The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> What The Missionary Said

What The Missionary Said
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, June 7 2008, 19:58:57 (CEST)
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One of the lamest proofs offered that we’re Assyrians was that there are plenty of letters from Missionaries SAYING we are. That, of course, is no proof. But it makes you wonder what their motives were in all of this. Just what did missionaries have to gain by cooing in our ears that we were descendants of Ashurbanipal anyway?

It ‘s shocking to learn in Dr Joseph’s book just what the reasons were for the sudden interest the West took in us. The earliest missionaries, the French Catholics, were trying to add numbers to the Church since whole countries in Europe were turning Protestant…but what about the later influx of Protestant sects during the great missionary age of the 1800s…what did these people want with us Nestorians and Jacobites?

Well, according to their own words the plan was to “save” us frist and then use us to go save the Muslims. The missionaries played up the fact that we thought of ourselves as the first apostolics, the spreaders of the Word, but we’d sort of lost interest over the centuries. What they failed to recognize, or maybe that’s why they wanted us to do it, was that it was one thing to preach Jesus to a heathen, quite another to do it to a Muslim, especially if his religion had protected you from orthodox witch-hunts all those centuries…it was a poor return for hospitality such as our Christians would never have received from Western Churches who would have burned them all at the stake, imprisoned or forcibly converted them from their “heretical” and “damned” religious sects and cults.

To bind the Christian villagers closer to themselves and divide them from association with their Muslim neighbors the missionaries gladly took up the device, handed them by the archaeologists, that we were not like the Muslims…that we were an entirely different breed of human altogether, certainly not “Arab” or “Turkish” or “Persian” Christians but ASSYRIANS! It was another classic example of “Divide and Conquer”. It would be easier, they thought, to send us in among Muslims if we looked down on them and prided ourselves as having quite a different heritage…

The upshot was we developed such a hatred for Muslims as inferior beings that we denied Assyrian “ethnicity” to any of us who married one, or converted to Islam. It would be like denying American citizenship to any American-born person who switched religions…making it clearer than anything that the whole “we are Assyrian” business is a fraud because how can you strip ethnicity, or genes, from someone over a religion? What this shows is that it’s ALL about religion and if you’re the wrong religion then you can’t be of what’s otherwise presented as a “national” or “ethnic” identity. And, conversely, if you’re the RIGHT religion why then you can be ASSYRIAN!

It was in the imperial and colonial interests of Western agents, first archaeologists, the earliest of whom weren’t men of science but quasi-adventurers, and second missionaries, who were all doing the work of Empire, or at least of imperialism and whose governments needed an ally within…an ally who could be brought to believe he was a superior being, or at least totally different from the target population and to think his better interests lay with the foreign, colonial powers rather than his own neighbors, who’d been his neighbors for centuries.

Any letters or interest the missionaries and archaeologists showed in us and the encouragement they gave us that we were indeed who they said we were was all done with their own interests and those of their governments foremost in their minds…they certainly did us no favors and in the end they began that process which we took up of ruining the lives of the Christians of the MidEast who’d lived in peace for centuries among Muslims…ever since the Arabs came and blessed us all by first imposing peace between our fat-headed bishops and then protecting us from the rapacious Romans.

But in the end, Europe got us after all.



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