The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Luxury of Don

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, March 2 2007, 17:07:45 (CET)
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The Luxury Don

If we recall, Don excused himself from a rational discussion because he was terribly upset at the way “his people” are suffering in Iraq. Other than yell “May You Live Long Ashur…somehow”, Don like most of us has done precious little besides be “terribly upset”. I don’t think it’s the actual people of Iraq and what they’re actually suffering that keeps Don in such a tender state…I think rather it’s that HE suffers that has him “suffering”. Just as he believes something because HE believes, no other evidence required or even necessary. There’s a subtle distinction here which will go the way of all other such subtleties in modern Assyria…straight over our heads.

With Dr Joseph’s book we are, in many ways, discussing the very causes that have helped those people to suffer…not so much by their own actions, except for those who had to beat a hasty retreat because they broke the law in Iraq…but because of what those very same people who got out have been saying and doing, based on their passionate and irrational belief that they are modern Assyrians, that has made life so much more difficult than it already is for everyone there. Indeed it has always and only been a “nationalist” minority of us who’ve damaged us all, who believed the British, the church or the Americans, or the British, and the British yet again…who’re the most notably “nationalistic” of us all and who’ve believed in and worked for the people who, essentially, are now and have been for some time, murdering Ashur…and who are as far away as their stubby legs could get them from their dear homeland…who are demanding and agitating and sending petitions and now, in the case of Fred Aprim, trying his damndest, long-distance, to make the Kurds angry enough at the innocent and long suffering Christians still alive in Kurdistan, that they might cease handing out money for them to rebuild some semblance of a life..or maybe retaliate in worse ways so Fred can “show the world” how important it is, to him, that “they” get a triangle.

This is the mentality of those who most believe they must be modern Assyrians, who think they’ve found a way to be GIVEN what everyone else on earth knows has to be earned and built and fought for and defended…because these modern Assyrian nationalists were GIVEN, and had attached to them by others, the very name and “identity” of “Assyrian”, which is nothing but Nestorian with “Assyria” tacked on as an afterthought( as it was nailed above their Nestorian churches only a few years ago). And since the name came to them so damn easily and from Europeans too, with nothing ventured on their own, except to live in a mud hut above the ground of Assyria, they are convinced that they can get the country itself as easily…also as a “gift” from the Europeans who first “gifted” them with the name of modern Assyrians…”the children of Shalmanessar”..as one hyperventilating Brit called us.

And it is precisely this that Dr Joseph discusses in this book: how the Nestorians of Iraq and that region ever came to think of themselves as modern day lineal descendants of the ancient Assyrians to begin with…an ancient heritage we were NEVER proud of in all those centuries we wailed, as Christians, about how the ancient Assyrians had been so bloody and cruel, to the Hebrews especially...a time when the treasures and indeed the knowledge that Assyrians existed lay buried from sight…and were anything more than a legendary people used as a foil to set against the Hebrews.

This is at the core of and the source of the single most notable characteristic most modern Assyrians share; an intense self-loathing that can be traced almost exactly to their ambivalent feelings(sometimes verging on schizophrenia…ahem) towards the people they now embrace as ancestors, while these same ancestors have been presented to them and believed to be by them, for centuries past, as some of most barbaric and hated people of their Holy Bible, hated even by them, the now “lineal descendants” of what they have despised as long as they can remember… which Holy Book they have accepted and venerated and BELIEVED faithfully for centuries.

It’s like having been an altar boy all your life and then becoming a deacon in your church, proud of your entire ancestry and current relatives until you discover you had the wrong ones,,,that your real ones, just recently dug up or released from prison, are nothing but a bunch of killers…how do you shop for Christmas presents for these new relatives from then on…how do you go the cemetery, sadly passing by the opulent graves of the people you thought all your life shared your bloodline, to kneel before the old tombs of your rotten new ancestors…and will you really continue inviting these new and hateful relatives, the kind of people your Christian faith has taught you since you were a pup were the most hated and hateful people of all… to the baptisms, weddings and birthday parties of your children…will you ever trust them? And what will this knowledge do to you if you must cut yourself off from the people you once loved… to force yourself to love your new relatives who haven’t a single quality you grew up admiring or even liking…and now have to dissimulate before where you once prided yourself on your honesty and sincerity…and know every moment of your new life…that every kiss you deliver has a lie behind it and not love.

How can you live a healthy and full life without your honor?

This, “we are modern Assyrians” business has loosened our screws…as Christian people, which is all that we have been and wanted to be for 2000 years almost. We want to believe it now, not because we are proud or even know or are interested much in the ancients…we have taken on this most uncomfortable mantle, for Christians, because it made us feel important…more important, and to the wealthy and powerful “lords” of the western world no less, than we had ever been before…it literally went to our heads and ruined them…and our hearts have been failing ever since.

We are the most thoroughly ashamed “proud” people on earth, living with a cancerous grwoth of loathing for the terrible things “our” ancestors did, torn between wanting to deny any connection to them, because of what we believed them to be for centuries, but yet attracted by the special status such a connection gave us recently in the eyes of powerful others and what it might get us by way of a pay-off, only our hearts aren’t in it… or, with a thin veneer of pride at what they did, but not wanting to get into it in detail…having lived for 2000 years, aligned with all those who had nothing but bad things to say about “our” ancestors, never knowing that they were OUR ancestors, as we claim now…feeling all that time a kinship with fellow Christians and a common loathing for the people our Bible told us were loathsome..to the point where we still, as Tiglath pointed out, repeat prayers of thanksgiving that “our” Babylonian children had their heads smashed against walls.

It may well be that Dr Joseph’s book inspires such intense reactions and condemnation because it offers a way out of a dilemma we secretly wish we could take…that his message appeals immediately to that distasteful feeling we have when we think, or rather feel, that this modern identity, which we hope to gain by, has sullied what purity we had as Christians… so that this otherwise inexplicably violent reaction arises from the guilt we feel at secretly wanting to deny those “ancestors” by settting aside an identity which has only caused us further humiliation.

This book tempts us…it holds out a way in which we can lay down this heavy burden of loving and hating ourselves at the same exact moment…to offer us, no matter how unintentionally, a long-ago forgotten peace of mind and soul in the tranquil knowledge we once had that we were only Christians, and could be again… Nestorians all along, except for a moment of madness in which the sudden interest and delight in the eyes of those people who praised themselves for “discovering” us… and that there might never have been any good reason at all to saddle ourselves and our children with the heritage of those “bloody savages” who have carried the disapproval and rebuke of the entire Christian and Jewish world…our real world, on their backs for 3000 years…transferring it to ours and our children’s backs without our ever having received any real and tangible reward or satisfaction for the inner turmoil and disruption it caused us, but only making more and more of a burden of our lives by giving us the pretext and even motive to make ourselves even more despised whenever we sided with those who knew how to use that burden, that “identity” to our increasing ruin, especially in these few years leading up to Kurdistan.

.And here, yet again, that bloody and most uncomfortable heritage is killing us some more for we must remain true to “Assyria”…to those damned Assyrians who angered people so…even to the point of being expected, by those of us willing to take money easily enough from the people destroying Assyria…to turn down money FROM Assyria, because of a name change we don’t approve of, to feed and clothe our families with. We must remain TRUE Assyrians, unable to GET an Assyria and unwilling to live at peace with that country unless it too is re-christened, as we were…always faithful to this modern Assyrian identity, when not faithful to the church, but NEVER faithful, it seems, to ourselves or our children, not in those important things that can keep them alive in body and soul, but an “idea” planted in our heads by others, of a ceonnection to a distant people we secretly, now, despise…In our loyalty to this barbarous ancestry, we must not now…as we should not have then, when Kurdistan was Iraq, take anything from or allow ourselves to be called Christian Kurds….as it was anathema to the nationalists to admit they were Christian Iraqis and no more and never NEEDED to be anything more.

Our confusion has reached such proportions that we have adopted a national program which depends on a Jew, Issaiah, giving us back Assyria, through the medium of warring Christian nations killing Muslims right now, as we speak…which isn’t too upsetting to us because no matter in what shape we get it, even if every Assyrian on it has been killed, it has “proven the bible to be correct”. Is it any wonder we’re a mess? Can it be that we really want Assyria and Assyrians destroyed by the same people who saddled us with this ancestry, who added to the burdens, unnecessarily, that we were already carrying as Christians? Since we can’t “get” Assyria and we can’t live in peace with ourselves or our neighbors “in” Assyria and not even “out” of Assyria…perhaps if Assyria were utterly destroyed and buried again and forgotten…we might go back to those good old days where we only blinded each other for Jesus without adding Ashurbanipal as another motive to seek revenge on ourselves, by ourselves.

When the going gets tough…as in Iraq for the last 18 years…the very tough and tender have nowhere to go…it’s left for someone else to battle for them. Trying to understand this book is part of that battle. Our nationalists are fighting for themselves and using those people back home as ammunition, all the while careful to stay out of harm’s way…they could give a shit about the real welfare of those whom they insist must NOT take ten bucks from Aghajan but starve instead while waiting for “real” Assyrian nationalistic pennies from Kenna, who has none at the moment and wont have any to share in the future,,,and if they become or remain “traitors”, by accepting “Kurdish” money, and we all know how easy it is to become a traitor among us…then they can just go hang…as we treat all “traitors” who “deny modern Assyrian identity, nationality and RIGHTS’, even if they were once our dear children and friends…like renegades and heretics who might just as well be killed for their “crimes”.

But…when the going gets tough on a forum, in America…where all you do is sit and type…even with the added burden of Maggie sitting on your guilt-burdened shoulders…you CAN bolt for the exit. Something your “dear” and poor people back home can’t do.

Khaya Ashur would be more appropriate if it read “Run Don, Run”.

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