The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: my grandfather.....

Re: my grandfather.....
Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Wednesday, October 2 2013, 21:08:39 (UTC)
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Your grandfather was a wise man. I can only imagine the gossip and envy. People hate those who think differently than they do, and don't easily conform to authority, or mob mentality.

One of my father's cousins was very fond of the Assyrian anthem that your grandfather or Dr. Atouraya wrote. I think he professionally recorded himself singing his rendition of the anthem, with a full band accompanying him.

Not meaning any disrespect to your grandfather, Dr. Atouraya or my uncle, I personally have a hard time taking nationalist anthems seriously. Anything having to do with nationalism and religion puts me to sleep. I think about how as a child of ethnic background, I used to think and dream in my ethnic languages. Now I dream only in English, unless I dream of someone to whom in real life I've mostly spoken to in Assyrian or Farsi. And if I move to Argentina, perhaps after a period of time, I will think, dream and live as a Spanish-speaking Argentine. I'm an imperfect, incomplete, forever changing, intellectually evolving human accident that just happened to be born to two individuals, in a particular time and place. Life is not static, to be in tune with life, one must be fluid. So I deeply oppose nationalism and religion, and anything that has a definite, unchanging structure and offers non-negotiable answers, as in religion or any top-down power structure, especially ones lead by males, or a male god, or a male Chairman of the Party, all of whom become drunk with their own narcissism and drown their people in deep pools of blood, while admiring their own grotesque image on the crimson surface.

I feel less hope for the "people" and the "workers". I should have been born into a rich aristocratic family and then turned communist, like some of the communist intellectuals of Hezb'Tudeh, the Iranian Communinst Party, whom among its members were former wealthy landowners from the Qajar aristocracy, who became communists after Reza Shah confiscated a portion of their wealth and lands.

I'm always amused by people who become radically communist when they lose their wealth, prestige and position of power. These are bourgeois matters which have no bearing on a true communist proletariat who never heard of Marx of Mao, doesn't even know what communism or proletariat means, but lives its reality daily, during each barefoot walk to fetch water from the nearest source, the one that current and past transnational corporations have used as a toilet to dump toxic waste, which could easily and with less hazard, be disposed... but it costs a bit of money, just about the smallest imaginable amount, compared to the unimaginable quarterly profits most transnationals make. And, by law, corporations have the same rights as an individual citizen by the Constitution, and, again by law, corporations are to maximize profits for their shareholders and investors, no matter what unintended consequences ("Blowback") their endless game of profits over people have, which in the neoliberal economic lingo is considered as "externalities". And as Gore Vidal rightly called our political parties "a property party with two right-wings", servile to the wishes and demands of 400 wealthy Americans, with Clinton and the Democrats dismantling welfare, signing NAFTA, and deregulating and privatizing the public airwaves, where some asshole crypto-fascist like Rupert Murdoch can buy as many newspapers, radio stations and TV channels as he pleases, and they push that on the public as "choice". What kind of choice does one have when the same idea is redundantly and hypnotically pumped into your psyche? No wonder people believe Fox news, what other alternative do they have? MSNBC? I like Rachel Maddow, but she's no Amy Goodman. So for most people who never heard of Amy Goodman or Democaracy Now!, http://www.democracynow.org/ they're left with the choice of soup or salad.


Definition: An externality is an effect of a purchase or use decision by one set of parties on others who did not have a choice and whose interests were not taken into account.

Classic example of a negative externality: pollution, generated by some productive enterprise, and affecting others who had no choice and were probably not taken nto account.

Example of a positive externality: Purchase a car of a certain model increases demand and thus availability for mechanics who know that kind of car, which improves the situation for others owning that model.

-- This third example is typical right-wing reasoning. So the poppy fields owned by the landowner warlord tribal Afghan Nato/U.S. allies, are being guarded by our young men and women in U.S. uniform, and whose end product of heroin ends up on the ports of Long Beach, and within a week, a group of white suburban kids are driving down to St. Julian street, in what's left of the last block of the old skid row after gentrification changed downtown L.A. by running out the poor and the immigrants, so they can make room to build expensive apartments for the children of the wealthy who have invested in, have interest in, or just felt like supporting the war in Afghanistan. And now their children who are "bored" and feel alienated, empty, and alone, while having 5000 Facebook "friends", they also become an example of externality when they develop a $300 a day smack habit, on product protected and procured by their parents' and leaders' allies whom they support in a "humanitarian" war to "free Afghan women from the Burkha", which the rest of the world, even the clinically blind, see it as yet another corporate war for control of resources, and the almost hundred-year-old policy of encirclement of the "Ruskies" and the "Chinks".


And I keep digressing...

I just wanted to say I have the deepest respect for your grandfather. He sounds like an extraordinary man. I can't judge Assyrians living in Iraq, because I don't think the Assyrians of Iran, like my family, and we were poor (still are), had it as bad as many Assyrians in Iraq. For one, the Persians are the total opposite of Arabs. The difference is night and day. The ethnic Persians, who make up 48% of the population has been institutionally racist toward Azeris, who make up 27% of the population, and most of the conscripts are Azeris (or "Torks", as Persians call them), and they are stereotyped as being "Tork e khar" Turkish donkey, or khmara. But, interestingly, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an ethnic Azeri.

There's also racsim against the Qurdish and the Afghani refugees of war, who have Iranian wives and children, but are not allowed Iranian citizenship, and are treated by the poor and uneducated with great hate and scorn, to where there have been public beatings of Afghans by groups of men, without one single person opposing or stopping it.

The Shah, as much as I dislike him and the clerics in power now, treated Christians: Armenians and Assyrians; and Iranian Jews, quite favorably. Iran has been Shia before the Pahlavis tried to quickly secularize and modernize the country, following Ataturk's policies in Turkey. So of course, the country was split between modernization ("Westernization") and reactionary conservative clerical rule. In Iran, Muslims were prohibited from drinking, but Assyrian and Armenian deli owners were allowed to sell vodka (though covertly) and sell ham and mortadella qalebis. Both Iranian Jews and Muslims love qalebis sandwiches, so some clerics and rabbis officiating over religious diet, simply lied and sanctioned qalebis as kosher or halal, asserting that qalebis comes from cow, not pork. So, basically with Christian America and Jewish Israel as the Shah's backers, he did more for Christians and Jews than he did for many Muslims who didn't have heat, running water, rampant disease, and just static misery. And the asshole had the millions to give to an Israeli producer to design a Hollywood-type epic film set spectacle, a mere farcical charade in 1971 in Takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis), where he gave the dog of Ethiopean Emperor Haile Selassi a diamond necklace for Selassi's dog which was worth $100,000 at 1970s currency rate. Meanwhile his own poor, not just in the south of Tehran, which was a bastion of Shia working class, full of vice and violence, underdeveloped and seething with rage and rancor. For these devout Muslims who's Muslim leader gives a leader of another country, a westernized Christian and Jewish African nation, a piece of jewelry, a artifact of blood diamonds, for his dog... an favored animal by all Muslims, as we all know.



Funny thing, I just looked up khmara on the Urban Dictionary and this is the definition:

Urban Dictionary http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=khmara

1 khmara

a group of assyrians who make short clips about doing random and stupid things.



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