Slobogoogling: Stan Goff

Stan Goff, as nearly everything written by or about him always says, is a retired US Special Forces Master Sergeant. He's written a book called Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti. I'm not qualified to comment on this book, but surely someone else out there is. (Paging Sgt. Stryker. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.)

Stan has apparently been busy in the antiwar camp since 9/11. Here's the text of a speech he gave at a "teach-in" (oooh, coopted 1960s rhetoric!) at the University of North Carolina on 9/17/01. You can read this in HTML here. We see that whatever talent Stan may have as a military historian, he's pretty lousy as a pundit:

"Since the attacks of September 11th, we have seen the unfolding of a national ritual denunciation of this crime that is much more than an expression of outrage and sadness. A disciplined military-financial-industrial press is harmonizing us in this ritual, and the orchestra director is theBush regime. Failure to participate is being constructed as heresy.

Heresy includes:

1. The failure to call for war or support out leaders when they call for war


2. The denial that this can be reduced to a test between good and evil


3. The refusal to accept official explanations


4. The temerity to suggest that our own rulers have committed equally offensive actions


5. And finally, that our own financial, political, military, and intelligence establishments bear a portion of the blame.

There is a new McCarthyism emerging here, and a new loyalty oath along with it."

Yeah, yeah, we know, the poor oppressed antiwar demonstrators. Been there, done that.

Next up is an article from 10/20/01, in which Stan discloses the real reason for the attacks and the US response. I'll give you a hint: it's all a Big Conspiracy! Involving oil! Which we're running out of! So we need to control the supply!

"The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power."

Too bad you didn't do any of these things. I'll give the man props for vocabulary, though - he actually used the word "klavern" to describe President Bush's senior leadership team.

Here's an interview conducted on 11/5/01 with someone named Mike McCormick. All I have to say is someone needs to explain the concept of "paragraphs" to whoever transcribed this.

Here's an excerpt from and plug for his book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti (ISBN: 1887128638; only two left in stock at Amazon, so hurry up and order). It's in a Marxism-Feminism list archive at csf.colorado.edu. The joke is left as an exercise for the reader.

I searched the Chron archives but found no matches for "Stan Goff", "Stanley Goff", or "Hideous Dream", so either he's not from the Bayou City or he's not a letter-writer like Sonja Myers. There were quite a few pages' worth of results in Google on Stan, but I think this gives the basic gist of who he is.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 24, 2002 to Around the world | TrackBack