Civil Liberties
A Beginners Guide
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A Oneworld Book
Published by Oneworld Publications 2009
This ebook edition published in 2012
Copyright Tom Head 2009
The right of Tom Head to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-85168-644-5
ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-140-6
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To my activism mentors Shannan Reaze and Michelle Coln, the two best guides any beginner could ask for.
Acknowledgments
Were all shaped by other people, and at the most fundamental level this means my family. My mothers, Carol and Cappy, are more responsible than anyone else for making me who I am. My grandparents Maybelle and Robert Carwile, my father John, my brother Jim, my nephew Anthony these are all people who also played a significant role in my intellectual development.
I would not be qualified to write, or interested in writing, a beginners guide to civil liberties if it were not for the many excellent local activists Ive worked with here in Mississippi. Chief among them are Shannan Reaze and Michelle Coln, to whom this book is dedicated; our adventures organizing direct action protests, leading issue advocacy in the media, and wrestling with the Mississippi State Legislature have been essential to shaping me as an activist. There are many, many other people who have guided me as an activist, but any attempt at a list would be dreadfully incomplete. Having no desire to hurt the feelings of any of my dear friends in the local activist community, I can only say that if you think I owe you my thanks, I almost certainly do.
My writing career has also been shaped by many people. Chief among them are the fatherdaughter writing team of John and Mariah Bear, who nine years ago brought me on board for a book project they were writing and transformed me from an aspiring author into a published author. If they had not made that generous decision, this book and the other twenty-two books Ive written, cowritten, or compiled over the years would not exist.
Since March 2006, Ive been running an online community and resource center on civil liberties for About.com, part of the New York Times Company. You can find it on the web at http://civilliberty.about.com, which is the place to go if you have something youd like to ask me, or something youd like to say, or if theres something youd just like to find out more about. The people Ive worked with at About.com among them staff members Fred Meyer, Jennifer Hubley, Caryn Solly, Sue Funke, Susan Hahn, Daniel Levisohn, Lauren Leonardi, Eric Hanson, and the hundreds of fellow About.com guides who help make up our online community have certainly shaped my development as a writer, and made it possible to produce this book.
This book is in your hands right now because of Marsha Filion at Oneworld Publications, who was an advocate for this project and helped shape it into what it is. Good editors are collaborators, coauthors in a sense, and Marsha is certainly a good editor. Her wisdom, patience, and attention to detail have been essential to this book.
Illustrations
1
Understanding civil liberties
There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother ... All competing pleasures will be destroyed ... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Liberty is power. I dont mean this in any metaphorical sense; I mean, literally, that liberty is power, agency, room to spread ones arms. Or as Thomas Jefferson put it: Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. In a word, power. Tyrants tend to have boundless liberty, which is what makes them tyrants. Slaves tend to have very little liberty, which is what makes them slaves. Assuming you live in a modern liberal democracy or something approaching one, you and I dont have or need as much liberty as tyrants, but we have more liberty than slaves. I suppose thats something.
People dont talk much about the liberty of tyrants because liberties, like your neighbors pants, are most noticeable when theyre missing and when you think about it, tyrants have a great many liberties that most of us, even in liberal democratic countries, will never have. A tyrant who wants something can take it by force. A tyrant who wants to promote an ideology can promote it using government funds, and imprison or kill anybody who speaks out against it. If youre a tyrant, everything in the country you rule is essentially yours. You can have the best food, the best clothes, the best medical care. You never have to wait in line for anything. And if the best your country has to offer isnt good enough for you, you can always declare war on a neighboring country.
