Yeah so, some time ago Gabe introduced me to Stangoff.com and I quickly became a goff junky. His lucid writing style and radical leftist analysis were providing decisive answers to such political questions as “Why do the Democrats suck?” and “Don’t we have an obligation to stay in Iraq after invading it?” Also, I was then becoming more interested in Feminism and through Goff’s blog I was given a tour of the front-lines of Feminist theory and the many contradictory positions struggling to define “true” feminism. This compelling combination had hooked me and I was slowly but surely being drawn into the ideological orbit of Stan Goff, the Feral Scholar.
Recent developments in Latin America and the rising “anti-neoliberal” sentiment around the world fed a sense of optimism about the (hopefully) inevitable revolution of the oppressed classes that would help create new avenues of democracy in an increasingly unstable global political environment; Stan Goff being the perfect person to polish off this optimism and back it up with military analysis of insurgency and post-marxist class observations. But not all was well in Elliott Land.
In the last several months I had become dully aware that I was neglecting some inward, “spiritual” aspects of myself, and that this might lead to some sad psychological experiences down the road if further ignored. While staying with my friend Josh in Hawaii I made a mental note to talk to my parents about maybe becoming involved in Subud after returning home. Other/additional options for religio-spiritualistic experiences I’ve entertained have been to attend one of the many churches in my local neighborhood, simply meditating, or when I was next in Eugene to have Asa, a resident Chaos Magician and Subgenius perform some cool magick ritual or something (for more about the Church of the Subgenius and Chaos Magick see: the Internet!)
My stay in Hawaii was enjoyable but also very dramatic because my friend’s family situation was destabilizing both monetarily and emotionally. I feel that my presence was not entirely obstructive, and that I maybe even helped mediate some of the frustrated emotions flying about, and that was/is a pretty good feeling. Also I became incredibly grateful of my own parents’ patience and understanding nature and, combining that with the feminist analysis of women’s labor being seen as a “free good” in society have realized a greater respect for my mom and all she has done for me. So my stay on Kauai had indeed effected me on a “deep” level, but it now seems clear some major demonic agents were yet to be exorcized.
Finally back in Portland I was ecstatic, literally high on life. For a period of at least five days I was brimming with happiness almost every waking moment. A couple causes for this occurred to me: I was very happy to be back in Portland, I had stopped smoking pot (which happened a lot on Kauaii even though I no longer find it a largely positive experience) and it leaving my system was causing an dramatic upswing in attitude AND thirdly, the Revolution was imminent. You see, during this period I purchased and eagerly read through Stan Goff’s “Full Spectrum Disorder”. In it Goff outlines the precarious grip global capitalism and its state actors have on growing movements for greater autonomy world wide. The Rumsfeld doctrine, summed up largely as: “If we have fancier weapons, flying drone bots and GPS coordinated tank movements, we will win any and all military engagements,” is exposed as largely being megalomaniacal fantasy that has already shown itself to to be ill suited to the jobs it is trying to get done. Further more, he details the near impossibility of defeating an urban based insurgency made up of locals with a foreign military force. Global implications: The US military, which backs up the worth of the USD, which is the linchpin of global capitalism, falters in its ambitions, and therefore global capitalism itself is shown to be unstable. Western civilization as we know it will soon fall apart!
I was ecstatic about this too.
Goff recommends, hypothetically, that members of “Overdeveloped Country A” learn themselves in reconnaissance skills and firearm maintenance.
“Cool!” I thought, in my fevered optimism. “We’ll have to till the soil and defend it with our very lives. Neat!” I thought of how exciting it would be, forging new self sustaining communities in the Pacific Northwest, independent of the omnipresent influence of capitulating political paradigms and corporate money incentives. I of course anticipated it would be a difficult, exhausting and possibly fatal process. But I was seeing the silver lining like the gleaming corona of a full eclipse. After all, we have no choice! “Socialism or barbarism… or fascism.” If the most alarmist claims were right, if peak oil was fo realz, and global capitalism would soon falter like an Imperial AT-AT tangled in tow cable, then I wanted to be prepared dammit! I mean, maybe it would turn out to all be deranged ranting… (and global warming a hoax created by Russian Weather Controlling machines!) BUT if it wasn’t, the price of not preparing seemed far too high.
Then my period of joyfulness fizzled out… but I still had my Goff, my friends, and a future of increasingly limited possibilities to deal with. I spread the word, and talked excitedly about our precarious future with friends, it was a future we would build! I had resolved that I would “stay and fight”, that I wouldn’t run off to Europe or Canada or some other safer seeming land unless everyone else I knew abandoned Portland first. It seemed a perfect place to transition into a better society: arable land, liberal consciousness and I grew up there! My mood swung radically from week to week, day to day as I tried to evaluate what it was really that I should do about all this.
Then I read Stan Goff’s defense of Stalinism. At this point, I was more confident of his analysis of Stalinism than I was of his anti-pornography stance. After all, his argument was qualified by the assertion that Stalin’s regime hadn’t actually murdered 30 million people, that the figure was a gross inflation by Capitalist partisans eager to show that “Socialism was worth than Nazism”. Silent screams of protest reverberated within my skull. Stan goff insisted that if Russia had not rapidly industrialized, it would have been “Africanized,” stripped of resources and intentionally kept undeveloped by the western powers. I also reasoned that at the very least WWII may have lasted years longer if there had been no USSR to keep the Nazis from flowing into Asia (roughly 25 million russians died in WWII). I was not convinced, but terrifyingly, I WANTED to believe. I desperately searched the internet for more commentary along this line. It is not so much Goff’s “defense” of Stalinism that I in retrospect find disturbing, but my reaction. Eagerness to accept that such deliberate terror and systematic violence was not just “rational” but somehow “necessary” in the “big scheme of things.” It was statements such as this that were both compelling and provoking of cognitive dissonance:
“Proper evaluation of the Soviet experiment, however, requires that it be set into the broad context of the twentieth century, a century of unprecedented bloodshed. Such an evaluation reveals that far from being the monsters they are often portrayed as, Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin followed the only practical course of action to ensure the survival of their country.”
That is, the survival of this abstract entity. I mean sure, also to avoid “Africanization,” no one wants to be Africa. But the arrogance and callousness of Empire lurked behind this reasoning. The USSR it seems to me, was not “Socialism on one country,” but Imperialism in fast-forward, an industrial colonialism that swept across the continent using capitalist modes of production and Imperial means of persuasion. After reading a particularly poignant, almost romantic exposition on Stalin’s terror I was unable to even tell for sure whether the essay had been a defense of Stalinism rather than a subtle and poetic condemnation. I was sorta losing it at that point. I decided to go to bed and sort it all out at some later point.
And so it came to pass, I was disenchanted pretty harshly with Mr. Goff. I would only fully realize how I had been relying on Goff’s writing as a means of ideologically grounding my politics (and therefore heavily effecting my sense of self as well as right & wrong) after a visit to Powells City of Books. What did I have to fall back on, politically that is, after this ideological meltdown? Feminism. I found a book titled “The Demon Lover, on the Sexuality of Terrorism”.
It immediately touched on a theme that I remembered having wanted to explore before, after I had seen a disturbing hip hop music video produced by wannabe Islamic Terrorists. “They’re just like us, in the worst possible way” I had thought. In “The Demon Lover” Robin Morgan talks about the masculine archetype of the warrior-hero/martyr, and it’s prevalence in every major civilization for thousands of years. The masked vigilante in fiction: Zorro, the Lone Ranger, many super-heroes such as Batman, who “strikes terror into the hearts of criminals everywhere.” In reality: The Zapatistas, Jihadists, the KKK, black clad Anarchists, all imitations in the vein of this archetype, even if they are trying to manifest different goals. She compares “male methods of struggle” with women led resistance (usually non-violent) throughout history, and how the latter has usually made real progress on behalf of the most oppressed (women, children and racial minorities). She observes that terrorism is a tactic used both by stateless revolutionary groups and standing governments, and that when the rebels actually succeed in a coup, their regime most often merely assumes its place in the seamless continium of state violence and oppression. She describes the narrative invoked by macho revolutionaries as the actions of the “rebel son against the tyrant father,” a narrative in which women do not even exist.
She also describes how women are often drawn to these demon lover personas, and talks about her own experience in radical revolutionary groups in the sixties before becoming a feminist. These groups often enforced “non-monogamy,” as a post-modern excuse to pressure women into having sex with all the men within the group. Along with this sexism was the intoxication with becoming the violent martyr, delighting in the destruction of your enemies, even in your own obliteration, as long as it is for the cause. She calls this the politics of Thanatos, the alternative being the politics of Eros (in which Life, rather than Death is embraced). Although I think these terms and other aspects of her analysis are somewhat simplistic, her main point was driven home for me and made me realize how gratuitously I had drifted into militant fantasies in my pursuit of political rightness.
This realization effected my entire mood, making me see how I had been only narrowly enjoying life for much of the past several months. Looking back, It seems likes I was practically lusting for Armageddon, because it seemed to me destruction had to precede change. A dangerous, perhaps arbitrary association that had secreted away any real sense of hope and optimism into a sort of frozen state, waiting to be thawed by the rising sun of some glorious cultural revolution. I mused that in the ecstatic period following my return to Portland I spent much of my time reading Goff’s book which seemed to imply just this, and that perhaps my positive emotions and optimism had been illogically associated with the book’s outlook. To me it seemed a perfect analogy for the mechanisms of organized religion, and their notorious use of The Book, in which real feelings of awe and spiritual re-birth are harnessed by cynical bigots into political movements to demonize sexual minorities and get fascist warmongers into high office.
In the book she also talks about her time meeting with women in refugee camps in the middle east whom she is told “have no interest in feminism,” a claim to which she poses contrary evidence. I definitely suggest the book, a new edition has been published for our post 9/11 word entitled “The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terror” with some added materiel.
It helped me remember that a truly “revolutionary” (now I am uncertain whether I favor the term anymore to describe the sort of change that I wish for in the future) outlook is not characterized by adherence to stated principals, but a continuos revelatory process. By an ongoing effort to greater understand our world we can extend our vigilance and compassion into each succeeding moment, because anything else is settling for less.