By Lucy Komisar
May 21, 2018
The people who put up this poster at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum, which I saw yesterday, must be millennials or younger!
It’s a critique of US foreign policy mostly in the 1980s. War in Vietnam, invasion of Grenada, Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, US bombing of Libya, invasion of Panama. But the blurb says the poster was created in ca (about) 1980! How can a poster that references those events be created before most of the events occurred? Curators appear to know nothing of the US 1980s war crimes the poster attacks!
Here’s the poster, which is also online. Text says:
And to explain:
But
Invasion of Grenada was in 1983.
Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador were the early 80s.
I know because I was there as a journalist in 1983.
First US bombing of Libya was in 1986.
Invasion of Panama was in 1989.
So how can this poster be created in 1980? Why don’t the people who make exhibits at Cooper Hewitt, a major New York museum, have a clue about US invasions of and attacks against other countries even 30-40 years ago?
Good that they put up the poster, but troubling that they appear to have no realization of the events it cites and present that confusion to the public.