Stan Goff

Writer, Speaker, Consultant

De Oppresso Liber

"To liberate the oppressed"

The Special Forces Motto

From Commie Watch:

"Yesterday a symposium in FrontPage Magazine entitled A Guerilla War in Iraq? featured, among others, socialist writer Stan Goff. I mention this because Stan Goff also writes an irregular column on military affairs for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and despite his abhorrent politics, is an excellent writer. (I also mention it so I can point out that you'll never see a right-wing equivalent of Stan Goff appearing in a left-wing equivalent of FrontPage.)"

From Free Republic ( a right-wing blog), referring to a teach-in at UNC-Chapel Hill September 17, 2001:

"The forum hit a new low, however, when panelist Stan Goff equated the terrorist attacks with the German Nazis' torching of the Reichstag in 1933.

"'The de facto executive branch and the compliant press are putting the historical spotlight right now on December 7, 1941, and Pearl Harbor,' said Goff, a disgruntled former U.S. Army Ranger. 'I think we need to aim that spotlight at February 27 in 1933 and the Reichstag fire.'

"The mere fact that the audience clapped and... yes, nodded their heads vigorously in agreement, made it all the more nauseating."

*********************************

                "...We can of course quote other social bifurcations related to fossil energy:  coal, oil, which lead to the industrial society.  Now we have the information technology, which leads to the networked society.  What will be the effect of the present bifurcation?  Because of the scales involved we can expect a larger role of non linear terms therefore larger fluctuations and increased instability."

                                -Ilya Prigogine, 1999

               "People say, how can I help in this war on terror? How can I fight evil?  You can do so by mentoring a child, by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."

                -George W. Bush, 2001

The Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems says:

"A system that exits far from thermodynamic equilibrium, hence efficiently dissipates the heat generated to sustain it, and has the capacity of changing to higher levels of orderliness... contain[s] subsystems that continuously fluctuate.  At times a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so magnified by possible feedback, that it shatters the pre-existing organisation.  At such revolutionary moments or 'bifurcation points',... ... it is impossible to determine in advance whether the system will disintegrate into 'chaos' or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of 'order'.

"The latter case defines dissipative structures so termed because they need more energy to sustain them than the simpler structures they replace and are limited in growth by the amount of heat they are able to disperse."

**************************

"When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes ... I think in perfect harmony—with my sister of long ago:  Let the earth marinate in poisons.  Let the bombs cover the ground like rain.  For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything."

-Alice Walker, on Zora Neale Hurston, 1976

"Perfect masculinity is sociopathic."

-Goff

   From Soft Skull Press:

Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream (Soft Skull, 2000). His work also appears in American Soldier: Stories of Special Forces from Iraq to Afghanistan, edited by Nate Hardcastle and Clint Willis (Thunders Mouth, 2002). He is working on his next book, Sex & War, about gender and the military, to be published in late 2004. Now living in Raleigh NC, he is an activist, spouse, father, and grandfather.
 

Stan Goff's career as a soldier in Army Special Operations (Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) took him from the invasions of Vietnam, Grenada and Haiti, to the training grounds of the cruel and corrupt Colombian and Peruvian armed forces. He taught Military Science at the US Military Academy at West Point, conducted classified missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and was deployed with the ill-fated Task Force Ranger (of Black Hawk Down fame) to Mogadishu. There are snapshots of those experiences in the new book, Full Spectrum Disorder.

But this is not a typical soldier's memoir. Goff engages in neither machismo nor maudlin soul-searching, and he is not content to merely tell stories. He interprets his own experience through years of study since he left the military, and attempts to draw lessons from it ñ lessons about politics, about world systems theory, about foreign policy, about war, about ecocide — dissecting the conjuncture with the sharpest tools he can find in an armamentarium of military science, chaos theory, deep ecology, feminism, revolutionary Black nationalism, and Marxism. From here he draws some starkly brutal conclusions about the risks we all face in the dangerous last days of an unstable empire.

Full Spectrum Disorder is a hard-eyed challenge to the political left and the military itself to confront each other as potential allies, it challenges the dominant intellectual division of labor during the "exterminist" stage of late imperialism, it challenges both leftist orthodoxy and the "moral imperialism" of liberals, and it serves as a primer for rebellion in the New American Century.

************

"Responding to revolutionary struggles, the counter-revolutionary, anti-revolutionary, and neoradical surface to confront and displace those inspired and sustained to vibrant rebellions... movements directed by neoradicals rarely extend their rhetoric to call for the abolition of capitalism and the corporate state... the deradicalizing tendencies are muted by the appearance of the symbolic radical."

-Joy James, Radcializing Feminism

**************

Interested in having Stan speak, write, or consult?

Contact the email at the bottom of this page, and include SPEAK, WRITE, or CONSULT in caps in the subject line.  Email is hopelessly clogged up with spams and scams (Viagra anyone, or a special banking deal in Nigeria?), so we need a marker that indicates a serious request.

"Goff's account is vivid. poetic, and unsparing.  He writes with an affection for the Haitian people, a distinct notion of his own fallibility, and a dogged thirst for justice."

-Jordan Green, Clamor

"Passionate, intelligent, and honest, Stan Goff's account is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti."

Kim Ives, Haiti Progres

"Goff shows a real writer's ability to connect with the irreducibility of experience.  Beyond the analysis of the military and political case, the pure rendering of experience is where the value of this book resides."

"Stan Goff has written a brilliant book with both heart and acerbic wit. For civilian readers, it offers often astounding stories of military practice and thinking. Military readers will recognize their experiences, while seeing them interpreted in a radically new way. No one will go away unchallenged or unchanged. A critical insider's view of the army, Stan Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder gives startling new perspectives on today's war zone news, while encouraging the long term view required to prevent disaster and create a more humane future."

Catherine Lutz, Professor, Anthropology and Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, author of Homefront

"Full Spectrum Disorder goes for the jugular with an Exacto knife."

Margaret Wyles, Sex, Lies & Fascism

"Stan Goff leads you to places you don't want to go, past horrific scenes of plunder and ruin, largely of our own devising. He takes us if not into the heart of darkness, at least into its bitter and terrifying spleen. Goff is our Conrad, surveying an empire on the downward slope, collapsing into the throes of a profound political and moral entropy. Just when the new American Imperium seemed to have the world in its grip (Full Spectrum Dominance, in the smug parlance of the Pentagon brass), everything began to fall apart, with devastating consequences for all of us. You'll want to avert your eyes from these pages. Don't. This is tough medicine, but it is medicinal reading nonetheless. If Goff doesn't point the way out of the Pentagon's darkening pit, he does something more important. He shows us how we got here and the psychic toll that brutal and arrogant course has taken on our humanity. Goff doesn't suffer illusions about fanciful quick fixes to our military malaise. But the mere fact that he lived to tell this vivid and spine-straightening tale is perhaps the most the most redemptive sign of all."