Crapped Out

The failed global elite in the new Nomos of the Earth

In moments of high tension, the history of mankind turns into an antithesis of elements pure and simple.

Carl Schmitt

Perhaps you have seen the film Trainspotting, and recall the scene in it in which heroin addict Renton fishes around in a diarrhoea-filled toilet for a lost opium suppository?

I was reminded of this scene while reading the introduction to the 2026 'World Report' of Human Rights Watch (HRW), penned by Philippe Bolopion, the organisation’s Executive Director. The project of international human rights law - the idea that through enumerating a list of legal rights it is possible to improve the human condition - is dead. It is an empty rhetorical shell that has been entirely co-opted by a class of globalised quasi-aristocrats to entrench their own sense of moral superiority. No actual human beings believe in it. The members of that wannabe global ruling caste know this. But they also know that their authority, such as it is, is founded on a phoney-baloney claim to possess an enlightened vision of improvement. They thus have no idea what else to do other than to reach down into the toilet bowl in search of another, desperate dose of that vision - a shot of soothing, reassuring soma to stave off for a little while longer a final confrontation with their genuine predicament.

Bolopion, entirely representative of this caste, thinks he has managed to get his grasping fingers around that elusive little pill. And we must pay careful attention to what he has found. Because it is, for sure, located beneath a vast swamp of excrement. The substance of Bolopion’s introduction is almost entirely ludicrous, and mostly written for domestic US consumption - i.e., HRW’s funders. Titled ‘Will Human Rights Survive a Trumpian World?: Authoritarian Advances Threaten Rules-Based Order’, it presents the absurd case that the greatest threat to human rights in the world is the nasty orange man in the White House. Donald Trump, you see, is carrying out a ‘broad assault on key pillars of US democracy’, has ‘undermined trust in the sanctity of elections’ (by winning?), has ‘rolled back women’s rights’ and ‘stripped protections from trans and intersex people’, and so on and so forth. And this, Bolopion tells us, is placing ‘relentless pressure’ on the ‘global human rights system’; Trump is at the crest of a global ‘authoritarian wave’ and the coming struggle against that wave will ‘play out most acutely in the US’.

Bolopion, you will quickly have seen, is as daft as a brush. Death squads patrol the streets of Tehran and Caracas; young girls routinely suffer genital mutilation in Sudan; slavery continues unabated in Mauritania; Islamists massacre Christians in Nigeria; entire populations live beneath the heel of oppression in Cuba and North Korea; the Syrians are mad at the Lebanese. Yet we are invited by Bolopion to believe that the most acute struggle for human rights in the world is playing out in the frenzied psychodrama of US politics.

The attempt to locate HRW as an important bastion in the US culture war is so transparently a plea for cash from US funders (Bolopion himself cannot resist observing amongst the litany of Trumpian crimes he lists that, hint-hint, this is all happening in an ‘environment where funding is scarce’) that it is simply not worth the effort to demolish. What is important, as I said, is what lies beneath all of this stinking effluence - an underlying narrative that we are going to have to get increasingly used to as the tantrum of the globalised ‘elite’ gathers pace, and which is actually therefore worth paying attention to.

This underlying narrative is that Trump’s USA, China and Russia are entering into an ‘alliance of convenience’ to ‘erode global rules’ alongside ‘a loose international network of countries’ - North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Myanmar, Cuba and Belarus - who, while they ‘share very little ideologically’, align in ‘promoting a regressive international agenda’. While it looks as though they are strategic rivals, in other words, Trump is actually getting along swimmingly with the likes of Putin and Xi and their various flunkies. These leaders ‘share open disdain for norms and institutions that could constrain their power’. And the job of the rest of the world (Bolopion identifies Canada, India, South Africa, Colombia, Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, the UK, etc.) is to form a ‘new global alliance’ to fight back.

Now, this is in one part best understood as a kind of simplistic cosplay, written by a man who has watched too many Star Wars films. If there is one thing that cosseted, over-educated, quasi-aristocratic trustifarians love, it is the idea that they might form - or ideally lead - a rebel alliance against Baddies. It does not particularly matter who those Baddies are; what matters is that they exist and are to be rebelled against.

And it is also in part to be understood as mere positioning in the culture war. Mark my words: 2026 is going to be characterised by a cementation of an already-existing discourse wherein ‘populists’ in the West are tainted by (fake) association with Russia and China as an excuse for preventing them running for office, imprisoning them, or casting them into real or metaphorical exile. We are going to see a heck of a lot more of these sorts of innuendos and they are going to start having real-world consequences; Bolopion’s rant is HRW’s signal that it too is getting in on the act.

But for all its silliness and its ulterior motive, this narrative does gesture towards something more important than mere posturing. And this can be easily understood from a brief reading of the final chapter of Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth, penned in 1950.