The Persian Gulf TV War

This study examines the propaganda war waged by the American media. The author attacks the role of the media during the conflict (Gulf War 1991) accusing them of silencing those wishing to voice their opposition to the war and so providing George Bush Sr. with the platform necessary to preach his war policies.

By using their power and influence, the media were able to spoon-feed the American public with their version of the war. As a result of this action, they failed to assume their democratic responsibilities to report on all aspects of the conflict.

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Violence Re/Presentation Gulf War & Beyond

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

-- Nineteen Eighty-Four

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels.

-- Henry IV, Part 2

Ordering the New World:

Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond

Simon Chesterman

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard's controversial thesis advanced during the Gulf War that it was in no sense a "real" war and his provocative claim that "the Gulf War did not take place" were lambasted at the time as exposing the political bankruptcy of postmodern scholarship.

At their most extreme, such critiques asserted an ideological complicity between anti-realist or irrationalist doctrine and "the crisis of moral and political nerve" said to be afflicting Western intellectuals.

In this article, I explore the theoretical and practical consequences of taking Baudrillard's discussion of the Gulf War qua non-event seriously.

In particular, I use his thesis as the departure point for a consideration of the presentation and representation of violence in the post-Cold War era more generally.

Crucially, I argue that Baudrillard's approach opens up a productive line of inquiry into violence, and its antagonistic and symbiotic relationship to order.

This critique has implications for the analysis of international relations, but may also open up a more productive engagement between international relations and international law.

In distinct ways, each discourse holds statism as axiomatic as the unitary locus of power and legitimacy respectively.

A critique of violence may provoke a doctrinal reassessment of the a priori equation of order and law that presently legitimates the realist presumptions of international relations and forecloses an interrogation of the theoretical bases of international law.

Overture

Since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed.

We will never know what an Iraqi taking part with a chance of fighting would have been like.

We will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like.

We have seen what an ultra-modern process of electrocution is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of an experimental enemy away from the field of battle with no possibility of reaction.

But this is not a war, any more than 10,000 tons of bombs per day is sufficient to make it a war. Any more than the direct transmission by CNN of real time information is sufficient to authenticate a war.

-- Baudrillard

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Intelligence, Evil, Lucid Pact

The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact Jean Baudrillard We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time. About the editors Jean Baudrillard is one of the most influential philosophical and cultural critics writing today. His books include Simulacra and Simulation, The Perfect Crime, America, Seduction, The System of Objects, Cool Memories, Symbolic Exchange and Death and the Transparency of Evil. Translated by Chris Turner. Chris Turner has translated many of the key works of French theory over the last two decades, particularly the work of Baudrillard, including most recently, The Spirit of Terrorism. Contents Integral Reality * At the Margins of the Real * The World in its Deep Illusoriness * The Easiest Solutions--Do you want to be free?--Do you want to be anyone else? * The Murder of the Sign * The Mental Diaspora of the Networks * We are All Agnostics * The Violence Done to the Image * Contemporary Art Contemporary with Itself * Virtuality and Events * Evil and Misfortune * The Intelligence of Evil * For Whom does the Bell of Politics Toll? * The Destruction of the Golden Pavilion * Duality's Revenge * Fracture Lines * Parallel Universes--Existential Divide--Time Divide * Anamnesis.

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