(1950 Routledge & Kegan Paul; paperback 1970, edited in unspecified ways, Sphere Paperback)
Could be a Jew in Crypsis. And/Or a Thoroughly Bamboozled Concerned Citizen.
Comfort was born in 1920; and so aged about 19 when Churchill declared war with his French colleague. Who's Who says he 'Refused military service', but I have no other information on that. As his Who's Who entry (for 1948) shows, he seems to have regarded himself as a poet and novelist. He went to Highgate School, north London, and in my informed opinion probably thought of himself as a Jew. He had an unusually mixed education, in Classics and Sciences, then Pathology and Surgery—I haven't attempted to decipher his memberships or evaluate his results. His PhD was in mollusc shell pigments (no detail), and a D.Sc. in gerontology; he is supposed (Pelican book blurb) to have written a standard work in gerontology, but if so the title has evaded me. As he was medically qualified, he might have become a psychiatrist, and seemed to have implied he was; certainly psychoanalytical expressions pop up in his work. His first book on sex, Sex in Society, seems to have been published in 1963.
He is best known ("is remembered by" is a journalistic staple) for The Joy of Sex of 1972 or 1973 in hardback and paperback—depending on the country. Since then, production details have emerged—including the couple, the photographer, I presume the artist who converted photos to drawings, and information on Comfort, such as his nose-picking habit. He seems to have changed his image from prim and scholarly to hairy and Jimmy-Savile-like. He divorced in 1973.
Comfort wrote a large number of poems, plays, novels, screenplays (see the Writers Directory 2000 extract), but, judging by his style in Authority and Delinquency, these must have been heavy going.
Comfort is sometimes described it terms such as 'a leading expert on the natural history of ageing and human sexuality'. I doubt if there's much truth in this. It's true he 'directed' some research groups. His underlying attitude seems to have been (from Nature and Human Nature 1966) '.. with six hundred teams clocking on daily in the USA alone to work on problems connected with ageing ... results should soon appear. ... [In] 1958, 1959 and 1960 the US Department of Health spent ... $4.5 M, $7.7 M, and $12.4 M on research projects in the field of age studies..' His books as far as I know quote from other authors, with nothing much in the way of critical enquiry. Medical training is mostly by rote. 'Gerontology' is something of a made-up neo-pseudo-specialisation, a composite of materials on people who have got old, rather than a study like embryology.
Comfort claimed variously to have been a pacifist and an anarchist, the latter being a common enough Jewish fake—as in Chomsky. This was a Spanish Civil War movement, supposedly successful; but if Chomsky supported it, clearly it was just another Jewish system for the credulous. Comfort's book on Authority is (see the exhaustive list) almost his only attempt at serious study of society. As a plausible guess, I'd expect Orwell's 1984 (of 1948) and Russell's first BBC Reith Lectures (delivered 1948, printed 1949) were significant seeds. And of course there was the end, or claimed end, of the Second World War, and the supposed invention of nuclear weapons, plus material on the 'Nazis' as the Jewish media always called them, the supposed horrors of concentration camps, the behaviour of Stalin (still alive), the 1948 war in Palestine. The UN, basically a Jewish-arranged outfit, was embarking on political activity.
I'd guess Authority and Delinquency was a flop—I can find little evidence of its making any impression, apart from in some feeble 'anarchist' apologetics. Archive.org has no downloadable version. Comfort himself could not have taken it very seriously—by 1970, he might have commented on both the Korean War and Vietnam War, and the supposed H-bomb, and the 1956 Hungarian revolution, but Comfort added nothing about them. A 1988 reprint has a short introduction, adding not much. Very little seems changed in the 1970 edition: the end-of-chapter bibliographies remain pre-1950 books; it was only by careful reading I could find anything suggesting updates. However, Comfort says he took out 'those passages which I now think were wrong'—and there may be many significant errors elided away. His successful sex book was a few years in the future; probably Authority and Delinquency was a pot-boiler aimed at a circle of his fans and promoted by the usual Jewish publicists.
The paperback blurb, I presume in the hardback version's jacket design too, sets the tone:
The government of a modern industrial state, backed by the police, the army, the media of communication, wields powers undreamed of one-hundred years ago.
The abuse of these powers by political opportunists, gangsters, psychopaths and authoritarian cliques pose a far more serious threat to society than the ordinary criminal.
This book is a pioneering attempt to apply the methods of criminology to the 'criminals in office'. It raises and answers a number of vitally important questions...
A few questions suggest themselves: even when these powers didn't exist, governments and other groups had powers, including making wars, famines, slavery, misery; is it in fact worse now, all in all? And: why did Comfort confine himself to governments?—what about organisations which span across many states? And: is there evidence that gangsters and psychopaths are worse than the common run of political schemers? And: did Alex Comfort in fact not only raise, but answer questions?
The abuse of these powers by political opportunists, gangsters, psychopaths and authoritarian cliques pose a far more serious threat to society than the ordinary criminal.
This book is a pioneering attempt to apply the methods of criminology to the 'criminals in office'. It raises and answers a number of vitally important questions...
The book has only two parts: I DELINQUENCY and II THE STATE, with part I about twice the length of II. Comfort's approach is unusual, in looking at psychiatry rather than (say) law, or education, or control of money. Comfort seems undeterred by the fact that psychologists can't even get satisfactory definitions of mental states and their pathologies. However, it does allow a lot of sinister-sounding descriptions to be deployed—'aggressive egocentrics', 'fantasy delinquents', 'paranoid psychotics', 'aberrant personalities', trail through Comfort's chapters—but 'criminals' or 'prostitutes' or 'bombers' or 'offenders' may sound worse than the actual people.
The United Nations as a new religion. This idea only occurred to me as I wrote this review, influenced by the idea that Jews invented both Christianity and Islam for their own purposes. After winning the Second World War, Jews had endless money to fund both a new religion, and large numbers of believers, housed luxuriously in their new buildings in New York. Compared with Rome's miserable defeat, and the desert Arabs, this was unbelievable opulence.
Comfort's introduction begins: In 1948 the Beirut conference of UNESCO initiated a large-scale international research team ... on the causes of international and intranational hatreds and tensions. ... [including] a study of the methods by which Fascism was established, and ... the presence of psychopathic or criminal elements in the government of states. ... followed by the inevitable unfocussed discursive comments on research, psychiatry, criminology, and the 'Unesco Tensions Project'.
Note Comfort's assumption that 'Fascism' involved psychopaths or criminals, the omission of Jews, and the conference site, in Lebanon in 1948, where Jews were starting wars—as usual. The UN deserves study; and of course has an intimate connection with Jews—Ashley Montagu, real name Israel Ehrenberg, in effect a founder of 'anti-racialism', being a typical specimen. 'Anti-racialism', obviously something Jews never believed in, was a plank of the UN, in effect part of its new religion, intended to appeal to all races, except perhaps whites and Asians. My reviews include Gunnar Dahlberg and Martin Gardner as just two writers of the 'anti-racialist' dogma; Gunnar Myrdal was another.
But as with other religions, Jewish control was never complete, and the equivalents of heretics and reformations and national orthodox variations would be expected. This 2011 forum exchange Understand UN and Israel looks at some few of the issues.
Comfort is very careful to distinguish 'delinquency' from 'crime'. I have to point out this is a typically Jewish trick, on the same lines as the Frankfurt School/New School of Social Research, 'Critical Theory', and all the rest of it. It's not defined well; Comfort's main example seems to be laws against homosexuality, and perhaps the death penalty—he seems unperturbed by huge wars, famines, mass thuggery, as his book title might suggest.
Alex Comfort on Crime:
Crime is the deliberate violation of a provision which the law upholds by threat of punishment. ... ‘The great leading rule of criminal law is that nothing is a crime unless it is plainly forbidden by law.’ [And much more].
Alex Comfort on Delinquency:
Delinquency ... is a name given by psychopathologists to those forms of behaviour disorder which manifest themselves in injury to others, or to society. [And much more]
There are difficulties here (why 'deliberate' violation? What about other types of legal structure? What about torts? What about conflicts of laws? ...). However, since Comfort's whole book is supposed to be about 'delinquency', the most important issue is deciding 'injury to others, or to society': who knows e.g. whether a murder might not benefit society? What if parts of 'society' are harmed, but others benefited? What about dead people; should they be considered? Comfort thinks crime is 'arbitrary' in its definition—rather in the way some student radicals described exams as 'random tests'.Crime is the deliberate violation of a provision which the law upholds by threat of punishment. ... ‘The great leading rule of criminal law is that nothing is a crime unless it is plainly forbidden by law.’ [And much more].
Alex Comfort on Delinquency:
Delinquency ... is a name given by psychopathologists to those forms of behaviour disorder which manifest themselves in injury to others, or to society. [And much more]
As an example of mass delinquency, here is Alex Comfort on British governments:
[p 29] 'One very characteristic—indeed, defining—character of persistent criminals is their baffling ineducability by experience... their behaviour is compulsive. There is an analogous ineducability in government, among the advocates of 'strong' policies. ... successive British 'strong' men (not all of one party) ... [repeated] in Palestine, Cyprus, India and Suez the identical attitudes and errors which lost them Ireland, nor Marxists from repeating the aberrations of the Czars. ... these are examples of stereotyped behavior ... performed for ... immediate emotional satisfaction ... [with] unjustified self-confidence, total disregard for others and the substitution of vague objectives such as prestige or revenge for concrete gain...'
All this is transparent Jewish bullshit. Note for example that the entirety of the Second World War is omitted—Jews and their collaborators won it, so why discuss it? Comfort says nothing on eastern Europe, Eisenhower, Stalin and mass murder in the Jewish USSR, nothing on the 'Great War' for that matter. It's comical that he accuses others of 'ineducability'.Comfort on 'Types of Leadership' and 'Aberrant Personalities':
[p 39] '... The idea of the 'collaborator' as a wartime phenomenon has no basis in fact—collaboration, in the derogatory sense, may originate in a masochistic delight in defeat, but a large part of it is the wartime counterpart of the normal executive status'
[p 42] '... the issues of foreign policy are increasingly imaginary—issues created so that they may be dramatised, crises requiring sensational acts of personal statesmanship, threats of an emotionally-satisfying kind to liberty or existence, the matter, in other words, of the film and comic book. ...'
[p 52] 'women prison offices—The terminal phase ... may perhaps be found in the records of the Belsen trial'
[p 54] 'A number of the fantasies of the first World War, such as the 'corpse factory' were actually realized by the combatants of the Second World War.'
[p 55] '... elderly company promoter ... suborned two thugs to decoy and murder a young man of whom he was jealous..' (No names or information; one of the very few presumably true stories)
[p 57] 'In extreme cases (Stalin and Beria's Russia and the CIA come to mind) one may end with a paranoid hard core, quite beyond policy control, flanked by a large force of borderline delinquents, informers, and double, treble or quadruple agents who may dismay their superiors by private enterprise spying or assassination. ...'
Comfort says odd things about what look like the Vichy area in France, and Quisling in Norway; but he may mean Jews in Poland—it's hard to know. His view of war declarations as dramas is true, though Comfort avoids comment on Jewish media control and its drumbeat of lies. He takes without the slightest effort of checking the propagandist versions of Germany. And Comfort seems to be taking the line, beloved of Jew apologists, that the USSR and CIA were out of control; it's a perfect cover for Jews in the USSR to pretend Stalin was untouchable, just as it's perfect cover for Kissinger and that type to pretend unawareness. His 'criminological investigation' is pure fantasy.
[p 39] '... The idea of the 'collaborator' as a wartime phenomenon has no basis in fact—collaboration, in the derogatory sense, may originate in a masochistic delight in defeat, but a large part of it is the wartime counterpart of the normal executive status'
[p 42] '... the issues of foreign policy are increasingly imaginary—issues created so that they may be dramatised, crises requiring sensational acts of personal statesmanship, threats of an emotionally-satisfying kind to liberty or existence, the matter, in other words, of the film and comic book. ...'
[p 52] 'women prison offices—The terminal phase ... may perhaps be found in the records of the Belsen trial'
[p 54] 'A number of the fantasies of the first World War, such as the 'corpse factory' were actually realized by the combatants of the Second World War.'
[p 55] '... elderly company promoter ... suborned two thugs to decoy and murder a young man of whom he was jealous..' (No names or information; one of the very few presumably true stories)
[p 57] 'In extreme cases (Stalin and Beria's Russia and the CIA come to mind) one may end with a paranoid hard core, quite beyond policy control, flanked by a large force of borderline delinquents, informers, and double, treble or quadruple agents who may dismay their superiors by private enterprise spying or assassination. ...'
Comfort on War and the Corps d'Élite
[Pp 63-68] '... Operatic attitudes such as 'unconditional surrender' or 'massive retaliations', derived from exhibitionist leaders, supersede intelligent thought. ... Problems can be shelved and replaced by action or by appropriate gestures. ... The genuine fear and hatred of war under these conditions cannot hide its satisfactions. ... This ambivalence makes the threat of war and the promise of war two of the most important political forces of our time. ... It is essentially the socially maladjusted civilian who is happiest in wartime—his problems are shelved... the criminal can redeem himself ... the paranoiac is at grips with an enemy whom others beside himself recognize and revile. The adjusted individual finds his entire life disorganized ... Neither the German exterminations of Jews, nor the Allied massacre of enemy civilian populations, ... the two most ... serious group-delinquent manifestations of the second World War, were spontaneous. .. Public sentiment against war is and was traditionally strong in Britain and America, and was by no means absent in Germany. Elaborate trickery was ... required to reconcile public opinion ... the Pearl Harbor incident was manipulated ... and the change in American public opinion between 1939 and 1941 was unquestionably due in part to ... government pressure. A marked exception was the forcing of war upon the British Government in 1939 by a spontaneous public reaction, [after] widespread suspicion of complicity between British right wing thought and Nazi ideology. ... The replacement of Hitler by another less paranoid leader ... might have produced a marked change in the pattern of history. ... There is documentary evidence relating most of the calculated and indiscriminate war crimes to the invention and planning of individual psychopaths in office. ... Etc etc.'
Again, Comfort exudes an inconsistent and unevidenced news-gawper view of what was, after all, a hugely serious issue. He has no interest in detail. The desperate sadness of a population, often not well-off, in rented housing, coming from an economic depression, forced onto rations and living in tents, buffetted by unending official propaganda, urged on by Jew puppets of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, is not part of Comfort's outlook—they are mere goyim, who should sacrifice their lives and possessions to the master race.
[Pp 63-68] '... Operatic attitudes such as 'unconditional surrender' or 'massive retaliations', derived from exhibitionist leaders, supersede intelligent thought. ... Problems can be shelved and replaced by action or by appropriate gestures. ... The genuine fear and hatred of war under these conditions cannot hide its satisfactions. ... This ambivalence makes the threat of war and the promise of war two of the most important political forces of our time. ... It is essentially the socially maladjusted civilian who is happiest in wartime—his problems are shelved... the criminal can redeem himself ... the paranoiac is at grips with an enemy whom others beside himself recognize and revile. The adjusted individual finds his entire life disorganized ... Neither the German exterminations of Jews, nor the Allied massacre of enemy civilian populations, ... the two most ... serious group-delinquent manifestations of the second World War, were spontaneous. .. Public sentiment against war is and was traditionally strong in Britain and America, and was by no means absent in Germany. Elaborate trickery was ... required to reconcile public opinion ... the Pearl Harbor incident was manipulated ... and the change in American public opinion between 1939 and 1941 was unquestionably due in part to ... government pressure. A marked exception was the forcing of war upon the British Government in 1939 by a spontaneous public reaction, [after] widespread suspicion of complicity between British right wing thought and Nazi ideology. ... The replacement of Hitler by another less paranoid leader ... might have produced a marked change in the pattern of history. ... There is documentary evidence relating most of the calculated and indiscriminate war crimes to the invention and planning of individual psychopaths in office. ... Etc etc.'
Comfort's 'Remedies' at the end of part II includes a few pages on 'Revolution' and on 'World Government'. The first is a trot through conventional histories of the last few centuries plus some 'anarchist' sidelights. It is descriptive, but of course excluding Jews, money, and secret fomentations of revolutions, and invasion and control of weak countries. (Surprisingly, 1956 Hungary gets a sentence or two). But his chapter is no help to anyone. Somewhat to my surprise, Comfort comes out against World Government, on the grounds that four powers of so-and-so's can't be expected to be helpful. He favours enlightened public opinion which is willing to stand firm.
How much did Comfort know about Jews? Possibly the 1950 first edition had information cut out by 1970, including anything unfavourable to Jews. But it's not credible he could have been completely ignorant. If books were plants and animals, Comfort's would be a weed which flourishes by blotting out other plants while dying itself; or an underwater creature squirting opaque clouds to obscure the view of others; or a frantic embedded parasite desperate not to be exposed to public view. No wonder his work is largely forgotten, with the exception of his books on sex. I wonder if he was tempted to include arty sketches of a rabbi having sex with a three-year old girl.