Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Apparently I’ve had the last word — actually the last two words — on the dialogue re the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency that played out on Schneier on Security from Tuesday through yesterday.  Obviously I came late to the party.

I found many, if not most, of the thirty-nine comments that preceded mine to be misinformed about the dynamics of the Civil Rights struggle and the nature of insurgency. But they were nonetheless valuable to me because in order to convince a reader of your argument, you have to be able to anticipate and address likely objections. So in that respect I’m very much in Bruce Schneier’s debt for bringing the Civil Rights / insurgency thesis  to the attention of his readers, and to his readers for taking time to comment.

Here ’s one objection I had not hitherto anticipated:

As the vast majority of the actions of both the civil rights protesters and the women’s suffragists were clearly and unequivocally protected by the Bill of Rights, yet rebellion enjoys no such Constitutional protections, I would strongly argue that conflating the two concepts by labeling civil disobedience as insurgency is to erode the protections for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly enshrined in the 1st Amendment.

The reason I had not considered it is that, to me, the rejoinder is so obvious.

To illustrate, let me offer the following extracts from another constitution:

Fundamental Rights and Duties

Article 19 [Equality]
(a) Citizens are equal before the law, without discrimination because of sex, blood, language, social origin, or religion.
(b) Equal opportunities are guaranteed to all citizens, according to the law.

Article 22 [Dignity, Personal Integrity, Arrest, Home]
(a) The dignity of man is safeguarded. It is inadmissible to cause any physical or psychological harm.
(b) It is inadmissible to arrest a person, to stop him, to imprison him or to search him, except in accordance with the rules of the law.
(c) Homes have their sanctity. It is inadmissible to enter or search them, except in accordance with the rules of the law.
Article 23 [Communication]
The secrecy of means of communications by mail, telegrams, and telephones is guaranteed. It is inadmissible to disclose it, except for considerations of justice and security, in accordance with the rules prescribed by the law.

Article 26 [Expression, Association]
The Constitution guarantees freedom of opinion, publication, meeting, demonstrations and formation of political parties, syndicates, and societies in accordance with the objectives of the Constitution and within the limits of the law. The State ensures the considerations necessary to exercise these liberties, which comply with the revolutionary, national, and progressive trend.

Those provisions offer protections that would have shielded Civil Rights activists as effectively as the U.S. Bill of Rights.

They happen to be protections enshrined in the constitution adopted in 1990 by Saddam Hussein’s Republic of Iraq.

My point should be obvious: constitutional guarantees are meaningless if they are routinely ignored or circumvented. That was precisely the situation that obtained in the Jim Crow South.