Rating: 
Summary: Pure sociological poetry
Review: A brilliant response to the mediated non-event of the Gulf War - a must read for anyone with lingering illusions on the nature of war in the unipolar post-Cold War world in which media war has eclipsed war itself and Clauswitz's definition fails to find resonance
Rating: 
Summary: Amazing!
Review: After i read it, i became more aware that things that we took for granted, are just false interpretations, like the dead officers on gulf war. Their dead are in fact just an ilussion to their family. Great tittle. But i would prefer "This book does not exist" or "This book is a mistake", ...
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: After i read it, i became more aware that things that we took for granted, are just false interpretations, like the dead officers on gulf war. Their dead are in fact just an ilussion to their family. Great tittle. But i would prefer "This book does not exist" or "This book is a mistake", ...
Rating: 
Summary: Great perspective
Review: Baudrillard does think the Gulf War happened - the title is just a provocation (it was clearly effective, since people who didn't read the book fell for Baudrillard's little joke and gave it one star).This book is a great European perspective in the changes that war has undergone, which places it in the same tradition as the work of Paul Virilio's STRATEGY OF DECEPTION, which is a vaguely Baudrillardian take on the Kosovo conflict, written in the same style. What Baudrillard has begun to see is that war isn't what it used to be. It's not about two countries getting in a political argument that breaks out in violence and all-out war. Baudrillard observes that Mutually Assured Destruction has brought war into the realm of virtuality. No longer is war the simple clash of brutes. Instead, it is a programmed operation that is executed according to a pre-defined model. The UN troops were not responding to the actual capabilities of the Iraqi army, Baudrillard says, but simply executing a plan that had already been decided upon. Thus, you didn't have the UN responding to Iraqi fire, but instead to the signatures on their infrared and radar, satellite images, coordinates, etc. The UN was essentially fighting a virtual reality war using real guns, pointing their missiles at dots on a radar and killing people in the process. Thus, the Gulf War dissociated the image from reality. The Gulf War was a war of images: intelligence images, news images. A media phenomenon for the world and for the military and for the world. For the military, because virtual reality replaced war as we used to know it, and for the world, because the media phenomenon of the Gulf War became a prime-time exposé of America's technological might, and of the threat of Saddam to the New World Order. Beneath the proliferation of images were thousands of dead Iraqis. But all we saw was the images. The real didn't matter. This is what Baudrillard is talking about when he says 'the real is no longer real.' Reality has become images - the real behind the images is no longer relevant. Did the Gulf War really happen? Eh, who cares. We saw the images. This isn't necessarily a profound or true statement on the war, but the subtlety of Baudrillard's perspective is very interesting, because I think Americans don't really see the difference between old and new warfare. Americans don't perceive the way in which détente moved deterrence into the realm of virtuality by turning the Cold War into a scary period of hostility to a game of let's-try-and-be-really-scared. As an intelligent foreigner, Baudrillard notices, and this quick book contains a host of very interesting observations such as the ones discussed above. Too bad it's so brief. Sometimes Baudrillard is too brief. But this book really has a great deal of very novel perspective. Read this, and then read Virilio. I think you'll like them.
Rating:
Summary: Drivel
Review: Garbage - don't bother to buy or read this.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book.
Review: If you read this book, please tell me about it as I have not yet read it. Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: Yes it did.
Review: It did take place. It did
Rating:
Summary: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
Review: No one can lack commonsense as much as an intellectual, especially a leftist one, and perhaps most of all a renowned French professor of sociology. To show his brilliance, Baudrillard takes a perfectly obvious fact and devotes a book to proving it wrong. In saying that the Kuwait war "did not take place," he means that the fighting was so lopsided, it did not constitute a war. Brushing aside American fears of heavy casualties, he deems that the war "was won in advance." It was, in his view, "a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version of what was the drama of war." From the American point of view, he claims, "no accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic order." In all, the events of early 1991 stood in relation to war as computer erotics do to actual sex. Baudrillard's exceedingly slight essay (a compilation of three articles published in the newspaper Libération) ceaselessly hammers away at these themes. He stands midway between the United States and Iraq, faulting each of these main actors about equally. For him, it is all aesthetics and ideology; the deeply important human, economic, and strategic issues raised by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait disappear under the weight of his relentless abstraction. Thus unconnected from reality, Baudrillard mangles everything from the French president's name to the number of traffic fatalities in the United States. The result is a book of profound error and transcendent stupidity, the most inane ever reviewed in these pages. Middle East Quarterly, March 1996
Rating:
Summary: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
Review: No one can lack commonsense as much as an intellectual, especially a leftist one, and perhaps most of all a renowned French professor of sociology. To show his brilliance, Baudrillard takes a perfectly obvious fact and devotes a book to proving it wrong. In saying that the Kuwait war "did not take place," he means that the fighting was so lopsided, it did not constitute a war. Brushing aside American fears of heavy casualties, he deems that the war "was won in advance." It was, in his view, "a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version of what was the drama of war." From the American point of view, he claims, "no accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic order." In all, the events of early 1991 stood in relation to war as computer erotics do to actual sex. Baudrillard's exceedingly slight essay (a compilation of three articles published in the newspaper Libération) ceaselessly hammers away at these themes. He stands midway between the United States and Iraq, faulting each of these main actors about equally. For him, it is all aesthetics and ideology; the deeply important human, economic, and strategic issues raised by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait disappear under the weight of his relentless abstraction. Thus unconnected from reality, Baudrillard mangles everything from the French president's name to the number of traffic fatalities in the United States. The result is a book of profound error and transcendent stupidity, the most inane ever reviewed in these pages. Middle East Quarterly, March 1996
Rating:
Summary: Baby food
Review: Reading this turned my head to much. That means it's good.
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