The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
Author	Jean Baudrillard
Original title	La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu
Translator	Paul Patton
Language	French
Subject	Gulf War
Publication date	1991
Publication place	France
Published in English	1995
Media type	Print

The Gulf War Did Not Take 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 and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.

While the author acknowledges that the events and violence of what has been called the Gulf War took place, he asks if the events that took place were really as they were presented, and whether they could be called a war. The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

Essays

Part 1, "The Gulf War will not take place" (La guerre du Golfe n'aura pas lieu) was published in Libération on January 4, 1991.
Part 2, "The Gulf War is not really taking place" (La guerre du Golfe a-t-elle vraiment lieu?) was published in Libération on February 6, 1991, and
Part 3, "The Gulf War did not take place" (La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu) was published in Libération on March 29, 1991.

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 versions 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.^[1] Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the West. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.^[2]

Uses of the argument

2015 Paris attacks

Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature, wrote a comment about the November 2015 Paris attacks on Aljazeera.com entitled The Paris attacks did not take place, in which he criticized how global media outlets like BBC had made up a hyperreal simulacrum of Paris. He believes that after the bombardment of Arabian countries by the West, refugees had flooded into Europe, changing its geography. While what used to happen in the East was eventually experienced in the West, shattering the imaginary "West-East" dichotomy, the global media outlets, however, focused overwhelmingly on Paris itself, as though it was independent of the rest of the world. He believes that the terrorist attacks did happen, but not in the hyperreal way depicted by the media like BBC.^[3]

Russo-Ukrainian war

Jarryd Bartle, a lecturer of social context, and Kong Degang, a literature and art scholar, cited Baudrillard's argument that "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" and compared it to the ongoing Russian attack on Ukraine.

Jarryd Bartle published his essay on UnHerd. He said that Baudrillard's opinion, once too postmodern to be accepted, was more relevant than ever in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Amidst the "spectacle" (as in The Society of the Spectacle) of the newsfeeds, people consumed information by piecing them up and fabricating their own virtual perspectives. Some even started imagining an outbreak of "World War III". He pointed out that while many commentators criticized the spread of misinformation, most lost sight of the harm of information overload and virtualisation.^[4]

Kong Degang, a Chinese scholar, compared the defense of Sihang Warehouse as featured in the Chinese film The Eight Hundred, the Gulf War as written about by Baudrillard, to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. He analyzed that in The Eight Hundred, the battle against the Japanese invaders is depicted as a "performance" intended to be watched by Shanghai citizens and the international community. From the audience's perspective, the Japanese invaders won the battle but lost the war in the "performance" due to their unrighteousness. But this was not the exact case in history since no one back then was able to predict the outcome of the war judging merely by a battle. The Russo-Ukrainian war, on the other hand, unfolded quite differently from both the defense of Sihang Warehouse and the Gulf War. The latest technologies enabled the media to provide a myriad of real-time simulacra which completely dwarf those of the Gulf War in both realness and virtualness, which also led to information overload. With no way to (in)validate the war updates, people soon got tired of the factual aspect of the war, as though it "did not take place"; But meanwhile, people willingly engage in a "cyber simulacra war" that is "constantly taking place". Both sides perform their "justness" and declare their own victories. But there exist actual losers who never want nor participate in this simulacra war: Ukrainian civilians, eastern Ukraine residents, foreigners in Ukraine, normal Russian citizens affected by sanctions, and even people in their war-afflicted homelands overlooked by the international community: Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc..^[5]

Israel-Gaza war

In November 2023, writer Kubra Solmaz argued that Baudrillard's writing about the creation of a hyper-reality through the replacement of the real situation in the Gulf War with representations that do not show the reality could also be applied to the Israel–Hamas war, which had started the month prior.^[6] She argues that the media reality around the war is fundamentally different than the material reality, using the dissonance between the media produced by Western media outlets, and that produced by the Palestinians within Gaza as the chief example.^[6]

References

^ William Merrin, "Uncritical criticism? Norris, Baudrillard and the Gulf War." Economy and Society, Volume 23, Issue 4, 1994, pp. 433–458, at p. 447.
^ Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; William Merrin, Baudrillard and the media. Polity Press, 2005, pp. 83–93; Paul Feldman and Corinna Lotz, A world to win: a rough guide to a future without global capitalism. London: Lupus Books, 2004, p. 325.
^ Dabashi, Hamid (2015-11-27). "The Paris attacks did not take place". Al Jazeera.
^ Bartle, Jarryd (2022-03-01). "The war in Ukraine: is it really taking place?". UnHerd.
^ 孔德罡 (2022-03-17). ""这场战争从未发生/始终发生"：拟像战争脆弱的后现代状态" ["This war did not take place / is constantly taking place": the fragile postmodern condition of the simulacra war] (in Chinese). 澎湃新闻·思想市场.
^ ^a ^b Solmaz, Kubra (2023-11-08). "Gaza's Ongoing Tragedy: Are Heart-Wrenching Images Losing Their Impact on Social Media?". Gaza's Ongoing Tragedy: Are Heart-Wrenching Images Losing Their Impact on Social Media?. Retrieved 2024-05-14.