Sex, Lies & Spies
If you can bear to read anymore of my ramblings after the posting of 'Empathy is not a Colour', then maybe it has helped you bring an even more critical approach to what I write. No bad thing. As Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense". Marx, being more economic with words for once, said, "Doubt everything".
Sunday Dec 11th was a day of serendipity for me when things just seemed to fall into place. I think.
I have been interested in the release of the film 'Syriana', from the Clooney/Soderbergh production company Section Eight, for some time and whilst doing some surfing on the internet on Sunday I came across the web-site for the film. Interesting read and the clip is worth viewing. But what caught my attention was the name of the character that William Hurt plays. I've enjoyed watching Hurt since 1987's 'Broadcast News' (though Holly Hunter's screen presence kept most of my attention in that film) and I really started to rate him as an actor following his lead in Chris Menges' 1994 'Second Best' and part in Wayne Wang's 1995 'Smoke' - small but fabulous films. So I checked out his role in 'Syriana' first.
I've not yet seen the film, just the clips from rottentomatoes.com and the synopsis on the 'Syriana' site so can't give any sort of critical analysis of the film nor of Hurt's character development or dialogue, which for all I know could be humanism personified amongst the corruption and skulduggery that is Oil and geopolitics.
William Hurt's character name and job description? Stan Goff, a retired CIA agent. That came as a bit of a jolt because I know that name from a blog called Feral Scholar which is run by a Stan Goff who claims to be a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant and now to be a revolutionary of the left and member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organisation. Whether the Hurt character's job description fits the blogger I have no idea. I've been visiting Goff's blog on a regular basis for the past year or so and occasionally dropped in a comment when I agreed with what he had written. I had to have a certain level of sureness that googling can occasionally provide about internet authenticity (now that's a contradiction in terms on a par with 'military intelligence'!), so googled his name. There is only one Stan Goff - besides the fictional one.
Is Goff an advisor on this film as he was for Schwarzenegger's disgracefully racist 'Collateral Damage', in which he also had a speaking role? Could the use of his name be just a coincidence?
I've searched for an advisory role for Goff on 'Syriana' but he is not listed in cast and crew at hollywood.com. No mention of it has appeared on his site so that is probably ruled out.
The film opened to a limited release on 23rd Nov then went nationwide in America on 9th Dec. On the 25th Nov, Goff announced that he had been invited to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas in January 2006. By the 1st Dec he had had to cancel, though his blog still calls for donations to fund the trip.
On the 2nd Dec, Counterpunch - an internet political newsletter - carried an open letter by Goff to Congress titled 'On Power', (it originally appeared at Feral Scholar the day before - the same day he cancelled his trip to Caracas). It is a verbal assault on those in Congress who support or vacillate over the war, with threats about what the masses will do to them, especially the Democrats at the elections in November 2006. No direct physical threats but things like "..we'll see you in the street,...", "You are directly in our path, and we are not going to go around you", as though wishing to replay the Russian revolution of nearly 90 years ago.
"It is because we understand power...", "Gradual, phased, planned, strategized, conditioned, delayed, partial withdrawls...", "To those of you....". He has used these lines as repetitions at the beginnings of paragraphs in an attempt to give the piece some heightened poetic meaning where none exists. It is a rant promising retribution from the masses he fantasises about leading, as they spontaneously coalesce around his rhetoric and storm the Congress. How real is that. Even I've stopped wanting to be Lenin.
Throughout the piece Goff writes of the military/police power of the American state threatening, intimidating it's people as though this is all that power is. Where is the power of the people in this piffle. Where the city and town councils voting against the war (Democrats amongst them), where the petition collecting, the campaign against military recruitment in colleges, occupations, civil disobedience, non-violent direct action, the participation of civil society in stopping this war - the quietly brave stuff that doesn't directly confront the police/military apparatus of the state? It's being built by non-sectarian people and their organisations and its growing, and it is mature enough not to sacrifice itself on the barricades of Goff's adventurist rhetoric. If it were not so dangerous it would be a laughable attempt at gaining some credence as a fire-brand and heroic spokesperson of the left, facing off against the mighty Congress.
This piece of bombast drew a response from John Halle titled 'What Are You Going to Do About It, Punk?' It was carried by Dissident Voice. The cartoonish pugnacity of Goff's rant has been exposed in no uncertain terms by Halle's coruscatingly funny spoof.
I've previously written about Counterpunch carrying, what is to me, an obvious Psy-ops article targeting Iran on its site. An unnamed source had informed Counterpunch that after the first Gulf War the USAF had lost some nuclear missiles off of the Somali coast and they had been retrieved from the sea by a South African arms dealer who sold them to Iran. Sound familiar? It should do, the story is basically a rehash of the Tom Clancy novel and film 'The Sum of All Fears'. Alexander Cockburn, co-editor at Counterpunch, graciously replied to my email about the article and stated, "...of course it's quite possible the whole thing is taken from a Clancy book,.....", though no mention of this was published at Counterpunch.
On 17th July I posted an article to Outside the Gates titled 'On Conspiracy Part 1' argueing against the use of conspiracy theory as a means to understanding political power and how to challenge it. Then on Nov 1st, though no names were mentioned, an attack on this position was posted at Goff's blog. The fact I had not allowed any comments to be posted seems to have wound him up enough to accuse me of being an 'intellectual elitist'. He also had the gall to posit the argument that a feminist conspiracy against patriarchy is a legitimate political strategy. The article appeared a week after I had posted a piece about the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke and the Terrorism Bill he's pushing through the British Parliament.
In what could look like running for cover, 'Counterpunch' carried an interview with Goff on 7th Nov - first published on 6th Nov by 'Left Hook', a youth orientated political magazine. Then the next day on the 8th Nov 'Counterpunch' carried an article by Goff himself which reads as though hastily written.
(The symbolism in the language used by some who claim themselves of the left, leaves a lot to be desired. 'Left Hook' and 'Counterpunch' are two whose titles carry an unambiguous violence which could be indicative of the means to be employed when struggling for socialism as the end. I may be a bit soft, but I have thought for quite a while that the ends do not justify the means and that, in fact the means determine the ends. Violence begets violence. A history of childhood and teenage violence, taken and given, outside and inside the military, has qualified me to say this.)
Obviously I didn't leave the Goff attack there but posted a response on Nov 13th - 'On Conspiracy Part 3'. (Part 2 details some cases where conspiracy law has been used by the state against opposition and Innocents).
Goff espouses a politics that will lead to the bloody defeat of what is remaining of the extra-parliamentary left in America, the entrenchment of the status quo during the epoch making time of Peak Oil and climate change and, if successful, aid a global population crash.
A short debunking of some of his ideas, the most pernicious of which is the view that America is made up of a collection of nations; Native American, Black American, Latino American, European (White) American etc. For a while I was drawn to this idea until I realised that it emphasised the differences between people based on ethnicity, colour, creed or gender. The most extreme form that this thinking takes is being implemented by the Anglo-American occupiers of Iraq in an attempt to control the world's most important hydrocarbon energy region. What is not sought for is common ground that can unite.
There are real differences between peoples (black and white and white and black are not the same) that when exploited can be translated into material differences like life expectancy, housing, educational achievement. The list is endless. The exploitation of these differences have a long and dishonourable history. Capitalism was built on slavery and genocide and their modern equivalents are integral to its functioning today.
But there is also a common unifying factor amongst peoples which becomes more apparent as the contradictions in capitalism become more acute as it enters organic crisis. Namely our relationships to the means of production - the owner or the wage slave. The distance between the reality of a wage slave's everyday life and struggle and that propagandised by the majority of media, schools, colleges, religious institutions (from cradle to grave), as well as the employer or government, becomes so pronounced that the contradictions are easily seen. It is at this point that the role of leadership becomes crucial and at the moment the left is found wanting or compromised. There are obviously deep-seated, historical problems that divide us and which need to be overcome like racism and sexism, but a self-claimed ideologue of the left who highlights difference and not commonality at this juncture is no friend to the exploited and oppressed.
By defining people through their ethnicity, colour, creed etc and not their relationship to the means of production you end up with the exploited and oppressed argueing amongst ourselves about where we stand in the hierarchy of oppression. The poor fighting the poor to the benefit of capital - again. Unity is, as Brecht has written of socialism, "The simple thing. So hard to achieve."
Goff's primary audience is American and to fully understand what he is doing this point needs to be emphasised. In her essay, 'Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy - Buy One get One Free', Arundhati Roy, that doyen of humanist clarity, has made the point that the American people (and I include the British) cannot confront Empire directly, militarily; "The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society". That non-violent direct action and mass participatory civil disobedience aimed at those who profit from the war (which class is that I wonder?) and their enabling government, is the political strategy that can win. How true!
The family tree that leads to the formation of Goff's 'party', Freedom Road Socialist Organisation, is interesting reading. It seems that the RCP - Revolutionary Communist Party - has a very prominent position in their recent history. I had a close encounter with the RCP in Britain around about 1975/76. I was a student delegate to the National Union of Students Bristol Area Committee and had no party political affiliation. I was invited to a meeting of the RCP by an RCP member I met in Bristol. Can't remember her name now. It was an invite to an invite only meeting, but I was never given that information. At the end of the meeting I asked, with youthful gullibility about joining and was brusquely told that, "We don't just take anybody". Never bothered with them again. Not serious about mass politics and seriously 'intellectual elitist'.
Throughout the following 20 years, rumours were rife on the left that the RCP was a front for the intelligence services. Is it true? I don't know, but I do know that the continual splitting and reforming that seems to be endemic amongst the myriad of Trotskyite/Maoist grouplets makes for brilliant cover for intelligence agencies to infiltrate, or to establish front organisations that can wreak havoc amongst the legitimate left. During the '70s and '80s the RCP achieved absolutely nothing for the British working class despite their parasitic presence at nearly every national demo ever held where they would try and sell their obtuse literature.
On the day I posted my response (conspiracy 3) Goff posted a piece on gender that he promoted as 'a tutorial'. The arrogance of this trained killer knows no bounds. According to Goff's analysis gender war has superseded class war as the conflict at the heart of capitalism, and that organising conspiratorially against men is a legitimate tactic in bringing it down. This is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't give a shit about what sex you are. Whether our labour, physical or intellectual can be exploited for the amount it takes to reproduce ourselves is it's bottom line calculation. Surplus labour, female or male can go to the wall.
Superficially attractive this approach echoes his thinking on 'American nations', in that it divides more than it unites those struggling against capitalism. Men are identified as the problem, the enemy, and not the mode of production. In his scenario the advance of capitalist women through the patriarchy can be interpreted as progressive. It is not. No matter what the gender, a capitalist is a capitalist, period. The same conditions of life for working class women and men will still pertain. Matriarchal capitalism or patriarchal capitalism or patriarchal socialism? None of them. What ever we build cannot survive if power is achieved and exercised by exploiting difference other than class.
I will say it again, conspiratorial politics is anathema to open, mass and democratic participation in political change. Identifying men as the enemy and organising against them in such fashion, or threaten them with it, negates any need to engage in the more difficult political struggle of changing men's thinking through argument, example and leadership. Bringing them along, winning them to changing themselves and challenging, then breaking with patriarchy is a bit harder than just dismissing them as the enemy, the problem. Like women, men hold up half the sky.
Goff's approach on gender is in fact an attack on Marxism. One of his latest posts brings this right into the open - Engels is to be uncoupled from Marx. Even a cursory glance through the Marx/Engels correspondence shows how central to the development of Marx's thinking was the bouncing of ideas between the two. Engels not only helped Marx financially but also with insights on the human condition he incorporated in his writings. I remember reading something similar in the '80s and wouldn't be surprised if this was a regurgitation of the same article.
Now this is where the political gets personal.
Early in November my computers were hacked. How do I know this? The browser became very slow, the router was flashing twenty to the dozen and later, when I opened a word processing programme that I have used every day for the last year, a notice appeared on the screen saying that this was the first time it had been opened since being installed. A hack which I am supposed to know about and be frightened of.
I have previously mentioned my struggle with pornography, that I am not clear of it yet but will be - eventually. I will get there and readers of this blog will be the first to know. When hacked at the beginning of Nov the site I was looking through was a 'free' lesbian porno site. I won't give the name or link but a picture from off the site appeared alongside an article about lesbian porn posted by Goff on Nov 29th. Yes I do watch lesbian porn, not all the time - not everyday or even every week. In fact months can go bye, then I will binge for a few days. Why lesbian porn? There are no men involved is the simple and obvious answer.
Goff hadn't written the article but taken it from another site - Den of the Biting Beaver - and added the picture. Biting Beaver's language is intelligent, frank and graphic, a welcome change from the usual fare critiquing pornography. This specific article concentrates it's critique on 'toys' and 'strapon' sex between submissive and dominant women acting out what is thought of as the 'traditional' male/female role. Vaginal and anal penetrative lesbian porn primarily for an audience of men. I've watched a lot of scenes like them and it has been more 'put-off' than arousing for a long time. What gives me the strongest climax and a momentary lifting of my own low self-esteem is the tenderness, intimacy and passion of the kiss. Believe it or not there is some lesbian porn where penetrative sex with dildos and strapons does not feature, nor where dominant/passive roles are played out.
Another article by Biting Beaver - Women and Pornography: My Story - is the best psycho-analytical piece on pornography I have ever read. Probably because it is so personal. I have previously thought about the neurological reasons of porn addiction, not the psychological, and this article spoke to me directly, expressed in language that which I had felt but had not yet fully, intellectually understood.
It is only men without empathy who will fail to comprehend the following quote;
"For me it had to be women I watched. The thought, the very idea of taking control from a man could not, ever, manifest in my mind. The idea of humiliating a man was so foreign to me that my mind discounted the possibility of it immediately, before it even blinked on the radar. I had spent my life with men controlling me it was clear, at least to me, that I would never get power from them. Instead, I turned to women even more vulnerable than me. Women who were EASIER targets to take power from than I was.(Original emphasis)
"Clearly, these women were pained, and I watched it. I saw it in every movie, in every picture, in every scene. I watched and heard the fake screams and I took power from their misery. I watched their faces twist for just a moment into a face of pain when they were penetrated anally; I saw it and used it to make myself feel better. In some ways I was taking their power. It was ME, it was certainly ME wielding the power over them in my mind, and it was the thought of ME taking their power on the screen that brought me to climax.
"it wasn't the sex, it wasn't the vaginas or the breasts or the tanned skin. It wasn't some sort of biological excitement from seeing two people having sex (although, that's what I told myself for a very long time). It was the power that is inherent in degrading and humiliating another human being that brought me to climax. I was stealing THEIR power, taking it from them in my fantasies and on my TV. With every orgasm I was stealing the little dignity that these women had left and using it to feed my own, seriously lacking, seriously damaged, sense of power and control and self-esteem.
"And I hated them for it. I hated them for reflecting my own weaknesses back at me. I despised them for allowing their dignity to be taken from them, just as I had done myself. These women were, in so many ways, a reflection of me, of my OWN powerlessness, and I hated them for 'letting' themselves be used in such a fashion.
"At the same time I hated MYSELF for using them. I hated myself for being a vampire of sorts, a kind of 'self-esteem vampire'. A creature which was incapable of making her own self-esteem and who therefore took it from other humans. But self-esteem garnered at the expense of another human being does not, and never can, replace your own. It simply drains from your body because it never belonged to you in the first place. Power that is stolen from another person is always empty power, it never fulfils, it never leaves its mark on you for more than a few days, sometimes even a few hours."
(I know. I'm a man taking power here by quoting from a woman's pain to try and understand my own. Its because I'm still too weak to get there by myself).
Any man who has used porn to get off on can understand this quote and if he says other he is either lying or shutting off his inherent empathy, frightened to confront his own low self-esteem and powerlessness. Yes, men as a gender exercise power over women in a patriarchy and individual men benefit from it, but the vast majority of us are powerless, have no control over our lives in the face of capital. It would be rather mechanistic to say that the powerless will try and take power from those even more powerless than themselves and not try and take it back from the powerful because they are weak in comparison. But this is the case for individual men and despite having a male gendered identity, we are isolated, weak and fearful in our sexuality as patriarchy decays along with capitalism. Fertile ground for porn.
It is no accident that porn is a multi-billion dollar industry and the internet infested with free porn sites as teasers for addiction. Capitalism has no morality and capitalists will search for profit where ever they can. Porn to them is a godsend, not only does it turn a substantial profit but perpetuates sexual roles that demean and distort the sexual desires of both men and women and which divides us from each other and ourselves. It my seem old fashioned in this age of brutal capitalism, but as Adrian Mitchell once told me a long time ago, "No revolution without compassion."
The latest excuse to myself for still returning to porn is my disability, being single and in my fifties. MS is a difficult degenerative disease to live with or be part of, and I do not expect women to any longer have a sexual interest in me. Yet I still crave to give and gain the sexual affection, tenderness and intimacy experienced in the best moments of some of my relationships. An invite to sit on my face has always stood me in good stead as well as being good fun. If fantasising along with tender lesbian porn helps in remembering these emotions even for that fleeting moment of orgasm then, still being a sexual being, a 'raving' hetero and borderline onanist, I do not feel like breaking my last sexual relationship, that with my right hand, quite yet.
If it is true that Goff posted the article to intimidate by informing that he knew where I had surfed, to try and exploit any guilt I may feel about my life and sex, and keep me quiet. Well, religion has used guilt of sex for millennia as a means to frighten and control the many for the benefit of the few. I'm way past that. Have I been hacked by a feminist conspiracy or forces from the shadows? Who knows.
People are complex beings and use porn in many different ways and for many different reasons, and I am sure that some of you reading this will not believe what I have written. But like my blog profile it is authentic. Who else in the present political climate would be bonkers enough to admit to a political history that included working for the failed Communist Party of Great Britain, or that they are struggling with porn? Only somebody who has no ambition to lead, with nowhere to hide and hence no reason to lie.
Am I a spy? I have really been asked that. Who for? I went to the London Demo in Sept but was too exhausted by the time I got to the start to join the march, and had to make my way back to where I was staying, knackered. What use am I going to be as a spy? All I'm doing is returning to my favourite means of learning - its getting more difficult for me to take pictures - and if my scribblings are seen as a threat, then the enemy must be as weak as I am. My only allegiance is to the poor.
The easiest thing to do is dismiss my observations as the rantings of paranoia. It is simple, I have a degenerative neurological disease so I must be bonkers. Implying that someone is 'mad' is the oldest political trick in the book, trying to make them that way the second oldest. That is not to say I am not loopy. The psychological campaign of the last four years directed at me may very well have succeeded and 'turned my mind'.
Is the use of Goff's name as a character in the film 'Syriana', a mere coincidence? It's the only plausible answer.
Buddha said, "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense". Marx, being more economic with words for once, said, "Doubt everything".
posted by les at 15:39
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