The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Professor Joseph...The Morning After

Professor Joseph...The Morning After

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, February 19 2007, 18:21:11 (CET) from 189.162.17.43 - dsl-189-162-17-43.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Professor Joseph, The Morning After. When someone tells me he knows how the universe was created because it says so in a book and, further, that I’ll be damned to hell if I don’t believe him and his book…he loses me. I’d be more inclined to the bible if it blessed me anyway and didn’t call me names for rejecting its “truth’s”. The best books of non-fiction are rational, well reasoned and well supplied with references, even when introducing a totally new topic, or better yet, another version…and they don’t damn anyone but treat us as reasonable and reasoning human beans intent on expanding and rounding out whatever we’ve been taught, interested only in what seems most plausible and conducive to mental, spiritual and communal health. Early in the morning I finished a first read-through of Dr Joseph’s book, “The Modern Assyrians Of The Middle East”. Had I used my marker to highlight every striking line or paragraph the book’s pages would now be puce. I held off and just read through it without pausing to think much, just letting it all wash over me. Not focused on any particular scenery on my journey I was more attuned to catch any hollow sounding phrase, any bump in the road or knocking of the valves. I couldn’t find any…didn’t feel any. The book felt “right”. I still get that special headache when the absurdities of the various churches, their Hottentot Hetmen and VooDoo rituals and histories are painstakingly unraveled, bone by feather by liver-flap…but since there’s no denying people have gone ape over this stuff since we can remember, one must exercise great forbearance and a willingness to put up with it all for the sake of the larger purpose at hand, sort of like what you need to get through an afternoon nap with a restless three-year old. To his credit though there’s no discernable bias in Dr Joseph’s handling of this delicate subject. He could be a scholarly Cannibal for all I know, so little did his own religious bias intrude. And I, for one, can’t say how much this is appreciated when dealing with anything that has “Assyrian” in the title. To me the most important part comes at the beginning where he discusses the little joke history played on us when, through the accidental meeting of romanticizing Europeans; sent abroad by their brethren for whatever reason, stumbled on the “lost” Christians living atop and adjacent to the mounds containing the treasures they dug up, consecrating them, in a mad moment, as the lineal descendants of those very people…and, what a feather in their cap, that these “discovered” and-once heathen Assyrians and Chaldeans had all spontaneously decided Christianity was best. The history of how that error was perpetuated and then used by European and American Evangelizing zealots in conjunction with the Mother Church of them all, the Roman Catholic, to win back the “heretics” of old…to be joined in this unseemly haste by foreign governments who took it up and used it as a way of setting us apart and they, as an ally and “friend” to us which did us far more harm than any good and all the misery that came of this and comes of it yet…not to mention the generations of barbarous nationalistic “scholars” and “intellectuals” this has spawned is damn near epic. No, it IS epic as handled by Dr. Joseph. None of it, of course, disproves that there aren’t descendants of the ancients still living in that region. Not a bit. But, if anyone is going to make a rational case for that, if anyone still feels somewhat giddy at the thought, then they will have to admit that such descendants can in no way be exclusively Christian and that these Christians can’t define what such descendants must do or say in order to join their ancestry to “ours”. The fact that this entire thing was started by Europeans and that we Christians jumped on board only after (although you can still see the distaste with which Christians admit to being linked to the people who manhandled them Hebrews), going along with anything the missionaries said in the belief that the governments of those missions would provide that special protection we all yearned for, should give us all pause…if we were the type to pause. Professor Joseph can’t be the only one of us who questions this belief of ours that we are Assyrians or Chaldeans…there must be others…but so far Professor Joseph seems to be one of the few, if not only, rash enough to actually write these things down…for which we should honor him…because at the rate we’ve been going on our own way, we’ve all but taken out a contract on the dwindling number of Christians left in Iraq. The fascinating thing to me in all of this is that Joseph doesn’t come out and say we “can’t” be such descendants…he simply tells the story of how those Christians of ours became convinced and why, what they thought to gain by such an association and, of course, their conviction that Christians and only Christians could be the “real” modern Assyrians. The tragic thing is that the more they took this notion up, especially in the ferment of nationalism that was gripping so many small minorities at the break-up of Ottoman Turkey but also as a reaction to the Colonial Powers in Europe, the more it cost them with their neighbors and ruling majorities, all Muslim, because this idea was being fanned into flame by missionaries representing Christian nations who then used their “special relationship” to the “lost” Christian minorities, one which they themselves had provided with a pseudo-national consciousness…as a pretext to intervene in the internal affairs of Muslim nations…and since the early missionaries at that time made no secret of their disdain for Islam and its teachings and Prophet…proclaiming, as if they were proud of it, that they were coming to “save” the heathen Christians and then USE them as evangelical workers in the cause of the “true faith” in its battle with the errors of Islam…well, all that was missing was to put a bullseye on the back of each Christian…and this, the governments of the mainline evangelicals, proceeded to do by declaring war against the Ottoman Empire…and in that turmoil and insecurity, recruiting a few of us Christians to fight in their cause with all those promises Darkies are famous for believing in…and are at times forced into trusting, no matter their doubts, because they wake up too late to the potentially dangerous situation their dalliance with foreign, fellow-Christians has led them into. All of this marvelously laid out in professor Joseph’s book. I have to wonder at the missing word “petroleum”…absent from most scholarly works on the subject of foreign missionary work…and I’m certain, if not for the internet, that word would never have appeared during the present missionary postion with which Bush is screwing that region either…a war for the same oil fields the Europeans desperately wanted then. And, as outright theft was costly back then as well and as that sort of thing was being frowned upon and resisted too, the next best thing was “spheres of influence” and “friendly” thugs…just as today. One wonders how much Rockefeller and Carnegie had to do with government support and use of missionaries. That standard old saw that American foreign policy is represented by the three “Ms”…missionaries, money and then Marines still rings true. Any robber baron of that day would understand that it’s best to first use up everyone else’s oil reserves rather than your own…for then they and not you, are at the disadvantage. Even the Second World War was fought over the need for large doses of petroleum to feed the engines of Europe and America…and Japan, whose western-style industrialization required gobs of the stuff…of which they had none but Malayasia did. The Germans eyed the rich oil fields to the east and indeed it was primarily the shortage of gasoline that brought their war machine to a halt. That’s neither here nor there, though it’s everywhere too. The important thing for now is that Dr Joseph’s book sheds a bright and rational light on a very dark corner of our collective psyche…and in this brilliant light perhaps the rats and cockroaches of nationalism will eventually be flushed out and down. Having ended with an apt poetical flourish, I will now go back to read the book again…and focus on details. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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