Dignity Series – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Never to be a Colony Again: Dignity, Defiance, and Self-Determination

The following is my transcription of the spoken statement delivered at the 68th Session of the United Nations General Assembly by Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Mugabe. The statement below begins at the 8:43 mark of: 26 Sep 2013 – Address by His Excellency Robert Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe at the general debate of the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Libya: Imperial Humanists and Helpless Others

[…continued from the previous article; see the list of related articles at the bottom of this page, plus information on the latest book, Slouching Towards Sirte] The empire that speaks of “dignity” first invented the image of the helpless Libyan begging for us to “stop standing idly by”—because we, in the West, are tasked with […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Libya: Empire or Dignity

[Part 6 of 6 of my series on “Dignity,” this article is itself divided up into a series of articles, each one partly derived and adapted from my book on NATO’s war against Libya. See the bottom of the articles for more details.] “May God bless them,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke with […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Stay Up, Zimbabwe: Pan-Africanism, Caribbean Solidarity, and Dignity

The Independence of What? In early August, Jamaica commemorated its 50th anniversary of Independence. At the very end of this month, Trinidad & Tobago will also mark its 50th anniversary of independence. Both “celebrations” were first made possible by Jamaica disrupting the West Indies Federation by dropping out in 1962 and choosing to take its […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Still Standing: Zimbabwe

“Mr. Mugabe, at the age of 88, is rumored to be in poor health. In April, rumors spread in Harare that he was on his deathbed in Singapore, but he appeared at the country’s independence day celebration a few days later, looking fit as he walked around a soccer stadium under a blazing sun for […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Zimbabwe: “Keep your money, keep your power, and keep away from us”

A lot of people really do not like Robert Mugabe. Now, moving on to matters of interest and importance…. The Problem of Defiance “Mugabe Remains Defiant,” read the subtitle of a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, from July 14, 2009, written by U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz, and published by WikiLeaks. (A lot […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

A Tear for Africa: Humanitarian Abduction and Reduction

Helpless, pleading, wanting, needing, small, weak, staring at you, black–this is the anti-bogeyman invented by Western humanitarianism, what passes as morality in the ideology of empire (yet again). Past the time of a London Missionary Society, we now have the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the moral dogma of a white, western elite that projects its […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity

This is the first part of a series on dignity that will appear on ZA, featuring the usual collage of songs, history, documents, and short essays. While there are treatments of “dignity” in Western philosophy, it is interesting to note the absence of the idea as a concept in the works of most anthropologists, which […]