President Biden’s powerful address to the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday was grounded in the most core values of the alliance among nations that, as he stressed, is at the heart of our species’ ability to survive and progress in this dangerous age. It was generally overlooked by a major media that is simply looking to harvest some useful (to them) and interesting (for them) headlines.

But humanity’s capacity and striving for basic survival is apparently not something that really sells papers these days, even though the threat of climate change and the egregious advance of tyrannies in vital places keeps us on edge. It is crucial that we ground ourselves in the fundamentals of what are at stake when we try to stand up against self-destructive tyranny. This is the important reality that is entirely lost on today’s pro-Trump GOP who’ve been stripped of any sense of honor or integrity in their mad pursuit of an unattainable fascist ideal.  

Biden Tuesday made repeated references to what is probably the most fundamental document of our collective existence now, the International Declaration of Human Rights, for which Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the late President, was the primary force in Paris in December 1948 to achieve its unanimous adoption soon after the founding of the United Nations itself.

The words of that declaration embody values that are eternal, that were essential in the founding of our nation on democratic principles that have taken two centuries to begin to be realized for everyone. That Biden centered his comments on that declaration is not to be overlooked.

Biden said, “Seventy-five years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights captured a remarkable act of collective hope — and I say that again — collective hope — drafted by a committee representing different regions, faiths, philosophies, and adopted by the entire General Assembly. The rights contained in the declaration are elemental and enduring.”

In this context, he added that in today’s world, this has to apply to everyone. “We have to continue working to ensure that women and girls enjoy equal rights and equal participation in their societies.  That Indigenous groups; racial, ethnic, religious minorities; people with disabilities do not have their potential stifled by systemic discrimination.  That the LGBTQI+ people are not prosecuted or targeted with violence because of who they are.” He concluded, “Let’s do this work together.  Let’s deliver progress for everyone. Let’s bend the arc of history for the good of the world because it’s within our power to do it.”

It is important in this context to recognize how pervasive the Trump forces have become in the irrational assault on basic women’s rights even in the U.S. Trump’s main achievement during his regrettable four year presidency was to stack the U.S. Supreme Court with a majority committed to undoing Roe Vs. Wade and thereby unleashing the most severe and reactionary assault on women unimaginable just a few years ago. When Biden spoke at the U.N. about the need to advance equal rights for women and girls in their societies, he was including not just the Third World, but now the U.S., too.

Trump’s second biggest achievement was to advance the fascist culture of Hitler and Putin on U.S. soil.

This has so polluted our popular culture now that millions of Americans are no longer aware of how they’ve been deluded by this thinking. It would not be wrong to assert that a major new offensive rooted in the International Declaration of the Rights of Man could play a decisive role to correct this.

A common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations, it sets out fundamental human rights to be universally protected. It has been translated into over 500 languages and is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels, all containing references to it in their preambles.

In its preamble, it affirms “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” to be “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”