Eric Laursen

The Duty to Stand Aside (eBook, ePUB)

Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Duty to Stand Aside tells the story of one of the most intriguing yet little-known literary-political feuds-and friendships-in 20th-century English literature. It examines the arguments that divided George Orwell, future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Alex Comfort, poet, biologist, anarchist-pacifist, and future author of the international bestseller The Joy of Sex-during WWII. Orwell maintained that standing aside, or opposing Britain's war against fascism, was "objectively pro-fascist." Comfort argued that intellectuals who did not stand aside and denounce their own government's atrocities-in Britain's case, saturation bombing of civilian population centers-had "sacrificed their responsible attitude to humanity."

Later, Comfort and Orwell developed a friendship based on appreciation of each other's work and a common concern about the growing power and penetration of the State-a concern that deeply influenced the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly before his death in 1950, however, Orwell would accuse Comfort of being "anti-British" and "temperamentally pro-totalitarian" in a memo he prepared secretly for the Foreign Office-a fact that Comfort, who died in 2000, never knew.

Laursen's book takes a fresh look at the Orwell-Comfort quarrel and the lessons it holds for our very different world-in which war has been replaced by undeclared "conflicts," civilian bombing is even more enthusiastically practiced, and moral choices between two sides are rarely straightforward.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: AK Press
• Altersempfehlung: ab 12 Jahre
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. Juni 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781849353175
• Artikelnr.: 52428939

Autorenporträt

Eric Laursen is an independent journalist, activist, and commentator. He is the author of The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan (AK Press, 2012), a BookList Editor's Choice selection; and co-author of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull Press, Spring 2010), which tells the story of the 2008 economic meltdown in text-and-graphics format. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Nation, The Village Voice, In These Times, Z Magazine, The Indypendent, HuffingtonPost.com, and The Arkansas Review. He is currently writing a biography of Alex Comfort. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

Inhaltsangabe

I. Introduction
II. A Clash of Temperaments
III. A Public "Set-To"
IV. A Disagreement in Verse
V. Finding Common Ground
VI. The Sociopathic State
VII. The "Snitch List"
VIII. The Nonconformist and the Duty-Bound
IX. Conclusion
Index