Comfort Alex - The duty to stand aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the wartime quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort

Not long after the last guns were fired, World War II became known as the Good Warthough we dont know who coined the phrase. It was always a strange way to refer to the worst slaughter in human history, but it quickly became commonplaceso much so that it has been used in the titles of book, films, in TV commercials, and a blizzard of articles, papers, and memoirs. By 1984, when Studs Terkel published his oral history of the periodlargely from the American point of viewhe had to add a touch of irony by putting his title in quotation marks: The Good War.

The phrase stuck for many reasons, the most obvious being the hugely repellent nature of the regimes on one side of the conflict. World War II was a righteous wara Crusade in Europe, according to the title of Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhowers wartime memoirbecause it ended the threat of world domination by Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism. Certainly, this was a good thingthe liberation of the Nazi death camps and the revelation of the vast crimes of Hitlers regime exposed mass murder and outright genocide on a scale that had never been practiced before. It is frightening to consider what the world would be like today if the Axis had won or even had fought the war to a stalemate.

But does that make World War II a good war?

Many of the leaders of the Allied war effort had supported or sympathized with one or another of the totalitarian regimes at various times before the German invasion of Poland. Some had quietly aided them or, as in Spain, actively undermined their opponents. Then there was the war itself: it changed the world by rewriting the maps of Europe and Asia, by introducing new technologies of death that have exposed enormous human populations to mass destruction, and by vastly expanding the political and economic elites expertise at surveillance, thought control, and police repression.

Some of the wars most terrible and enduring innovations, like area bombing of civilian populations, were devised not by Berlin but by democratic Britain. Napalm was developed at Harvard University and first deployed by the U.S. Army Air Force on Berlin in March 1944. The atomic bomb, under development by Germany in the early days of the war, was brought into being and inflicted on a civilian Japanese population by an American government already looking to cement its dominance in the coming postwar order. Other major powers got their hands on the technology as quickly as they could. Ever since, life on Earth has depended on the judgment and sanity of a small collection of politicians, dictators, and warlords, many of whom would more appropriately be standing trial for assorted crimes against humanity than occupying positions of power.

War is the health of the State, the American radical journalist Randolph Bourne wrote in the last months of World War I. Since World War II, war is more accurately the addiction of the State, as one or more nuclear powers have been pursuing some conflict (the word war appears less and less as an official designation) in some part of the world almost continuously. Above all, World War II produced an immeasurable expansion of the scope, pervasiveness, and ambition of the State itself.

On neither side of the conflict did governments stumble into this; from the start, all were focused on how the war would enable them to shape the world that followed it. Plenty of people outside centers of power analyzed the trend correctly at the time, but they were either dismissed as pacifists or defeatists or else kept their opinions to themselves. Nevertheless, they created a legacy that has complicated the task of making war in the decades since the Bomb was dropped and in a few cases has helped to stop or end wars.

This book is about two remarkable English writers, both of whom grasped the larger implications of their governments actions in World War II but took opposite sides in the debate over how critics of the State should respond. George Orwell was a more or less libertarian socialist who first opposed and then wholeheartedly joined the war effort. Alex Comfort was an anarchist and pacifist who distrusted his governments intentions and worked to expose the warfare on civilians that it initiated as part of the struggle to defeat Hitler.

Orwell went on to author two of the most widely read fictional works in the English language, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four . Today he is widely see as a kind of secular saint on account of his keen analysis of the misuse of language in politics and his unbending opposition to totalitarianism on both the left and the right. In the process, the inconsistencies, excesses, and tortuousness of some of his political writings have been glossed over or ignored. In his zeal to defeat fascism and, later, Stalinism, Orwell kept his misgivings about his own government largely to himself, rationalized some of them away, and lost no opportunity to tag its criticsincluding a young poet, physician, and biologist named Alex Comfortas objectively pro-German or pro-totalitarian.

Comfort is remembered today mainly as the author of an extremely successful 1972 book, The Joy of Sex . But in the 1940s he was rapidly building a reputation as both a talented writer and a radical critic of war and the State. An influential treatise he published in 1950, Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State: A Criminological Approach to the Problem of Power , attempts to answer the questions he had begun asking during the war: What sort of people order atrocities? Why do they so often find their way into positions of leadership? And how does the State create the conditions for them to flourish and to act? Like Nineteen Eighty-Four , the analysis in Authority and Delinquency grew partly out of Comfort and Orwells public quarrel during the war and the friendlier dialogue between them once it was over.