Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946)

Today Alex Comfort (1920-2000) is best known for his popular sex guide. The Joy of Sex. Few of the readers of that book would know that during the 1940s he was an anarchist pacifist war resister, as well as a noted poet and novelist. His anarchism was rooted in the notion of individual resistance and disobedience to whathe, as a medically traineddoctor and scientist. regarded as the mass insanity of war. Thefollowing excerpts are reprinted[rom his? 946 pamphlet, Peace and Disobedience, originally published as a Peace News Pamphlet, later reprinted in Against Power and Death: The Anarchist Articles and Pamphlets of Alex Comfort (London: Freedom Press, 1994), ed. David Goodway. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of Nicholas Comfort and the Comfort estate.

THOSE WHO TOOK THEIR STAND AGAINST the war because they believed in human liberty and responsibility and recognized the utter irrelevance of military victory in a conflict of such a character, were opposed with the argument that the road not only to personal survival but to international amity and national self-realization lay through this conflict, that individual disobedience was impotent against organized repression—that even ifwe were walking on corpses, at least we were walking towards the comity of nations.

Every one of those predictions has proved false. We are confronted with a certainty of renewed war even more imminent than it was in 1935, with a world equally divided between rapacious and mendacious gangs, with the knowledge that the technique and conception of the repressive state must be fought all over again at the level of personal resistance where it is vulnerable, by those individual and personal methods of disobedience which are the only weapons effective against it, the only revolutionary ideology which does not carry in itself the seeds of a post-revolutionary tyranny. The democratic allies have disgraced themselves more completely in the sight of historical libertarianism than any coalition which ever uttered a pretension or broke a promise. They have reduced indiscriminate bombardment to a fine art. They have replaced famine, destruction and repression with repression, destruction and famine. They have repeated in detail actions which differ only from those of the fascists in that we are responsible for them. They have debased the currency of humanity to an even lower level than have the fascists themselves, because they have debased it in the name ofhuman liberation. Fascism was the conscious and voluntary adoption ofthat irrationalism which lies at the root of all irresponsible societies, and the practice ofthat irrationalism is no less inevitable because we choose to repudiate it. The savagery of the Japanese towards their prisoners was in itself a less serious social phenomenon than the savagery ofthe Allies towards the population of Japan, for if the first was the product of the zoo, the second, like Belsen and Maidenek [Nazi death camps), was the product of the lunatic asylum...

The conclusion of the anarchist theory of history [that) barbarism must be resisted by individual disobedience, and that all other forms of resistance to it are self-defeating, has been vindicated in every occupied country...

It has been ably argued by (George) Orwell and others that the military techniques and weapons ofa period tend to dictate its social structure—the longbow and the hand grenade make for libertarianism; the atom bomb and the aeroplane, weapons which cannot be manufactured by a body smaller than a state, for a tyrannical order, because of the relative concentration of the power of making and using them in the hands of the rulers. It has been argued that against tyranny equipped with nuclear energy no resistance is possible. Orwell foresees a stable order of tyranny based on these weapons. But it is an essential feature ofthe new ways ofwar that they are indiscriminate, and can be used only against a community—they are weapons with few ideological possibilities. Armed revolution cannot succeed, but armed revolution, being based upon power, has never succeeded in producing anything but tyranny. The very states which are able to make and use atomic weapons are singularly vulnerable, by their very complexity, to the attacks of individual disobedience, and the events of the war 1 anny against individual recalcitrants are precisely what they were in 2000 BC—terrorism, mass execution, political police, propaganda. The contentions of anarchism have been strengthened, not weakened, by the advent of new weapons.

It seems thatthe forcible destruction of centralized power, the chief preoccupation of other generations of libertarian thought, is becoming less and less our responsibility. Those institutions now constitute a far more serious threat to themselves than any revolutionary movement. The history of libertarianism is the history of alternation between the fear of stable tyranny which must be subverted and the conviction that tyrannies contain the matter of their own violent end. It is perfectly true that no society since the fall of Rome has contained so much historically explosive material. Megalopolitan government is utterly irresponsible, it displays an irrevocable tendency to war, and its cities are increasingly indefensible. Its irresponsibility runs parallel with its lack of cohesion, its militarism with its vulnerability. In such an order war ceases to be a means of upholding the status quo—the new feature of war in the last fifty years is that it tends to subvert all existing social organizations, to sweep away its makers rather than to maintain their power. ..

We have three duties: to resist, to educate and to establish and encourage mutual aid communities. By these means we may make possible survival ifwestern society collapses, the ability to resist if tyranny succeeds it, and the readiness of the people if reform can be gained by compromise. Resistance and disobedience are still the only forces able to cope with barbarism, and so long as we do not practice them we are unarmed.

Against this background, we are faced with the prospect of conscription. That means that our own war has not yet begun. We have seen it begun, tentatively and haltingly but bravely, by the resistance movements of all countries. We have one enemy, irresponsible government, against which we are committed to a perpetual and unrelenting maquis. Every government that intends war is as much our enemy as ever the Germans were... Wars are not deplorable accidents produced by the perfidy of degenerate nations—they are the results of calculated policy: we will set them outside the bounds of calculation. Atrocities are not only the work of sadists—your friends and relatives who butchered the whole of Hamburg were not sadists—they are the result of obedience, an obedience which forgets its humanity. We will not accept that obedience. The safeguard of peace is not a vast army, but an unreliable public, a public that will fill the streets and empty the factories at the word War, that will learn and accept the lesson of resistance. The way to stop atrocities is to refuse to participate in them.

The weapon of irresponsibility today, the weapon that has characterized the collapse of every megalopolitan military state, is military conscription, the final impudence of the demand that men should put their bodies and consciences in hands that they may not question, and over which they have no control. The maquis fights for a cause which he can lose but cannot vitiate—it cannot be taken from him: the soldier fights for a cause which, because it lies outside his hands, is forfeit from the day that he obeys. We will be the maquisards of the peace; not by violence but by disobedience, not by terrorism but by humanity we will utterly destroy the conscription upon which the military plans of Great Powers are based. We will see that when next they attempt to make this structure bear their weight, it will precipitate the adventurers into the fiilth where they deserve to be.

The relevance of pacifism has never stood higher, ifwe wish it. Political leaders have never looked smaller or more despicable in the eyes of the world public than the brawlers and oil-hunters ofthe ‘United Nations’ sitting and manoeuvring for position among the ruins and starvation which they have created, a policyless caucus of tyrants who lack even the stature oftyranny. The atomic bomb has brought home to increasing numbers of the public at large that tyranny is not a greater evil than war, because war itselfis an instrument oftyranny on the largest scale. The will to resist is there—it is essential that the conception of a pacifism of personal objection, directed to the salvaging of one’s own conscience, should be replaced by a pacifism able to canalize and provide support for the ordinary man’s resistance to the destruction ofhis own rights and life—the resistance which makes conscription necessary...

It is possible that resistance towar will lead ustothe necessity of resistance to a tyranny other than that of our own government, which will be costly and destructive. But we can accept it in the knowledge that the results of such a resistance are historically permanent, and that its cost in life and suffering would be infinitely less than that of a renewed national war.

Objection is not enough. The objector, particularly the religious objector, is politically irrelevant because he is chiefly interested in safeguarding his own conscientious objection to one aspect of state irresponsibility. You do not want objection, you want resistance, personal and national, organized and individual, ready to adopt every means short of violence to destroy and render useless the whole mechanism of conscription. It is not enough to secure the immunity and the support of religious believers and a politically conscious minority. The opposition of the ordinary man to militaty service must be canalized. He will not stand up against the machinery of governments and penalties, with the knowledge that his wife and children are hostages, unless he has the consciousness ofthat powerful, ifinvisible, support which the European resistance movements gave to the unpolitical man in his opposition to the Germans. Men will defY conscription in defence of their own lives and homes, against military adventurers, if they knowthat there is' someone to support them. They will act out of an intuitive and thoroughly unpatriotic love of freedom, the sentiment which makes conscription necessary in the first place. The answer to conscription, in England and in every country of the world, is a resistance movement which does not confine itself to anarchists or Quakers, and which asks few political credentials of its members. We have no right to ask whether a man is a draft-dodger or a high-minded idealist—he has the right to reject conscription, and we must uphold that right. The time for public protest is running out—it is no good protesting against men like Himmler, Harris or the American race fanatics: they must be resisted. It is by taking the offensive that pacifism will become politically relevant. It seems to me that we have been too long intoxicated by the semblance of a democracy which we knew to be unreal. It is weighted and we cannot win, but we continue to pay lip-service to it. The organizers ofconscription are as much our enemies as a foreign invader, and deserve no better treatment. The political relevance of pacifism lies in its willingness to substitute resistance for objection, and it seems to me that the time for such substitution is riper from one day to the next.

Peace News Pamphlet, 1946