Note
Between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony. It is this utter opprobrium that Alex Comfort defines as criminal lunacy, condemns with the utmost vigour, demanding the “condign punishment of the men who are responsible”.
Source: War Commentary, 25th August 1945
Now in, Alex Comfort, Writings against Power and Death, Freedom Press, London, 1994.
We have just witnessed an act of criminal lunacy which must be without parallel in recorded history. A city of 300,000 people has been suddenly and deliberately obliterated and its inhabitants murdered by the English and American governments. It is difficult to express in coherent language the contempt and shame which we feel. That this thing should be done in our name makes us feel physically bespattered with the filth of it.
Even a public slowly and deliberately accustomed by propaganda to acquiesce to irresponsible murder is stricken by it. We have dissented and protested in the past, but the time for dissent and protest are over. The men who did this are criminal lunatics.
Unless this final atrocity is irrevocably and unquestionably brought home to them by public opinion, we have no claim to be human beings, we have no right to condemn any excess of the past or the future, we do not deserve any vestige of freedom.
No alliance of nations fostering such pretensions has ever covered itself with such utter disgrace. The sickening cant about indiscriminate bombardment, the lies about liberty and justice, have appeared for what they are — the restoration of moral order for what it is, a death's head. This action is not to be judged by men — men will be judged by it, as they were judged by the atrocities of Dachau: the only question that will be asked is — 'Did you resist it to your utmost?'
One need only consider how last Monday's announcement would have affected the nation if it had been made in 1937 to realise how profoundly our responsibility has degenerated, and how much of the practice of fascism has been sold to us since then. An endless iteration of enemy brutality has been used to acclimatise us to crimes which have now reached the magnitude of this massacre.
The only remedy which is possible to us, if we are to remain human beings and not be lepers in the eyes of every decent person and every period of history, is the condign punishment of the men who are responsible. Not one political leader who has tolerated this filthy thing, or the indiscriminate bombardment of Germany which preceded it, should be permitted to escape the consequence of what he has done.
Apart from the fantastic irresponsibility of scientists who are prepared to put such a weapon into the hands of our present rulers, the responsibility for seeing that no political or military figure associated with this action shall be permitted to remain rests upon us. It is high time that we tried our own war criminals, or history will rightly and justly try and condemn us to permanent hatred and contempt.