The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> "Iraq 1900 to !950", Longrigg

"Iraq 1900 to !950", Longrigg
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, September 15 2007, 3:00:14 (CEST)
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The following extracts, with commentary, are taken from the book of this title by Stephen H. Longrigg, Oxford University Press, 1953.

I’m going to swim clear of the unreliable history taught to us by our grandparents and village priests. At the very least I want to learn the common language being spoken out there, among those who have far more power to dictate our future than those grandparents had or we ever will if we keep making things up to suiit ourselves. There’s nothing to be gained by defining the words of the English language in our own, quaint, way…not if we mean to converse with any but those long gone grandparents. Likewise, what passes for history among ourselves has no meaning or validity anywhere besides the lobbies of various hotels during the annual AANF conventions.

This effort follows my insistence that any art work I produced would aim at the larger audience rather than our hysterical circles where, litterally, anything goes. To put it bluntly; it’s past time to join the civilized world and not merely snap at it from the sidelines.

Here are the first references to the Assyrians in this book….I’ll call them that because this author does so.

“The penetration of a British mission, followed by the light British forces which formed Dunsterforce, into north-west Persia early in 1918, besides weakening the Army in Iraq by excessive extension, found touch in Urmiyah district with a Christian community, of which earlier mention has been made: the Assyrians. The ruin of this small nation was already imminent, and was shortly to be consummated. On the outbreak of war the Turkish attitude to it had been one of reassurance; and while in Persia the Urmiya Assyrians were decimated by the departure of the protecting Russians and by subsequent Persian brutality, their cousins the Hakkari mountaineers survived unmolested during the Armenian massacres of 1915 and the proclamation of Jihad. Russian forces, however, invaded Turkish Armenia, reached Van and Bashqal’a, and invited the Assyrians to rise against their hated rulers. By a rash and fatal decision they accepted and declared their apostasy from Turkish allegiance…only to find themselves abandoned by a sudden Russian retirement. Thereafter every Kurdish tribe of the region…Barwari, Artushi, Chal, Oramar…had the best pretexts to combine under Turkish instigation to assail them.. Kuchanis and other villages were pillaged, the Mar Sham’un’s brother put to death in Mosul. The first assaults indeed did not avail to dislodge the Assyrian villagers; but in a second series, in the midsummer of 1915, their territory was ravaged and themselves driven to their highest inaccessible pastures. Winter rendered this refuge uninhabitable. The Russians could not respond to a supreme appeal; and the whole community managed, with astonishing fortitude, to climb and fight its way to Urmiya. Based there, where they were highly unwelcome, they raided the westward hill villages of their Kurdish enemies.”

This is at least comprehensible and delievered in a civilized, thoughtful, manner and not..."I gonna tell you real troot abou-it da real TROOT"!!!



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