Posted by pancho from host-148-244-221-58.block.alestra.net.mx (148.244.221.58) on Tuesday, October 08, 2002 at 12:55PM :
The Damning of Ashur
What a difference in perspective it makes. I feel like scales have been brushed off of my eyes. Now, after forty years, things make sense...make great and wonderful sense. I am Assyrian and Chaldean...I care nothing at all for the religions of Judaism, Islam or Christianity...may the best in them always stay a step ahead of the worst in each of them. Peace be unto Moses, Jesus and Muhammad...but all three of you, take your hands from off the throat of Ashur.
It comes as no surprise to realize that people will kill their brothers and sisters. In all countries there have been civil wars..brother against brother, father against son, and all of them raping each others mothers and wives and daughters. It is a dirty business. Brothers have killed each other over religion. The French turned on their neighbor Protestants and killed 10,000 in one night, to blessings by the Catholic Pope. In America the Civil War brought families to the brink of extinction, killing each other over principle and economic benefit. In Ireland the people have been at each other's throats for centuries and in Yugoslavia and the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where West meets East, Islam confronts Christianity, where the same people divided between these two sister religions have been killing each other also for centuries...and you can't tell one side from another...except for what should be mere details of creed...but translate into all the hellish reasons people need to hate those they rob and murder.
Turns out it's been no different in Iraq where the Assyrians, who are the indigenous people of that region, have been split between two religions, each bringing to that region customs from different cultures that have often clashed and have divided families for centuries. Assyrians are no different when it comes to intolerance, bigotry or decency. We too can be kind to those of the same religion and be taught to despise those of another sect. As we also have those people who don't care enough about these artificial differences and taboos to hate anyone...seeing an Assyrian first, a Buddhist or Muslim or Christian second.
Iraq has had the most amazing history. "Cradle of Civilization" never fit an area better than it does that small patch of fertile ground. Fertile in every way. The great cultures of Sumer, of Babylon, once regarded as the greatest city the world had ever known...the people of Assyria whose real contributions are only now coming to light...then the Persians and Greeks. The religion of Ashur of Marduk, home to Abraham, home to Jews to Christians and finally Islam. Islam that began in Arabia but was soon to be overwhelmed by Persia and Assyria. Where in Baghdad, only a few miles and centuries from Babylon, another great civilization was born, from a combination of Arab dedication and intensity coupled with all of the thousand years old Heritage of the Assyrians and Babylonians and Persians and Greeks. The Baghdad of the great Haroun Al Rashid...that was civilized long before the West ever was. The Muslims who took civilzation all the way to Spain from where it spread to an ignorant and barbarous Europe.
No WONDER the arts of civilization went right on being refined and developed and perfected in that region...look at its ancestry, look at what the people had to draw on and use. And the shame of it that today the West sees nothing but oil for its engines and profits for a few. What a crime against humanity that this precious land is being ground under and turned into an oil rig. It's like cutting your heart out and then wondering why you rot.
The people who can do this sort of thing are dead already. Soul dead and mind dead...yet they stumble on wrecking to the left and right in their search for something with which to replace the soul they gave up.
Petroleum?
-- pancho
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