number of casualties like never before, the mainstream media imposed a filtered (hyper)reality in which carnage no longer had any place. Any images that contradicted this
reductionist, symbolic representation of the Gulf War had to be removed from the official
footage before being disseminated to screens all around the world.
Decrying the nefarious effects of the hyper-real fiction that is emblematic of the
integral reality of virtual war, Baudrillard laments, “There is a profound scorn in the kind
of ‘clean’ war which renders the other powerless without destroying its flesh […] This
idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war
conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness” (The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place 40; 43). Noting that simulations of war in real-time are
intentionally fabricated to give the chimerical impression that a nation can wage a war in
which pain has been nearly entirely taken out of the equation, Baudrillard further
explains, “Violence is white-washed, history is whitewashed, all as part of a vast
enterprise of cosmetic surgery at whose completion nothing will be left but a society for
which, and individuals for whom, all violence, all negativity, are strictly forbidden” (The
Transparency of Evil 50). For Baudrillard, the refusal to nuance the master narrative that
justifies a war is necessary in order to maintain hyper-real representations of a nonevent.
Under the weight of ubiquitous simulations, the real collapses and in essence
ceases to exist. Realizing that transmitting realistic images of traumatized victims that
have been brutally killed or displaced during military operations would undermine the
internal logic of the signs of war which continually flash across our screens, the media
sweeps away any semblance of stark realism. Whereas nothing could be further from
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