On January 4, 1991\u2014thirteen days before the bombing of Iraq began\u2014the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published an essay in Liberation titled \u201cThe Gulf War Will Not Take Place\u201d. The headline nodded to Jean Giraudoux\u2019s play \u201cThe Trojan War Will Not Take Place\u201d, whose characters try to forestall the inevitable.<\/p>\n
Once the bombing started, he followed with a second essay\u2014\u201cThe Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?\u201d. After hostilities ended came a third: \u201cThe Gulf War Did Not Take Place\u201d. These texts made up a book<\/a> published in May 1991.<\/p>\n This piece explains why the French thinker\u2019s idea still holds today\u2014judging by Donald Trump\u2019s posts and more.<\/p>\n Baudrillard did not deny that bombs fell in the desert and people died. His point was different: what occurred was not war in the usual sense\u2014a clash of armies able to inflict comparable damage on each other. The imbalance of military power was so great that direct confrontation never happened.<\/p>\n What mattered most to Baudrillard was how events in the Persian Gulf were perceived. The 1991 war became the first armed conflict in history that television broadcast live, 24 hours a day. Viewers saw strikes from missile-borne cameras but not the victims or the destruction\u2014the American authorities, mindful of Vietnam, imposed controls on the media.<\/p>\n \u201cAt times the absurdity of the media\u2019s self-representation as the purveyor of reality and immediacy broke the surface\u2014in such moments as, for example, when CNN\u2019s cameras switched live to a group of reporters somewhere in the Persian Gulf, only for them to admit that they were themselves sitting and watching CNN, trying to work out what was happening. Television news, it seemed, had finally caught up with the logic of simulation,\u201d <\/em>wrote<\/em><\/a> Baudrillard\u2019s translator Paul Patton in the introduction to the English edition.<\/em><\/p>\n Hyperreality is a situation in which the image of an event matters more than objective reality. The copy displaces the original\u2014not because anyone is deliberately deceiving, but because that is how media work. They make the image more accessible and more vivid than reality itself.<\/p>\nOn \u201cthe war that did not happen\u201d<\/h2>\n
What hyperreality is<\/h2>\n
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