The Gulf War was a seemingly decisive military action led by the United States against Iraq in 1991.
Over a series of essays, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued the war was an expression of his concept of “hyperreality,” in which emerging visual media could be used to create something false that appears even realer than reality itself.
By 1995, he assembled these essays into a final, short book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
In it, he argues that the conflict was less a traditional war and more a carefully staged media event. He claims the imagery, reporting and language used during the Gulf War created a hyperreality in which the spectacle of war replaced the messy, lived reality of violence. In short, the book critiques how modern warfare is mediated and consumed, suggesting that what people experienced was not the war itself, but its representation.
Yes all wars are mediated (newspaper and radio, for example how, for example the Second World War featured a PR campaign by American military officials). But Baudrillard argues, the Gulf War was one of the first where the mediation was so overwhelming that many experienced the spectacle instead of the conflict itself.
Below I have my notes for future reference.
- Intro: CNN camera crew asked reporters in the Gulf what was going on and they said they were watching CNN to figure out themselves
- First live TV of a war: gulf war
- Commentator: “Desert Storm was the first major global media crisis orchestration that made instant history” —crisis comms and movie directing
- Precession of Simulcra
- Is gulf war did not take place a science fiction, as author had suggested (intro writer calls it a “fuite en avant”)
- Staged massacre at Timisoara
- Americans got a computer virus into Iraq military
- You want us up believe this was a clean minimalist war? Why stop there: say there was no war at all
- Not a war but a simulcram of a war
- Televisual information claims to give access to events but instead create informational stand ins, or representstin
- Kuwait diplomat daughter coached in her report that Iraq pulled babies out of incubators to die
- Hyperreality is his big thing
- Ontological
- Epistemology
- Simulcram
- “We are in neither a logic of war nor logic of peace, but in a logical deterrence”
- Hostages and self deterrence (nuclear weapons)
- HPSP: highly profitable senseless project
- Clausewitz: politics by other means
- Non war is a test of politics like stock market is test of the economy
- “The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict.”
- Empty war is like World Cup match decided by penalty kicks (a sorry spectacle”). Could have “ dispensed with the game and its sterile standoff”
- To America, the gulf says: “you who do not wish to see us, we will show you what you are like”
- ((This is pretentious as hell: “We have entered a deceptive world in which an entire culture lauds assiduously its counterfeit.”
- “At a certain speed, the speed of light, you lose even your shadow. At a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense.”
- “ Soft war and pure war go boating”
- “It is the same with God: even when we no longer believe, we continue to believe that we believe”
- Author referenced the likely urban myth of 12k coffins sent to gulf war
- Author argues that the Americans could have beat Saddam more swiftly like the Israelis have but the Americans didn’t to keep it in suspense
- Says Saddam kept planes in Iran like the burglar who keeps his stash hidden while in jail
- Compared this war to IVF, “is not sufficient to produce a child”
- Author: “Who could’ve rendered more service to everyone, in such a short time at such little cost, then Saddam Hussein?” Israelis and American arms glorified, Horne her and Iran and the UN
- Author argues that of the 500k American soldiers in gulf war over 7 months, three times more would have died of car accidents in average if they were home: “Should we consider multiplying clean wars in order to reduce the murderous death toll of peace time?”
- “The presumption of information in the media here doubles the political arrogance of the western Empire. All those journalists who set themselves up as bears of the universal conscience, all those presenters who set themselves up as strategists, all the while overwhelming us with a flood of useless images, emotional blackmail by massacre, fraud. Instead of discussing the threshold of social tolerance for immigration, we would do better to discuss this threshold of mental tolerance for information. With regard to the ladder, we can say that it was deliberately crossed.”
- Brecht: This beer isn’t proper beer, although that is perhaps compensated for by the fact that these cigars aren’t cigars
- If there was a real war, how is Saddam still in power?