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=> something rotten in Assyria

something rotten in Assyria
Posted by farid (Guest) - Monday, October 13 2003, 10:13:25 (EDT)
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There seems to me to be two ways of approaching this, "we're the descendants of the ancient Assyrians" business. One is to mean it in the sense that we have been born in lands that once inspired, saw, felt, were ruled and influenced by the ancient Assyrians, among others...people whose genetic strain or accomplishments could not possibly have been wiped off the face of the earth. The other is to go a step further and use this undeniable fact as a basis for fabulous and fantastic claims for actual compensation for what Christian Assyrians, the "direct descendants" of the ancient Assyrians "lost" over 2000 years ago.

Land seizures are nothing new...they happen in Palestine with regularity...the Native Americans, both north and south, suffered one of the most massive land seizures in recent history. Nowhere on earth have any conquering nations or intrepid colonists been expected, or forced, to give anything back that they've taken from the rightful owners unless of course through counter military and violent measures or and very rarely, voluntarily. This is so well known and approved of that it's a wonder only our own boys don't understand it, or pretend not to.

I don't know to whom, in all apparent seriousness, they address these claims for compensation to. The United Nations, that started off its career by carving an Israel out of the sovereign nation of Palestine and then dividing Korea and later Vietnam in two at the cost of untold bloodshed and human misery? Perhaps an America that built its inalienable right to Freedom on the stolen lands and broken bodies of Native Americans and its monuments to Liberty with the stolen bodies of enslaved Africans and enforced and uncompensated labor of women? Or the Brits, maybe, who've always been sensitive to the rights of Darkies? What's embarrassing, but more damning and damaging even than that, is that these demands do real and lasting harm to the very people our boys claim to be making them on behalf of...the remaining Christians over there...as well as losing us the interest and support of a very different kind of Assyrian who's too ashamed and uncomfortable to be associated with religious fanatics and lunkheads. Could that possibly be a part of their goal or even just a happy coincidence?

But the claim for compensation or the creation of a "Tiny BetNahrain" aside, there remains the much more intriguing question of what degree of "Assyrianism" is left on the planet and whose body it runs through and how it shows itself. If our boys insist Christianity is the same thing as being Assyrian, then Christian is all an Assyrian has to be. But this is absurd. In the days of the empire perhaps religion defined ethnicity and ethnicity religion, but those days are long gone. Indeed the very idea of ethnic origin has taken a beating and in a few more centuries will be meaningless. We will become what we have always been, a Human Species made up of a lot of regional and other variations increasingly squeezed into each other's faces and forced into each other's orifices to create a composite picture...which seems to me to be a good thing in the end. How nice it is to have a multiplicity of choices when you go out to dine...to have on one block Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Arab, French, Italian, African, Brazilian etc, restaurants instead of Denny's on both sides of the street and that's all. Anyone talking about "purity" of blood or race in this era is dangerously close to espousing Fascism...ahem.

It seems to me increasingly obvious that while Assyrianism remained alive in a genetic sense, however one would measure it, as did a mere fragment of what Assyrianism built...the Assyrian consciousness certainly died out long ago and was replaced by religious affiliation. Our Christian boys hope, or rather wish, that by reviving a claim to an Assyrian descent that predates Christianity and goes as far back as the dawn of recorded history, in their fertile imaginations, they have a snowball's chance in Jerusalem of regaining "their" country. This is madness enthroned and goes nowhere. It never has and it never will.

A far more interesting field of conjecture is why the Assyrians would have done something so drastic as denying their own gods and taking on the ones belonging to, if not their enemies, then certainly a people they felt superior to in every way: them fun-loving, raucous Hebrew Hillbillies. Especially at a time when ethnicity and religion and everything else were indeeed all wrapped up together and inseperable. Today it's an easy thing to take on any number of religious beliefs while being of one nationality, one ethnicity...one city and country and job even. Nothing else has to change much in your daily commute, in your vacations, where you dine or shop or go to school or what movies you see if you go from Muslim to Buddhist to Lutheran to Sikh. But that wasn't the case back then. The Assyrians were certainly tolerant of other religions and could live side by side with people whose rituals might be vastly different from theirs...but that's not the same thing as hopping from one to another yourself.

And you can get a bit of a sense of what religious loyalty meant back then, which is nowhere near as steadfast a thing as it is today, by simply broaching the subject of "regime change" with our Christian Assyrians...of a switch back to Ashur, or over to Muhammad or any other god...as well as by contemplating all the martyr stories we're so proud of...tales of mothers holding their childrens' throats for the knife rather than see that child forswear a Jew named Jesus. Yet it would appear there were no such Assyrian mothers when it was a question of setting Ashur aside...indeed they seem to have run with great speed and joyous abandon to another god and away from Ashur as if their lives under his direction had been one long unmitigated disaster...sort of like the Hebrews under Yahwe had been...a god the Assyrians somehow came to prefer over Ashur...as if he'd been better to the Hebrews and to his own son than Ashur had ever been to Assyrians. And they're PROUD to have done so without being placed under any duress...with No knives held to their throats, but on the contrary under the compelling reason that Yahwe cured an obscure Assyrian named Abgar where Ashur couldn't...and that's all it took, which seems like such a slur upon everything people felt towards their gods and the depth of their spiritual committment...such an outrageously odd and unheard of denial of everything a People held dear and identified their core beliefs with, then and now, that it has to jangle your mind...if you have one.

How could a Jew declare he was even more of a Jew specifically by denying Yahwe and Yahwism and claiming thereby to have become a better Human Being for doing so? It seems so ridiculous a statement when made about and by anyone other than Christian Assyrians. Yet that's exactly what they do. It would seem today that it's a sign of your un-Assyrianism and even marks you a traitor, of all things, if you suggest reverting back to an Assyrian god rather than following a Hebrew one, if you must have gods at all.

The more you listen to these claims...the more you contemplate the character of the people making them, the more you think about it for yourself dispassionately...the clearer it becomes that this is a silly and childish political/religious ploy having nothing to do with either an Assyrian cultural belief OR a Hebrew/Christian religious one...but sheer bigotry and rank opportunism.

Hovering in the air around us are numerous reminders of what those who believed in Ashur achieved...as there are countless examples of what Jews and their offspring, the Christians and Muslims, achieved. But whereas Muslims, Jews and Christians have their religious accomplishents alongside their cultural, non-religious, ones...Christian Assyrians have only their modified Hebrew religion and feel it's more than enough, "thank you". Even in their Diaspora...in their worst days in Christian Europe, Jews had a rich culture AS Jews...aside from the synagogue. But not Christian Assyrians who seem to even disdain any open affiliation with their own glorious past because it was a pagan one...a non-Christian one...an Assyrian Heritage, not even "pure" back then, that was "unfriendly" to the Jews who gave them Jesus... a magnificent history as Assyrians these same Jews they now follow after scorned, libelled,defamed, stole, altered...spat upon and then returned.

Something is terribly rotten in Assyria.



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