After a Year of Being Locked Down
Nobody (as far as I know) has commented on how hard this year of lockdowns has been on university professors. That’s good: nobody should. Many millions of workers…
Author: Maximilian C. Forte
The Pandemic: Indigenous Perspectives on Survival, Adaptation, Rebuilding, and Preparedness
Statement released by Chief Ricardo Bharath Hernandez, Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, Arima, Trinidad & Tobago, June 16, 2020. As Amerindians/Indigenous Peoples in the Caribbean, we are hist…
Pathways for the Post-COVID New Old World
Part 5 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Some are openly proclaiming, “you don’t want to waste a crisis,” as they calculate how the crisis could become a…
The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer: Nature vs. Culture in a Pandemic
Part 4 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. The Seventh Seal As if taken from a plot of some 1950s science-fiction classic, or an episode from the original…
Goodbye “American Greatness”
Part 3 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Indispensable. Here was the so-called “indispensable nation,” the self-appointed saviour of the world, with generations of its leaders and thinkers…
Globalization in the Widening Gyre of COVID-19
Part 2 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. The Routes of Panic It turns out that when people panic, they panic according to a template. Panic follows established…
From 9/11 to 2008 and COVID-19: Signs and Wonders of a Collapsing Global (Dis)order
Part 1 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series lasting from April 26 through April 30. Corona—meaning: a crown. Travelling around the world, as if at full gallop. Firing…
Land, Labour, and Power in a Colonial Catholic Mission in Trinidad
Colonial propaganda that masks “humanitarianism” behind self-interest, and breeds euphemisms that are inversions of reality, constitute the recurring subjects of the critiques produced on Zero Anthrop…
From Hollywood to Hitler: Rethinking the Cultural Politics of Propaganda
What is propaganda? What does cinema reveal about the Third Reich and its people? What are German films about during the Third Reich? What do they reveal? And…
State of the Empire: Reviewing 2019
Annual Review of 2019: The State of the Empire at the End of a Decade This year marks the end of the second decade of the 21st-century, and…
Global Giants: American Empire and Transnational Capital
Review of Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips (Introduction by William I. Robinson). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. LCCN 2018017493; ISBN 9781609808716 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609808723…
Pearls before Swine
Pearls, in the Parish of St. Andrew’s, Grenada, just up the road from the main town of Grenville, is a unique place that sits at the intersection of two…
Climate Propaganda for Corporate Profit: Bell Canada
Strategically timed to appear immediately after a heady week of international climate emergency marches, including large ones in Canada, and after the same week in which Greta Thunberg…
Girls, Groupies, and Grim Reapers: The Religious Politics of Mass Response
Following a week at the UN and ensuing climate change “protests” (state-sanctioned, party-approved, media-praised, university-endorsed, “protests”), in which we were yet agai…
Trees Talk…and Sometimes They Also Tell Lies
Out on a limb in Grenada in August, I had the fine pleasure of sampling such a special sweet fruit of the “Spice Isle”. It is a fruit…
New Book: ARIMA BORN
Arima Born Revealing the History of Arima and its Mission through the Catholic Church’s Baptismal Registers, 1820–1916 by Maximilian C. Forte Montreal: Alert Press, 2019 The Catholic Mission…
Google’s Empire: The Science Fiction of Power
“For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to make a film about libraries,” explains Ben Lewis, the director of Google and the World Brain (2013).…
Cyber-Terrorism: How the US and Israel Attacked Iran—and Failed
Sabotaging another nation’s power grids, or blowing up industrial plants, are actual acts of war under international law. The term “cyber-terrorism” as used in the title, almost softens…
Brexitannia: The Faces and Voices of Brexit
First shown at London’s East End Festival in June of 2017, Brexitannia was the very first documentary about Brexit. It is a striking and deeply pensive film, in…
Brexit, the Uncivil War: Watering Myths with the Teardrops of the Ruling Class
What have been billed as momentous EU Parliament elections are taking place this week (May 23–26), and it seemed like the right time to review some Brexit films—one…
Protecting Venezuela’s Embassy and International Law
For more than a month, a particularly courageous group of people have dedicated all of their time and energies to protecting the integrity of the Embassy of the…
American Exceptionalism, American Innocence
Review of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. By Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong. Foreword…
America: Imagine an America without Her
What might world history have looked like if there had never been a United States, or if it ceased to exist before the 20th-century? Is “America” an “exceptional”…
A Desperate Empire Crashes in Venezuela
The April 30, 2019, coup attempt in Venezuela has come and gone. The coup has failed. “Failed state” theory just got a lot more complicated. No longer can…