We need to be careful with the scope here, I think. "War on general-purpose computing" is already abstract enough most people just roll their eyes and move on; expanding that to "war on freedom" guarantees that almost nobody will care.
I have mixed feelings about what to do. On the one hand, there would be merit in requiring a professional license for programmers like in other engineering fields - a lot of the mess in our industry could be removed if at least some jobs would require a license, which would give both a recognized right to refuse work based on ethical issues (backed by professional association) and the liability in case you fucked up badly and people died.
On the other hand, I fear the day when Turing-complete systems will get regulated and require a (probably expensive) license to use. Like many others here, I benefited a lot from being able to tinker with computers and programming languages in my teenage years, before I had access to formal education on the topic. I would like my children to have the same chance.
In a way, my feelings are reflected on a smaller scale in the way I feel about sandboxing. On the one hand, I appreciate the idea of isolation and don't like user-hostile software to be able to do whatever it wants on my system. On the other hand, I'd love to have the right to breach the sandbox myself and mess with software running on it. On Windows I still can alter GUI elements of running applications; try that on unrooted Android.
If it was just about security vs. freedom, then the problem would be relatively easy; some compromise could be reached (e.g. expanded definition of "life-critical" systems which would require licenses, and also hopefully licenses for jobs requiring use of personally identifiable information). As it is, there are other selfish/malicious actors in play - like music/movie industry pushing for DRM, corporations fighting for their walled gardens, etc. It'll be hard to navigate this problem space.