In case you haven’t already heard, today is the day America officially became the laughingstock of the world. Trump gave a speech that could have been penned by an alt-right incel reading from a reddit thread playing Weimar Germany at a high school Model UN — and the real UN General Assembly laughed at him. “I didn’t expect this”, he said, baffled.

LOL. So how did American become the laughingstock of the world? The story is subtler and deeper than you probably think — and it’s much worse, too, not just about Trump, but the decades which put America in the crazed hands of an idiot demagogue. It goes like this. America rejected the very institutions, laws, codes, and rules the world was creating, designing, sharing, writing, in the aftermath of the world’s greatest war, to ever prevent fascism and authoritarianism from rising again — in fact, it tried to prevent, over and over again, the world from agreeing on all that — only to itself collapse into fascism and authoritarianism. LOL — do you see the irony? These things aren’t a coincidence — they are cause and effect, as I’ll explain. And then America, adding comedy to tragedy, proclaimed that the rest of the world should join it in collapsing. When you do all that, my friends, what should you expect but laughter?

Now. To tell you this story, I want to tell you a quick one from my own life — just the other night, in fact. There we were, me, an American friend, and some European friends, watching a new BBC show — about a British lawyer who tries a Congolese war criminal in the International Criminal Court at the Hague. My American friend couldn’t make any sense of it — “Wait”, she asked, “I don’t get it. How can a British lawyer try an African general in a Dutch court?” My European friends laughed — surprised. Did she really not understand how the world worked? Just like the world laughed at Trump, in a way.

I had to step and explain it was perfectly understandable that she didn’t know what was going on — Americans are often completely in the dark, more or less, about the world, as an iron curtain of ignorance and folly descends on them. All they have is capitalist media — not BBC shows like the above, which educate people. What is it, really, that my friend didn’t understand, or even know?

The world built rules and codes, very real laws and institutions, whose sole purpose was to prevent authoritarianism and fascism. America alone fiercely rejected them — while proudly, wrongly, telling its own people it “led the world.” Hence, today, a strange, weird, terrible thing has happened — Americans think they once led the world, whereas in fact they rejected it — but by rejecting the world, America also failed to share in the rules and codes which were built precisely to prevent authoritarianism and fascism. Can you guess what was going to happen next?

Bang! America collapsed into authoritarianism and fascism — it’s not a coincidence, it’s a consequence of never accepting the institutions and laws, rules and ideas, that the world made precisely to prevent those things. Does that make sense so far? Now let’s delve into some of those institutions and ideas, so you understand what I mean.

In 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, the UN, which was a new creation, a new institution in itself — the birth of a global democracy (sorry, Steve Bannon) — passed a truly groundbreaking charter: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it’s vital to understand the context: leaders then understood what today we have forgotten. War, fascism, authoritarianism, strongmen, genocide, collapse — these things all happen when people who expected lives of comfort and stability suddenly grow poorer and begin to dehumanize their neighbors and colleagues and friends, in order to feel great again, in order to feel strong and rich and powerful, banding together into little predatory tribes. And so the world came together and passed this great charter in order, first and foremost, to establish a great first in human history — the idea that all people were people.

You might think, especially if you’re American — “Well, so what? Aren’t all people…people?” Ah, my friend — you don’t even know the limits of how badly American thinking has failed you. Let me explain why this matters so, by discussing what happened next. The Universal Declaration of Rights was just a charter — to bring it to life, countries had to sign treaties about specific groups of rights — for example, those giving rights to women, to minorities, protecting labour, shielding freedoms of various kinds.

But only one rich country never ratified many of these treaties. In fact, it began to furiously resist any real advancements in human rights. That country was America. So much so that the rest of the world quickly began to roll its eyes at what began to be seen as American intransigence, and then as sheer wrong-headed ignorance.

But the world also didn’t quite understand that America couldn’t ratify many of these treaties. It was itself a segregated apartheid state. It only ended segregation in 1971. How could it sign treaties giving people equal rights — or be punished and disciplined by its peer nations — when it itself wasn’t ready to do so to its very own people? All people weren’t people in America — so how could America sign up to a world order that wanted all people to be people? Do you see the problem? The world was moving ahead, swiftly, with conviction, towards greater equality, freedom, and peace. But America was trapped by its past — not just unwilling, but politically and institutionally unable to join it. You can’t exactly ratify human rights for all if you’re making black people drink at separate water fountains.

To the rest of the world, what America was really doing was refusing to legitimize global democracy. Hence, in America, the bizarre myth began to be promoted that the UN was the opposite of democracy, that it was going to invade, that it was going to take away America’s freedom, and so on — all paranoid delusions, spread by fantasists. The truth was that thanks to the UN’s hard work, global poverty and injustice did in fact begin to decline sharply, and freedom rose. Women entered the workforce, children began to be educated, wars were prevented, conflict shrank, mortality fell, life expectancy rose. This was an era of prosperity — not a perfect one, to be sure, but one all the same — only one country refused to join it, and in fact, stood in its way. That country was more often than not America.

But what Americans didn’t realize is that by refusing to join the world in precisely those institutions and ideas whose whole point was to prevent fascism ever rising again, they were only making themselves more vulnerable to it, too. Americans never really understood that such things couldn’t just happen “over there”, in those poor countries, but here, too, in their very own land. And so by refusing to make personhood and freedoms and rights real priorities — no, freedom isn’t just the right to carry a machine gun around, do you want to live in Afghanistan? — they were only ever speeding their very own collapse. Remember, these ideas and institutions were built in the shadow of the Great War, to prevent fascist and authoritarian, Nazi, political economy from ever happening again — so wasn’t America, by never really agreeing to share in them, only just ensuring that it would be more prone to all that? Do you see where this story is going?

Fast forward a few decades. Another groundbreaking idea — this one, even greater, perhaps, than the idea that all people were people. In 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted. It contained what I think are some of the greatest political and social advances in history — it defined four new crimes, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and crimes of aggression. And it instituted an international court to try them. Institutions, ideas, and rules — remember? Here they all are — working together, literally coming to life, a new court, new laws, new trials.

(Now, the last time the world had an international court was at the Nuremberg Trials, after the war. But that was temporary. This one wasn’t — it was something genuinely new. And so it was a global public good of a novel kind — global public law to prevent war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. What a beautiful idea — unless, perhaps you’re American, and believe that you are above the world, not a part of it. And it began to work, too. War criminals were tried and sentenced, and genocides and war crimes began to fall. The global public good — literally coming to life.)

But maybe you can guess what happened next. There was one country which refused to adopt the Rome Statute. That country, of course, was America. Why? Well, a cynic might say that America had friends in low places that it wanted to protect — dictators it had propped up. An optimist might say otherwise. Either way, the simple fact is that America didn’t believe it should be bound by any rules the world had agreed upon. It thought it was above them.

But those rules were there to prevent authoritarianism and fascism. Never more so than in the literal institution, verb, of the International Criminal Court. How so? Defining and trying new categories of law, like crimes against humanity, worked just as any justice system might — it deterred tomorrow’s offenders. Do you see the problem by now? Just like before, America had only left itself more vulnerable to collapsing into authoritarianism and fascism — by refusing to adopt the very laws and institutions which were designed precisely to prevent such things. Americans thought that could never happen there — and so they never agreed to share in the very mechanisms whose fundamental purpose was to prevent it. LOL — what was going to happen to such a foolish nation?

Bang! Just fifteen years or so later, America was in the hands of a demagogue. Minorities were demonized and scapegoated. Kids were put in camps. Little one-year-old toddlers were put on trial. Towns were raided, and the vulnerable targeted. Citizenship began to be revoked. The classic sequence of fascist collapse had come home to America. It wasn’t a coincidence — it was cause and effect. No participation in the ICC — all the easier for crimes against humanity, like those kids in camps not even allowed to hug each other, to be committed by monsters “just carrying out orders.” Do you see the obvious link? America didn’t have much institutional protection from fascist collapse — because it itself had refused to sign up to the laws and institutions, the codes and rules, the global public goods, like human rights treaties and international law, whose entire purpose was to prevent such a thing in the first place. It had scorned and rejected these things, as meaningless, costly, threatening — never quite understanding the very real, very crucial purpose they were meant to serve, nor that without them, it itself was left more vulnerable to fascism and authoritarianism, too. LOL — isn’t the irony staggering?

With such institutions and rules in place, nations were less prone to collapsing into fascism — without them, though, economic stagnation and racism could easily trigger implosion into fascism all over again. After all, they were built to prevent the buildup to World War II from recurring, remember? And yet there America was — rejecting, over and over again, the very institutions and ideas built to prevent fascists — only to find itself overrun by textbook fascists just a few decades later, and utterly baffled and shocked as to why or how. Do you see the irony? The aching stupidity? The brain-melting obviousness and predictability of all this?

It’s true that stagnation and racism, together, lit the spark of American collapse. But what gave the fire the oxygen it needed to grow? America was especially vulnerable, among nations, to fascist collapse, because it had never joined a world which had built global public goods, institutions and laws, that were designed specifically to prevent exactly such a thing from ever recurring. Bang! Such a thing recurred in America, faster than anyone thought it could — and Americans were bewildered as to how they got there.

But the answer was obvious. America had rejected the world. The world had tried to become a better place — one that was genuinely freer and fairer. It didn’t do a perfect job — that much is sure. But it did, on reflection, a pretty decent one. Freer and fairer, the world understood, fascism was less likely to spark and explode. And so such a world agreed on very laws and institutions whose fundamental purpose, whose primary goal, was to prevent fascism. America resisted all that. It rejected that very world — one building laws and institutions to prevent fascism and authoritarianism — over and over again. Bang! America collapsed into exactly fascism and authoritarianism because it didn’t share in the laws and institutions, the codes and rules, that were designed and created to prevent exactly that.

And in a way, all that — a kind of shattering, incredible, jaw-dropping ignorance, driven by aggressive, egotistical, gun-toting self-interest — has always been the American problem. Just as capitalism teaches Americans only to ever be self-interested, so America has always been too self-interested, really, to join the world. But if you refuse, scornfully, to join a world which has created institutions and written laws to prevent fascism, and then you collapse into fascism, precisely because you refused to share in precisely the laws and institutions which the world built to prevent exactly that — and then you tell the world to join you in collapsing…well, my friends, that is how you become the incredible and amazing laughingstock of the world.

Umair

September 2018