June 03, 2004

There were people here, tribal people, when the first colonists arrived from Spain, England and Holland. The face of "America" by whatever name the various tribes called this continent, changed and a new civilization came over the land, starting in the east and pushing westward.

Thousands of years and half a world away are a tribal people known as the Kurds. Americans probably first took notice of them in the media presentations of Saddam Hussein's gassing of Kurdish people in Iraq, but the Kurds have been in and around the region known as "Asia Minor" and into the Middle East for millennia. It just so happens that they've been left without a country, so they retain their ethnicity and have since the end of World War I among the nations of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, to a lesser extent in Syria and other nearby countries.

At the end of the first World War, the Kurds were promised a land of their own, but were left out when the Brits and others drew the boundaries of nations like Turkey and the region called Palestine. Kurds go back at least as far as the Hittite civilization, or the Hurrians, a very ancient people who have remained in the general area of their original known settlements regardless of the body politic that ruled. Like all peoples under the rule of conquerors, the Kurds have been a suffering minority in the very lands where they once flourished and built their own culture.

The land now occupied by a nation called the United States of America was once the domain of tribal peoples, and much of the Southwest is in the process of being reclaimed in the same manner that the Hurrians took over the lands of the Kurds somewhere around four thousand years ago. They came, they stayed, they conquered by numbers and then by force. Governments do that. When peoples who come to live become a governmental power, or influence in the existing body politic, by their numbers they eventually will overrun and rule.

We Americans tend to think in terms of always having been here, particularly those of us whose ancestry in America goes back far enough that we cannot identify the first one of our namesake people to come to the new world. (The name "Seese" is of Germanic origin but I do not relate to Germany, only to the USA.) What is occurring in the Southwest is that both Asians and Hispanics (mostly Mexicans, but other Spanish-speaking people also) are entering in droves. Certain areas of the Phoenix metroplex have signs in their native tongues only, and when they are Asian I cannot read a word on the store signs or billboards in the area. In the Los Angeles of the 1940's and 50's we had Chinatown and the Olvera Street Mexican district of stores and shops. San Francisco had about the same mixture of non-English speaking people.

It has been twenty years since I last flew to Los Angeles to visit a friend there who went to high school with me. I said I wouldn't return, and kept that pledge. There was no charm in recalling what was in a certain area and trying to fit it into the pattern of what stood in the same place as a different entity. It wasn't one thing, it was everywhere. The face of Hollywood had totally changed, the languages were sufficient to be the output of Babel and the signs were foreign.

All people become accustomed to an area as it is, things as they are or were, but things change in spite of our resistance. Things changed for the Kurdish people in spite of their resistance and continuing fight for a land of their own. The Palestinians are getting the publicity because they're in a struggle for the ancient Land of Canaan with the descendants of the biblical inhabitants, the Jews, or Israel. One thing can be said of the Jews, of all the peoples in the world, they are the greatest objects of media focus wherever they go and whatever they do. They seek this publicity for their cause, whatever cause it is at the time, and receive it. The Kurds are not that adept at public relations and media resourcing.

The Kurds also have only one national "hero" and that is the legendary Saladin, who came from the area that Saddam Hussein called his home, Tikrit in Iraq. After being worshippers of their own pantheon, many Anatolians, including some Kurds, became Christians in the time of St. Paul (Tarsus, by the way, is still in Turkey where it was when Saul was born there, later to become the apostle Paul.) Islam surged into the area of Anatolia around the eighth or ninth century A.D. and the people converted to Islam. A few groups on the fringes of the territories retained the Kurdish language and religion, but very few. There are still a few today.

Now with the United States being the focus both of world hate and world desire to live abundantly, will the influx of one or some displace the European descendants we think of as "Americans" until we, like the Kurds, are strangers in our own birthplace and the birthplace of our forefathers? Are we, like the Kurds, destined to become persecuted for our ethnicity and language, and driven into a nomadic lifestyle where we are unwanted everywhere and located nowhere?

Could it happen here? Of course it could. There are some 25 million Kurds living in their ancient part of the world, perhaps more if a true census were taken. They are the world's largest "nation without a home" because they stay in the ancient lands rather than moving elsewhere, if any other nation wants them. Some have located in Iran, now besieged Iraq, Syria, but most live/exist in poverty in that political entity the world knows as Turkey.

These are not Arab peoples either. The earlier Kurds, judging from what little art is displayed, were rather light skinned folks and yet among them are darker skinned people, probably from intermarriage with people from India, Iran, or the Arabic tribes. Isn't that a picture of America? Some of us have the western European appearance, others are darker and we call them "Mediterranean" in appearance. We also have American citizens who are still seeking a name for themselves, but I will simply call them "black Americans" since they aren't from Africa, and many whites consider sub-Saharan Africa home, while Muslims and other Arabic people occupy North Africa. We have ethnic Mexicans who are American citizens as well as various Asian people.

Thousands of years before bar codes or RFID chips, people insisted on a common identity so they could distinguish themselves from other people. It was a partial answer to the perennial question, "who am I and where did I come from?" It is no guarantee of where one is destined to go.

While most American eyes are on the southern border because of the thousands of illegal aliens crossing each day to get lost in the enclaves their relatives and friends have established in the USA, sociologists are predicting that this nation will have more Asians than Hispanics in another decade or two. The Europeans simply are not reproducing sufficiently to keep up with the waves of immigration.

Are the new waves of immigrants "Americans?" Not unless they came here legally and have citizenship papers, and then the question of generational loyalty to the ethnic polity of their families and "roots" will come up in any conflict. It takes time to become assimilated, far more time than it takes to become dispersed or extinguished.

Once we had meaningful immigration laws and now we do not. The global governance plan is to repopulate the land known as the United States of America until we, the European descendants, become a people without a home just as the Kurds are people without their own nation.

Perhaps people who will not force their government to enforce the law are the perpetrators rather than the victims, and the "unintended consequences" will distress them very much. For all their great tolerance and beautiful heritage, they may find that like those who have gone before, nations and empires and peoples change the face of the earth. The earth itself changes its own face by volcanoes, oceanic phenomena and earthquakes, but not as quickly as man can change his own lot.

Perhaps the Kurds will allow us to join them after we are displaced? No, actually they dislike Americans and with good reason. We, like the other nations, have used them for our political ambitions and then broken our promises to them regarding their establishment of a nation. And like them, some of the leadership has betrayed the people.

We really should study the Kurds. Half way around the world, there is a people whom we are emulating, only their struggle is much older than ours. It's just an object lesson in how quickly people can lose their homeland and be assimilated into other nationalities or, as in the case of Kurds (and Jews) retain their identity at a great price of suffering and bloodshed.

Perhaps a future paper, the Mexi-Nasian Times, will make room on page twelve for a small story about the plight of the homeless "Euroamericans" who keep insisting that this is their country and they want a small part of it back as their own nation.

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