The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> My Apology To Dr Kelley Ross (double damn!)

My Apology To Dr Kelley Ross (double damn!)

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, March 7 2007, 16:25:21 (CET)
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Apology To Dr Kelley Ross (double damn!)

Dear Lord is there no end to shame?

That a man as steeped in arrogance as I should have to make such public penance, in one week, is almost insupportable. But what else can I do…for I am honestly, even honorably arrogant, and so I must.

Not only must I apologize to Dr Ross…but I have to admit to having used fucking Xenophon as “proof” in my public debate with him. Why, oh why, didn’t someone shoot that bastard at the battle of Cunaxa and put him out of my misery. Not only that, on top of the rest…but I must drink the bitter cup of Aprim…for by all that’s absurd I too…it almost kills…I too used Aprim’s very words…”I know because my parents told me”!

There, that’s the worst of it, if Ashur can show a little mercy and get OFF my back…and not sit up there roaring with laughter, I could hold my head up a little higher these days.

Dr Ross came to our attention when Jeff dragged him in here and showed that he had argued with some Assrian students in a class who’d said, when the topic of modern Assyrians came up that they knew(sigh) what they knew because their parents told them. Dr Ross had argued that they were mistaken, that ancient Assyrians had disappeared into Christianity, which was just as good because it was the best thing those savages ever did.

Two months later and after much todo, Dr Ross and I were on the stage of an auditorium at his junior college in Los Angeles and I was giving Xenophon as “proof”, because he took people on the land to be the same people as the people who’d been on that land when that land has been known to exist as Assyria land. My main point, however… which is still valid, was that the ancient Assyrians were not savages by any means, that they did not disappear any lost tribes but rather took the Hebrews to Nineveh as you would take Grandpa Festus, Jeb McCoy and cousin Hatfield to New York or Paris for some soap and culture…and that far from disappearing the Hebrews decided to stay in Paris and not return to Armpit Holler in the wilds of Tennessee which, they thought, before seeing Broadway, was a promised land.

I will now have to tell him I was mistaken in believing Xenophon, and any other “proof” along those same lines…right up to Layard and on to my parents and even Aprim…that the ancient Assyrians went the way of the Sumerians, Amorites, Hurrians, Chaldeans and Babylonians before them…and the Arameans, into whom they disappeared, and who followed them to disappear into the Arabs…and that this was the normal, usual, natural and to-be-expected route of all ancient cultures who’d each taken their turn in bringing us along and who, each in its turn, went to a well-earned rest.

I still don’t like the putz, still don’t appreciate his being the one, and for the wrong motive, to burst that bubble for those hot-headed, but poorly informed, young people of ours who’d been badly misled, as we all have been.

And this leads to a chilling realization. When I said…and Aprim now says that “everyone knows the truth of it…” whom do we mean by everyone? If we mean ourselves, then we admit to such circular reasoning as to require serious intervention, or admit, without knowing it, that all someone has to say to “prove” us wrong is “no one knows”. It’s the classic “He said/She said”…only in Assyria….which, oddly enough we have in the form of “Mirr-i/Mirr-ookh.

In truth most people, other than ourselves, don’t care. Beyond an interesting blip, they hardly give it much weight…unless they’re Evangelicals in which case, like their brethren of the 1800s, they hope to use us, put us to work because of that “great tradition” of our Church when we were apostolic pains in the ass…and got ourselves decimated for it until the Arabs came and put an end to that line of work.

A certain someone, someone very important in our community confides that a State Department official, one with practical experience in the matter, said that Assyrians are the biggest joke in Iraq politics…and who can argue? They have nothing, no sizeable numbers, they are at each others throats long before any “enemy” has sharpened his knife…they turn each other in as “traitors” to the very people they are appealing to for help OR, their enemies, of which there is no end…. as a “nation” which can, on its own authority(which all the use to back up all of their claims and historical myths), elect a government-in-exile which they’ve never governed to begin with…with no power base, no guns they wont use on each other first and with a benign reliance on Issaiah to get them what he promisedand thereby validate “their’ Holy Book…but who still walk around the streets of Baghdad and the halls of power, tin cup in hand, begging, and call that “National Work”.

Perhaps the people who count, the ones even we admit count the most because they are the ones we are begging from, are the ones who “know”…who know of the error Dr Joseph and so many other experts know, the kind of people they consult with and not Fred Aprim or Kenna, that this modern/ancient identity is part of the joke, or all of it…and the very reason we’ve become “a joke in Iraqi politics”.

Maybe we’ve just been patronized all these years…patted on the head after reciting our lesson well…allowed to sit in on conferences with our name tags reading “Member for Assyria”…who are being laughed at behind our backs…and maybe this explains why we can never “unite”…because our sense of being really Assyrian is paper thin…and also the reason we always feel “betrayed” or not respected in the morning, after delivering the goods the night before…because no one took any promise we thought we heard seriously…just as you might “yes-yes” a child in order to get it to shut up, or take a nap. We were possibly never “betrayed” by others more than we betrayed ourselves into believing this hoax in the first place..and have continued, unthinking, as I now have to admit I did… and Maggie and Aprim still do, corrupting the minds of our next generation…so they’ll do the same and so on into a sad future as unwitting clowns…good lord…how to turn a glorious heritage into a badge of shame.

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