The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Metaphysical Two-Step

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, February 23 2007, 17:49:11 (CET)
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I think I see how our nationalists willfully mis-read or shuffle what aren’t even facts to suit themselves. Dr. Joseph says that Rassam, “To bolster his theory that the Nestorians were the descendants of the ancient Chaldeans…” claims, incorrectly, that Xenophon called the people there Chaldeans etc. It doesn’t matter, for my purposes here whether or not Rassam was correct or if Xenophon was. What I want to show is how WE operate.

Our nationalists, reading that Xenophon “said” that the ancients were Chaldeans, is all we need. We seize upon that, without bothering to read the original, and say, “obviously Rassam and Xenophon were wrong…wrong in calling those ancients Chaldeans…because WE know they were Assyrians”…and we come away having “proven” that Xenophon and Rassam both, while way off as to what to call the ancients, were way RIGHT in providing us with the basis for our “validation” of what we need very badly to believe…after we make the very slightest CORRECTION of their errors(which only compounds the errors)…by giving the RIGHT name to those ancients. And thus “proof” from “classical writers” is produced out of whole cloth…writers who on closer reading were trying to “bolster” something they wanted to believe…or who got it completely wrong or who meant something entirely different than what we think, or want desperately to think, they meant.

Xenophon, it turns out, meant something else entirely by “Chaldeans”, but not Assyrians either…rather he meant the people of Urartu…he also never called the people of Assyria anything but Medes. But we take Rassam’s attempt to “bolster” his own pet theory as “evidence”, substituting our own pet, which is that the ancients were Assyrians and not Chaldeans…and think we have proven something when we “correct” Rassam by inserting “Assyrian” where he said “Chaldean”, when all we’ve done is add to and increase a series of errors, with one of our own making.

We don’t stop to consider, as Dr Joseph has done, whether Rassam was correct in assuming that Xenophon meant “our” Chaldeans when he, Rassam, says Xenophon used that term…we aren’t inspired or motivated, as a scholar would be, to check the original source by reading the “Anabasis”…rather we are thrilled to find, not a “truth”, but a platform, an opening on which we can construct our own error, which we then grandly dub the “truth” because “we know” that by Chaldeans, Rassam meant Assyrians, because “we know who we are” and that the Assyrians “came first” and are the “most important”and since “everyone knows” the land is called Assyria, “ how could there be Chaldeans in it” and on and on…using as a starting point for our “truths” an error…we accept the one error; that Rassam said that Xenophon said the people he encountered were Chaldeans…but we “correct” that error, not by finding the truth of the matter; that he really called the people Medes and the land Media, but by substituting our own error;”everybody knows he meant to say, or should have said, Assyrians instead of Chaldeans”…into a “truth” when we make the NEXT error by substituting our erroneous notion; that he must have meant Assyrians all along for Rassam’s erroneous claim; that Xenophon called the people Chaldeans and not Medes…and that if Xenophon used the term “Chaldean” he meant by it the people of Urartu anyway…and not what we think of as Chaldeans.

By such long and winding paths do we lose ourselves completely, always maintaining with fervor that we know where we’re going…claiming, even as we get deeper and deeper into the dark wood and, out of all rhyme or reason, that we are “finding” ourselves…and then become furious with people who want to “deny who we are”, when they’re just trying to open our eyes gently and lead us back to the sunshine so we can see our way for real.

We are people, living in a dark hut we say is in Assyria, the windows all sealed shut…preferring to paint pretty pictures of hills and mountains, lakes and rivers, sunsets and trees, all of them in and of “Assyria” on the tightly closed windows, so when we look out “at the world” we see what we need to…who are terribly afraid and hostile to the idea of merely pushing one of our painted windows open to see the real lakes and rivers and mountains and moon and stars outside…we prefer to dwell with our fables clutched tightly to our chests, in the dark, resisting all efforts to let any fresh air or sunshine in…and our rapidly deteriorating communal and mental health is the price we pay for insisting on these painted fancies and pretty delusions. And now that Kurdistan sits beyond those closed windows…we will dig a hole in that hut and bury ourselves and our children even deeper, to get them away from the “ugliness” of the open fields and mountains beyond and those who would “steal from us our last consolation”.

I think if we examine most of our claims that, “writers have said we are the Assyrians”, we’ll see similar errors and a willful twisting of actual and then imagined facts, and also a twisting of errors and then compounding of errors to suit ourselves, when all it has done is drive us further away from reality into the arms of blind faith, not in religion perhaps, but in an almost equally faith-based and cult-like belief in rituals and improbabilities, replete with condemnations for “heresy”, excommunication, trial by Inquisition, gouging of eyes, tearing of fingernails and burning at the stake that we’ve made of “political nationalism”.

This is all the “crime” that Dr. Joseph has committed, by a scholarly( providing sources) and reasoned attempt to see where the twists and turns came from…the “errors” that have sent us hurtling through space at breakneck speed, breaking our and our children’s necks by overloading them with misconceptions and tortuous arguments delivered in hysterical diatribes which have a concealed threat in them that we will be cast out unless we agree blindly… which have made the most of them either disgusted and removed or barely fit for intellectual activity, let alone civil discourse on the matter, and has proven nothing more than that we can not only swallow the Jewish bible whole, but wash it down with a roaring Mississippi of “historical” and “national” fallacies. After such a double whammy dealt to the young minds of our children, is it any wonder they remain childlike, long after adulthood, where this subject is concerned…frozen in a sort of arrested development brought about by an almost deliberate crippling of the faculties of higher reason they need with which to mature?

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