Assyria: 3,000 Years of History, Yet the Internet Is Our Only Home | Part 1
"He that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole world about himself." - Johann Gottfried Herder
Almost a year ago now, while researching a blog post about drama on reddit.com (the Woody Allen subreddit thinks he's innocent, by the way), my brother sent a few links from a small subreddit called r/Assyria. The Assyrians, a little-known collection of Christian practicing tribes from the hills of south-east Turkey, north-east Syria, northern Iraq, and north-west Iran, are hoping to build support for a new, independent nation for their people.
This piqued my interest because I am an Assyrian, albeit a very pale one. I have one grandfather who was born in northern Iran in 1898 and immigrated to the United States in 1915 during the genocide of the Assyrian people known as the Sefyo. Lately, I've been feeling out of place in the world, and I've been thinking that nothing would settle my restless soul more than converting my beautiful, young, Middle Eastern-looking, but actually Catholic, Mexican wife to the Syriac Orthodox Church and return to my people's ancestral homeland. But how serious are these Assyrians actually about the cause, and more importantly, what would be required in order to establish a new homeland for my people? This is part 1 of a multi-part series about me, my family, and the Assyrian people where I answer those questions.
I knew a little about the topic of nationalism already because I spent many nights hunched over barstools in Edinburgh half-listening to Dani talk about her homework. But this "Assyrian question" is more than an academic one for me, and facing my personal history led me on a quest to understand myself that I have clung to tightly over the last year while my entire life unraveled around me. My New Year's resolution this year was "chaos". I got what I wanted and more, and as I have frantically explained the Assyrian dilemma to anyone who will listen—at dinner parties, at the gym, as foreplay (fellas it works)—my WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, and emails began to overflow with correspondence from hundreds of Iraqi strangers and Assyrian-Americans, my email began to fill up with legal correspondence from Kurdish enemies of the Assyrian cause, I found myself pulling out thousands of dollars of cash from ATMs in the middle of the night, setting up fake interviews with strangers, getting in fights with people's mothers, booking and re-booking flights to the Middle East (and desperately searching for a man to take us), and it's not totally unfair that my friends started to get concerned about me.
But who are the Assyrians? My people are known by many different names—Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Nestorians, Jacobites, Arameans, sometimes, erroneously, Syrians—called Aïssors or Assoris by the Armenians, Suriyani by the Turks, Suryoyo, Suraya, or Suryani depending on your dialect, also incorrectly called Iraqi Christians, Kurdish Christians, Arab Christians, Syriac-speaking Christians, Aramaic speaking Christians, Syrian Christians, Persian Christians, Semitic Turks, Turkish Christians or "The original Aramaic speaking race of northern Mesoptamia", according to one Reddit user. The Assyro-Chaldeans consider themselves the descendants of the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia as far back as 2500 BCE. Some Assyrians claim that all people in the Middle East are actually just Assyrians, that when Islam was brought to the region, a process of Arabization took place that negated those who kept the Syriac language and Christian identity to an ethnoreligious identity, as opposed to a universal one.
Assyrians speak Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, and have historically lived in inaccessible mountain retreats in rural outposts. They captured the interest of 19th-century missionaries who traveled to learn more about the mysterious Christian tribes and brought new European ideas of nationalistic self-determination with them. The population suffered during the first genocide of the 20th century, which occurred concurrently with the Armenian genocide. After the First World War, there were a few failed attempts at national determination, but the population now lives largely in diaspora, with approximately 2.5 million Assyrians surviving to this day with 1 million remaining in the Middle East, approximately 600,000 in the United States, and 100,000-200,000 living in Sweden and Germany. This diaspora largely affiliates with its splintered religious communities: the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Syrian Orthodox Church.
Like other people without a homeland, the Assyrians are subject to a variety of myth. Some, like proponent Edward Hine, believed that the Germanic people were the descendants of the ancient Assyrians. If a people was "lost" to the ages, it meant they had migrated to a new region and forgotten their history. So, Hine believed legends that the Neo-Assyrians conquered lands as far west as Trier and had long controlled parts of Europe. (He also believed that the people of Great Britain were genetically, racially, and linguistically the direct descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel. He wrote, "It is an utter impossibility for England to ever be defeated. And this is another result arising entirely from the fact of our being Israel.")
If we are to believe Hine's account, then my great-great-grandmother, who was born in 1790 to a rumored fifty-year-old mother (either in Bavaria or NRW, depending on which account you believe), and my Assyrian grandfather make me as ethnically Assyrian as a person can possibly be, and the perfect person to understand the plight of the Assyrian people, which I believe can help us understand the entire world.
But I can also relate as someone with intense and uncompromisingly delusional political beliefs. I went on vacation to Europe with my girlfriend eight years ago and never found my way home, and it's my strongest-held belief that a person doesn't belong to a nation until they try to leave it. Besides realizing that all I ever want to do with my entire life is sit in a hot car in California and get in a fight with a stranger at a gas station, I learned that your nation, whether you like to admit it or not, defines almost every aspect of who you are. It is one of the only things in the world that people will willingly kill and die for. It defines social life, family life, your body, your voice, your ambition, because nothing feels better than to be part of a collective "we". You can't blame the modern Assyrians who sit on their computers and post on Reddit from comfortable couches in Chicago, Södertälje, and Turlock for dreaming of a better life in northern Iraq. Without our nation, who are we? One of my people writes on Reddit, "3,000 Years of History, Yet The Internet is Our Only Home."