Posted by sankho from CPE-203-45-1-117.vic.bigpond.net.au (203.45.1.117) on Monday, November 25, 2002 at 3:17AM :
Had a counseling session with Tiglath yesterday. It was good. Learned a lot. Here are some of the things I learned.
The Iraqi Arabs are not Arab. They are Assyrian. Because they live in a land most of which was once part of the Assyrian empire. Most of them just became Moslem and so can be confused with the Arabs from the Saudi Arabian desert. The Assyrians who belong to that other religion think they are the only true Assyrians because they are hopeless. The Arabs are just as Assyrian as the ‘Assyrians’, who have really just adopted a Jewish religion. The Arab Assyrians act more Assyrian than the Assyrian Assyrians because they stay in the land and defend it from the bad people in the West. They just CALL themselves Arab, that’s all. Whereas the Assyrian Assyrians like to mix with the bad people. They’re real arse-kissers. Yuk.
For example Saddam. He is a true and good Assyrian. Because he built a museum for old Assyrian things and has a picture of the Ishtar gate on paper notes he prints. His mum puts a cross on the nice hot cross buns they make. They converted from that other religion to Islam about two hundred years ago. He likes to compare himself with the old Babylonians and expand his territory. He really hates Jews, just like the old Assyrians. Wants to take over Judea and Israel again and send even more tribes packing. So the ‘Assyrians’ who are embarrassed by this and being Iraqi are stupid. And after all, Assyria is a verb, not a noun. You have to DO things for Assyria rather than just TALK ABOUT IT A LOT.
He has hung, shot, executed, electrocuted, liquidated, and poisoned with Thallium people who don’t agree with him. He likes to protect his country from fuddy duddies. There are many fuddy duddies who look hungrily at Iraq’s lands. Like some people who said they want to call themselves ‘Assyrian’ or Jews. He said no you have to say you’re A-rab (and later he said Kurdish is ok too). But that doesn’t matter really because Arab is really the same as Assyrian! (Didn’t help the poor Jews hanging in Baghdad’s streets. But Jewish people are ok now. They have a place where people can’t tell them they can’t call themselves Jewish otherwise they will be hung, shot, executed, electrocuted, liquidated, and poisoned with Thallium). (At any rate, apparently America does the same thing to people IT doesn’t like, just that they know how to make it sound good with all their cool news channels. Like when they killed those people in the middle of the Yemen desert without a trial.) After all, Assyria is a verb not a noun. And those ‘Assyrians’ who got hung, shot, executed, electrocuted, liquidated, and poisoned with Thallium were probably just the type who LIKED TO TALK ABOUT IT A LOT.
So, people in Iraq are Assyrian because they live in the land once called Assyria. And they are doing things to defend that heritage. But the people OUTSIDE Iraq who build museums for old Assyrian things and who speak and teach Akkadian or Syriac in universities aren’t really Assyrian – like the British or Americans or Germans or Finnish who have built the best Assyrian museums and same of who speak Akkadian and Syriac better than many Iraqis. That’s because they don’t actually live in the land called Iraq, which in any case is really Assyria. (Besides which, all that museum stuff is hot). So there is no such thing as an Anglo-Assyrian. Or Assyro-American. Or Finno-Assyrian. There are however plenty of Assyrian Americans who mix with these bad people and LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT A LOT.
So people who call themselves Assyrian (and who probably just LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT A LOT) and live outside Iraq – Assyria – are in a quandary. If they call themselves Assyrian and do stuff to conserve their heritage they are no different to the British who build nice Assyrian museums, because they don’t live in Iraq – Assyria. Which is a problem because in Iraq there are many, many Arab people who just live there and don’t do anything to defend a heritage they don’t know or care about. But I am told they are more Assyrian than the other ones just because they live in the land.
Then there are people like the non-Moslem Lebanese. They were pretty happy to call themselves Arab when a lot of oil was first being pumped up in the “Arab” countries and it looked like the Arab-speaking world had a good future. But now they are saying we are not Arabs and many people are beginning to relearn Syriac (Syriac is not a church language, it just means the Assyrian language, Sureth, but that’s too confusing because apparently Arabic is Assyrian and Assyrian is Arabic), which they stopped speaking only a couple hundred years ago. They don’t like being called Arabs anymore because it’s pretty daggy now – the Arabs look like cornered animals fighting the homicide bombers with suicide bombers. They haven’t managed to get organized despite the fact that there are so many of THEM and so few of their enemy and they have all that oil for free. But they like to blame the West because it’s always easier to blame someone else rather than take responsibility for your own cock ups. But this is all ok because their heritage is the greatest and it civilised civilisation.
There are more nations now who don’t like to call themselves Arab anymore, like people in Africa; Libya for example: the leader was on Al Jazeera the other day saying ‘we are not Arabs’.
But these people are obviously crazy. Just like the ‘Assyrians’ – the ones who LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IT A LOT. They should realize that by saying they are not Arab they are blowing hot wind and making trouble with their neighbours and they should all just shut up and work to preserve a heritage that is Arab. Only… it’s really Assyrian.
The point of all this, I am told, is that by saying Arabs are really Assyrians in an Arab’s dish-dasha, you are Assyrianising things and that’s the only way we can survive. So that when a Chaldean in Iraq says he is Arab and has Arab blood flowing in his veins he really means Assyrian. Just a Catholic one…
Done. I’m glad I sorted all THAT out…
-- sankho
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