The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Adam and Eve and Lucy Too

Adam and Eve and Lucy Too
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, October 14 2008, 19:41:40 (CEST)
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Adam and Eve and Lucy Too

If you’re alive today you’re the result of a miraculous ride through countless centuries taken by your genetic material during which time your ancestors managed to avoid any number of traps nature set for them. At any point along a hundred thousand year plus journey not one of your direct forbears was killed....fell off a cliff and died or was eaten by some beast that no longer exists. If today you should happen to be the last of your line and drop dead tomorrow before producing offspring, it will mean that your long genetic and ancestral strain just died with you...for good and ever. You will never come back again to be represented in your offspring for you will no offspring. The long string of your family line stretching back to Adam and Eve, or some half-ape from Africa, has been cut and that, as they say, is that. And this is exactly what has happened to countless numbers of people along the way; their family tree got chopped down.

Before there were Assyrians or Jews, there was something or someone else. Greeks, as we know them in their Golden Age, weren’t created for the purpose in a laboratory in 500 B.C. Their genetic strain, and culture too, descended from somewhere else...from people who knew nothing of “Greece”. They “became” Greeks, they didn’t start out that way. And since Socrates they’ve become something else again by blending and mixing with others and even by physically leaving Greece to settle in other lands and “become” something else entirely. Others moved in from other places and “became” Greeks, though they had nothing in common with ancient Greeks. And the more humans move around the world and screw around the world the more they all become something else than what they started out as.

The ancient Assyrians weren’t an original race of people, neither were the Babylonians or Egyptians or French. Each group descended from someone else and from somewhere else...and after them others came and mixed and matched until today when we don’t know what we are or where we started. Politically we want to say we started at Ashur and Nineveh and never changed...but that’s impossible.

There is no genetic way to be Assyrian. You can admire the culture so much you want to adopt it and immerse yourself in it...except no one today knows what an Assyrian culture is. What we have are Christians who, for personal and political reasons, WANT to be Assyrian...and they base this on the fact that they were born in lands once known as Assyrian. But you don’t become an ethnic Navajo or German or Chinese, by being born in those lands...neither do you become ethnic by learning their languages...or eating their food, or even adopting their religion and everything else about them. No DNA study anywhere will ever produce an Apache gene, or an Assyrian, but not Babylonian or Arab, gene. There may have been an Aboriginal (Australian) gene, before foreigners moved in, but BetNahrain was always a cosmopolitan crossroads of the world...no one there was ever pure anything.

Sure, you can BE what you want to be as long as nothing official is involved. You can stick a feather in your head and tell your co-workers you’re descended from Geronimo....but when the tribe hands out casino earnings it will take more than a feather, war paint and what you WANT to be, to get you a share of their earnings. For official things you need official documents.

Christians in Iraq can BELIEVE they are Assyrians and they can SAY they are Assyrians and they can WANT to be Assyrians and they can tell journalists that they ARE Assyrians...but when it comes to handing out deeds and titles to land it won’t be enough. There is no official or genetic or even cultural way to prove ancestry...not Assyrian ancestry anyway.

When our people enter America or Europe they know enough not to talk foolishly by claiming Assyrian nationality on entry papers and visas...they know damn well that this is serious business and any funny answers can bring trouble, especially these days. Even we understand that when it comes to seriously important things, things where others, usually Whites, are in charge, only serious answers from mature and serious people will do. That’s not the time to tell the officer that you’re the grandson of Ashurbanipal. That’s when we all write down our real nationalities...Iraqi or Iranian or Syrian etc...what it says on our passports. If the officials should ask what ethnic group we think we’re descended from we can say “Assyrian”....who really cares? But, if they did care and it did matter, much more would be expected than just our word for it, or a feather.

But, when you want a NATION, your ethnic status doesn’t count...not any more and especially not if you want a new one, created entirely for you or, more difficult still, if you’re asking for your old one to be “given back” to you. The question naturally arises, “well, who do you THINK you were and can you prove it today”? You’ve got to have a serious claim to land...I mean the kind of claim a grown-up will acknowledge, not a chapter from Aprim or Rosie-Malek’s book. Even less can your religion determine “nationality”. That went out with tribes long ago...except for the Jews and, need we say it, for the Assyrians too if they had just kept their original religion. Ah well.

For Christians, no matter what ethnicity they claim, there are no land-rights. There can’t be and there will never be, especially not in Muslim countries, for heaven’s sake! Certainly not freely given...and if they are seized, well....look out. Even asking and demanding and demonstrating and writing for them can be sedition, which is illegal in every country on earth and can result in prison or even execution, depending on how unsettled the times are...and right now in Iraq and Kurdistan, they are very unsettled. Just the sort of atmosphere that can get a grandson of Ashurbanipal, much less a son of a bitch, killed.

Therefore, the best we can hope for if we “love Assyrians” is to make life as safe and promising as we can for those who claim such an identity and especially for their innocent children who are born into this mess. Unfortunately we’ve been plagued for decades with self-serving opportunists who, increasingly from a safe distance, have carried on foolish and harmful crusades filled with empty demands and threats as well as paranoid declarations of how certain people are out to get them, usually because they “fear” Assyrian unity or power. Their actions have threatened the security and welfare of those Assyrians who’ve either chosen to remain in Iraq or haven’t been able to leave.

The call for a homeland, or territory, or administrative zone or region, triangle or whatever else you want to call it, let alone a nation, will only and can only result in further erosion of the status of the Christians of Iraq. Land can certainly be seized by force and held and eventually made legal....as in Israel and now Kurdistan, but no one, certainly no Iraqi Muslim, is going to give any land to Christians....even less so after this recent Crusade. And for Muslims it will take much more than claims of Assyrian ancestry and ancient ownership to win anything. In fact there is not a single instance in all recorded history of any indigenous group making such demands getting anything but more misery for their pains. It’s true some native lands were retuned to tribes in Canada but they were not economically valuable lands and the power to give resided with the government. Additionally there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the affected tribes were exactly what they claimed to be. None of this holds true anywhere in the MidEast, least of all in oil-rich and Muslim Iraq.

No government, has ever “given back” land seized from indigenous people...never, and certainly not when the claim originated 2,500 years ago. Especially not under the circumstances existing in Iraq today and for the foreseeable future. For one thing it would set a disastrous precedent which would anger numerous modern nations by stirring up a hornet’s nest among their indigenous people. Native Americans made such claims in the 70s even to seizing ancient tribal lands and were attacked by the FBI and all manner of police forces, their leaders either killed or imprisoned for life. To make such claims and worse, take action, is called sedition and is illegal in every modern nation. And when a country is at war, as Iraq is, sedition becomes treason and is punished swiftly and mercilessly...therefore to encourage the embattled Christians of Iraq to “stand up for what is their’s”, at this particular time especially, is to push them over a cliff or into a grave.

Our people are pleased to always “hope”...but that’s been their downfall, politically, in the past; that they’ve aligned themselves with foreign Christian powers in the hope that they’ll gain some advantage...all it’s brought us is more suffering and retaliation, just as will be the case again when the latest foreigners who gave us “hope”, but “betrayed” us, leave. It is not, therefore, the mark of a “true” Assyrian to encourage such a “hope” or call for such a thing. It is rather the action of one who cares very little for what actually transpires on the ground in Iraq and more for how he looks to his cousins, friends, priest and in the Western media.

In this climate, and with the realities facing us, a friend of the Assyrians will try to minimize antagonism between the shrinking and cowed community and the dominant majority, as we would wherever they lived as a minority, especially in hostile surroundings. The best we can do is make some sort of future for the children...something especially to give them pride, the real thing and not empty boasting or paranoid ranting. That, and the example of Assyrians doing and building and entering all facets of world-culture and endeavor.

What’s the good, even if you have ties to the Rockefellers if you’re an indolent bum yourself, dreaming big, while living in a crate? In fact, it’s arguably worse, under those conditions, to brag too much of your ties to the great ones....for all that you’ll receive are sidelong glances and hushed whispers as in, “what in the hell happened to YOU”? The implication being that even with all the advantages of such a heritage, a heritage you yourself brag about, is this the best you could do? Needless to say you additionally become an embarrassment to the family tree, as well as yourself and, worst of all, to your children.

Let’s drop the demands for any kind of safe-haven, because among other difficulties, it won’t be safe place but just the reverse with Muslim fury raised to fever-pitch and all Christians conveniently rounded up into one location and focus of hostility. Iraqi Christians, as Chaldeans in particular have shown, can live and thrive perfectly well in Iraq. It is the constant harping on what Assyrians “are owed” by “Arabs” and their refusal to engage fully as citizens of the nation of Iraq which has led the few to make life difficult on the rest of the community. Instead of drawing a border around the Christians of Iraq we should be encouraging them to join in every facet of national life...as they have been doing all along. This means that we have to repudiate the so-called Assyrian nationalists, not promote them. They are the ones doing the greatest harm to the Christians of Iraq...they and the extremist Muslims that go hand in hand with them.



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