Smart and Lazy...Mostly Lazy

The writer Jerry Pournelle writes that conventional wisdom among the military used to judge officers by two variables: by smart and stupid, and by active or lazy. Of course it's an oversimplification, but I have found using those variables is a good rule of thumb.
The list would be like this:

Stupid and Active

Stupid and Lazy

Smart and Active

Smart and Lazy

The active and stupid are to be eliminated. That combination is so obviously dangerous it doesn't really need to be explained. But if it does, let's just say they'll get many men killed in battle, or even in training.

Lazy and stupid are the heart of the army, the kind who work their way up from the bottom. They are most of the officer corp. They aren't dangerous, because they want to do as little as possible.

Smart and active make good staff officers, but aren't to be promoted, and they are never to be given supreme command. They're always coming up with bright ideas, but that doesn't mean they're good ones.

To my surprise, the highest command goes to the smart and lazy. They come up with good ideas, but get others to carry them out.

As best as I've been able to discover, it was Count von Bismarck who discovered these variables, when he realized the two most importance things in soldiers were their intelligence and their propensity to take action. Things got simplified over the years to "smart" or "stupid" and "active" or "lazy."

I was a bit surprised, since I'm smart and lazy. My idea of a good time is to sit in the backyard in a lawnchair as the sun goes down, smoke my pipe and watch my pug (who is very stupid and very active) run in circles. Or to spend an hour soaking in a bath. My idea of sports is fishing. Yet I'd make it to the top in the military? Hard to believe. But then, I did try to build a robot when I was 12, figuring if I succeeded it could do my housework.

I operate on the assumption the military, having been around for thousands of years, knows what it's talking about. Since human nature doesn't change, you can take those variables and apply them to other fields. What about politics? If you do, you'll encounter something pretty scary.

George Bush was stupid and active. And as the years of his Presidency went by, he got dumb and dumber. Is this what political power does to people? Make them stupid, make them think they can get away with things no one in his right mind would think he could get away with? Make them lose their conscience? I am reminded of the saying, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I think a better saying is, "Power intoxicates, and immunity corrupts." Bill Clinton became stupid and active, and almost got booted out of the Presidency.

As for Barry Soetero, he is also stupid and active. As hard as it is too believe, he's worse than Bush.

Such stupidity and activity has lead to the U.S. being involved in six wars, and the severe damaging of the economy.

Apparently almost all politicians are stupid and active. That's why they cause so many problems. An example of a man who is smart and lazy (lazy as a politician) is Ron Paul, who is an exemplar of what every politician should be.

Hitler, for example, was a consummate politician, one who was described as half-genius, half-insane. Half-genius and half-insane makes him stupid and active, so it's not surprising when he was in the military his commanding writers wrote of him that they could not detect in him any qualities for being an officer. Although people think he never made it beyond corporal, he really never made it beyond private, first class.

I once wrote an article a few years ago about what I would do if I was the King of America. I'd gamble, chase women, drink wine, grow roses, and do several other things, almost none of them political. I'd get rid of most laws and let the free market take care of itself. In other words, I'd actualize my smart and lazy self even more than it already is. And I'd make a good king.

The problem with politics is that it always attracts the active, whether they're smart or stupid. The public is the one that pays for their activity. If we have to have politicians, we need lazy ones. The best, of course, would be lazy and smart.

Don't look at me, though. I'm not interested. I am, of course, much too smart – or is it lazy? – to fall for the con job known as politics.

Death by a Bazillion Little Lizard Bites

Fairy tales, fables and myths have outlasted almost every other kind of story, and certainly will outlast heavy tomes written by Ph.D.s from Ivy League universities, because they're easy to understand, and make their point simply and clearly. Here's an example:

This is a story with which everyone is familiar, even unto a four-year-old child: a village is menaced by a dragon, so the hero rides out, slays it and saves the village.

True, it's a simple story, but, in different versions, it's the basis of many stories all over the world. Look at the great Japanese film, The Seven Samuri: the village is menaced by bandits, so the villagers hire samuri to slay the attackers. Village, Dragon, Hero. See? Simple!

Now imagine what people would think of this story: the kingdom is under attack by what the inhabitants think is a dragon. None understand the reason the dragon is attacking them is because the king, his advisors and their soldiers have been kicking the dragon for 50 years.

So the king sends his soldiers out to kill the dragon. What they find is not a dragon, but some tiny and not very dangerous lizards. Still, the king uses up his soldiers and the kingdom's wealth chasing the lizards all over the world so they can kill them in order to impose democracy on them.

At the same time, the king and his advisors throw open the borders of the kingdom so tens of millions of lizards can move into the kingdom and eat up the kingdom's wealth, impoverishing the people. The lizards want to kill or expel the people in the kingdom, so they can take over the land, somehow thinking the wealth will still be there even after they've devoured every last scrap of it.

Could not even the youngest of children see though this? Of course they could.

The moral: the real attacks in any kingdom come from the inside, from the king and his advisors, not from the tiny little lizards outside, that everyone has magnified into being a dragon.

The Bravery of the Yappy Little Dog

When I was in college and driving a taxi, I learned quickly that whenever a Little Old Lady invited me into her house or apartment and then immediately closed the door behind me ("Ha ha! Now he's trapped!"), it meant I was going to be forced to drink a glass of buttermilk, eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, to be washed down with the buttermilk), or carry a broken motorized wheelchair – equipped with 200 pounds of dead batteries – outside to my car.

Once, while trapped in an apartment full of flowered slipcovers and potpourri, a very fat cat waddled over and pawed at one shoe until he pulled the loops out of the laces. Then, after repeating the process on my other shoe, wandered away, leaving me standing there with two partially-untied shoes. I was in awe of this awesomely talented cat. "Oh, he does that to everyone," the Little Old Lady explained, as if that made it okay that the cat had mangled my shoelaces. If he had retied them, then I would have really been impressed.

Another time, two of those little yappy dogs, the ones the size of softballs, charged over and latched onto my pant cuffs (one dog on each cuff), growling and tugging all the while. I lifted one leg off the ground, with a dog attached and dangling in the air, still growing. "Oh, he does that to everyone," the Little Old Owner told me. It was like being attacked by tiny little canine versions of the twins in The Matrix Reloaded.

If I had given those dogs a smack, they would have run yipping away, probably to hide under the owner's bed. Instead I just stood there with the dogs attached, praying there would be no buttermilk involved.

Those little yappy dogs remind me of armchair-warrior chickenhawks who write abusive emails to me. People like them never say anything to me when I'm in what we hacker-types call "the meatbody." But when they hide behind an email address, safe a thousand miles away, then it's "grr! snarl! woof! woof! grr! snarl!" One guy even made fun of my squinty (but cute) little eyes, as if that has any relevance to anything.

To me it is curious that these people think they are brave and patriotic, and I am a coward and a traitor. I think it's the other way around. If I was to define their beliefs in a few sentences, it would be these:

"It is patriotic to not criticize whatever our leaders do during wartime. It is brave to join the military and not question what they are doing. We should go where we are sent, and if we have to, fight and die. We must stand as One."

That is not my definition of bravery or patriotism. It's my definition of fascism. Here are some of Mussolini's writings: "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people."

And here one is probably his most famous sayings: "Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people."

The late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who has influenced me more than I can possibly say, wrote in his magnum opus, Leftism Revisited...that there is a continuum with anarchy on the Right and communism, socialism, democracy and fascism on the Left. Even though most people think fascism and national socialism (Nazism) are "Right," they are not. They're Left.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn referred to himself as a (Catholic) "anarchist of the far Right." He also wrote, with absolute accuracy, that "'I' comes from God, and 'We' from the Devil" (as in "My name is Legion, for there are many of us").

"We" is the one word that best describes the Left. "We" as the State, a nation of people all thinking and acting as One. But just as the body is ruled by the head, a nation is always ruled by a small group of people who lead the sheeple around, often to their deaths. The blind leading the blind, as the saying goes.

The Devil as "We" explains some of the bizarre happenings of the 20th century, such as brave, patriotic Germans and Russians slaughtering each other at the Battle of Stalingrad, in which more soldiers were killed than America has lost in all of its wars combined.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn points out, and I agree completely, that religion is on the Right, and atheism on the Left. There are atheists and agnostics on the Right, but all are sympathetic to religion. The rabid hatred of all religion exists only on the Left. (This is one of the reasons why Objectivists do not understand that Ayn Rand's militant atheism puts her squarely and permanently in the Leftist camp). Both Hitler and Stalin were atheists. Hitler intended to not only eradicate Judaism, but also Christianity, which he called a "Jewish religion."

When religion moves over to the Left it loses all legitimacy. It cannot support the "We" of the Devil and call itself true religion. A combination of fascism and this false religiousness leads to "God and Country" and "Gott mit uns." People think such combinations are patriotic and Godly, but in reality it's Satanic. Religion and the Left are absolutely and eternally opposed to each other, no matter if you call the Left communism, socialism, fascism...or democracy.

If you think the above is not backed up by the Bible, remember that Jesus never said a good word about the State, and insulted and abused its minions. His opponents – the combination of supporters of the State, pseudo-intellectual "elites" and the perverters of the "organized religion" of his day – are the ones he referred to as murderers, liars, thieves and hypocrites. And his death – like Socrates – was at the hand of the State, the mob, the "We."

The same kind of people who existed in his time exist in ours. The same kind of trouble they caused then they are still causing now. Today they are Leftist empire-building neo-pagans creating amoral philosophies out of their heads, ignoring a few thousand year's work of Rightist theologians and philosophers who spent their lives discovering Natural Law – laws built into human nature and the universe. An example: all empires collapse.

Every primitive tribe in history has called itself "the People" or "the Human Beings." Every one of them has believed God has smiled on them, only them, and no one else. When these tribes get big enough to be called nations, they still believe that God smiles on them, only them, and no one else. No matter how much they break His laws by murdering and stealing (even if it's justified as war), they still think He smiles on them and protects their soldiers. All it needs is just a little prayer to push things along.

I don't believe in these ideas one iota. German soldiers marched into battle with "Gott mit uns" inscribed on their belt buckles. Not surprisingly, these pagan talismans didn't do a bit of good to stop artillery and machine gun rounds.

Patriotism can be Rightist, to support liberty and freedom. It can also be used by Leftism, to support the State, which always claims it is the same thing as the country. True patriotism is supporting freedom in your country, not slavery. The false patriot supports the "We," the State.

Obviously there are Christians, Jews and Muslims who sincerely and completely believe that God supports them, has given them eternal title to some speck of land, and will slaughter the other as apostates. Personally, I think they're all nuts, and I plan on staying out of the whole fight. After a thousand or so years of war you'd think those involved might get it though their heads they're doing something wrong.

Why do people have this eternal tendency to be collectivist, to be, as Norman Mailer has claimed, naturally fascist? Is it the desire for security, even at the expense of liberty? If it is, it won't work. Benjamin Franklin was absolutely correct when he wrote, "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." And they'll lose both liberty and safety.

The "security" of the State leads only to chaos. As Proudhon wrote, "Liberty is the mother, not daughter, of order." For one thing, the "security" of the State leads to a crushing, Brazil-type bureaucracy, in which everyone is reduced to a cog – and, worse, a slave, living eternally in fear.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, again in Leftism Revisitedwrote that, "viewed from a certain angle, we are all subject to two basic drives: identity and diversity." Identity he calls "a herd instinct, a strong feeling of community that regards another group with hostility." He believes "identity and its drives tend to efface self, tend towards an 'usness' in which the ego becomes submerged." This quote helps to explain humanity's natural desire for fascism.

Erich Fromm, a confused socialist with occasional flashes of brilliance, wrote in his book, Escape from Freedom, that people will, in order to escape the (Rightist) burden of freedom and responsibility, even turn to (Leftist) dictators. They will bring their freedom to them and lay it at their feet. "The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton," he writes, echoing Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self."

In the famous "Grand Inquisitor" scene in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has the Inquisitor say, "For centuries...we have been wrestling with...freedom, but now it is ended and over for good." He was commenting on the fact that many people want to give up their freedom to "authority." The Inquisitor goes so far as to claim, "they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet."

The quotes above is why "We" is the Devil. And the "We" are always led around by their noses by a tiny group who use, to quote Dostoevsky again, "miracle, mystery and authority" to wow the masses.

If patriotism can be used for Rightist or Leftist purposes, so can courage. Contrary to what most people think, courage is not rare and almost priceless. It's common, and built into us. Everyone has the ability to be brave, and everyone can easily be a hero.

When bravery is used in the defense of freedom and liberty, it is always opposed to the State. When bravery is used in defense of slavery, it is always used to support the State. (When I saw "State" I don't mean the always-minimal government based on Natural Law; I mean what is created when government ignores the Law and starts making up fake "laws" on its own.)

One subset of the Leftist pseudo-brave is the Little Yappy Dog. These are the armchair-warrior chickenhawks who avoid military service but expect others to serve in their place. They yap and yap and yap, gang up on those who disagree with them, and call them traitors, cowards and Leftists. The irony is that the Little Yappy Dog is the traitor, the coward and the Leftist. And when kicked, they always turn tail and run. If they have beds, they'd hide under them.

The Militarization of the Police

About 20 years ago in my hometown the police quietly and at night pulled up about 50 marijuana plants from a woman's backyard. They bagged them and disposed of them however the police dispose of such things.

The next morning an outraged elderly woman called the police and complained some hooligans had sneaked on her property the night before and pulled up every one of her okra plants. And then absconded with them!

The police were embarrassed, but came clean and admitted their mistake. They compensated her for her plants, the newspapers had a good laugh, and the whole thing was forgotten.

According to Google, marijuana and okra bear a strong resemblance to each other.

I assume the police were sending a message to whomever they thought was the grower: we know who you are, so quit what you are doing, or next time you will get in big trouble. Call if a friendly warning.

That common sense among the police is evaporating.

Now imagine how that raid might have gone down today: cops dressed in ninja-suits, with machine guns, crashing through the woman's doors and windows in a pre-dawn raid, throwing concussion grenades throughout the house and macing and tazering and cuffing the poor old lady after tossing her on her floor from her wheelchair, and shooting her incontinent Pomeranian as a potential threat. And maybe shooting her, too, if she didn't die from a stroke or heart attack.

My, how things have changed in 20 years. Officer Friendly has turned into the Gestapo pointing a Heckler and Koch submachine gun into the face of a six-year-old Elian Gonzalez. How can a man like that live with himself? The only way is if he rationalizes and deludes himself that what he did is honorable. Which it isn't, in no way. Obviously, self-delusion knows no bounds. Personally, I would have never done what he did. Had that order been issued to me, I would have quit.

What the heck has happened here? Whatever happened to Mayberry and Andy and Barney asking for permission to put his one bullet in his revolver? How has the line between the police and the military become so blurred? Or better yet, degraded and eroded? There must be an explanation.

Could it have anything to do with the War on [Insert Whatever]? Whenever people say, "There ought to be a law" what they're saying, even though they rarely understand it, is that ultimately the police should be allowed to stick a gun in someone's face – or even kill them – to make them follow the law, no matter how stupid or immoral that law is. "Declaring war" on whatever is currently illegal means militarizing the police and demonizing lawbreakers. Unfortunately, that demonizing always slops over onto whatever innocent citizen who happens to get into the way. Everyone becomes guilty, no trial involved.

War always creates an "us versus them" mentality, always among soldiers, and now among the police, when we pretend government can declare "war" on domestic "problems." That's the price we are always going to pay with, "There ought to be a law": the "lawbreakers" are always the bad guys deserving of death, even if that "bad guy" is merely smoking a joint to overcome the nausea of chemotherapy.

Of course, brutality always follows this dehumanization. "The War on Drugs," or on obesity, or tobacco, or firearms, always involves dehumanizing the target. It's an unavoidable part of human nature.

Do we really want to create police who dehumanize and demonize the public? That's the path to creating better killers, not better police. When's the last time they were referred to as "peace officers"? And since when have "peace officers" been issued fully automatic M-16s? And bayonets?

This dehumanization and demonization will always happen when the line between the military and police disappear.

The problem has been going on for longer than it appears. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, writes there is a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of human life. He claims in World War II, only one in five soldiers fired their rifles.

By the time of Vietnam, he says, this percentage had been raised to the point where only five percent didn't fire their weapons. Perhaps this is a good thing from a military point of view (and I'd argue this is debatable), but in the long run it is terrible for society.

This change was created by desensitizing soldiers to killing, by teaching them the enemy is not human, by teaching them to not think but instead follow orders without question. When the police become militarized, and are trained with modern military techniques, they're being taught the same thing: those defined as "perps" are not human. That's how a grown man can stick a machine gun in the face of a six-year-old boy. He's not thinking; he's just "following orders."

Writes Grossman, "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."

Militarizing the police, and the attendant dehumanization and demonization of the public, and "there ought to be a law," is not the path to a better society. It is the path to the public being the enemy, including those who say, "there ought to be a law" (and how shocked they will be when it comes their turn to be brutalized!). It is, ultimately, the path to tyranny.

21st Century Paranoid Guy

I recently received an email which read, in part: "Charles Lindbergh was a traitor who tried to sell out his country to the Nazis just as many leftists today would sell us out to the Islamo-Fascists."

The letter was in response to my review of Philip Roth's libelous (and boring) novel, The Plot Against America, an odious attempt at an "alternate history" in which Charles Lindbergh became President in 1940, kept America out of World War II, and turned the U.S. into the American version of Nazi Germany.

To be accurate, I will refer to this writer as "21st Century Paranoid Guy."

It only took several seconds to understand what the story was behind Paranoid Guy's screed. Fortunately, I understand his point of view. Too bad he doesn't understand mine. I call this Scott's Law, after a friend who told me, "The smart understand the stupid a lot better than the stupid understand the smart."

It explains why I understand Paranoid Guy but why he will never understand me.

What PG is saying is, "If Charles Lindbergh had become President in 1940, he would have kept us out of World War II by appeasing the Nazis, and they would have conquered the world!!!"

He's also saying, "If Lindbergh or someone like him was President now, he would keep us out of World War III by appeasing those Islamo-fascists, and they would have conquered the world!"

I like to call this "the Pinky and the Brain Fallacy." (Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?" Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky...try and conquer the world.")

The fact he uses the word "Islamo-fascists" makes me suspect he reads that vast intellectual and moral wasteland of misspelled insults known as Free Republic. It's one of their favorite words there, along with "Muslimes" and "nuke."

It's a shame PG doesn't understand history a bit better than he does. His view is, to be charitable, very simplistic. So I'll help him out here.

Throughout all of the 20th century, and even now, at the beginning of the 21st, there have not been separate wars with different names like "World War I," World War II," "the Korean War," "the Vietnam War," and "Infinite Justice" or "Enduring Freedom," or whatever it's being called now.

Instead, we have had is one war, with breathers in between.

World War I was just another in a long line of European wars. Before the U.S. got involved, it was almost over. European wars were, as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams warned, none of our business.

What essentially got the U.S. into World War I was the sinking of the passenger Lusitania, by a German submarine. The reason it went down so fast is because it was filled with munitions for England.

Munitions on a passenger liner? Who would do such a thing? Why, governments, of course! The reason? To get the U.S. in the war on the side of England, which was agitating for our help.

The German government had placed full-page ads in the Eastern newspapers, warning people to stay off of passenger ships. That's something you won't find in most history books.

After WWI was over, Woodrow Wilson went along with the crushing reparations against Germany, allowing Hitler to rise to power. At first, many people praised Hitler, including Churchill and Gandhi, until the world realized what he was.

The Great Depression, caused not by the free market but government interference in the economy, spread throughout the world, including to Germany. That certainly helped Hitler's rise.

World War II was a direct result of World War I. If the U.S. hadn't gotten involved in World War I, there wouldn't have been a World War II. Even if there had been a World War II, there was, again, no reason for us to get involved. If the National Socialists of Germany and the International Socialist of Russia wanted to slaughter each other, well, exactly whose side should we have been on?

Unfortunately, FDR wanted the U.S. to get involved. Roosevelt, who was a bit of a fascist, and certainly pro-Communist (he called Stalin "Uncle Joe"), apparently wanted to share the world with him. Why else would he have delivered Christian Eastern Europe to this mass-murdering Communist atheist?

There is substantial evidence that FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. If he wasn't agitating for war against Japan, then why did he cut off Japan's oil, when it had no domestic supplies? Why did he send the Flying Tigers against them in China, if not to provoke them into attacking us? Perhaps he didn't want Uncle Joe to have to fight a two-front war against Germany and Japan?

The U.S.'s getting involved in WWII on the side of the Communists against the Nazis is what allowed the USSR to grow so strong. And our mistakes in China allowed the Communists to come to power there.

Both those mistakes led to Korea and Vietnam.

After World War II, many of the Jews in Europe moved to the just-founded state of Israel, most of them did not know they were now living in an area that had been at war for four thousand years.

The U.S.'s unqualified support of Israel, no matter what it did to the Palestinians, and our attack on Iraq when it didn't attack us, along with our blockade of that country which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is what caused the attack on 9/11.

9/11 wasn't because we are "good" and they are "bad." It was an attempt to draw the U.S. into a guerrilla war in the Middle East, in order to drain us of blood and treasure, so we would leave the area, the way the USSR left Afghanistan.

Since 9/11 was a criminal offense by a small group of people, it would have been easier and more effective to hunt them down and kill them, not invade two countries and turn most of the world against us. A world that was mostly sympathic toward us after 9/11.

Now, in 2011, we are still involved in wars that have been going on since 1914. Include the history of the Middle East, and we're involved in a war that has been going on for millennia. It's one we're not going to end, no matter what the fantasies of George Bush and others in the administration.

The world of Paranoid Guy is not the real world. It's not as simple as, "they're going to conquer he world!!!"

Why do I call him "21st Century Paranoid Guy"? Because he's paranoid those "Islamo-fascists" are going to conquer the world. Personally, I can't figure out how they're going to do it, since all 22 Islamic countries in the world have a combined economy about the size of Spain.

I suppose he thinks they're going to move to America and Europe and take over both. Well, that problem can be solved with some immigration reform. But the world is never going to see Muslim armies, navies and air forces attacking the Western world. It will never happen. We're only about a thousand years ahead of them, and they'll never catch up. They're inbred, for one thing -- that's what happens when people marry their cousins for the last few thousand years.

Paranoia is an easy thing to exploit. I'll use a quote from Hermann Goering to explain how to manipulate the public: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." His quote was directed toward 20th Century Paranoid Guy, the same guy (who was about 75) whom I overheard say, "If we don't stop those Iraqis over there, we'll have to fight them over here!!"

In other words, tell people they're being attacked by someone who is going to conquer the world!! and they'll become paranoid, get the vapors and lose the ability to think rationally. That's why I get letters telling me if Charles Lindbergh was President today, Islam would take over the world.

Whoa, talk about an alternate history fantasy.

I seriously doubt Lindbergh, who flew the P-38 Lightning in combat in the Pacific theater, would allow anyone to take over the United States. He'd certainly see through Barak "Open Borders" Obama.

And I'm sure he'd understand this quote by Joseph Goebbels, a quote about which Barak is clueless: "This war is a defensive war. It was forced upon us by our enemies, who wish to destroy our nation. The only thing we cannot afford to lose in this war is our freedom, the foundation of our life and our future. No one has the right to complain about limitations on his personal freedom caused by the war."

I doubt 21st Century Paranoid Guy understands it, either. Heck, I know he doesn't!