The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Strangers to Themselves

Strangers to Themselves

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, February 16 2008, 19:22:09 (CET) from 12.199.144.42 - mail.shpl.org Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla Website: Website title:

Maybe Christianity wouldn’t have been a disaster to our people if we’d not allowed ourselves to break apart even as it did. There seems to have been no solid ground under our feet once we began chasing after different versions of Christianity. When the Ottoman Empire was ended and Iraq emerged as a sovereign nation the Assyrian refugees from Hakkari and Persia refused to accept Iraqi nationhood but instead saw themselves as displaced people who’d been promised a country of their own. To identify completely with Iraq was made to appear like treason to “Assyria”, even to Jesus. At the same time the infestation of western European missionaries lured many away from their ancient religious ties, costing them the continuity of tradition. It became acceptable to change religious beliefs in search of benefits offered by the West. Many even toyed with the idea of adopting Greek Orthodoxy in hopes that Russia would offer them her protection much as France protected the Catholics among us and, we’d hoped, Britain would protect those of us lured to the Anglican Church…as America was supposed to protect those who adopted the Baptist faith. Religion, which is supposed to mean something eternal, became something transient…something you could change if greater benefits came your way, or the hardships of constancy became too much to endure. We split into warring sects much as we had been when the Arabs first came, and have continued dividing, most recently thanks to the Mar Bawi brawl which has set friend against friend and family against itself. To add to all this we came to believe we were descended from the ancient Assyrians and Chaldeans, which divided us into two hostile supposedly “ethnic” camps…adding one more division on top of our religious ones. Then there are Syriacs, Maronites and now Arameans as well. We seem to have a mania for splintering and a revulsion towards brotherhood. To complete our undoing we refused loyalty to the actual nations we lived in so that not even a political base existed on which we could gain a firm foothold. As if that wasn’t enough we grew to resent those of us who hailed from different countries…the Assyrians of Iran vs the Assyrians of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. In the modern era where tribes and even religious sects no longer matter and people are grouped by nations, we ‘ve abandoned the actual nations created from our ancient lands in favor of western nations who long ago discarded the kinds of ties we seek to maintain where our insecure identities huddle in tribal ghettoes, if not physical then mental and spiritual. To be what we consider “ourselves” we have to abandon what we cherished most, if we wish to take full advantage of our new surroundings, especially where our children are concerned… otherwise we circle the wagons, inoculating ourselves against modernity, even to the point of misunderstanding or refusing to learn the actual meanings and essentials of the new institutions we encounter in the West, including the very definition of Democracy and even the proper use of the dominant language… trying to balance precariously with one foot in a modernity we view with hostility while the other stays rooted in some ethnic enclave in the Middle East that no longer exists. And, as a final blow to our sanity we’ve migrated to western Christian nations in the belief that it was better for us to live in any Christian nation, no matter the culture, rather than remain with the “enemy” Muslims who “denied” our ethnic claims and “persecuted” our religious beliefs. Once safe in the West we found it difficult to maintain what was supposedly most dear to us. We found our children swept away by an irresistible foreign culture, forgetting their language and neglecting religion; which we thought we came to the West to save and cherish…our first generations found it hard to assimilate and at the same time maintain what was left of the identity that seemed so important once that it cost us a settled life among the people we’d been neighbors to for hundreds of years in favor of a “tolerance” in the West in which we became lost anyway. No longer in the Middle East we don’t dare live fully in the present, in our new homes, so that we really have no home anywhere which promises to allow us to carry on in the ways we were used to, which we thought we emigrated to ensure and protect. Our religious sects are looked at askance by Europeans and Americans, our claims to being ethnic Assyrians meant nothing,,,,everything about us that we had felt was unique and special in Muslim countries didn’t matter much in the West and didn’t seem to inspire even our children with any kind of passion. Our religions became fads and fashions or were neglected altogether, we stood apart from our fellow MidEasterners, we claimed a totally different orientation…we made ourselves strangers in what had been our homeland for centuries simply because we resented Muslim dominance…so we escaped to the West only to find we were still strangers even though welcome, but among strangers….welcome to assimilate and get lost…as we have been doing for decades now…youth groups notwithstanding. We cut ourselves off from everything that mattered to us most…we either refused to sink roots deep into the soil of BetNahrain and other MidEastern countries…or we tore them up to travel half-way around the world only to find our roots could not take hold in foreign soil unless we changed everything about ourselves…to become indistinguishable in time from all the other transplanted stock. You could say we had to lose ourselves to save a semblance of ourselves but that even that will in time disappear…and we’re still foreign and outsiders in the West as we made ourselves in the East. To cap our loss of self-worth we’ve even come to helping finance an illegal war against BetNahrain, a land we claim to love, a war which threatens to spread and engulf all the countries we had lived in since Time began. In short, nothing is solid under our feet…and it’s all gone to our heads. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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