The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> On The Dangerous Foolishness of Assyrian Nationalism

On The Dangerous Foolishness of Assyrian Nationalism
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, December 29 2015, 16:24:00 (UTC)
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On the Dangerous Foolishness of Assyrian Nationalism

International Law is still the law of the jungle. Where taking land is concerned; if you could keep it long enough it became your new nation( the United Nations now forbids it). Every modern nation on earth today exists on land taken from previous inhabitants...therefore it is not news that your ancestral homelands are now occupied by others and have become theirs. It is the way of the world. The only exception is Israel and in that case the land wasn't “given back”...it was taken by a third party, Britain, from Palestine and made into Israel. This is known as a crime not a triumph of nationalism.

Iraq and the Assyrian nationalists are hardly in the same situation though they like to think they are. Before the creation of Israel, following on the heels of the mass murder of millions of Jews, there was nowhere in Europe Jews felt safe or were welcome. Creating a country for them seemed the least Christians could do after trying unsuccessfully to murder them all....but no Jew, except under extreme provocation and with no other choice would have left Paris or Berlin or Rome or Prague for 1940s Haifa and Jaffa.

Assyrians are not faced with such a bleak circumstance. If they don't like life in Iraq they are welcome in any number of Christian nations which also happen to be the richest most advanced in the world....Jews did not have this option in 1946. No Jew in his right mind wanted to live on a Kibbutz...it was a matter of no choice....Assyrians have the entire Western World to choose from.

Prior to 1945 any Jew anywhere in the world could go visit Jerusalem...even live there if they wanted....a few did but again, under duress, not choice. Any Assyrian could have visited Iraq and the Nineveh Plains...no one stopped them...they could even have lived there if they wanted.

The conditions for Jews and Assyrians which led each group to “demand a homeland of our own” were entirely different. Assyrians were not suffering persecution for being Christians anywhere in the world...so what was the “emergency”? What is the emergency now? There is none, in fact hardly any Assyrian would now take his or her family back to “Nineveh”....it's merely a pose, a romantic fixation and a way to get attention and maybe pity. Then there's the oil. Israel had no resources to speak of...it still doesn't. But a “return” of the Nineveh Plains would also be a return of great wealth, in oil....for that reason alone the land will never be “given back” to a Christian minority living abroad.

It is not the Assyrians of Iraq who make this demand...it is the comfortable ones safely away from Iraq and who, if they ever visit Iraq again, will do so briefly, on vacation...or perhaps invest in property...from a distance. Any modern “Assyria” would have to be an Apartheid State, by definition. Christians will always be a minority and unless strict political limits are placed on Muslim Iraqis, they will in time outnumber Christians and democratically change the State to suit themselves....as Israelis fear their Muslims could do one day, if allowed full liberty. Otherwise every Muslim would have to be excluded from “Nineveh”....which would cause a storm of other problems for any modern Assyria.

For one thing “Assyria” would be landlocked, with no easy access to the sea except by river and even then would have to pass through Muslim territory...and it would be a simple matter for its Muslim neighbors to close both their borders and airspace to any Nineveh....then what? How would you even get to Nineveh unless Muslims allowed it?

Then there is the small matter of Sedition which, in time of war becomes Treason, punishable by death in all countries. Sedition is a crime, it is illegal everywhere on earth. One man's sedition may be another man's nationalism but the authorities will know how to deal with it either way. Even the United States passed an Alien and Sedition Act in WW I making it a crime to criticize the government. If the “enlightened” United States has such laws what do we expect from “evil” Muslims?

Assyrian nationalists tend to read only the Bible and next, what soothes their sense of being wronged therefore they are ignorant of the definition of Sedition and such things as the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s. During that time Native Americans, tired on waiting for the government to make good on ancient treaties, seized native lands, Alcatraz Island being one. After a few months Federal Agents, the FBI and Marshals descended on the peaceful men women and children...many were arrested and a few killed and others jailed. And Native Americans have much more recent, and legal claims to their homelands than do modern Assyrians....but to no avail. To the Native Americans they were merely taking what was theirs, by treaty....but to the authorities they were dealing in sedition and that is a crime.

To encourage any Iraqi Assyrians still living in Iraq to “stand up and demand what is ours” is to invite them to commit a serious crime and face any number of unpleasant repercussions. To encourage them from a distance is to bring them to the attention of the authorities who might wish to take “preventative steps”....it would not be the first time foreign meddling has caused grief to native Christians, even though they themselves were innocent.

Therefore it is highly irresponsible for any Assyrian, living outside Iraq, to make these kinds of pleas or demands. They will not suffer for it, but others will...as they have in the past. To these foreign nationalists it is a lark, something to do, a “cause” and a way to gain attention. It might give the illusion of “purpose” and “meaning”...and how much television can you watch without getting the itch to make history and remake maps?

As Shlomo Sand said in his excellent book on the invention of Jews....if everyone went back to their original homeland the world would become a madhouse...or words to that effect. Of course it will never happen...Iraq will not “give back” anything. Someone else might take the land from Iraq forcibly and give it to Assyrian nationalists...at least this is their hope. But the backlash from that would mean that not a single one a the nationalists would ever go back to a Nineveh become even more dangerous than Chicago.

...how has Israel turned out?



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