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{"id":22334,"date":"2018-04-27T18:30:26","date_gmt":"2018-04-27T12:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/?p=22334"},"modified":"2018-04-27T15:59:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-27T09:59:31","slug":"orwell-v-comfort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2018\/04\/orwell-v-comfort\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell v. Comfort"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Eric Laursen\u2019s forthcoming\u00a0\u00a0The Duty to Stand Aside<\/em><\/a> provides an intimate glimpse into British debates about Allied tactics during World War II. He focuses on the \u201cwartime quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orwell needs no introduce. Comfort is best known for his Joy of Sex<\/em>, published long after the war. During the war, Comfort worked as a physician but we better known as a poet, a member of the \u201cNew Romantics\u201d circle, and a vocal pacifist. Orwell and Comfort clashed publicly about the war, but carried on a more nuanced private correspondence.<\/p>\n

After the war, \u201cComfort began to develop an argument that connects his anarchist and pacifist writings of the 1940s with his later writings on sex: ending racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, and other scourges of existing society was closely connected with cultural and interpersonal struggles against repressive sexual practices, gender, and family patterns.\u201d Communal living would provide an alternative to what he describes as \u201cthe sociopathic state.\u201d<\/p>\n

The big revelation of the book is that Orwell included Comfort in a list of pro-Soviet British intellectuals and artists. He described Comfort (unfairly, Lauren thinks) as \u201cSubjectively pro-German during war, appears temperamentally pro-totalitarian.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flash point for their public debate was the Allied practice of attacking civilians. Laursen estimates that \u201csome six hundred thousand European civilians were killed and well over a million seriously injured from the British and American air raids, while 7.5 million were left homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the raids didn\u2019t accomplish their aim, to demoralize the people of the Axis powers and to provoke revolt among working classes. The latter were the deliberate target. Laursen quotes \u201cBritish air officials\u201d saying that air raids should focus on \u201cthat section of the population which, in any country, is least mobile and most vulnerable to a general air attack \u2013 the working class.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"