In 1991, in a series of texts published by Release and subsequently grouped in the collection The Gulf War Didn’t Happen (Editions Galilée), sociologist Jean Baudrillard announced the clinical death of military confrontation in its traditional form. We “we are assigned to the simulacrum of war”, he wrote, adding: “The real drama, the real war, we no longer have the taste or the need for it. What we need is the aphrodisiac flavor of the multiplication of the false, of the hallucination of violence. »
Television, CNN in the lead, then flattered this alleged hallucinatory desire, contributing to the idea that war was no longer a barbaric craft, but a high-tech “surgical” operation. Green images, laser strikes, meteorological naturalization of the conflict (the famous “Desert Storm” operation): everything then combined, and in a totally abusive way, to present this event, no less dirty than the others, as something “clean” .
Thirty years later, it seems that Putin’s power has become Baudrillardian in turn. For Russian propaganda, the Ukrainian war is not taking place. From a semantic point of view first of all, since it is presented as an operation of “liberation”. Then, from a factual point of view, all the atrocities committed are reduced to the rank of hallucinations produced by the West; a simple scene. Boutcha, site of a horrible massacre of Ukrainian civilians? A ” film set “, advance the Russian authorities, never stingy with disgust.
Attempts to de-dramatize
But what changes today compared to the first Gulf conflict is that the fable is no longer centralized. We entered straight into what everyday life The Daily Telegraph qualified as “first war of the TikTok era”, with combat videos edited as music videos and often accompanied by pop music. A war which, on a media level, has become participatory, involving both state propaganda structures and anonymous people. Ridiculed by a meme which shows him with the skull surmounted by a cope cage (these metal protections cobbled together on Russian tanks with the hope of limiting the damage of the Javelin missile), the master of the Kremlin suddenly seems less threatening, less inaccessible. Almost within range.
“When the war materialized, pop diversions began to rub shoulders with images of raw atrocities on social networks, with a lack of problematic hierarchy” – Nicolas Nova, socioanthropologist
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