Stan Goff

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Person.png Stan Goff   Medium SourcewatchRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(activist)
Stan Goff.png
BornNovember 12, 1951
San Diego, California, USA
NationalityUS
American anti-war activist, writer, and blogger. Prior to his activism Goff had a long career in the U.S. armed forces.

Stan Goff is an American anti-war activist, writer, and blogger. Prior to his activism Goff had a long career in the U.S. armed forces, serving in the United States Army from 1970 to 1996 with two breaks in service. After retiring from the military he became a political activist, adopting anti-imperialist, feminist, and socialist/Marxist views, and is now a Christian.

Military career

"Stan Goff entered military service in January 1970 and retired from the Army on February 1, 1996. His first assignment was to Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and he retired from the 3rd Special Forces, the unit he belonged to during the 1994 U.S. invasion of Haiti. In the course of his career, he was assigned to two parachute infantry units, three Ranger units, two Special Forces units, and Delta Force. In addition to working in a total of eight conflict areas, he taught small unit tactics at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama and Military Science at West Point.

Activism

Goff became politically active almost immediately after his military career ended, and quickly took up the study of Marxism. He joined the Communist Party USA for a brief period, but left the party in response to what he describes as the demand for "ideological conformity," and his belief that the party was hostile to feminism. This is a criticism he levels frequently at the entire left, which he describes as "male-dominated, and tokenizing of women.".

In 1996, Goff secured a job as organizing director for Democracy South, a non-profit organization which did research and advocacy on money-and-politics in the South, and stayed there for the next five and a half years.

In 2001, he did a short stint as the military technical adviser for the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Collateral Damage, which he describes as one of the most miserable jobs in his life, and for which he publicly apologized after the film was altered, in the wake of 9-11, into what Goff called "yet another male revenge fantasy".

Throughout this post-military period, he remained in touch with Haitian political issues, and developed a close working relationship with Katharine Kean, a film maker who has worked in Haiti for decades, and the political cadres of the National Popular Party, a left party in Haiti with a peasant popular base. He returned to Haiti dozens of times since then, and has written extensively on the political developments there.

After the September 11 attacks and the resulting push for war, Goff was in demand as a public speaker. His military career and his opposition to the coming war gave him a degree of immunity from many criticisms made against anti-war advocates.

He also became involved with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization around the same time, drawn primarily by the organization's analysis of Black nationalism, and the organization's stated goal of the "refoundation" of the American Left. In the process of writing a column called "Military Matters" for the organization, he began his second book, Full Spectrum Disorder - The Military in the New American Century, (Soft Skull Press, 2004).

Activism against the Iraq War

Goff is referred to in Mary Tillman's book, Boots on the Ground by Dusk[1]” as being a major influence and assistance in getting to the truth behind the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman.

After the publication of Full Spectrum Disorder, Goff became interested in the connections between militarism and the social construction of masculinity. He studied feminist writings and theory over the next two years in the process of writing his third book, Sex & War (Lulu Press, 2006).[2]

In March 2006 Goff helped to organize the Veterans and Survivors March of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, and Gold Star Families for Peace to call attention to the cost of the war in Iraq and its impact on relief efforts along the Gulf coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

After the Veterans and Survivors March, Goff pulled back from public engagement and worked as a landscape helper, an apprentice stonemason, and a home deconstruction crew with Wake County (NC) Habitat for Humanity.

He took up a study of the historical Jesus in 2006, and from that study gained an interest in theology. In 2008, he was baptized and is a professed Christian and pacifist, eschewing political labels like socialist or anarchist. In 2009, he wrote a tract entitled "Why I won't call myself progressive", that reflected the influences of Christian writers John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Amy Laura Hall, and Ivan Illich. He is an advocate of non-coercive, community re-localization efforts and what he calls "food praxis," or practical activities that promote food sovereignty.

Goff resided with his wife, Sherry, for a year - 2009-2010 - in Grecia, Costa Rica; and now lives in Michigan. He worked with the Adrian Dominican Sisters on a long term permaculture land use project until 2017, and now devotes full time to writing.

He is an active blogger and is the author of several books, including Hideous Dream (2000), Full-Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century (2004), Energy War (2006), Sex & War (2006), Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church (2015), "Mammon's Ecology - Metaphysic of the Empty Sign" (2018), and "Tough Gynes - Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men" (2019). He has also been a contributor to CounterPunch and Huffington Post.[3]

Articles & Commentary

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

  • Ernest Greene, "And Now for the Refutation," hardcoregossip.com, February 14, 2005 (scroll down page, as another copy of Goff's article precedes Greene's response).
  • pr, "Get Gough," Melbourne (Australia) IndyMedia, March 12, 2005 (scroll down page to article).

2006

Haiti & Venezuela

Iraq & Iran

On the War in Iraq

Abu Ghraib

2003

2004

2005

Interviews with Stan Goff

Articles & Commentary

1997

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Books by Stan Goff


 

A Document by Stan Goff

TitleDocument typePublication dateSubject(s)Description
Document:The So-Called Evidence Is a Farcearticle10 October 20019-11
Peak Oil
American Empire		'What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.'
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References

  1. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=Ogz3Gq3vpkAC
  2. ↑ Americans Who Tell The Truth
  3. ↑ Huffington Post Bio
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