War of postmodern irony
Friday October 26, 2001 The Guardian
So Britain is on a war footing, the media is filled with war correspondents filing their reports, and Tony Blair is a great war leader. There's only one problem: there's no war taking place.
The whole charade recalls Jean Baudrillard's thesis that the Gulf war did not take place, which was dismissed at the time as the ramblings of a postmodern pseudo-intellectual French philosopher. But his basic claim that what we witnessed was purely a media performance aimed to assert US military authority over the globe was clear enough, and seems just as pertinent now.
Something terrible is happening in Afghanistan, but it's not a war. What we are witnessing on our televisions and in our newspapers is the performance of a war purely for our consumption, to gain our compliance for US military adventures.
Why journalists are so eager to go along with this is something they will have to explain one day, as happened after the Gulf "war", when the media went through the usual process of blaming the government and the military for misleading it about that slaughter.
Meanwhile, Kate Adie is in Cheltenham, addressing a festival of literature. I rest my case. Phil Cole Lecturer in media ethics, Middlesex University p.cole at mdx.ac.uk