The Gulf War Did Not clear Place

The Gulf War Did Not pretend Place French: La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération & British paper The Guardian between January in addition to March 1991.

Contrary to the title, the author believes that the events and violence of the Gulf War actually took place, whereas the effect is one of interpretation: were the events that took place comparable to how they were presented, and could these events be called a war? The denomination is a acknowledgment to the play The Trojan War Will non Take Place by Jean Giraudoux in which characters try to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable.

The essays in Libération and The Guardian were published before, during and after the Gulf War and they were titled accordingly: during the American military and rhetorical buildup as "The Gulf War Will not Take Place"; during military action as "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place", and after action was over, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place". A book of elongated list of paraphrases of the truncated original articles in French was published in May 1991. The English translation was published in early 1995 translated by Paul Patton.

Summary

Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war. Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most component did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. nearly nothing was presents known approximately Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the segment of abstraction of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know approximately the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations portrayed it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.




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