The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.

While what used to happen in the East was eventually experienced in the West, shattering the imaginary "West-East" dichotomy, the global media outlets, however, focused overwhelmingly on Paris itself, as though it was independent of the rest of the world.

[3] Jarryd Bartle, a lecturer of social context, and Kong Degang, a literature and art scholar, cited Baudrillard's argument that "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" and compared it to the ongoing Russian attack on Ukraine.

He analyzed that in The Eight Hundred, the battle against the Japanese invaders is depicted as a "performance" intended to be watched by Shanghai citizens and the international community.

The latest technologies enabled the media to provide a myriad of real-time simulacra which completely dwarf those of the Gulf War in both realness and virtualness, which also led to information overload.