Big and Strong as a Palm Tree

The Afro-futurist jazz guru Sun Ra (1914-1993) once remarked that "There are other worlds they have not told you about!" With the spirit of Sun Ra in mind, I begin my blogging experience. Get ready for a jazzy voyage in many directions!

I am a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada). My name in Hebrew means "big and strong as a palm tree." I reside in Toronto, one of the truly great multicultural cities of the planet. I am a Toronto Footbal Club (FC) fan! I played varsity soccer for The McGill Redmen for three seasons back in the 1990s! Like Albert Camus, I insist that football (soccer) taught me lots that I know about morals and obligations in life. I am also the author of Where Have All The Fascists Gone?(Ashgate, 2007).

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9690&edition_id=10650

I am working on a second book, Modernism and the European New Right (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011). Both works explore the attempt of neo-fascist intellectuals in Western Europe after 1968 to revitalize fascist thought in the age after the official defeats of Nazism and Fascism in 1945. The second more precisely examines the views of modernity of European New Right intellectuals, which have been accused by liberal and left-wing critics of recreating a "fascism with a human face."

Although I graduated with a Ph.D. from Montreal's McGill University, I am no traditional intellectual. I also write journalistic articles and poetry. Writing in different realms allows me to connect with different parts of my soul. I also want to have a positive impact on the world beyond the walls of the academy. I have recently published a critique of Israeli Apartheid Week in The National Post with the aim of finding a just two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/02/26/tamir-bar-on-the-manipulative-mythology-of-israeli-apartheid.aspx


As a result of this article, the Dave Rutherford Show in Calgary interviewed me for 20 minutes on March 6, 2009. My poem "Exile" will be published shortly in The Toronto Quarterly (no. 3).

Exile

They say that exile ended in 1948,
The birth of the state,
The springtime of its hopes.
Now we in the diaspora
Wandering in the desert for forty years,
Wondering when it will end?
But should I return,
Would I not again be an exile in my own land?
Would I not long for the dream palaces of Granada,
Or the azure-domed synagogue at Kensington Market?
Would I not lament what the state had become,
The new exiles in our midst caught by barbed wires?
Exile is deep pain like being pulled from the roots of an ancient tree.
Exile is the exodus of freedom.
(Tamir Bar-On, The Toronto Quarterly, 3, 2009)

In Big and Strong as a Palm Tree, I will offer you my academic, journalistic, and poetic writings. Moreover, I will hopefully tell the stories that are not told by our mainstream media outlets. Too often we sell ourselves short in liberal democracies by not asking for a more robust, vibrant exchange of ideas between political foes. I happen to believe that a good newspaper or Internet site is one that does not slavishly follow a dogma, but asks hard questions and makes competent arguments. I relish debates, even with my political opponents. I hope to engender critical skills training in readers by asking tough questions of all political movements on the right, left, or beyond.

I also happen to believe that we can grow spiritually as a human species. That we must heal the world, even as we see it decaying. That love can be more powerful than hate. That a clash of civilizations is not inevitable. That we can help build bridges between friends, lovers, communities, workers, classes, nations, cultures, religions, men and women, believers and so-called unbelievers, city and countryside, gay and straight people, Jews and Arabs, and hundreds of other divisions.

I do hope that this blog, in its small way, helps inch us forward to a new consciousness. This consciousness can lead us towards a more open exchange of ideas, the flowering of democracy here and beyond, and genuine peace and social justice. Like Dostoyevsky, we must understand that no political cause can ultimately legitimize the anguished cries of one suffering child. And like modern Greens, I would argue that our technological, capitalist civilization cannot sustain itself. We must start to slow down if the planet is to survive. If we would like to create more sustainable human relationships, we must supersede a mercantile mentality and its attendant institutions. Marxism might have died in its crude permutations, but the questions it posed about social injustice will always remain. No civilized political society can neglect the dignity of free thinkers.

Tamir Bar-On