GR: Who won the war?

[Joseph Tracy]

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/09/30/craig-murray-losing-my-religion/



Craig Murray first came to my own and many other's attention when he 
spoke out on torture in Uzbekistan.

While he was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan (2002–2004), he 
exposed the violations of human rights in that country by the Karimov 
administration. This led to conflict with his superiors in the Foreign 
Office until finally he was removed from the post.[14][15] Specifically, 
Murray lodged formal written complaints to his superiors stating that it 
was morally and legally wrong to obtain intelligence under torture and 
that intelligence received by the Secret Intelligence Service (and the 
US Central Intelligence Agency) from the Uzbek government was unreliable 
because it had been obtained through torture.[16].  Wikipedia


He is now an activist and Journalist fighting for Scottish independence 
and against an increasingly authoritarian and corrupt British legal 
system.
His journalism is more than opinion writing. He travels , 
attends trials with a keen legal understanding, and is as concerned with 
the human face of cultural and political issues as anyone I have read.  
He has been trying for years to use the ideals of law to fight the 
crimes of the UK state. This article describes how that approach is 
being undermined by authoritarian systems addicted to murder and 
silencing dissent.

I have often made the argument on the list that P delves deeply in GR 
into the similarities of the British empire with its fascist enemy and 
finds not so much a war against fascism but a war among varieties of 
authoritarian states devoted to a merger of military imperialism , 
propaganda, and corporate capitalism. That merger is the essence of 
Mussolini's understanding of fascism, a term he was most responsible for 
popularizing on a large scale, including the use of his column in the 
Hearst Newspapers.. P also roots the growth of fascism in notions of 
self correcting systems of social control, similar to perfecting a 
guidance system on a plane or rocket. In essence what is now being 
called technocracy. Many have objected to my proposal with an argument 
that narrowly describes fascism as Nazism with its uniquely  peculiar 
police state style. It seems obvious to me that Pynchon is purposely 
attacking the mythology of inherent western goodness that heroizes what 
was essentially an internal dispute among corporatized imperialists( a 
celebration of markets).

  What the difference is between bombing and napalming Vietnam ( Iraq, 
Cambodia, Libya, Syria, Iran…)for imperialist and capitalist goals, or 
the militarism of the axis powers is in my mind the difference between 
German and Japanese nationalism and  American or Anglo nationalism. 
Each  is filled with their own set of lies and myths justifying imperial 
murder on a mass scale. There is no moral or motivational difference. 
And these crimes were committed right after the so called war on fascism.

There have been many attempts to limit the murderous excesses of both 
nationalism, religious wars and empire building in human history. And 
central to most has been the idea of a legal system that balances human 
rights, the basic morality of treating others as you would want to be 
treated, and legitimate shared interests in preventing criminal 
behavior. Similar ideals have inspired the major faith communities of 
the world.  The less accountable a nation or corporation or military 
alliance is to those restraints of law, and the more pervasively 
powerful those entities become, the more we enter into a dystopian 
police state.

I would argue that Ps’ work, among other human concerns and patterns , 
has elaborately chronicled that descent into authoritarianism on a  
global systemic scale, where the pavlovian systems of motivation 
coalesce as an internal guidance system to prevent any large scale 
resistance. It does not matter whether one sees this as planned design 
or emergent success of motivational manipulations, it is a win vs lose  
game theory type model in which the largest winners tend toward 
ruthlessness, lies and behaviors that on a local scale would be 
confronted as criminal and halted by the local legal system. Losers are 
openly demonized, or mourned with  both sincere and crocodile tears, but 
have little chance of justice in our rigged courts. Resistors to state 
criminality are ignored, arrested, and marginalized. The fascistic 
nature of this descent of the west has become evident, as Murray argues, 
to most of the world in the fate of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon. We see 
the hubris it produces in Afghanistan, Vietnam  Iran  and the proxy war 
on Russia.

The game is being played as win/lose but Nukes, and global warming long 
ago made it lose/lose.