Must Read: Stan Goff interview: "September 11th was a neo-con wet dream".

Stan Goff is without a doubt the most articulate ex-military (Special Forces) writer/spokesman around today. He was with with the military families in the "Bring them home" press conference the other day (shown on CSpan)and gave a moving speech.

We need Stan on Cable to set America straight.

http://truthout.org/docs_03/073103A.shtml


TO Interview: Stan Goff with Jennifer Van Bergen
t r u t h o u t | Wednesday, 16 July 2003

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What do you think about Bush's build-up of the military?

Bush is making more politically fatal mistakes than I can count these days. His so-called build-up of the military is one of them. He is not in fact building up the military, depending on how you define that. He is building up the weapons industry, at the behest of his mad military advisor, Donald Rumsfeld - a weird man who has convinced himself without a shred of evidence to support it, that he is a military genius.

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Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial.

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About the fact that we now know that Bush lied about WMD's?

Every thing this administration has told the public has been a lie from the very beginning. The way you determine whether on not the Bush cabinet is lying is by whether or not their lips are moving. They started with a fraudulent election, consolidated by a right-wing judicial fiat. They had planned the invasion of Afghanistan as a first step for developing a standing military presence in the region the summer prior to 9/11. They'd even informed the Pakistanis of their intention to invade in October. Then the 9/11 hijackers fly in like a scourge against the nation, but like Santa Claus for the Bush's neo-con clique. All the plans were put on fast forward, and the pretext was now available for advancing a very aggressive domestic agenda for the development of a police state infrastructure. September 11th was a neo-con wet dream.

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What about the Patriot Act? What about the Military Tribunals? The Guantanamo detainees? The "unlawful enemy combatants"? Do you think the Bush Administration is violating the Constitution? The Geneva Conventions? (Other international laws?)

This is the most lawless administration in living memory, and that's a real accomplishment given the parade of arch criminals who have occupied the Executive Branch for the last 100 years. There is a wealth of material available on the net and elsewhere warning us about the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act has one major flaw. Once the decision is made to apply it generally, instead of against scapegoat populations, the U.S. government will be faced with the most heavily armed population in the world. There's a certain grim poetic justice there. The tribunals and detentions are just plain exercises of impunity against every internationally recognized standard of legal practice in the world. This is also well known. The Geneva Conventions forbid unilateral invasions in the absence of a real and immediate threat. Period. It's unequivocal. People say we should be cautious with the term fascism. I agree. We are now faced with a wannabe fascist administration. They would do well to recount how Mussolini ended up.

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goss

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so what more will it take to go from wannabe to an actual fascist administration?

that if the government is taken away from the people, the people have a right and duty to take back the government.

...that damn Democracy we have didn't get in the way. Democrats are so inconsiderate.

"The way you determine whether on not the Bush cabinet is lying is by whether or not their lips are moving."

I love that line in print!

Amazing person. Truly someone to be listened to.

"Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial."

By and large, yes indeed. That's where * has gotten that 55% approval rating. The above is also the reason so many DUers have turned off commercial television in recent years. We're wide awake now, and horrified by what we see.

Great article. Thanks for posting!

" I should say that I am not a liberal. I find most liberals to be conservatives who want to be forgiven." (True)

"These are people who say we live in a system, but they don't really believe it. In their most secret hearts, they've bought the whole bourgeois narrative about personal responsibility, individualism, the history of kings and generals, all of it." (I would say that this describes 90% of the "liberals" here on DU. The "bourgeois narrative of personal responsibility, individualism.." is Marxist thought and phraseology writ large, BTW.)

"... and a very real, very deep crisis of capitalism itself." (Will DUers who love Goff assent to this? I know I would. We are indeed experiencing a very deep crisis in capitalism.)

"Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial." (Complete commodification of our consciousness? Marx, Das Capital, Volume 1, chpts 1-10)

"with the real material economy now gutted by parasitic speculation" (Classic Marxist diction)

"This is the most lawless administration in living memory, and that's a real accomplishment given the parade of arch criminals who have occupied the Executive Branch for the last 100 years." (Indeed)

"Americans are not critical thinkers by and large. We suffer from a collective sociogenic learning disability based on the complete commodification of our consciousness by consumerism and electronic media. So we are not only bitterly unhappy and alienated, we are intensely stupid and attached to denial."

This fair-and-balanced assessment is what has primed us for facism. People in power are aware of this, but it never gets discussed - even by the politicians we support. The REAL battle is for our hearts & minds...and our pocketbooks. I just hope the people who need to hear this will listen (better coming from ex-military than from one of them "liberals")... and at least try to let themselves think about it.

This Goff/Goss fella is the real patriot! Go gettum!

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(JVB) What conflicts did you fight in?

(SG My first duty assignment was Vietnam. It was the 80s before I worked in any more conflict areas. I didn't fight in them all. They included Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti.

(JVB) I realize you’ve written about Haiti in your fascinating book, “Hideous Dreams,” but could you tell us anything briefly about any of the other conflicts?

(SG) Well, there was a common denominator that it took me a couple of decades to figure out. We were engaged in conflicts against poor people. I didn’t realize it at the time – Haiti was the watershed actually – but this is the military role in an imperial state. While the national chambers of commerce in these places, with their eager compradors, assisted US corporations to drain the value out of these countries, the military’s job, often through the surrogate militaries of the host nation as we called it, is to stand guard against all those masses of people in the host nation from whom the value was being drained in labor and resources. If you steal enough from people, they hit a point where they become rebellious, and to continue stealing, you have to use people with guns.

Aside from that sort of macro-analysis, one thing that stands out in my mind is how badly many of the operations went, and how important it is for the US military to spend huge sums of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are examples. Real emblems of stupidity in planning and execution. That’s why I tell people not to buy into the hype about US military invincibility. Person for person, and dollar for dollar, the US military is the most inefficient in the world. And the most fragile. They are fragile because of their overwhelming dependence on high technology, and fragile because the troops come out of a pampered consumer culture where real physical hardship is anecdotal. Sustained hardship, as we are seeing in Iraq now, devastates morale.

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Thanks for the post.

Ever since I saw him on the MFSO press conf, I've been digesting everything I can find of his...

:toast:

I had no idea this was right under my nose!