Tamir Bar-On

Dr. Tamir Bar-On is a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada). He completed his BA and MA in political science at Toronto’s York University, while he earned his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

Bar-On is one of the world’s leading experts in the Anglo-American world on the French nouvelle droite, a cultural school of thought born in France in 1968 that has been accused of fascism by many of its liberal and left-wing critics. He is the author of Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007). His mentor is the esteemed British historian of fascism Roger Griffin from Oxford Brookes University. Griffin acted as Bar-On’s external supervisor for his Ph.D. dissertation on the nouvelle droite at McGill University, while he also penned the “Preface” to Where Have All The Fascists Gone? Bar-On has also been influenced by Parisian philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, particularly his reading of the French nouvelle droite and its re-packaging of racism in anti-racist, multicultural guises expresed as the “right to difference” of cultural communities around the globe.

In Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, Bar-On argues that fascists in the post-World War Two period took three paths: 1) Neo-fascist political parties like Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – Italian Social Movement); 2) Extra-parliamentary [...] groups such as Italy’s Ordine Nuovo (ON – New Order); and 3) Cultural movements such as the French nouvelle droite that waved the “anti-fascist,” “post-fascist” and multicultural banners. His Where Have All the Fascists Gone? explores the cultural attempts of intellectuals and think-tanks, especially in France and Italy, to revive the tradition of the inter-war Conservative Revolution (CR), which helped nourish Fascism and Nazism. Bar-On meticulously explores the leading works of French nouvelle droite ideologue Alain de Benoist. He argues that while borrowing ideas from the anti-capitalist New Left and 1968 generation, nouvelle droite or European New Right (ENR) thinkers like de Benoist nonetheless contributed to an anti-liberal political climate that paved the way for the rise of extreme right-wing political parties throughout Europe from the 1980s and into the new millennium.

Dr. Bar-On is currently working on his second book, Modernism and the European New Right (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011). His academic work has been published in leading political science journals such as Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Millennium, International Politics, and The European Legacy.

Bar-On has also written important pieces on [...]. Beginning in 2009 he wrote for Canada’s National Post and criticized what he dubbed the “manipulative mythology of Israeli Apartheid Week.” Canada’s leading conservative talk-show based in Calgary, the “Dave Rutherford Show,” interviewed him for 20 minutes about “Israeli Apartheid Week” on Canadian university campuses from March 1-8, 2009.

Non-Fiction

Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007.

"Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire", Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16 (3) (2008), pp. 329-345.

Book review for Abdullah Ocalan, Prison Writings: The Roots of Civilisation in Millennium 37 (2) (2008), pp. 511-513.

"The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999," The European Legacy 6 (3) (2001), pp. 333–351.

“Fighting Violence: A Critique of the War On [...],” 

International Politics (42) (2005), pp. 225-245.

Articles in Books:

"Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Quest For Empire," in Godin, E., Jenkins, B. and Mammone, A. (eds.), A Janus-Faced European Right-Wing Extremism (Berghahn, 2009).

"Quebec Separatist Conflict," in Nigel Young (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Peace (Oxford University Press, 2009).

“European New Right,” “Globalization,” "Gramsci," and “GRECE” entries in Cyprian Blamires (ed.), World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2006), pp. 211-214; 280-281; 286; 290-291.

“A Critical Response to Roger Griffin’s ‘Fascism’s new faces" in Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, and Andreas Umland, (eds.), Fascism Past and Present, West and East (Ibidem-Verlag, 2006), pp. 85-92.

“The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999,” in Harvey Simmons and Sergei Plekhanov (eds.), Is fascism history?: selected papers (Centre for International Security Studies, 2001).

LINKS

“The manipulative mythology of Israeli apartheid,” The National Post (February 26, 2009): http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/02/26/tamir-bar-on-the-manipulative-mythology-of-israeli-apartheid.aspx

Interview and book launch (York University, 2008) for Where Have All The Fascists Gone?: http://www.yorku.ca/ylife/2008/02-Feb/02-18/tamir-021808.htm

“Introduction” to Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, (Ashgate, 2007): http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9690&edition_id=10650