The Gulf War Did Not Take Place Quotes

“The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of
any carnal contamination or warrior's passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“We have neither need of nor the taste for real drama or real war. What we require is the aphrodisiac spice of the multiplication of fakes and the hallucination of violence, for we have a hallucinogenic pleasure in all things, which, as in the case of drugs, is also the pleasure in our indifference and our irresponsibility and thus in our true liberty. Here is the supreme form of democracy. Through it our definitive retreat from the world takes shape: the pleasure of mental speculation in images equalling that of capital in a stock market run, or that of the corpses in the charnel house of Timisoara.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“As a result. the more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced. the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order. In this sense, the Iran-Iraq war was a successful first phase: Iraq served to liquidate the most radical form of the anti-Western challenge, even though it never defeated it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“Brecht again: "As for the place not desired, there is something there and that's disorder. As for the desired place, there is nothing there and that's order." The New World Order is made up of all these compensations and the fact that there is nothing rather than something, on the ground, on the screens, in our heads: consensus by deterrence. At the desired place (the GuIf, nothing took place, non-war. At the desired place (TV, information), nothing took place, no images, nothing but filler. Not much took place in all our heads either, and that too is in order. The fact that there was nothing at this or that desired place was harmoniously compensated for by the fact that there was nothing elsewhere either. In this manner, the global order unifies all the partial orders.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“It is like truth according to Nietzsche: we no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed. Similarly, we do not believe that war is war when all uncertainty is supposedly removed and it appears as a naked operation. The nudity of war is no less virtual than that of the erotic body in the apparatus of striptease.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“One of the two adversaries is a rug salesman, the other an arms salesman: they have neither the same logic nor the same strategy, even though they are both crooks. There is not enough communication between them to enable them to make war upon each other.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“War stripped of its passions. its phantasms. its finery. its veils. its violence. its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even. and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics. as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy. whereas the American
technological decoy only aims to deceive itself. The first days of the lightning attack. dominated by this technological mystification. will remain one of the finest bluffs. one of the finest collective mirages of contemporary History (along with Timisoara). We are all accomplices in these fantasmagoria. it must be said, as we are in any publicity campaign. In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so
war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capital moves.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

“Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war. Wastes which incarnate the secret violence of this society, uncoerced and non-degradable defecation.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place