Man those essays are some hot garbage. If you read them, you come away thinking that the US just decided to attack Iraq to make a point to Saddam. Let me quote it

> Unlike earlier wars, in which there were political aims either of conquest or domination, what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future.

A beautiful sentence, but Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intent of conquering it. The essays would better be titled “Kuwait does not exist”.

Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)

I usually don't read French philosophers, but when I do, I simply take it as an elaborate language game. It's like enjoying any team sport, where when one players says, "we are going to crush them!", it's generally not an actual plan involving physical crushing. In this case, I see Baudrillard simply using the idea of the Gulf War, to make a point about the larger context in which it took place - the media images, the self-stylings of various leaders, how it was commented on, etc. It was the world's first "cable news war," and while Baudrillard was not alone in noticing this at the time, certainly he had anticipated it in his previous writings on simulacra and hyper-reality.

I really love Baudrillard's writing and I'm particularly fond of America. But, I do take issue with this idea of "the larger context in which it took place" being the American media. When the context in which took place, is Saddam beginning his plan of conquering the middle east. He's not wrong about the American Media, but he really does go three essays about the gulf war, without mentioning Kuwait.

I made that phrase up, though Baudrillard would probably have somewhat agreed - at any rate, he was a cultural critic, so he wasn't interested in the geopolitical causes of events, and more the "semiotic" causes, so to speak. I can't think of the right word here, I am not a sociologist/media studies major, but it's something like, How do the cultural symbols prevalent at the time and the media in which they are expressed form our notion of "the thing that happened."

Yes, there is one way of answering the question, like you say, which is, Saddam invades Kuwait for oil, and the US has to take action to restore the geopolitical balance in the area. For a post-modern philosopher, the interesting tack is more like, "The recognition by the administration of the opportunity to turn this into a show worth watching about American heroism is what drove the sequence of events."

edit: grammar

> Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :)

Sounds an awful lot like Alex Jones. "I'm just asking a question, talkin about hypotheticals".

If you toss out a theory and then suggest it should be read as fiction then it's got about as much value to anyone as Klingon philosophy. And the Klingons are a lot more consistent than most Continental philosophy.

I have read no Klingon philosophy but I have no doubt it's way more consistent than Continental philosophy - possibly because it describes a made-up world, which can be shaped to the philosophy, rather than the other way round.

With all continental philosophy, my general attitude is that the best approach is to see it as an attempt to narrate the human condition rather than to theorize about it, in the strict sense. And yes, it's impossible to know which mode a particular Continental philosopher is in. As in, just how seriously is this dude taking himself? (it's mostly dudes.) We can tell from accounts of their lives that they were pretty serious in their pursuits of course - maybe not the French as much, certainly the Germans and Scandinavians.

Comparing this philosophy to demagoguery is a bit of a cheap insult mostly because the Continental philosophers weren't trying to rile the masses up. Maybe Nietzsche made the most serious attempt at doing so, though I think most of his work gained prominence posthumously.

I think the comparison to sci-fi is apt - SF writers perhaps are the most self conscious about the metaphysical implications of their subject matter or storylines, out of all writers, I'd say. But seeing as so much of that era was really a response to the vacuum left by the decline in Christianity's influence, it couldn't help being somewhat bizarre and self-contradictory. It's a tough act to follow if you aren't going to let yourself rely on divine intervention, and have to be the bastard child of Enlightenment thought as well as a millennia of Christian metaphysics. So of course, so much of it sounds like some kooky alien story.

I never came away thinking these things after reading those essays.

The novel insights he presents in these essays deal with the West's ability to structure the narrative - via mass-media - of the Gulf War, resulting in the very real and senseless violence that occurred. All the while for the citizens of those Western nations though, none of the "Vietnam effect" was witnessed.

In a sense, your post proves his point quite adeptly, because you immediately made reference to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, insinuating that the West had some sort of obligation to act with further terror & violence. The Gulf War was not Saddam's act of turning Kuwait into literally hell [0], but rather the West's shameful leveraging of mass media to conduct abhorrent uses of overwhelming technological force to destroy an entire region of the world.

Since this war began and ended, the US has "conquered" five or so states in the Middle East-North Africa region. Should somebody have rightfully stepped in and stopped us from engaging in these conquests?

[0] http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/05/lessons-of-darkness-werner-h...

great comment. some thoughts .

> this war began and ended

technically it did. realistically it hasn't for those who live there? (see also Afghanistan where the women and children now get to enjoy the mess and radicalization the US left behind). Maybe Iraq ended because we decided not to look at it any more?

> Should somebody have rightfully stepped in and stopped us from engaging in these conquests?

not sure if it would have made a difference, the real question IMO is Should they have intervened in the first place?. My own opinion has shifted in the past 20 years or so from supporting the West to step in and "do something! please anything to make it stop", to "how dare they suggest anything without cleaning up their own filthy disgusting hypocrite acts first". I believe the only way to make the West better is to implement change in our own society first (that is if we really want to have the audacity to lecture others). We can still use economic pressure to fight things but the moment our dear leaders suggest "pre-emptive strikes" there will be hypocrisy and injustice.

Also these events don't happen (didn't happen) in a vacuum. In this specific case the US can be blamed for repeating the same mistake[1] which the UK colonial powers decades before made when they invented "modern Iraq" by supporting niche groups and placing them into a position of power. In a way this is like somebody invading and toppling the US-regime in 2021, not understanding anything about the country, and giving the nuclear codes to the Amish (not that there is anything wrong with Amish culture or tradition but they do not represent the majority of the people). The US then propped up an illegitimate regime due to ignorance of the actual power dynamics in the local society at the time.

[1] https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/histor...

“Economic pressure” also kills children and brings suffering to the people.

The fact is that the US has bankrolled or committed itself atrocities just as gruesome as any of the “evil dictators” against which our media drums up popular fervor. Look into what we did in the Marshall Islands, for instance, (documented in the film The Coming War on China) or what we bankrolled in Chile under Pinochet.

But let’s not pretend our opinions have any significance in these matters. An end to endless war is not on the ballot. All we can do is face the reality that our state and media are run by this sort of cynical cretin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

> let’s not pretend our opinions have any significance in these matters.

I disagree strongly with this. That's what the powerful want you to think and feel—that your opinion has no significance. Fortunately, it's not true.

Facing the reality I mentioned is the only opinion that matters. From there we can start to talk about building something new. Otherwise, have all the anti-war protests and activism in the last 20-30 years curtailed the US war machine one bit?

The things you have said make me feel engaging with you is a waste of time, as my opinions don't matter, and it's all futile and hopeless.

You talk of "we" and "us"—"facing the reality" you describe being "all we can do". Maybe just speak for yourself? I don't feel included in your "we", and don't want to be. It sounds like you have such definite opinions that talking with you won't help anything. ...Maybe that is the real unchangeable reality here, your certainty that you're right?

I think one has to have hope.

I didn’t say it was all futile and hopeless. I have a lot of hope, but maybe in a different direction than you do. And my opinions on these issues have developed significantly even in the last year. I’m always open to new understanding.

But the US has been at war my entire adult life, and it has a very long history of brutality abroad. I’m pragmatic about what changing that will require.

No, you just have the same way of thinking as Chomsky, where you're so anti-imperialist that everything the US does is bad. Even when it's good. The invasion of Iraq can be bad and the gulf war can be good, there's no contradiction here. Go to Kuwait and ask someone who was alive during the gulf war, if they think it was about "the West's shameful leveraging of mass media to conduct abhorrent uses of overwhelming technological force to destroy an entire region of the world."

The Gulf War has nothing to do with Kuwait. We did not use overwhelming technological force on Kuwait. We used it on Iraq.

Once again, you demonstrate how warmongers cannot ever justify these abhorrent actions in the MENA region without invoking the highly dubious altruism of "we gotta punish the bad guys." The obvious need for the Gulf War from the 1990s warmonger point of view was the unprecedented post-Cold-War military buildup that was not only terribly unnecessary but has led to the loss of innumerable lives all over the globe thanks to our orgy of violence, ongoing to this day, called the War on Terrorism. But it did line the pockets of the shareholders of Raytheon and Boeing.

In a certain sense, this also helped line the pockets of Noam Chomsky, with whom I agree on very little beyond war. And even there, he's a complex thinker and I have many disagreements. Why would you try to pigeonhole and dismember my argument by placing me in the same category as Chomsky? You may think it's fine second-handing this issue and passing the buck to bigger names than yours, but instead of that, why don't you try arguing the merits of your ideas directly? Explain why millions of dead women & children were worth the "white lie" of the Gulf War being all about punishing the actions of Saddam in Kuwait?

A LiveLeak showing how people sitting in offices design these narratives and sell them to the public would be genuinely revolutionary - especially if it also showed uncensored video of the gore and horror of the results.

IMO Baudrillard and the rest of Critical Theory are absolutely useless at this.

The language is obscure, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, and exclusive. Instead of revealing the reality of how these thing work it has the opposite effect of making them even more obscure, arcane, and distant - except for a tiny, tiny minority of self-styled insiders who feel like they have privileged secret insight which flatters their moral and intellectual vanity.

The insight is useless and illusory unless it changes mass awareness and mass behaviour. Baudrillard, Lyotard, and the rest have made a terrible contribution to making that less, not more, likely.

Some friends of mine and I are working through Simulacra and Simulation. It takes us about 30 minutes to get through three sentences, while we parse the horrible word choice and ridiculously obfuscating sentence structure.

Luckily, once we've created our interpretation of what he's saying, it seems very smart, and we certainly couldn't have done it without him.

The blog "The Last Psychiatrist" does a lot of Baudrillard-style commentary.

Sounds like an effort worth pursuing and that you may be someone good at laying it out/directing it?

For the record, Critical Theory doesn't really refer to Baudrillard or Lyotard - it's a term from Adorno, I think.

Who cares if they Adorn themselves in Banderillas or Leotards.

Well said man.

That's exactly the scary thing about war though.

You can grow up, go to school, make friends, fall in love, fall out of love, graduate, move, make new friends, learn to cook, fall back in love, buy a home, get a job, get a new job, learn to paint, fix that leak in the kitchen...

And then a car bomb goes off while you're walking by and all that time spent is gone.

But that’s life. I have 2 friends that died in a car accident. They were in their mid-20s. A split second accident. If they didn’t drive that night, they probably would never get as close to death as they did that night. But it happened and all their efforts were erased in a second. It’s not just war that causes that.

The difference is not only the scale of things but especially that a war is caused by people, on purpose, too often with the consent of their population.

Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

The vast majority of car "accidents" (more properly collisions) are the predictable result of policy choices.

What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?

I imagine there are several.

American driver education and testing are notoriously lax compared to much of the world; make driver testing more intensive and frequent.

Traffic enforcement is geared more towards municipal income generation and the facilitating of searches and arrests for other crimes than toward ensuring safe driving; stop pulling over poor people to search for drugs and start photographing and billing middle class and rich people for speeding or for idling in the middle/passing lane.

Car manufacturers jack up the price on critical safety features and make it difficult to retrofit them into existing vehicles; regulate them.

Our roadways are often designed poorly, mixing use cases in ways that result in unnecessary injury (e.g., "stroads" and intersections with poor pedestrian design); regulate and fix those.

What's a stroad?

I tried writing an answer, realized I suck at that, and so am providing a link that answers the question better than I can:

https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/

The takeaway is that streets and roads have different goals, and when that's not acknowledged we wind up with the misery that is driving in US towns.

A combination between a street and a road.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-...

Take care driving as serious as aviation. Mandatory dash cams to make it easier to assign blame, automatic sensors which alert police when they detect the driver is behaving erratically. Make it easy to report other drivers for bad behavior (sitting on someone else's bumper, brake checking them, cutting them off, jersey lane swapping) which results in mandatory training or points off their license.

This is the only response I have seen to my question that could maybe change things - specifically having automatic sensors in every vehicle that automatically alert police when you do something dangerous. I think this would be unrealistic to implement, but assuming you could, it would probably help (assuming sensor data could be used as proof of bad driving).

As for reporting bad driving, you really need proof of a person's bad driving if you're going to penalize them for it. Having more traffic cameras helps a bit, but people just learn where the cameras are and drive carefully when they know they are being filmed.

Your tone suggests you can't imagine any, which is... surprising. There are a vast array of things you can do to make driving safer, at the cost of making it less accessible and/or more expensive. Different countries already set their threshold differently - in the US, a driving test takes 20 minutes and everyone passes, while in the UK it takes 40 minutes and most people fail the first time. And lo and behold, 4 times fewer accidents per capita in the UK - despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.

I guess I didn't ask the right question here. My issue is with the statement "the vast majority of accidents are due to bad policy". I would disagree with this statement. Some people occasionally make bad decisions when they drive or get distracted and cause accidents. How do you create a policy to keep people from occasionally getting distracted or making a risky choice. You can't. Most people who are driving in a risky manner know how to drive safely, know that their behavior is not appropriate and they do it anyway because they don't care or think they can get away with it. Almost every person I have met who is a bad driver says something like "it's a risk I'm willing to take" or "I know the risks" without any thought about the fact that their behavior is putting others at risk as well. The only thing that usually changes these people's behavior is getting in an accident, at which point you just hope they didn't injure someone else too badly. Even then, I know of people who have been in accidents who still drive horribly. I'm convinced the problems are more cultural than anything else.

People are people everywhere, I'm sure plenty of drivers in e.g. Sweden get distracted or make bad choices - indeed Swedish road design policy is that road design should explicitly accommodate that. "Culture" is a lazy non-explanation, and wouldn't explain why e.g. the Netherlands had similarly high collision rates in the 1970s, but now doesn't - not because their culture is less American now (at least, I can't see how such a claim is at all defensible), but because of deliberate policy changes.

You can't prevent all distraction or all bad choices, but you can reduce collision rates by at least a factor of 20 or so with the right policy choices - we know because these other countries have done it. So I think it's fair to say that the majority of collisions are caused by not making those policy choices.

So you are saying Americans are just worse drivers? America has more car accidents per capita than similarly dense countries with different policies. One policy is to make public transit better, that reduces accidents a lot since it gets people off the roads. Another policy is stricter tests as talked about above. The end result is way less accidents entirely thanks to policies.

> despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.

You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates? If anything I'd suspect the opposite - much harder to be distracted on your phone, eating food, etc when you need both hands to be able to drive. It also keeps your mind more engaged if you're shifting gears all the time (obviously doesn't apply to highway driving where you can sit in the same gear for miles on end but at least my intuition tells me the highway isn't where most accidents occur).

> You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates?

I agree with you! But manual transmissions don't necessarily work as you'd assume - my brother at 18 could text or have a soda and shift at the same time. Similarly, we can end up at our destinations without remembering exactly all the steps - it's become automatic.

That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.

> That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.

That's an interesting way to phrase it so I'm curious what you mean. I have long thought that it would be nice if more people drove manual because then they would try and regulate their speed a bit more to minimize shifts, eg in stop and go traffic I'd prefer going 3 miles/hour for 20 seconds than 10 miles/hour but fully stopping every 2 car lengths, or when you see a red light ahead, most people stay their current speed and then stop quickly rather than slowing in order for it to change to green before they have to fully stop.

Is that the concept you're getting at with the following distance thing (since longer following distance gives more room to keep a consistent speed) or are you getting at something else?

I think we assume the same thing, but use different examples. Were manual transmissions more common, people would presumably try to minimize shifting.

My example (major gripe) is city driving. Coasting instead of actually stopping (as you come up on a line of cars at a light that just turned green) means you minimize shifting, but it requires a buffer of a couple dozen meters. It just isn't possible when you're too close.

Increase the testing requirements for new drivers to make it harder to get a license, for starters. Or make it easier to suspend people's licenses for acts of unsafe driving.

America has extremely low requirements to get licensed as a driver; this is intentional. We wanted everyone out of public transit and into cars. In other countries it's far more difficult to get licensed to drive, you're expected to have more skills. Hell, most drivers in Europe drive stick because you're required to test on a manual transmission.

Much stricter requirements for getting (and keeping) your drivers license. Policies focusing on reducing drunk driving (both focusing changing attitudes, increasing the risk of getting caught and increasing the punishments for people caught). More consistent and continuous enforcement of existing driving laws. You can probably do more to get unsafe cars off the roads. There is a lot you can do around designing roads and traffic flows in ways that reduce the risk of accidents.

Middle of the road separation barriers.

Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.

Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think)

More trains, buses, subways.

> Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.

That actually leads to more collisions at intersections.

The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away).

Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision.

The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.

Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.

Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.

> There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.

Roads can accommodate traffic moving at different speeds. For example, buses and trucks consistently move slower than passenger vehicles, especially up grades, but drivers of faster vehicles simply change lanes to pass them. This works on interstates where drivers of passenger vehicles are going 70 to 90 mph and commercial vehicles are going 40 to 60 mph.

Similarly, on a surface street with traffic moving anywhere from 0 to 40 mph, cyclists moving 0 to 20 mph can similarly integrate with traffic with faster drivers changing lanes to pass them.

> Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing.

I've read about the designs, but the assumptions that they make do not really hold. For example, the typical "protected" intersection with curb extensions and an offset assumes that a motorist will look down the bike path to check for cyclists before exiting an intersection while moving at 10 mph. In reality, drivers aren't going to do that.

As I noted earlier, this principle works with pedestrians, because, while walking, they're moving around 5 feet per second, so seeing a pedestrian 10 feet away from the intersection is pretty easy for a driver making a turn since they really don't have to look down the sidewalk.

In contrast, a cyclist is moving anywhere from 15 to 30 feet per second. A cyclist that's two seconds away from entering an intersection can be anywhere from 30 to 60 feet away. This requires a drivers to actually look down the bike path, which isn't always going to occur. The cyclist may assume that the turning driver has seen them, but that assumption is in correct, and the cyclist will have to slow rapidly to avoid a collision.

Also, a lot of cyclists, when making use of such infrastructure, believe that they have pedestrian style right of way, meaning that they will do things like ride around the front of a turning vehicle believing that they'll stop to avoid a collision instead of just yielding.

A typical person takes about a second or so to react to something unexpected. At 10 mph, the motorist has already covered 16 feet, meaning that they would collide with a cyclist before they have a chance to even press the brake pedal.

I do sometimes wonder why Americans learn how to drive before they learn how to drink.

Stricter driving tests is the obvious one.

Public transit and grade-separated bike lanes.

Car accidents are caused by people, by a system kept in place on purpose, and most the population is made dependent on them in many countries, in that there is no choice but to make oneself at risk of a car "accident".

But the deadly acts in war are meant to be deadly, meant to kill people. Most people aren’t trying to kill others even if they’re essentially forced to drive in a car-centric society. The killing is almost always accidental and unintended.

There's a part of me that that thinks there are no accidents. Yes--that whole Freud thing.

As I have aged, I do think their are accidents, and life is a gamble. It has always bothered me the rich can afford to take chances, but that's another story.

I still think it's best to think you can control your fate with most acccidents though.

In high school, and college, I drove without insurance. (California used to require auto insurance, but didn't mandate it at DMV. I honestly couldn't afford it.)

I used to think of driving as walking on a cliff's edge. You just don't make a mistake. It did work, but I probally got very lucky too.

> Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

I disagree.

With car design, function and ownership as they are, we (the people) accept that there is an uncommonly high risk of a crash and serious injury to ourselves and to the general public.

We only call it an "accident" to abrogate that responsibility.

On the point about scale: some wikipedia browsing suggests road traffic deaths currently kill about 10 times as many people as wars, globally.

You could argue that anything is an accident. Can you stop a war after it starts? Hardly. Can you stop a war before it starts? Hardly. Same as for car accidents. You could be smart and attentive, foster an environment unsupportive of accidents, but in the end we're not conscious enough to exert such control.

That's the scary thing about life, not war in particular. Everything you just said applies to everyone alive right now. What difference does a few decades make?

"Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

- James 4:14

> what you'd see most of the time is actually soldiers doing nothing

True, but that part of the reality of war is hardly relevant. I don’t need to emphasize with the bored soldiers. That’s part of life for me too.

I emphathize with the bored soldiers that suddenly had a massive bomb land in their midst.

Isn’t it actually an issue that soldiers are so bored in completely remote places for months and months?

People engaging in the army to get some hot action sure would have liked to know more about that aspect, and for better or worse the general public’s perception would also be different when accurately imagining x thousands of trained people stuck in the desert doing nothing 99% of the time.

“War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

Hah, yeah, that was kind of the quote I had in mind when writing my original comment.

Both points of view are necessary, but one is more important than the other.

The bigger deal is that in its inherent brutality, there should be a high bar for war, and that is something that people need constant reminding of.

The other is mostly a matter of public expenditure and the fact that military service is basically a form of welfare that's more palatable to many people, even if it boils down to paying people to work out and carry boxes around in a far away desert.

>Liveleak doesn't portray the reality of war because it shows you some beheading.

What it did is give people a glimpse at the horrible results of war - a glimpse that (before sites like liveleak) most people in the USA had not been allowed to see on the "news" since the Vietnam war. Its one thing to hear a throwaway line on the evening news about more air strikes in a far off country and quite another thing to see the results of an air strike. To see the bodies ripped and torn and the lives that are destroyed. Binging on these sort of horrible images is not useful or healthy but everyone should be exposed to them at least once to understand what the consequences of war look like.

I think soldiers should see this as part of their training

I served in the British Army and before I went out to Afghanistan I'd watch all of the gory Middle East stuff because I wanted to know what I was getting myself in for. Also to see the kind of situations that had killed my friend.

I'm glad I did, because although most of it was extremely boring stuff like you describe I probably would have brushed off the capabilities of the Taliban

Then CNN and BBC defiantly show the reality of war aka, guys with machine guns shooting at the sky so the reporter can pretend he is near the frontlines.

Sorry man, but every bit of that book (and everything else jean baudrillard wrote) is fashionable nonsense. Hyperreality is a bankrupt useless concept and has no basis in reality. Baudrillard tries to sound profound but really just sounds like a post modernist schizo like the rest of his contemporaries

Unfortunately, you're not right. The world is moving into text. What matters is the effects words have, not their truth. Brexit and Trump are significant evidence of this, but there's a lot more. Today, online bullying is probably a bigger problem for teenagers than offline, and that's because they live more of their lives online. They are literally moving into the simulation, a place constructed out of allusion and conjunction of symbols.

Consider all the fighting over words in what the right likes to call the woke. Symbolism, not the real, is bigger than ever and getting more important every day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn

Words increasingly constitute reality, rather than being referents to some external reality.

> Brexit and Trump are significant evidence of this

Brexit is the new heresy apparently. What if I told you the EU was the "false words"? The representation of Brexit as racist was certainly an emotive argument.