Jean Baudrillard Quotes

The military has been determined to control the images of war since Vietnam. They're convinced that they lost the war because of loss of political support back home, because people saw what was going on.

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one… The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the 'New York Times' or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

An information operations team was sent to Afghanistan to conduct various psychological operations on the Afghans and Taliban. The team was then asked not to focus on the Taliban but on manipulating senators into giving more funds and troops [to the war].

Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam.

The participation if women in some armies in the world is in reality only symbolic. The talk about the role of Zionist women in fighting with the combat units of the enemy in the war of 5 June 1967 was intended more as propaganda than anything real or substantial. It was calculated to intensify and compound the adverse psychological effects of the war by exploiting the backward outlook of large sections of Arab society and their role in the community. The intention was to achieve adverse psychological effects by saying to Arabs that they were defeated, in 1967, by women.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot." [Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

No liberal newspaper ever talked about the invasion of Vietnam; they talked about the defense of Vietnam. And then they were saying, "well, it's not going well." Ok, that make them liberal. It's like, it's if we were to say, that going back to, say, Nazi Germany, that Hitler's general staff was liberal after Stalingrad because they were criticizing his tactics: "It was a mistake to fight a two front war, we should've knocked off Englad first," or something.

That, what we're really seeing in Iraq is not a terrible war, but in fact, just the media's portrayal of it.

World War II is smothered in sentimentality and nostalgia. What's interesting about Vietnam is that sentimentality is just not there, so you're given kind of a clean access to it in one way. It's also a war that represents a failure for the United States. Many people came back feeling like they never wanted to talk about it again. And so we developed a national amnesia.

Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says "Bad war, good soldier." Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.

Visual renditions of war not only establish what can be seen, and the audio-track established what can be heard, but the photographs also "train" us in ways of focusing on targets, ways of regarding suffering and loss.

Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a 'bionic face,' why didn't they do a better job of it?

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money." (On Vietnam War)

Realistically speaking, Ayn Rand should not have opposed the antidraft movement and supported the Vietnam War effort - in effect, she supported military conscription.

I would say we must win the information war against ISIS. Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it.

The only way to win the war is to move people's hearts and minds.

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.

The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition.