Play it Again, Sam

 

This installation opens with the front page of a daily newspaper showing a defining moment in 1951. The contents of that page inform much about the condition of Britain and the U.S. Today.

 

October 1951 saw the last days of a Labour government that had reconstructed Britain in an \'austere\' economic post-war climate. As the main article attests, it was to be the last days too of British Imperialism.

 

What it doesn\'t say is that “since the 1920\'s the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum - had run the southern parts of the country very much as a colonial power exporting huge profits to its stockholders in London. The wartime allied occupation and the Iranian Government’s dependence on postwar Western support to stave off Soviet pressure made the AIOC\'s political position stronger than it had ever been, and the British Labour Government seemed as disinclined as its predecessor to force the company to begin sharing its profits with the Iranians. Meanwhile, the workers in the oilfields around Abadan lived in misery, receiving on average less than fifty cents per day, with no vacations, no health care, and no insurance provided by the company” (1).

 

This event was to precipitate the Suez Crisis five years later. There, without U.S. support the British Empire crumbled and “America replaced it as the major force all over the Third World”(2), laying the foundations for the Cold War.

 

“Terror produces terror” writes Susan Buck-Morss, “the engagements of war cannot exist without the mirroring” (3). In his book “Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle”, Slavoj Zizek refers to the U.S. as “a distorted mirror of Europe itself” and that “the true economic aim of the war was prevention of the dollars defeat against the Euro” (4).

 

In 1951, as today: the instruments of economic greed and colonial intervention have shattered “a common public sphere”(5). On reading the news items again, we begin to see that really only the names have changed. America\'s “deterrent” of the Atom Bomb on that page is today\'s headline of Iran\'s immanent “threat” of a capacity to build their own bomb.

 

The mirroring goes on and on …..... Sam plays it again.

 

 

(1): The Global Cold War. Odd Arne Westad. Cambridge. 2002. p. 120.

(2): Ibid.

(3): A Global Public Sphere. Susan Buck-Morss. Radical Philosophy, Jan. 2002. P4.

(4): Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Slavoj Zizek. Verso. 2004. p. 35,36.

(5): As in (3).