below is from another list and long time ago in cyber-time, Michael Hoover
JB's articles originally published in *Liberation* newspaper between January & March 1991...translated into English and published as _The Gulf War Did Not Take Place_ by University of Indiana Press in 1995.
Jean Baudrillard, French post-modern (I guess) thinker, doesn't matter much these days (some would say he never did), even he has indicated that he hasn't had anything to say (some would say he never did) for two decades. But his saying that is part of fatalistic gambit that has been alluring and seductive for some postmodern academics and post-New Lefties.
B's late 60s/early 70s writings attempted to 'go beyond' what he claimed to be Marxism's conservatism - its roots in assumptions of political economy offering no basis for radical social transformation. And some of his earlier stuff on consumerism & electronic media is insightful and useful even if it is not original. B proceeded to claim 'going beyond' production, needs, truth, ideology, revolution, _____ (fill in blank). His trajectory is political dead-end offering no possibility of escape so we can either revel in commodities or posture as rebels (why not both simultaneously) and so it is Baudrillard who shows himself to be conservative.
Anyway, when you read (assuming you'd want to) Gulf War stuff you find that B did not actually claim that war never happened, rather he posited that it didn't occur way it appeared on CNN. For Baudrillard, 'reality' no longer exists outside tv (what he calls hyperreality) which has come to define the world. So, according to B, tv's depiction of events is more real for tv watchers than actual events (what he calls simulation/ simulacra). In this case, CNN turned death into entertainment.
Baudrillard's hyperbole (and cyberbole) aside, the dangers of this stuff are obvious: matter matters, the electronic gadgets that 'produce' hyperreality are themselves produced by exploited (and hyper-exploited) labor and 10,000 tons of bombs per day is a war. Michael Hoover ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- and for what it's worth, from Baudrillard's "In the Shadow of the Millenium": 'I had announced that 'the Gulf War did not take place.' Contrary to traditional prophets who always predict that something will happen, I had announced that something would not happen. I am the opposite type of prophet. In any case, prophecies are always wrong. What the prophets announce never takes place. So, when I say that something will not take place, it will then take place. The Gulf War did take place..."