Stephen Zunes – Professor of anti-American Studies
Spent some time reading Stephen Zunes, a younger, poorer version of Noam Chomsky and can boil down his philosophy to four words:
It’s all America’s Fault
Terrorism? It’s America’s fault. Iraq? Blood for oil. Anything bad that happens in the world – rest assured that there is some nameless group or corporation behind it. The man is Machiavelli on acid, a Left-wing as paranoid as anyone to the right of Pat Buchanan.
Where he differs from Chomsky and much of the rest of the anti-Semitic Left is his viewing of the Jews and Israel as puppets of America, “mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests.”
Like your garden variety anti-Semite, Zune sees not Jewish but American conspiracies behind every troublespot in the world. Somalia? The prolific Stephen Zunes pens “The Long and Hidden History of the U.S in Somalia”. East Timor? “For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999.” Global Warming? Our Fateful Choice: Global Leader or Global Cop Tooth Decay? No – although Google did find his name associated with the term on four pages.
Zunes never offers any evidence in support of his assertions; rather he uses generic groupings like “people in power” or “oil industry” in the assumption that proof is not needed. After all, he is a tenured professor at University of San Francisco – the backup school for Bay Area Catholic kids who didn’t have the grades for Berkeley or UCSF.
However like all conspiracy theories, evidence supporting his arguments is as hard to come by as a clear photograph of the second shooter on the grassy knoll. For example, Zunes wrote a piece stating that Israel violated more UN Resolutions than any other state – failing to mention that Israel has been involved in roughly 270 UN Security Council Resolutions to begin with – or about 16%. Nor does he expose his methodology to determine how a state violates a UN Security Council Resolution, merely stating “I did not include those resolutions which simply criticised a particular action by a government. Nor did I include resolutions where the language is ambiguous enough to make assertions of non-compliance debatable.” This is exactly the kind of methodology that drives “real” scientists nuts, and takes the “science” out of “social science” by emphasizing the “liberal” in the term “liberal arts”.
Well, there’s no methodology because there’s no substance beyond what could qualify as at best, a blogger’s rant:
In other words, no country has done more to compromise the authority of the United Nations Security Council and its enforcement mechanisms than has the United States.While the UN Security Council had a strong case to insist that Iraq be more fully compliant with its resolutions, the United States is the last country to claim the right to enforce alleged non-compliance militarily. Not only does the UN Charter and UN Security Council resolution 1441 explicitly recognise that only the Security Council as a whole – and not any single member – has the legal authority to enforce such resolutions militarily, but the United States is the last member of the world body to claim any kind of moral authority to do so.
By Zunes logic, no country can be held accountable to the UN because some have gotten away it. This is akin to a serial killer saying that he should be allowed to be freed because Scotland Yard never caught Jack the Ripper. To do otherwise would be to “cherry-pick” UN resolutions.
Zunes “logic” – or lack thereof – leaves me feeling like I had just been rolling around in the intellectual mud with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other great conspiracy fictions. Reading him I’m reminded of the conservative intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who were seduced by fascism. In fact, little beyond being born 70 years too late separates him from his intellectual peers of that bygone era.
Worse, his logic dehumanizes those who he attempts to ally with. In Zunes world, the Palestinians, Jews, Hezballah, North Koreans – everyone – are merely automatons, reacting to Americans in predictable ways. All their actions are instigated by Americans; they have no will to act on their own. Only Americans have the human quality of free will.
Unfortunately for the world according to Zunes, Americans use this free will to choose greed and avarice. In a sense, by imbueing these qualities to Americans alone, Zunes in effect advocates a type of “super nationalism,” where the only nation that matters is America, and like the warriors of old that ate the hearts of their enemies to gain their bravery, its only by overcoming and destroying America that the rest of the world becomes human. This problem is not Zunes alone; it is inherent to the “politics of victimization” where suffering is the only scale that matters while true power remains in the hands of the victimizer.
Zunes advocates this destruction of the United States by using a common tactic of the Left: Denying the right of the United States to pursue its goals, while allowing other nations to pursue their own goals. Zunes criticizes any American action whereby the nation pursues a goal to its benefit, for example by denying the United States the right to pursue a strategic victory over Syria or prevent Iran from attaining nuclear weapons. At the same time, Zunes argues that Iran has the right to nuclear weapons because its in its own interest.
Leftists like Zunes are fundamentally terrified by the hegemony America represents, and seek to bind it with Lilliputian threads. It must be frustrating for Zunes, who is so widely quoted in the Leftist media to see his threads ignored as the United States moves forward and follows its strategic interests. Luckily for Zunes, and the Leftists like Chomsky who are his intellectual peers, the nation sees men like him as evidence that the United States is not the nation they believe it is – for the nation that Chomsky and Zunes claim exists would have executed both men long ago. Instead, both are esconced in Academia where they can safely promulgate their vision of a world terrorized by the United States.
I hadn’t realized that SFSU had such a great fiction department.
Ron Coleman:
As you say, Scott, it’s all in what you’re counting. Sixteen percent doesn’t sound that high until you realize that Israel is less than 1% of the membership of the UN and that countries whose governments have actually engaged in mass murder have never been the subject of UN resolutions.
I mean, using the UN as a measuring stick for anything besides the competition for corruption and cynicism is… well, corrupt and cynical.
17 August 2006, 8:27 pmCutting Edge Political Commentary The Razor:
[...] The following is a revised version of this post. — Research United Nations Security Council Resolutions and you will inevitably discover the work of Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of San Francisco, and Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project. During the run up to the American invasion of Iraq, Zunes published “United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq” which attacks the Bush Administration argument that Iraq’s failure to comply with UN resolutions necessitated military action. [...]
14 September 2006, 10:03 am