The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Onward To Tragedy

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, March 18 2007, 0:04:17 (CET)
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The first chapter can really stand by itself as the story of how the Nestorians were first mistaken for Chaldeans and then for Assyrians. It’s a fascinating tale of mistaken identity on a grand and historic scale…first perpetrated by others and then swallowed hook line and sinker by the Nestorians themselves.

The rest of the book tells of the tragic consequences that came from these initial errors. It’s not like things would have been great or even tolerable between the Nestorians and their Kurdish, Persian and Turkish neighbors, who far outnumbered them, had they never decided on being Assyrians. The tragic events leading up to the First World War would have played out pretty much as they did…Assyrian identity or no. The sad part, which flows directly from this mistaken notion, is the clamoring after a nation when that war ended…based on their erroneous idea that they constituted an ancient Assyrian “nation”, which had lost its territory and, whose surviving lineal descendants, now had a good case, rather than a chance in hell, of being given it “back”.

The Nestorians would have been as persecuted, as violated, as beaten and battered had they never heard of the ancient Assyrians or thought themselves to be modern Assyrians. Their Christian religion alone plus the manipulations, inter-faith rivalries and deceit of the first missionaries to “discover” this fertile plain of co-religionist s would have done it for them. It was their mistaken conviction that, as modern descendants of an ancient nation, they should not or could not be part of any another real nation, as small as their numbers were and as hostile as their Muslim neighbors were to them…that sealed their fate. Where they might have been able to resume their admittedly insecure position among their neighbors after the Great War and built from there, this growing sense of entitlement among their budding nationalists made it certain they would go on, instead, steadily losing ground as they continued insisting upon a modern identity and it’s national “rights” no Muslim was willing to grant them.

Their cozying up to the missionaries and the occupying Russian military, which gave them a false sense of security amid new-found but temporary protectors…seeking to gain political advantage or security and thus inviting the foreigners to meddle in local affairs, or wreck vengeance on their behalf against Muslims…marked them out for retribution once the big powers were gone…and the same thing will happen again. It’s just possible, had they never gotten it into their heads that they were a modern nation of ancient Assyrians, they would have seen their true position as a religious minority, even more disliked now for the recent war fought out in that region by western Christian powers…perhaps an unwilling but, nevertheless, a legal and recognized member of whatever nations they had found themselves in at the time of the archaeological discoveries and on up to the Great War. They may have eventually moved forward though not as a millet, those days were over, but as part of the larger national group...instead of further aggravating things by insisting they were a nation apart and must be recognized and treated as such.

That was the ultimate tragedy and end result of a string of mistakes beginning even before the archaeological discoveries when the pope created the “Chaldean” Catholic Church in the 17th Century. It has given “nationalists” a false banner to rally round since the end of the Great War and has caused even more suffering, exacerbating what the Nestorians already had to face, without ever allowing them to rebuild their lives with any security because of nationalist propagandizing and agitation.

This is the crime which our nationalists have committed against us in the guise of getting us a country...added onto the crimes our competing clergy has committed in dividing us more and more over the Hebrew Bible. They’ve been playing all this time like there was anything substantial or beneficial to be gained by the community as a whole in their political aspirations or sectarian jealousies…they have cruelly played with the lives of others in pursuit of their personal glories, while remaining at a safe distance from the center of turmoil their visions of glory on earth or in heaven have caused to swirl around innocent Christians of BetNahrain.

It is safe to say that all “true” nationalists are safely out of Iraq, as is the head of their mother church, and those within Iraq know better than to make any of these claims, even if they believed them. And, from that safe distance, you can see them continue this deadly game as Aprim tries, manfully, to get the Kurds angry enough to stop paying out money to destitute Christians in Kurdistan…hoping, thereby, to force them, through increased destitution into “resistance” and “rebellion”, as Clinton claimed Sanctions were intended to do when Saddam was in power, and into supporting Kenna and his gang of thuggy opportunists.

When Saddam helped build churches in America those accepting his help were called traitors and sell-outs, but those working for the American invasion were our “heroes” and true Assyrians…now that Aghajan is helping Assyrians rebuild, he’s called a wolf in sheep’s clothing and those of our people taking his help are “naïve fools” and traitors too, instead of devastated mothers and fathers with half-starved children who can expect next to nothing in the way of meaningful help from any nationalist…a strange breed who thrill at meaningless titles and scraps of paper without seeing the blood in the background.

It seems the only ones we credit as “real” Assyrians, who know their ass from a hole in the ground in Assyria are those who dug it out themselves and crawled into it.

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