Where Have All the Fascists Gone?

253 Pages·2007·2.492 MB·English

by  Tamir Bar-On

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FASCISTS GONE?
This page intentionally left blank
Where Have All The
Fascists Gone?
TAMIR BAR-ON
George Brown College, Toronto, Canada
With a Preface by Roger Griffin
First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Tamir Bar-On 2007

Tamir Bar-On has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bar-On, Tamir
Where have all the fascists gone?
1. Conservatism - Europe 2. Fascism - Europe 3. Right-wing
extremists - Europe
I. Title
320.5'2'094
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bar-On, Tamir.
Where have all the fascists gone? / by Tamir Bar-On.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7154-1
1. Conservatism--Europe. 2. Fascism--Europe. 3. Right and left (Political science)
I. Title.
JC573.2.E85B37 2007
320.53'3094--dc22
2007001513

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-7154-1 (hbk)
Contents
About the Author vii
Foreword viii
Preface xvii
Acknowledgements xviii
Introduction 1
1 The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins:
The Right-Wing Roots 21
Ideological Origins: The Counter-Revolution Against 1789 23
The Post-War Years: Gradual Metapolitical Turn 29
2 The ENR’s Birth and Development in France: A New Right? 33
GRECE’s “Cultural War” Begins 35
The French New Right in the 1970s: Dark Days to Respectability 36
The “Hot Summer” in 1979 40
3 The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Opening to the Left 45
The Nouvelle Droite in the 1990s and Beyond: Fascism Revisited
or Mere Cultural Criticism? 54
The Second “Hot Summer” in 1993 54
4 The ENR and the Legacy of May 1968 – A Critical Turning Point 57
ENR Perceptions of May 1968: We Alone Carry The Flame 59
The ENR New Guard 67
The Context of French, European and International Politics in 1968 71
5 ENR Influences and Worldview: The Primacy of Metapolitics and
the “Right to Difference” 79
The Consistent Metapolitical Thread: A Break with the Old Right? 84
Traditional Politics of the “Masses” Versus the Metapolitics of the
“Philosopoher Kings” 86
The ENR’s Focus on the “Culture Wars”: A Stroke of Genius? 89
The ENR’s Other Faith: Anti-Egalitarianism or the “Right to Difference” 91
The ENR’s Nightmare: A Universal, Egalitarian World Society of
Happy Consumers 94
6 Ambiguities in the ENR Worldview 99
Cultural Metapolitics versus Traditional Politics 100
Paganism versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition 103
Intellectual Elitism versus Popular Social Change 104
vi Where Have All The Fascists Gone?
The “Conservative Revolution” versus New Left 105
Conservative versus Revolutionary View of the World 107
Scientism-Intellectualism versus Myth-Making 108
Simplistic Anti-Americanism versus Recycling of American Federalism 109
Pro-Third World Stance versus Pronounced Euro-Centrism 111
A Communitarian “Destiny” versus Intellectual Freedom 112
7 Interpreting the ENR 115
Classification of the Scholarly Literature 119
Position One: “Designer Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism”? 121
Position Two: A New Political Paradigm? 128
Position Three: Ideological Synthesis of Old and New Right? 132
Position Four: Confusion and Ambiguity 135
The Griffin-Taguieff Debate: Fascism or Post-Fascism? 136
A Note of Academic Caution 138
8 The Influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe and Beyond:
A Right-Wing International? 141
The Nouvelle Droite’s Pan-European Context 142
The Italian Nuova Destra: Fascism’s Kiss of Death? 144
The ENR in North America: The Isolated Case of Telos or a Broader
Cultural and Political Trend? 148
A Short History of Telos: The Drift from Left to Right 149
Telos Considers the Merits of the ENR Worldview: The 1993-4 Debates 151
Telos and the ENR Debates: Idiosyncratic or Broader Phenomenon? 157
Lessons of the ENR-Telos Rapprochement 160
9 The ENR’s Relationship to the Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascism 165
Divergences Between the ENR and Alain de Benoist and the
Front National (FN) 166
The Affinity Between the ENR and Extreme-Right:
The Anti-Egalitarian Ethos and the Obsessive Quest for Identity? 169
ENR Connections to Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascist Circles 172
10 Treason of the Intellectuals? 177
The Failure to Claim Historical Responsibility: Recycling the Demons
of the Past? 178
The Role of Modern Intellectuals: All Traitors? 180
ENR Intellectuals: The Reign of Interests or the Fires of Idealism? 184
Metapolitics, Apoliteia and Political Power 185
ENR Views of Human Nature and Political Power: Between Malleable
Man and “Eternal” Conflict 187
Conclusion 191
References 207
Index 217
About the Author
Dr Tamir Bar-On received his Ph.D. in political science from McGill University.
He currently teaches political science and sociology at George Brown College in
Toronto, Canada. Dr Bar-On has published numerous academic articles on neo-
fascism and terrorism, including in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia
(ABC-CLIO, 2006) and Fascism Past and Present, West and East (ibidem-Verlag,
2006).
Foreword
Another Face? Another Mazeway?
Reflections on the Newness and
Rightness of the European New Right
Roger Griffin
A Faceless Fascism?
Commenting on the social importance of speaking with a ‘good’ accent in Britain’s
class-obsessed society, George Bernard Shaw wrote in Pygmalion that ‘It is impossible
for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise
him.’ By the same token it appears that the subject of fascism is still so contentious
that it is impossible to make a pronouncement about it without exciting the wrath
or scorn of some other intellectual who feels almost personally affronted by the
position that has been adopted within the debate. Some prime examples emerged
from the heated controversy ignited in the pages of a German ‘forum discussion’
journal by my contention1 that fascism changed its ‘faces’ in the post-war period,
several direct descendants from interwar movements undergoing radical changes in
ideology and ‘style’, while one adopted the exclusively ‘metapolitical’ expression
now familiar as the European New Right (ENR).
To judge from the highly polarized reception of my own article, irreconcilable
ideological and methodological divides – too often exacerbated by bitter personal
enmities and soured communications – are bound to condition any serious discussion
of the ENR, which is in any case sufficiently polymorphous and polysemic to provide
grist to a number of rival interpretive mills.2 As long as this situation prevails, Tamir
1 Roger Griffin, ‘Fascism’s new faces (and new facelessness) in the “post-fascist”
epoch, and its threats to contemporary democracy’, Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik, 15.3 (2003). The
entire issue was republished as Andreas Umland, Werner Loh, Roger Griffin (eds.) Fascism
Past and Present, West and East (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006). For particularly vitriolic reactions
see especially the contributions of Bärbel Meuerer, Klaus Holz, Friedrich Pohlmann, and
James Gregor.
 It is worth noting that for Julius Evola, one of the principal influences on the ENR
especially in Italy and Russia, the ‘liberal’ human sciences are mired a priori in assumptions
about the nature of knowledge, history, and culture, which reflect the decadence of the modern
age since they operate ‘outside the Tradition’ of higher metapolitical knowledge of the world.
See in particular the introduction to his seminal pre-war text La Rivolta contro il mondo
moderno (1934), published by Inner Traditions in English as The Revolt against the Modern
World (1995), translated by Guido Stucco.
Foreword ix
Bar-On’s carefully crafted account of the ENR’s debt to ‘historic fascism’ in its
genesis – amazingly the first scholarly monograph to appear on the movement in
English by a non-fellow-traveller3 – and his documentation of the tenuous connections
to the conventional extreme right it retains to this day, are likely to alienate at least
three constituencies of readers, no matter how much they are appreciated elsewhere
in ‘mainstream’ academia.
The first is made up of intellectuals of a neo-Trotskyite or hard-line Socialist
persuasion who, unlike some of their Marxist fraternity, have resisted the temptation
to allow their visions of universal social justice to be lured onto the rocks of radical
right utopias by metapolitical sirens. Unencumbered by the methodological soul-
searching of liberals, they have no qualms about branding the New Right as neo-
fascist along with the neo-populism of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider, but would
place the forces of capitalist and anti-socialist reaction underlying the ENR’s anti-
racist, anti-nationalist, and anti-totalitarian sophistry at the centre of their analysis.4
Then there is a significant group of historians for whom the era of fascism
effectively died in April 1945, after which the species of politics in which armed mass-
parties carried out assaults on liberal democracy withered to such insignificance that it
no longer poses a threat to civil society. As a result their panoramic accounts of fascism
pay scant attention to post-war developments. Where they do take it into account, the
focus is either on movements that have aped Fascism or Nazism before their seizure
of power (e.g., the National Front in Britain), or electoral parties that attempted in vain
to disguise their continuing affiliation to them (e.g. Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano
and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands in Germany). Such historians5
remain unimpressed by the argument that one of fascism’s responses to defeat might
have been deliberately to change its spots by shedding its paramilitary, party-political
dimension, and charismatic style of leadership. This is because they assume these traits
to be definitional of fascism, along with the uniforms, cult of violence, spectacular
(‘religious’) mode of politics, attempted mass-mobilization, and rabid nationalism, all
of which are conspicuous by their absence in the ENR.6
3 For a thorough exploration of the ENR in Germany see Roger Woods, Germany’s New
Right as Culture and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which complements Bar-
On’s book with its main focus on the French New Right.
 See for example Nick Lowles’ article ‘The Men who are creating a new BNP’s
ideology’, Searchlight online, http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=templat
e&story=19 (accessed 13/04/2007).
 A number of such historians took part in the EWE debate.
6 e.g. Stanley Payne’s seminal A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (London: University
College London Press, 1995), Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004)
all of which briefly consider post-19 developments in fascism but portray the topic as
largely irrelevant, in the process omitting any reference to the ENR as one of its possible
manifestations. James Gregor addresses the putative neo-fascist identity of the nouvelle droite
in his The Search for Neofascism: the Use and Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 006), pp. 7-, but as part of such a scathing attack on
academics who find neofascism a useful political category that he can safely be counted as one
of the sceptics about the value of the historical investigation Bar-On offers here.