The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

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Posted by parhad (Guest) - Wednesday, March 10 2004, 12:26:33 (EST)
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Everyone knows a political prisoner whose identity remains hidden is doomed. Anything can be done to him and her and if no one knows the person even exists...it's over. That's why Amnesty International, P.E.N and other organizations flood the media with the prisoner's name and encourage people all over the world to write on behalf of the person to the offending government..it's a way of yelling out your window when you see a mugging take place..."WE SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING". Just that can scare the government off because often enough political prisoners get that way because of the whim of some official...they aren't a real threat to anything...just a tyrant having his fun and games...and when he sees that the world sees, he thinks better of it. Doesn't aways work and not in cases where the prisoner is of some serious threat...but it has saved enough people to be worthwhile.

It's that way with us. Hardly anyone knows we still exist...and that makes us vulnerable. You can beat an Assyrian up in a back alley and no one knows it happened...and when you tell the world their reaction is, "if you are indeed descendants of that proud empire..how is it we never hear of you"? A damned good question.

My response was that it was high time we let the world know...not just for their sake but for the sake of our own future generations...who have nothing at all in the world to feel proud about that isn't in a museum. That was the motive behind the Ashurbanipal Monument...though I swear there are still people who think this was a great way for me to get rich...to which I can only say YOU go sell art to Assyrians and see how rich you get. Hell you can't sell them on a language or history school...but a monument? Gimme a break.

After the Ashurbanipal Monument was successfully installed, damned but if it didn't get harder to make the next one... the Shumirum, which took 13 years, cost over $200,000 raised through sales of my own sculpture and the generous donation of one Assyrian woman. And then all hell broke loose...and it sits face down in a storage yard in California...but I don't quit easily...you have to cut my head off and heart out before my jaws will slacken...so I began a Hammurabi Monument for Detroit...got two years and $90,000 into it and then destroyed it myself because I could see where we were headed. We Assyrians are famous for one thing and one thing only: being the first to kill another Assyrian.

In and around that there were ten portrait heads of Assyrian Kings and various other sculptures and two busts sitting in a University in Turlock. In the course of all of this I got to meet those who set themselves up as leaders of our community and what a dismal lot they are, each of them willing to destroy somethng if it can't be theirs..sort of like our Christians feel about Iraq..if it can't be made Christian then of what value is it...burn it and kill everyone in it.

The thing I learned from all of this and I see operating on these forums is that Assyrians are terribly afraid of a higher stndard of expectations for what it takes to qualify as an Assyrian. They've become wedded to mediocrity, as you can see in the quality of arguments you get and behaviors. And there's that jealousy and envy thing with each sect trying to take the lead and smashing everyone else around them.

I see it all stemming from our forced conversion to Christianity for anything less than the use of force to achieve that end is a slander on the good name of our ancestors and the god who inspred them to greatness. Africans were stolen and brought to the doors of Christianity...they were denied the use of their religions, languages, dress and customs and those who fought were killed and the women were raped repeatedly and their children raised as Christian slaves and today there are Afro-American churches all over America where the congregants sing hymns of praise to that same Jesus in whose name they were brutalized and enslaved, their culture forcibly ripped from them...and they are GLAD...and they KNOW their history...know how it all happened..know it wasn't a single Jew came walking over the hill and converted them all by any magic in Jesus. We choose to still believe our ancestors were in the hills quaking with fear and then leaped into the arms of the Jew Jesus. And, believing this, have unknowingly cut ourselves off from that thread that ran through those people all those centuries...and howl about all we want to...it is cut so long as we pray to two masters.

That to me is the source of the self-lothing I see in all of us for we are loyal today to a multiplicity of Jewish sects, not Ashur...and we are paying the price daily. And that incudes what happened to us in Turkey when the Christian West massed offshore with eery intention of attacking and murdering and stealing from people wo'd done them no harm..as they just did again to Iraq. And we...why we're Christian and so our sympathies lie with them.

Trying to raise an Assyrian consciousness is difficult because there isn't one. There's a Cristian consciousness and I suppose if I'd wanted to make monuments of Saint this and Saint that I would have had more support...but EVERYBODY has a saint this and a saint that...what is Assyrian about them? The church will NOT tolerate giving due reverence and respect to our ancestors because it raises that nagging issue...if we had a culture so vastly superior to that of the Hebrews...and we did...then how is it they remained faithful to THAT old fart...while we threw Ashur away for the same old bloody fart? How?

And to tell us that we didn't really because, "Ashur and Yahwe were very close"...is about as much of a lie and a dastardly thing to say as one could imagine. There is far more to our modern history than the fairy tales the churches spin that have us spinning in circles...and the truth of what happened to us and why we are at this deplorable stage in our development lies somewhere else..and Peter and Ben and the boys don't want those areas approached at all...and so they insist we keep playing the same broken record over and over and nothing else.

Our real future as a living breathing people lies elsewhere...you don't get aywhere whining and crying about a lost past...unless you want your future to remain lost as well.

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