We live in an era where the media controls what we see, watch, listen to, and hear. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East reflect Western media bias and a warmongering reporting strategy. In journalistic and literary writing, Jean Baudrillard's theory of simulacra, in which reality is imagined, and imagination becomes real, flourishes in the likenesses of computer-generated images (simulacre), deceptive copies that have no resemblance to the original. Similarly, AI-generated content blurs the distinction between virtual and real through hyper-realistic synthetic media. While Western media promote the US-Israeli misinformation and unverified narratives, pro-Ukrainian news reportage is reflected in the Russia-Ukraine War in the "Ghost of Kyiv" stories that create a hyperreality in which one Ukrainian soldier shoots down several Russian jets using simulated images.
Obliteration
In this era of "post-truth," fake news and misinformation facilitated by social media and AI are the order of the day. Politicians' utterances do not mean what they superficially mean. On 22 June 2025, The Associated Press reported that Trump claimed Iran's key nuclear sites had been "completely and fully obliterated" by strikes. The Advanced English Dictionary describes the word "obliterate" as "reduced to nothingness" and "destroy utterly by any means."
The over seventy days of the US-Israeli War on Iran (28 February 2026 to 13 May 2026) reveals that Trump's earlier statement referred to a military operation rather than structural destruction, since Iran demonstrated military might in its own right as a recipient of aggression. Had Iran's nuclear capabilities been "completely and fully obliterated" in June 2025, operations "Epic Fury" and "Roaring Lion" would not have been carried out in February 2026. If words carry any meaning, such meaning is not forced into the words. Hypothetically, meaning is burdened by information, and meaning is a separate system of information — and that information destroys meaning. This illustrates Baudrillard's argument that "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."
Simulacrum
Jack Mapanje's The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison depicts the supposed release of Dick Mapanje, Aaron Gadama, Twaibu Sangala, and David Chiwanga from Mikuyu Prison in the postcolonial predicament of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda's Malawi. The Special Branch Police members who come to release them suspiciously do not sign their names in the Prison Gatebook, which later disappears. In another poem, "The Following Dawn the Boots," the world listens to an eccentric radio announcement that the four intended "to cross the border at Mwanza / And their supposed accident there." Staged accidents are part of simulacral regimes. In James Ng'ombe's Madala's Children (1996), a government car changes its number plate to 8201 for plotting purposes, and the first announcement on the radio says, "two cabinet ministers are missing." Soon, the report changes to death in a car accident.
In Legson Kayira's The Detainee (1974), Sam Mpasu's Political Prisoner 3/75 (1995), and Tiyambe Zeleza's Smouldering Charcoal (1992), the disappearances of political opponents are illustrative of the simulacral strategy, while the citizenry is fed with stories that do not reflect reality.
The urban legend about "missing private parts" in Malawi's Nsanje and Chikwawa districts in May 2026, where victims claim their genitals have been stolen through witchcraft by a simple touch, creates a copy without an original — simulacrum — since when the police take the victims to hospital, doctors confirm their private parts are intact.
This incident has been blown out of proportion by different versions of social media misinformation.
Jean Baudrillard's Theory of Simulacra
The more we consume fake news from social media platforms and AI-generated information — through which algorithms and simulations decipher the real to derive the artificial — the more we lose our authentic selves and our sense of being.
According to the French structuralist and Marxist theorist Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), "simulacra" involves counterfeiting, production, and simulation, and the image (simulacre) undergoes four phases: (1) it is a reflection of a profound reality; (2) it masks and denatures a profound reality; (3) it masks the absence of a profound reality; (4) it has no relation to any reality whatsoever. Through the processes of simulacra, Baudrillard asserts, we remain with a "generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." This kind of image is comparable to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where one encounters a cat's grin without a cat. It transcends reality.
There has never been an era in which America was great since its discovery by Amerigo Vespucci, through to its being colonised by Britain and its involvement in the atrocious slave trade. Donald Trump's desire "To Make America Great Again" has no past reality with which to compare. Therefore, it is a simulacral expression through which wishes pass as a celluloid image. However, his post on social media — "a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again" (7 April 2026) — recalls the Persian Empire, its headquarters in modern Iran, thriving around the Euphrates-Tigris River basin. To destroy this entire civilisation emanating from US-Israeli Irano-phobia reflects psychic dementia through social media posts, in which immersion in digital images and algorithms blurs the sense of real-world reality.
On April 29, 2026, Donald Trump threatened Iran on Truth Social, saying the country "better get smart soon!" The post was accompanied by an AI-generated picture of Trump holding a gun with explosions in the background, and the words "NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!" Trump's AI-generated image is the epitome of simulacrum, embodying hyperreality. His image is more important than reality, blurring the line between war and politics. Thus, social media and AI-generated images transcend reality, diminishing the culture of truth.
Rushdie, a Made Novelist with No Natural Talent (Ingenium), Tries Magical Realism
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses takes the form of Orientalism through which the "Occident" (the West) stereotypes the "Orient" (the East) to reinforce the superiority of the Self and the inferiority of the Other. Through parody, pastiche, transformations that transcend reality, and dreams, Rushdie rewrites a people's religion on secularist foundations. While Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is anti-Jewish, The Satanic Verses is anti-Arab. Jews and Arabs are Semites, and they speak Semitic languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). While Miguel de Cervantes, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoevsky are born novelists, Salman Rushdie is made. The Satanic Verses is the product of a penurious spirituality.
Hyper-realistically surviving a hijacked Flight 420 explosion over England in which everyone has died, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha — a movie and television star, respectively — undergo numerous metamorphoses and experience dreams that reflect their mental derangement and pathological symptoms of nihilism. The names Gibreel Farishta (Angel Gabriel) and Saladin Chamcha (Salahuddin Ayyubi) are derogatorily used in the novel. In one of his dreams, Gibreel delivers the so-called "satanic verses" to Mahound (a scorn for Muhammad). Rushdie writes: "To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be … Mahound." Dreams and AI intersect: AI replicates symbolic human dreams, creating a hyperreality in which the simulation experience blurs with reality.
Rushdie's portrayal of his scorned characters reflects the mind of Europe. In Medieval Europe, the name Mahound was the religious symbol of the Devil, while the black man was a racial symbol of the devil on earth. Blackness is symbolic of a lack of humanness. By renaming Muhammad as Mahound, Rushdie insinuates a lack of godliness, the Devil, and a baby-threatener. The Satanic Verses is also Negrophobic. In his poem "The White Man's Burden," Rudyard Kipling calls the black man "Half devil and half child." In Orientalism (1978), Said argues that "One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed." Since the discourse of desire is the discourse of crisis, and also the discourse of power, our desires become reality. This position is summed up by Baudrillard: "'Take your desires for reality!' can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power since in a non-referential world, even the confusion of the reality principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality."
Conclusion
There are different angles from which we can view the world, and Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum provides yet another prism. In this era of generative hyperreality — besides social media, AI, and magic realism — replicated realities challenge traditional thought. However, thinking from the perspective of critical realism, reality exists beyond and above human theorisation. This view allows room for epistemological fallibilism: the recognition that human knowledge is imperfect.
