Posted by pancho from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Thursday, September 26, 2002 at 1:26PM :
I think nothing we do in the immediate future is going to affect our condition in Iraq or elsewhere in the MidEast. Whether we sit on any opposition Democratic Movement Question Committee or not...whether we re-build villages there or not...whether we build schools there or not. We've been through this cycle before...we've been kicked in the teeth and displaced, lost our homes and goods and resettled, lived under trees in the snow as refugees...left the region when we could...stayed and suffered and endured when we couldn't afford to. And it will happen to us all over again in a few generations till the last one of us leaves. Yell about it all you want to...as we've been shouting and weeping and moaning about it for generations now. If you know your history, you try not to repeat the same mistakes because they lead to the same place...with one exception...your numbers diminish, other than that...it's just a mad cycle.
I don't mean you do nothing, far from it...you just don't waste your time by setting yourself up for the same thing to hit you just as unawares, just as unprepared and helpless the next time. We are famously reactive...that is we are content to ignore what lies on the horizon...not even caring to look ahead a little and see what storm might hit tomorrow. When it hits, we take it as best we can, then we bury our dead and set about the immediate task of getting dinner for that night. As long as we can deal with the immediate problems...we feel we are doing something for ourselves. It has never crossed our collective minds to begin to prepare ahead of time, to anticipate what might likely hapen, based on our bitter experiences of the past, and the not too distant past at that.
Everything, and I mean everything, that is being built in the north of Iraq can be destroyed in ten minutes. Nothing is even being tried anywhere else in Iraq by us because, "America isn't protecting us there"...and that alone shows how little we've learned...when America or Britain "protects" us back there...we are dead, not right away, but a day of reckoning WILL come...it surely will. The British "protected" the Armenian radicals when they stormed the national bank in Istanbul threatening to blow the place up, before the First World War. The British "saved" them by first playing up the situation...lamenting how "cruel" the Sultan was that he would force his people to such desperate measures...then they presented themseles as the friends and guardians of their "fellow Christians"...wheedled some trade concessions and landing rights from the harrassed Sultan...faced with this "indignant Moral Christian power"...and as a final touch, the British Ambassador escorted the Armenian crimminals (whatever you think of them...they broke numerous laws in Turkey) out on his private yacht. Needless to say when the Sultan finally realized he had a potential nest of traitors in his midst and on his borders...where the Brits, Germans, Russians, Austrians, French and Italians, ALL Christians, were patroling... and took those infamous gruesome measures panicky tyrants will take...the European Christians were nowhere in sight to "save" anybody...they were busy saving the oil fields from each other. (Right now America holds several citizens in secret jails and denies them basic legal and human rights...it can happen anywhere).
It doesn't matter which came first, the Christian Assyrian egg, or the Muslim Chicken...we have a situation there on the ground where we are perceived as less than patriotic...as wishing a "regime change" even more than Bush does. This will not help us at all, and place us at an even greater risk for future retaliation, when Bush takes his happy pills and is replaced here by a much needed regime change. Neither he, The United States government nor Queen Elizabeth gives a good goddamn about us...not unless there is something to be gained by them for their "care". An Assyrian Christian caught out in a field by a starving lion would probably be pleased at the prospect of being hugged by such a noble animal who condescended to notice him.
For saying these obvious truths you get branded a traitor...one secretly working for Saddam because you play into his "agenda"...which is supposedly to wipe out Assyrian consciousness and Assyrians along with it. That's odd...it was America that supported and urged and armed Saddam to go fight the Iranians, having first prepared the way by replacing the secular and now uncooperative Shah with just the right type of fanatic Muslim clerics...and there were Assyrians on both sides of that war. It was America that gave Saddam the green light to go into Kuwait, then turned around and killed how many of his soldiers, numerous Assyrians among them...it was America that sent poison into Iraq, that buried alive hundreds of soldiers, many of them Assyrians...that betrayed the opposition it helped set up...and that has been denying food and medicine to Iraqi people resulting in at least 600,000 dead Iraqi children, many of those Assyrian as well. Where in all of this do our patriots see a sign of American love and good will towards Assyrians?
I'm not at all convinced that Saddam bears Assyrians any ill will. No more than any other government holds against its citizens who claim prior rights to the land and talk about "taking it back". We have an odd sort of patriot who sees making outlandish demands and getting his arse tossed into jail as a "Movement". Who sees those of us who accept things like mountains, oceans and Muslim rule in the MidEast for the last 1300 years, as defeatists...and then traitors. The Assyrians who made a place for themselves in Muslim Iraq...like the ones who make a place for themselves in Christian America...are facing some obvious realities...each trying to do waht is best for thier families and children. Assyrians in America would be in for a rude shock if they talked about taking over Manhattan...even if they could prove they'd been here 1000 years before. It just wouldn't sit well the the rest of the people and the government. Native Americans tried it and got nowhere.
But you'll say that Christians are being persecuted in Iraq and aren't in America, so there is no need to take over Manhattan. Christians may not be popular in the MidEast just now...or for a long time now. But what does that have to do with Assyrians? If Assyrians obey the laws of Iraq, as they are expected to obey laws elsewhere...they can and have been able to live in peace. The ones who agitate and tell you differently are not the ones who are Assyrian...they are the Christian ones who want more rights and exposure for their Christian faith. They just can't demand it as Christians for they HAVE no special rights to the land as Christians. They use being Assyrian instead...when their ancestors were the first ones to slam the Assyrian Heritage, NOT Saddam or any Muslims. Remember...we are PROUD to have become Christians...and just as PLEASED that we saw the light and the true faith...that we left silly Ishtar and dumb old pagan Ashur behind. In other words we ourselves gutted the very core of what being Assyrian was...as we admit now that the RELGION of Christianity is our heart and soul and our salvation and our love and darling. Who showed to others first that being Assyrian was no big deal..."watch us switch". Who first betrayed the people of Ashur?
-- pancho
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