When I talk about the Obedient Generation that calls itself The Greatest Generation, people always ask me about later ones. As I have patiently and repeatedly explain, the later generations were the natural byproduct of the first one, the Obedients.

When you have a fifth of an entire generation taken in youth and beaten into mindless submission in Basic Training, and an entire generation forced to believe that anything the Government does is Glorious and Right … and all the rest of it, the crowd these people raises is going to be warped.

It is too bad for the anti-alcohol forces that Prohibition came a generation too early. The Obedient Generation would have accepted it. The Greatest Generation would certainly have obeyed Prohibition, as it obeyed everything else imposed on it.

We will never get rid of that Generation’s War on Drugs. Failure just means jam it harder. Anything that generation called a War was lost, like the War on Poverty and the War on Terror. No modern American is able to question walking around an airport with his pants at his knees and barefooted — if he’s lucky and not stripped — but I can’t see the Americans who threw out Prohibition putting up with it.

The Stockholm Syndrome is not new. It was what WWII Basic Training was all about: The Sarge reduces you to kissing his ass, probably sometimes literally, by screaming in your face and you drool over any little mercy he shows.

No, that does not “make men.” It makes slaves. It is a process aimed at producing slobbering moral cowards. Today’s military, I hate to admit, could take out the Greatest Generation, a battalion to a regiment, in short order.

I have known people on about every side in WWII. I have never heard ANYBODY praise American soldiers except Americans. If it were not for the Italians, who didn’t even know which side they were on much of the time, Americans would have been the bad jokes of the War.

As a practical Matter, I noticed early that the person who uses the word “liar” all the time is invariably a person who is very loose about the truth. Let me repeat and emphasize that this is not theory, it is PRACTICAL matter if you are in professional-level politics. I can see in my mind people who would come in to see congressional staff and start saying liars, liars, liars.

I can remember how we ALL reacted to them, while acting like we took them seriously. A lie is an INTENTIONAL untruth. Most of the people on the other side are screwed, but not lying. And calling a liar a liar is not going to phase a real liar.

As I have pointed out, a person who keeps denouncing Hate is always pretty good hater himself. He cannot see the other as different from him, and for him, hatred of what he calls Hater is a perfectly good motivation that needs no explanation.

A person who keeps talking about Mercy, Mercy, Mercy is kind to the Inquisitors.

Some time ago I talked about what interrogation is all about. The largest part of it is LISTENING. What a person says about those he hates tells you all about him. People who do not know this wonder why interrogators would like to get to terrorists early unless they are going to torture him.

Actually, if you know how to handle it, you can get answers from someone who is against you almost as well as you can someone on your side at a debriefing. If you know things like the Liar rule and so forth, a person who is not ready for such questioning will dance around information in a very predictable way. He won’t think he has given you any, but if you know what you’re doing he might as well have a neon sign on his forehead.

Which brings us to the only group in history that could call itself the Greatest Generation with a straight face.

The Founding Fathers would never have even considered such a label. Neither side in the Civil War, even the most self-righteous, would have been able to keep a straight face calling itself the Greatest Generation Ever.

A piece of wisdom which predates me says it:

“Methinks he doth protest too much.”

When the Greatest Generation was born, the white race straddled the world like a giant. They left apologizing for their very existence. No wonder they have to shout so loud.