Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did not Take Place, 1991

Paul Patton, Introduction

p. 17 Baud argues that what took place was not a war, not that nothing took
place

1. The Gulf War Will Not Take Place

p. 27 Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted

with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real
apocalypse.
We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a
hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.
p. 28 ...we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation...
We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to
the catastrophe of the real.

2. The Gulf War: is it really taking place?

p. 29 The war is also pure and speculative, to the extent that we do not see the
real event that it could be or that it would signify.

p. 34 ...the entire world including the military is caught up in a process of

intellectualization.
the undecidable ...the use of a word-processor renders futile and impossible the
passage to the act of writing, because it removes from it in advance any dramatic
uncertainty.
p.41 war turned into information becomes a symptom
p. 46 the principle of simulation which governs all information and the structural
unreality of images
p. 47 rather than the `revolution of real time of which Virilio speaks, we should
speak of an involution in real time
p. 49 [this is Virilio] at a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their
sense
p. 52 TV , with everyone at home, plays its role of social control by collective
stupefaction
p. 58 intellectuals and politicians agreed: this war exists, we have seen it.

3. The Gulf War did not take place

p. 62 adversaries never confronted each other face to face: one in its virtual war, the
other in its traditional war