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Posted by farid (Guest) - Sunday, November 9 2003, 12:12:37 (EST)
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...this was supposed to be titled "Self-Loathing"

Self Loathing.

After 20 years involvement in the Assyrian community and fairly comprehensively at times, I still feel the strongest characteristic of this community is self-loathing, compensated for in some by a whopping false pride and for the rest a sort of apologetic self-abnegation through Christianity meek and mild, as if to make up for what the Jews tell us we were.

I certainly started out that way. All my life the reminder that we were in any way descendants of the ancient Assyrians was more cause for shame than anything else. Not for the supposed brutality of the ancients but from the contrast I saw in the position we used to hold to the one we now occupied. I didn't know anything of our art history though and by discovering it I found something timeless and great but at the same time something terribly neglected. How "proud people" can behave the way we do, is something I still can't comprehend. Whatever we had been known for, we sure as hell weren't getting a reputation for anything near as worthy today...if we were known to exist at all. It was especially the silence we ourselves maintained, our unwillingness to make room for ourselves on the world's stage that set me to wondering and then working.

The only thing we brag of brings us right back to self-hatred: we are inordinately proud of having dumped the very soul and wellspring of our culture and picked up on one branch of Judaism...one that mainstream Jews didn't even want...as in, "Give up our ancient religion for this carpenter...are you CRAZY"? Rationalize it as we might, there just isn't any way to come away Christian and at the same time feel any real pride as an Assyrian. Not that there's anything terribly wrong with Christianity...but it begs the question of what was terribly wrong with Ashurism...especially if you contrast what we were able to achieve under Ashur to the miserable showing we've made under Christ, what we bragged of then compared to what we're so proud of now...especially as the temptation to change religions and then change again and yet again has divided us further and further until we argue about which version of Christ is better...but are in total agreement that any facet of Christ is preferable to any association with Ashur: Christ at his worst is far better for us than Ashur at his best. How can any Assyrian believe such a thing?

We hardly have a basis to build anything upon as the one thing dearest to us has also caused us to divide and fragment the most. It's as if we embraced Dissolution then set out roaming the earth longing for Unity all the more...makes no sense...and look at us. As Fry had Sir Thomas More say in his play "A Man For All Seasons"..."A man's soul is like water in his hands...if he once opens them he needn't hope to find it again". What we let go of long ago is gone. It's that simple. What we embraced, Christianity, is all we are.

Christianity isn't just a religion with us like it is with any other settled group of people who have a government and borders. As with the Jews, even before they were sent to wander the world and more so after, religion is "Being"..."Meaning" and of course "Culture". Christiaity is our National Identity, especially when you consider how we turn our backs on our own children who marry outside the faith...as if they were betraying not a universal god, whom you wouldn't think would bother about ethnic origin, but our own families, ethnic group or "nation". When we say it's not possible to be of any religion except Christianity, in order to remain Assyrian...we put religion ahead of identity...we make religion into identity. That's why we're so comfortable with Christian Fundamentalism...because it too is intolerant.

We agree with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant who believes in "pure" Americans and "real" Christians...meaning those just like himself...who looks down on the "other" kind...the Hindu-American...or Mexican or Afro or Arab-American. We're so damn sure of the value of this common religion that we believe the White Man means us too when he uses the word, "Christian" or "American". We're still hoping that by joining ourselves to him hand and foot... and his brand of Christianity, he'll overlook our complexion...or our wiry hair or ethnic origin. We're in for a surprise, bigger than the aftermath of 9/11. This willingness to be White at all costs is another aspect of our self-lothing...and we have many.

The face of Extremism now has to be more benign than not...it couldn't grow...couldn't slip by unnoticed otherwise. You don't start with a Reichstag Fire or a 9/11...you build up to it. There are alliances made now that will be terminated one day. Republicans "welcome" Blacks now and will for some time yet to come...even as they gut the provisions in the law that allow for Head-Start or "Preferences"...as if the White Man got where he did through fair play. Two kinds of Blacks are welcome in the Republican Party...the first are the clowns and fools, most of whom got where they did through some sort of affirmative action...and that's the whole point...as in, "see what happens when you treat these people as if they were human and give them an advantage". The other kind are the exceptional but opportunistic...the ones who secretly hate their color because they believe it kept them back...and it no doubt did, even though their color also helped them get where they are...a liability that's also the basis for later "advantages"...a very schizoid way to live. Sort of like cutting off a person's legs and then teaching him to "love" the fake ones you provide because after all they do allow for a certain "upward mobility" and that's better than nothing. Then you make the person feel "wrong" or "unrealistic" if he insists that you're the one who crippled him in the first place and a wooden leg hardly suffices as payment or qualifies as "Affirmative Action". Someone like Colin Powell who knows he's capabale...who knows he could have gotten much farther had he been White or if not would at least feel secure in his accomplishments...has to live with the knowledge that people see him as the Affirmative Action Hero and will never believe that his raw talents alone could have gotten him where he is. Had it not been for all the Christian Racists, Black's wouldn't have NEEDED affirmative action in the first place.

Colin Powell is most welcome in the Republican Party...for now. But only because he's worth bringing down...humiliating...like Madeleine Albright and Janet Reno were made into caricatures of ballsy men and went along with it for they too hate being women because of the liabilities it placed in front of ambitious humans who had the bad luck to be born female. Clownish Blacks like Clarence Uncle Thomas and Condi Rice on the one hand and on the other brilliant and seemingly honorable Blacks of integrity such as Colin Powell are just what the Party needs to hold up to its Racist constituency as proof of what happens when you allow the US Constitution to be "used" by these people to get them into positions they either didn't really earn...or are unfit to hold...and of course as a way of setting up "better" Blacks for a harder fall back down to where they "belong", with the White Man's spittle running down their souls. Unwittingly Powell and Rice and Thomas will give the Republicans the cover they need and their best shot at dismantling the laws and provisions enacted specifically to allow the three of them, among others, to climb anywhere out of the hole White America still believes Blacks belong in...and they'll allow themselves to be used because they want desperately to believe that Race doesn't matter in America anymore...how dumb, how desperately tired of it all you must be to fall for this.

Somewhere inside of him Powell knows he was used and slimed...and that it was deliberate. He's damaged goods now... lost whatever luster he had believing he'd finally "arrived"...that he was being judged as a man first and that in his case being Black was an added advantage to his People. And to think it was the Republican Party that openned the door to Blacks!!! He's been turned into a clown...a liar...a dimwit too stupid even to understand his own calling...believing the millitary "intelligence" he was spoon fed. Which was it...was Powell so stupid as to believe in WMDs or was he playing along? For a White to be so duplicitous is part of the game, of HIS game...part of the racial mind-set...but for a Black man to allow himself to be used this way...well, why should it surprise anyone? Muhammad Ali said he wouldn't fight in Vietnam because no Vietamese had ever called him Nigger or tried to lynch him...but Whites had done these things to Powell and his family...and yet he took orders from the same White Man to go kill innocent victims belonging to another "degraded" race, in the same war Ali refused to be a part of. Powell sold out long ago...Bush just put the seal of infamy on him by "elevating" him to cabinet level so everyone could watch his demise. Powell is done for, finished.

Thomas and Condi can stay where they are...constant reminders of what's "wrong" with Affirmative Action, or even Desegregation, when they're the worst examples of what it can do. Not that they aren't "good enough" at their professions...not every White to hold those offices was brilliant or above reproach...but because they'll help reverse the trend, vote conservative, play-act the White role, even though other's like them will have it that much harder or find it impossible to move forward against the Racist Tide that's welling up in America...behind Jesus...who else.

As inconceivable as it seems, Powell and Thomas and many more are collaborating with the White Man to undo their own people...because they hate what being Black has done to their own integrity and humanity...like the Jews who worked for the Nazi camp guards...or, dare we say it...like Assyrians so relieved to be Christian, thereby distancing themselves from the Assyrian Heritage...that "bloody, brutal, pagan, non Yahwe-fawning" past. That same reformed Jew called a Christian, who for centuries hounded and murdered Jews for refusing to "accept Christ", is the same Christian Assyrian who hates anything Assyrian that won't bow and scrape and fall to its knees before Christ.

Self-Loathing.

And what about all those thousands of cuneiform documents that are STILL un-read 150 years after being excavated...3000 years after they were written...lying in dusty basement vaults. You know damn well if they were in Hebrew or English they'd have been studied to pieces and every advantage to be taken from them squeezed out. Let some shards and a scroll or two in Hebrew be found in Palestine and museums are built and scholars set to pulling each other's hair for decades. In America a fragment of a picket fence 150 years old, brand new when those cuneiform tablets were first uncovered, is declared a protected "National Landmark" and travellers actually pull over to contemplate its "historical significance". How can people NOT be interested in what those documents hold? How can we not be? Unless we, Jews and Christians, all have a sneaking suspicion of what's in them...and don't want to know.

Perhaps this is one time that old saw about people not knowing their past history live in danger of repeating it isn't true. One would WISH we could just approximate our past history a little...but that might be the danger of learning it...that might be why Assyrian history is now Christian history, filled with Mar Ones and Twos and Church Fathers and mothers and sons of bitches and why we keep repeating it, practising its dismal lesson of collaboration followed by begging over and over again...Our ignorance of our Assyrian past pays off, keeps us from being Assyrian while full knowledge of our Christian past keeps us fully and foolishly Christian...but to whose benefit? We repeat every foolishness we suffered as Christians and count ourselves fortunate in our ignorance of anything Assyrian.

Looking at us dispassionately and from a distance you'd be hard pressed to believe we loved being Assyrians...were proud of it...and you'd be forgiven for coming away with the firm conviction that we loved everything about being Christian. And no...they are not the same thing. Assyrians earned their pride, they never begged for it.

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