UNDEFEATED.
That was the tone. On a recent timeline scroll, the White House official X account posted a video to boast about real-world airstrikes against Iran-backed militias. But it wasn't raw combat footage, nor was it a somber briefing from the Pentagon. It was a video game clip. A digitally rendered, hyper-stylized montage used to visually represent the execution of lethal, real-world military force.
It was a jarring piece of cognitive dissonance, a global superpower using the aesthetic of an arcade lobby to broadcast state violence. But more than just a tasteless social media blunder, this post is the symptom of a profound metaphysical shift in how we wage and consume conflict.
What we are looking at is, in the truest sense of the word, obscene. But to see why, we have to strip the word of its modern moral baggage and return it to the classical theater. The Latin ob-scaena literally translates to off-stage. For the Greeks and Romans, the most gruesome, visceral acts of violence were never performed in front of the audience. They were considered too intensely real, too disruptive for the artificial space of the play. The true horror always happened off-scene, kept safely out of sight.
What the White House posted is the ultimate modern obscenity, but perfectly inverted. Today, the actual, physical reality of the airstrikes, the shattered concrete, the concussive force, the bodies, is kept strictly off-stage. We are protected from the friction of reality. What is presented on-stage instead is a sterile, frictionless video game facade. We are given the triumph and the explosion, entirely detached from the physical devastation.
War as a sterile performance
We have been warned about this before. In 1991, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published a series of essays titled The Gulf War did not take place. His argument was not a denial of the bombings, but a realization that traditional warfare had died. He observed that what the world was watching on television was not a war, but a matter of “war-processing in which the enemy only appears as a computerised target.” The physical conflict had been entirely swallowed by its media representation.
Baudrillard noted that we are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual. In other words, the virtual simulation of the war replaces the war itself. We sit in front of screens, absorbing an event that has been sterilized into “an asexual surgical war.”
The nuggets of truth Baudrillard buried in that essay perfectly predict the White House's video game post. He noted that the war is pure and speculative, to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify. He warned that what we live in real time is not the event, but rather in larger than life the spectacle of the degradation of the event and its spectral evocation. Stripping away the military public relations, he wrote bluntly that it is not war taking place over there but the disfiguration of the world.
If the 1991 Gulf War was the first hyperreal conflict, fought with green night-vision, nose-cone cameras, and sanitized briefings, today's conflict has pushed the simulacrum to its terminal stage. You can hear this metaphysical shift in the branding itself. In 1991, the operation was dubbed Desert Storm, a name evoking a sweeping, physical, almost natural phenomenon. Today, we are handed Epic Fury. It is a title that belongs on a game cartridge rather than a military briefing. We no longer even need the pretense of real camera footage. A video game suffices. The abstraction has deepened to the point where the state can literally use a simulation to represent a simulation.
Baudrillard argued that the real warmongers are those who live on the ideology of the veracity of this war, while the actual devastation is carried out at another level by trickery, hyperreality, simulacra. By replacing the gravity of military action with a digital graphic, the state achieves the ultimate clean war, clean because it exists entirely in the realm of the virtual. The violence is executed, but the public only consumes the metaphor. The Gulf War did not take place. And as we watch digital jets fly across our social media feeds, it is clear that this one isn't taking place, either.
