Amidst a Salman Rushdie reference and constant references to Ceacescu’s Romania, Baudrillard claims that both the West and Saddam faked each other out in the Gulf War and perverted the media to their own ends. Believable, but cliche for leftist literature of the period.

A little hard to follow for a layman, but nonetheless a fascinating look at what effect the media has on the reality of modern "warfare".

Brilliant, prescient of this current digital-detritus hellscape in which information croons like missile nadir decoy-venom. Baudrillard - cutting, sarcastic, cynical, comprehensive in a loose way (for tautness does not exist, after all). Smedley Butler stranded in a land of vague spectacle; DeLillo's Most Photographed Barn; Hypernormalization's central thesis about the world being too difficult and complex to manage. War is surgical, deterministic; blank-screen ramblings within this impermanent realm.

I think I would have respected this author's efforts more if he'd just been as audacious as the title he went with in the actual essay,work,whatever you want to call it. Instead, it's this overanalytical false equivalency, that because the media played out the familiar notes of war and said war on ground level didn't look the same, it was all propaganda. If you have to try this hard to ply abstract conclusions into hard data, then you probably never had a case to begin with. This is what overintellectualizing gets you. You start guessing the very nature of words, the very nature of said words' definitions, and you're forever mired and stuck in between conclusions on EVERYTHING.

In our world full with AI and MLL race this book is more relevant than ever

Great insight on what was happening on the grounds between the different countries and their people in the Arab Gulf including the role of the USA.

The crux of Baudrillard's argument is that there was not a 'real war', in that there was certainly a war represented in the media (CNN etc) but this wasn't the correct label. Baudrillard's argument is that the real events were a one-sided invasion, a beatdown of an enemy that didn't exist and was created by the US. The Iraqi's could not 'fight' in the war, as one would expect a belligerent to fight, because there was no war.

The text does have quite a lot of orientalist understandings of Arabs. In this book, they are presented as stupid, inherently backwards, and savages. In this context, Baudrillard ridicules the US for invading them, and highlights the mismatch which is grounded in this understanding of the Arabs as so totally inferior. The modern day analogy would be a UFC fighter 'fighting' a four year old. It's not a fight, it's a grown man beating up a child. But Baudrillard does not analyse why the 'mismatch' (as he understands it) exists. His mismatch axiom, if you refuse to accept it, renders his argument moot.

In The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Jean Baudrillard offers a radically subversive critique of the 1991 Gulf War, transmuting the very notion of conflict into a dizzying vortex of hyperreality. Baudrillard doesn't so much analyse the war as he performs a metaphysical autopsy on the corpse of reality itself, revealing that the entrails of history are nothing more than televisual static - a void where the real has been obliterated by the relentless onslaught of simulacra.
Baudrillard's text is not just a work of theory, but an ideological neutron bomb that detonates the fragile superstructure of Western epistemology. The Gulf War, in Baudrillard's cunningly paradoxical formulation, is less a war than a war of signs - a shadow play where bombs are dropped not on enemy combatants, but on the very possibility of objective understanding. The war, we are told, is not an event but a media hallucination, an immaculate conception of conflict birthed from the loins of TV news cycles and the metastasising spectacle of late capitalism.
In this desert of the real, the Gulf War ceases to exist as an ontological event and becomes instead a recursive loop of signification - a war that wages itself in the ethereal realm of pixels and propagandised rhetoric. Baudrillard doesn't simply suggest that the war didn't take place; he wryly intimates that the very idea of taking place is itself a relic of a bygone era, a quaint illusion maintained by those who still cling to the naïve belief in a reality unmediated by screens.
Baudrillard's critique is not of the war itself - because what war? - but of the simulacra in which the war is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, an orgiastic profusion of images that signify nothing but their own vacuity. The Gulf War becomes the paradigmatic non-event of our hyperreal epoch, a conflict that obliterates not bodies but the very concept of conflict itself. Here, death is dematerialised, transformed into a spectral abstraction devoid of consequence, where Iraqi casualties are algorithmically erased, absorbed into the simulacral machinery of media representation.
In Baudrillard's grim vision, the war is nothing more than a mirage - a desolate illusion projected onto the sands of history by the technocratic priests of the military-industrial complex. What is left, then, of war in this postmodern abyss? Baudrillard posits a chilling answer: nothing. The Gulf War did not take place because, in the hyperreal landscape where signifiers have severed their ties to any referent, nothing can truly take place anymore. History has been swallowed by the black hole of the spectacle, leaving us with only the faint afterglow of its simulated remnants.
Ultimately, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is Baudrillard's triumphant eulogy for the real, a work that gleefully dances on the grave of traditional historiography and declares, with a knowing smirk, that all is simulacrum, all is spectacle, and nothing - absolutely nothing - remains of the world we once thought we knew. In this terminal stage of hyperreality, where even war is but a fleeting image on a screen, Baudrillard leaves us with the terrifying realisation that we are adrift in a sea of signs, with no anchor to the real and no escape from the infinite recursion of the hyperreal. And in this, perhaps, lies Baudrillard's most profound irony: that the only war that truly took place was the one waged against reality itself - and reality lost.

This shit is so good and accurate, my boy Baudrillard a little racist but you know he's still my crazy-ass white boy

Provocative but often over generalizing from very specific context and running wild with his earlier theory.

"Zamiast dyskutować o poziomie społecznej tolerancji dla imigrantów, lepiej by było, gdybyśmy dyskutowali o poziomie umysłowej tolerancji dla informacji".

Najlepiej byłoby podyskutować o poziomie umysłowej tolerancji dla niewiele wnoszącej gadaniny Baudrillarda. Może i jest miejscami urokliwa, może i jest miejscami uwodząca, ale przede wszystkim – irytująca.

Este es el momento exacto en el cual la metafísica comenzó a atacar parasíticamente a la geografía.

Baudrillard se la vuela afirmando que ya no existen espacios euclidianos y que por ende la guerra del golfo no existió.