The Gulf War did not take place

What Hacker News says

1. potholeresellerJun 2025
   > All photographs or videos you have seen have been placed there for you to see them.

   For those reading the above, wondering about this phenomenon, read Baudrilliard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Even if you don't agree with Baudrilliard's overall thesis, the facts he brings up are still cogent (e.g. a photo from the Exon Valdez spill was used instead of an actual photo of the Iraqi military's destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields). The media has been a critical aspect of war since at least the Falklands War.

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2. Barrin92May 2021
   Liveleak doesn't portray the reality of war because it shows you some beheading. Voyeurism and gore are not the same as genuine insight into what scary and violent places are actually like. It's worth reading Baudrillard's 'The Gulf War Did Not Take Place' on how media representation, and stylized, selective footage is used to distort. You didn't get to know the 'reality' of war, but the hyper-reality of it.

   If you were to actually go see the reality of war what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing, not interating with any enemy. People trying to scrape by, someone fixing a pipe, that kind of thing. LiveLeak was even worse and a better source for propaganda than sensational news.

   [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulf_War_Did_Not_Take_Plac...

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3. dweezApr 2026
   The modern world is like Jean Baudrillard's vision of hell. Back in 1991 he wrote "The Gulf War did not take place", commenting on what was at the time a new development of 24/7 live media coverage of the war. Media saturation created a hyperreality where images about the war replaced the thing itself. How far we have come. We are so complacent here that war exists only as stream of symbols and sounds streaming out of our screen. I think many do not truly believe it is real.
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4. cess11Jan 2025
   He wrote in many different styles, depending on the subject and likely audience. Simulacra and Simulation, Silent Majorities and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place are very different texts.
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5. jaculabilisOct 2024
   > I think the author is using the original motivation of musing on null hypotheses to derive the title "The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place",

   It's probably a reference to "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" by Jean Baudrillard, which took a similar critical view of the Gulf War as TFA takes of the Higgs discovery.

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6. darigoOct 2023
   I crossed into Mexico via Eagle Pass. I was hitchhiking throughout the US and then throughout Mexico with my wife. Nothing seemed so dramatic then, but maybe it's blown up in recent years. When I got to the bottom of Mexico I stayed a night in Tapachula, which was totally nuts. Flooded with French speaking black immigrants en route to the US.

   Really interesting place. Lots of cool food and people to talk to with interesting stories. Painful stories, too. Such an overwhelming, disorienting place. Maybe it's changed too, though. The above-ground world we see on the news is stable because it's a mask for the entropic chaos of the underworld, where portals to the unknown pop in and out of existence all around you, and it's easy to get lost and everything disappears all the time, and you'll never be able to know how or why.

   The real world is like a tornado made of spaghetti. And the fake world (like in Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place kind of way) feels so much realer and more familiar because it doesn't need to deal with the eccentricities and contradictions of reality, but can safely play with its symbols. Like the difference between making a Yoda out of Legos vs making a real Yoda. Blood and guts and bricks in boxes, flooding over wet dirt.

   What a cheesy stunt, which of course makes it so fitting for someone like Mr 𝕏 dot com

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