Defiling a Confederate Shrine
If you want to really make your feelings clear,
then defile an offensive shrine by converting it into a latrine.
The tradition goes back at least to the 9th century BCE,
as described in the Hebrew Bible.
Back then it was shrines to the deity Ba'al.
Now it's the violently pro-slavery Confederacy.
Jefferson Davis deserted from his position with the U.S. Army to become
the President of the Confederate States of America, fighting to preserve
the southern "peculiar institution" of slavery.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy
celebrates the fight to preserve slavery.
It has been the Ku Klux Klan's most prominent supporter.
In 2021, one of their shrines to Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy,
and slavery was almost converted into a toilet.
Unfortunately, it wasn't.
Not this time, anyway.
Jefferson Davis, the Unrepentant Confederate
The above plaque is associated with a stone chair that serves as one of
the many monuments to Jefferson Davis infesting the southern U.S.
Ronald Reagan's admiration for "States' Rights"
It describes how Davis and his many supporters believe that "States' Rights"
(to exercise slavery, or at least segregation)
"will ultimately triumph".
It quotes Davis as stating that "The
[pro-slavery, pro-segregation, and violently racist]
principles for which we contend will reassert themselves
in another form and another time."
Below is the stone chair shrine from Selma, Alabama.
The Openly Racist United Daughters of the Confederacy
The United Daughters of the Confederacy
is an association of women who promote White Supremacy
and the pseudo-historical "Lost Cause", the fantasy that the
Confederacy will "rise again".
In 1896 the UDC established the Children of the Confederacy
to indoctrinate children in a racist mis-interpretation of history.
The UDC demands that public schools use "history" textbooks that portray
the American Civil War from a pro-southern, pro-slavery point of view.
Among other nonsense, their chosen textbooks have insisted that
the U.S. Civil War had nothing at all to do with slavery.
The UDC venerated the Ku Klux Klan,
preserving Klan artifacts and symbology.
The UDC unanimously endorsed
"The Ku Klux Klan, or the Invisible Empire",
a book written by one of its members claiming that the Klan had rescued
the south from northern-perpetrated violence.
The pro-Klan book became a supplementary reader in southern schools.
Iron Age Defilements Set The Pattern
In the late 9th century BCE, King Jehu of the Northern Kingdom of Israel
destroyed a temple to Ba'al in Samaria, and converted it into a latrine.
One century later, King Hezekiah similarly defiled a temple to Ba'al
at the site of Tel Lachish.
Ba'al's Shrine Becomes a Latrine
King Hezekiah Ritually Defiles a Shrine to Ba'al
Ba'al was known as בעל
to the Israelites,
𐎁𐎓𐎍
in
Ugaritic
cuneiform,
𐤋𐤏𐤁
in
Phoenician,
and Βάαλ to the later Greeks.
Ba'al was a prominent deity of the ancient Levant.
And, at the same time, Ba'al was also a name or title
commonly used to refer to the local deities.
It's sort of like "God" in English being the name or form of address
of the sole deity of Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief,
and (in lower case) the general category of supernatural being.
It can mean a god or
the name of the God.
The name Ba'al was used to refer to the primary god in the local religions.
He was associated with the storm and rain god Hadad
in the northwest Semitic and ancient Mesopotamian religions.
The earliest Israelites sometimes used Ba'al to refer
to their god Yahweh.
The 2021 Attempted Defilement of the Confederate Shrine
A group calling itself White Lies Matter
took the stone chair from the Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama,
in March 2021.
Pro-Confederate groups said that the stone chair was worth US$500,000,
although they neglected to estimate its value in Confederate dollars.
White Lies Matter had shipped a banner to the UDC and demanded that they
display it on their headquarters building in Richmond, Virginia,
the one-time capitol of the Confederacy.
The banner included a quote from Black activist Assata Shakur,
"The rulers of this country have always considered their property
more important than our lives."
They added:
Failure to do so will result in the monument, an ornate stone chair,
immediately being turned into a toilet.
If they do display the banner, not only will we return the chair intact,
but we will clean it to boot.
They included a Photoshopped image of the chair in a potentially
much improved state:
A representative of the pro-slavery UDC said that she had heard reports
of the chair's theft and the associated demand, but she said that it was,
like everything not favorable to the far right, "Fake news".
Meanwhile, frozen-food heir Tucker Carlson's popular
White Power Hour
was, as usual, keeping the white supremacists frightened.
The UDC's view that neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis are
"very fine people" has, unfortunately, become popular in the U.S.
The December 6, 2021, violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol saw
insurrectionists carrying the Confederate flag where Jefferson Davis'
troops failed to go.
Some of the openly racist insurrectionists
smeared their feces
around the building.
That behavior wasn't reported back in the time of kings Jehu and Hezekiah.
It's more the sort of behavior you see at the monkey house at the zoo.
Next article:
Uroscopy, or the Ancient Science of Pee-Examining
