This silver coin commemorating an anticipated (but never realized) Bay of Pigs victory features an outline of Cuba with a rebel invader advancing past a fallen member of Castro's military in the foreground.#HISTINT #Museum
— CIA (@CIA) May 25, 2021
A heavily astroturfed insurrection attempt by reactionaries. Who failed spectacularly in no small part because promised/inferred military aid never materialized. Now rapidly becoming martyrs whose only crime in the eyes of John Birch-types was not having brought enough guns.
— Zd (@Zeddary) May 25, 2021
There’s always high-ranking military planners who design flattering uniforms and strike off medals for themselves before thinking about how the troops will be moved and supplied. Such men are more dangerous than the enemy — especially when they’re canonized in the memories of their survivors’ descendants…
dc
“No habrá más fin que la victoria”, yeah, I guess Fidel could have said that without embarrassing himself.
prostratedragon
Aha. I was thinking that surely this idea has been set to poetry.
joel hanes
military planners who design flattering uniforms and strike off medals for themselves
Lieutenants Scheisskopf
Villago Delenda Est
Jacobite nonsense has faded, but still, it’s part of Scottish Nationalism.
DMcK
History is falsely idealized as mythology; mythology inspires ideology; ideology begets some really shitty actions. Forget about the Lost Causes, the myth of WWII’s “Greatest Generation” was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq, just as Mussolini invoked the glory of Rome to justify his misadventures in northern Africa (and Fascism in general). Don’t even get me started on Joseph Campbell’s poisonous bullshit….
Amir Khalid
I hope whoever got one of those Bay of Pigs coins had the good sense to never show it off in public.
Cermet
And least we forget, it was the lost of cheap labor by sugar companies (and their asset’s being nationalized) that turned the US against Castro. Still, sugar is one of those super protected business’ commodities that we can’t dare compromise. For decades the sugar industry has convinced amerikans of and promoted the false idea that fat is the issue in the amerikan diet and not sugar. Of course sugar is the number one cause of most of amerikan’s food related health issues.
HumboldtBlue
If you need a smile, well this will do.
Betty Cracker
I so appreciate Rep. Lieu’s sarcasm. He’s good at it!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t know. I would support a commission to examine future GOP treason.
eclare
@Betty Cracker: Love it!
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: I read a Bay of Pigs anecdote (I believe in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest). The story was that John Kennedy was talking with his Labor Secretary, Arthur Goldberg, not long after the fiasco, and the Bay of Pigs came up.
Goldberg said to Kennedy, I really wish you had consulted with me and Stew Udall beforehand.
Kennedy responded, But you’re the Labor Secretary, and Stew Udall is Secretary of Interior!
Goldberg replied, Yes, but Stew Udall commanded Marines in the Pacific in WWII, and he knows how difficult amphibious operations are. And I worked with the OSS in Europe, and I could have told you how very few of the agents we sent into occupied Europe survived.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: Those are some really cheerful looking henchmen standing behind McConnell in that CSPAN clip. Roy Blunt look’s like he’s ready to puke!
I think McConnell and his colleagues still haven’t gotten over the Georgia Senate runoff.
debbie
@Geminid:
Dude, they still haven’t gotten over Bork! //
Chief Oshkosh
@Geminid: I am sure that many will tell me about the 11 dimensional chess game that President Biden is playing against these mooks, but when can I haz ta infrastructure week? I guess Shumer doesn’t have the votes yet.
debbie
Good grief, even the Google Doodle is too challenging this morning.
Geminid
@Chief Oshkosh: In the words of the late Dale Earnhardt: “We’ll git ‘er done.”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Sadly, the Bay of Pigs coin is inadequate to show the history of the heroic rebel invader, who was likely to be a corrupt, bribery-bloated former cop, civil official or army officer who would later go on to lucrative employment in the narcotics, strongarm or land speculator trade…..
Uncle Cosmo
@Geminid:
I’ve been rereading Sir Martin Gilbert‘s The Second World War, a near-unendurable litany of deaths in the hundreds and thousands each day of the conflict**. Sir Martin, who seems obsessed with shoehorning as many victims’ names as possible into his day-by-day account***, pays special attention to those “agents sent into occupied Europe” who were immediately captured or soon betrayed and eventually tortured and executed.
** Reading this massive tome (>700 pages) is an exercise in being mentally pounded by a ten-pound bag of unmixed cement, in the head or back or legs, over and over again. One of my best friends asked me to recommend a comprehensive WW2 history; remembering that he was depressed for weeks after viewing Shoah, I could not in good conscience recommend this one.
*** Any historical museum grapples with the balance between narration (what happened) and memorialization (to whom it happened). American institutions tend to emphasize the narrative (perhaps because we don’t trust our schooling to have provided it). Gilbert’s approach reminds me of the many Eastern European war museums I’ve visited which seemed obsessed with “let[ting] no one who played a part in the eventual triumph be forgotten.” The narrative tends to get lost in the litany of names and faces, the profusion of personal items, hammering home the fact that these were real people who lived (and often died) to enable victory.
Presumably their curators trust the schools to acquaint their citizens with what happened and in what order. In most instances I’d read enough narrative history to fill in the context – but I wonder whether average USAns would not find/have not found themselves befuddled if not lost amongst the exhibits.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est: and the Stuart family to this day still claim to be the rightful kings of Scotland, England and Wales.
TomatoQueen
@Uncle Cosmo:
@Geminid: A pro pos of both posts & books: The right person to blame is the person responsible & for the Bay of Pigs it was Richard Bissell, who ran a good portion of our side of the Battle of the Atlantic–in his head, as he had that peculiar kind of file card-to-file-card intellect. These days we use Excel. That spectacular exercise was follow by his running the U-2 program until…so Dick Bissell was liked and trusted–people were in awe of him and had every confidence in him. Until. All those guys who didn’t end up in office (it seems) went to Yale together, served in OSS together, then on to CIA, then scatter, and most of them, including Dick Bissell, returned to Yale to teach English and/or run the Library, which was how I got to know some of them cos my father worked at the Beinecke for 20 years. A wonderful history/memoir is Robin Winks’ Cloak and Gown, somewhat in the style of the Eastern European works as there are a lot of people, but then to a reader who remembers them, mirabile dictu they’ve come to life again, down to the shirts they wore (I remember the shirt very well, finest linen, not made today). I remember Dick Bissell as a kind and thoughtful man–but what a lot he had on his mind.
Another Scott
(The NMAAHC has an online exhibit on the Tulsa massacre.)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Golux
Too late to this thread, but anyway…
I live a five-minute walk from the (later) home of one of the architects of the Bay Of Pigs.