6405: New Book on Haiti Occupation now available (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: "K. M. Ives" <kives@gateway.net>

Soft Skull Press has just released "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir
of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti" by Stan Goff, an erstwhile list member.
It is almost 500 pages and costs about $12 if you buy it online at
Soft Skull (www.softskull.com), which publishes other provocative
titles like "Fortunate Son," a must-read about our new "president" (in
the U.S.). The following is the publisher's blurb and then one by a
reviewer.

Kim Ives

------------

U.S. imperialism through the eyes of a member of the U.S. Special
Forces

After a distinguished career in elite Ranger, Airborne, Special
Forces, and counter-terrorist units, Stan Goff refused to turn away
from the implications of his own experience. He chose to defy the
contradictions between what the foreign policy establishment said and
what the US military did. He took sides with Haitian democratic forces
over the US supported death squads. Conflict escalated with his men,
who were steeped in racist, anti-Haitian propaganda, as well as with
commanders who depended on him to "read between the lines" and support
a massive campaign of deception aimed at both the Haitian and American
people.

"Hideous Dream" is a revealing look inside US foreign policy, behind
the mystique of Special Forces, and inside the racist history of
American imperial domination of Haiti. It is also a deeply personal
account of a man trapped between his emerging political consciousness
and the cynical mandates of his life as a professional soldier.

Stan Goff began his military career in Vietnam as a grunt with the
173rd Airborne Brigade. He went to Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada,
Panama, Venezuela, Honduras, South Korea, Colombia, Peru, and Somalia,
with Special Operations Units, before
participating in the 1994 invasion of Haiti. He worked in Infantry,
Ranger, Special Forces, and Counter-terrorist units, as well as taught
at the Jungle Operations Training Center and at West Point.

Hideous Dream is available from the publisher for 30% off.

www.softskull.com


>From Mark Jones, Historian:

"Hideous Dream" is Stan Goff's compelling and important book about the
US military in Haiti.

Soldiers have a specific way of relating to truth:  it matters to
them.  It is a matter of life and death to them.  So they judge people
by a different standard of truth.  And they judge politics
differently.  They are the first to know what kind of power comes from
the barrel of a gun.

That is why soldiers make good revolutionaries, and that is why
revolutions always acquire their most turbulent force and active
expression among the men and women of revolutionary armed forces, the
workers in uniform.

Soldiers are political scientists.  No one is more interested than
they are, in what they are asked to die for.  For this reason, no one
is closer to the heart of the people than soldiers are.  When the
people are rotten, soldiers can not fight.  When the people rise up,
they are always in the front ranks.

We must learn to work amongst the armed forces.

Stan Goff is a soldier, and he is a revolutionary.

Stand by.