Chaldeans, Arameans and Babylonians. Yet when they speak of life in Mesopotamia and the greater empire it is always referred to as the Assyrio-Babylonian culture and ancient religious practices. The ancient language we spoke was Akkadian and the modern language is Aramaic.
Divided we are tribe-like as Assyrian, Chaldeans or whatever else, united we are the descendants of the Assyrio-Babylonian culture and history. We must not try and silence the questions of the uneducated or make up answers in which they wish to hear. We must attempt to enlighten the view of a unified Assyrio-Babylonian society.
How much more do we need to be divided? We already fight with each other as to what country we currently originate from whether it be Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey or Lebanon. We already disagree on dogmatic practices in our respected
Christian sects. Why do we need to divide ourselves even more?
Our Semitic brothers the Jews have united as one. Historically we are the ones that destroyed the records of their tribal affiliations that brought
them closer together, so why are we still separating ourselves through the same means that they did during ancient times?
Their struggle in Israel is not our concern. Unlike us they have achieved what we only wish to and that is returning home. After all, is it not better to fight for a cause we believe in rather than sleep comfortably on a feathered pillow?
The passionate ones about separation of our group will call me a fool and say I am ignorant for not wanting to keep the culture of my region. I never have said forget the regional practices of celebration but only to nationalize them.
Do the Iranians not classify themselves as such just because one cheers for Persepolis over Tehran during a futbol match? No, whether red or blue wins at the end of the night everyone returns home as an Iranian, only one with
wounded pride while the other victorious in praise of his home city.
What we have done to ourselves is ideal for American Protestantism. They are not unified under a Pope or Patriarch but rather a building, listening to one Preacher who tells a group in attendance his interpretation of the faith. We
are doing the same thing, just not from a religious stand point but rather a nationalistic one.
I am not saying anything against the Protestant Assyrian views, my example is that of division between the Christian sects in the United States to the degree of each church listening to only one voice.
The Assyrio-Babylonian does not need to be dissolved in such a manner. We the youth and young adults of this culture are lost in western society. We have begun to behave like people of different ethnic groups with no relationship
to our own. We are forgetting that no matter where we go, we are outsiders...even in our own land.
If we continue to be diluted into a society that thinks of us as a subgroup of Arabs rather than a complete and separate Semitic ethnicity then we might as well assimilate fully into their culture losing all site of who we are and what we gave this world.
At the rate we are going, we are proving the history books right...we are an extinct people. The only correction is that we were not defeated by outside invaders but rather by our own hand.
The Assyrio-Babylonian society is like a farm that has not been tended to. If we do not rejuvenate the land then our crops will die. Do not let us become that bushel of wheat that was not tended to, but rather a new seed that will
replenish the land.
We were the ones that brought civilization to savage, now is the time for us to reestablish ourselves in the trunk of tree in which we were the roots for it's foundation.
-- Jeff
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