Twenty-six historians last week wrote the following letter to this newspaper: "We, the undersigned, wish to register our protest at the imprisonment of our fellow Irish historian Fintan Lane, and join in the call for his immediate release, writes Kevin Myers.
Fintan is serving a 60-day sentence for his conscientious refusal to pay his fine arising from his participation in a peaceful protest at Shannon Airport against the facilitation of the US military by the Irish Government."
So what's their point? Is he being punished for being a historian? No, he's not. So why does the incidental matter of his career cause others of that profession to come together in his support? They are surely not saying that historians should be immune to the law, which should otherwise be imposed on lesser species, are they? For, historian or not, he broke the law. He was punished with a fine, which he refused to pay. Our historians do not believe that fines levied by courts are optional affairs, do they? Since we have done away with the cat o' nine tails, the stocks, the ducking-stool and deportation, clink is all that's left, and that's what he chose.
Our historian chums say that his refusal to pay the fine is "conscientious". I agree with them. But a conscience only works when it has principles, which Fintan Lane clearly has. And principles are only defined by one's readiness to pay a price to maintain them - otherwise they're not principles at all, just points of view. I think he was misguided to do what he did at Shannon, and more misguided not to pay his fine; but we should all applaud the peaceful zeal with which he is prepared to defend his principles.
Civilisation is built on such people who are prepared to suffer for their principles; but it is not based on a legal culture which exonerates people from the consequences of breaking the rule of law, merely because they have "principles", or even because they are historians.
Our historians being historians, they would know it is the immutable law of lawlessness that mayhem and misery are its certain outcome. Unpunished lawlessness usually has modest consequences; but grown to full and plenteous splendour, the most poisonous fruit of lawlessness is found wherever tyranny flourishes, as in Iraq.
Yet were the Americans not breaking the law in invading Iraq? No, indeed, they were enforcing it, after the official police force - the UN - refused to enforce its own numerous resolutions. It is a citizen's right and duty to take action when the police prove delinquent, corrupt or inept - which, under French contamination, the UN had become.
I have no way of knowing whether our historians' concern about Fintan Lane's imprisonment reflects a common opposition to the use of Shannon by the Americans. If that's the case, then they should have told us: otherwise, their demand for Fintan Lane's release is tendentious, and implies rather fatuously that that the rule of law shouldn't apply to those opposed to US use of Shannon.
And as events in Libya have now triumphantly shown, the world is a measurably better place with Saddam evicted from power. Weapons of mass destruction are now themselves to be destroyed. We can never know the consequences of what would have happened if the Franco-German axis of pathological inertia towards the evil Hussein dynasty had triumphed, but we can be sure they would have been atrocious. The iron law of consequence has unfailingly shown that inertia feeds the appetites of the tyrant; as it did with Saddam throughout his appalling regime which everyone had a hand in propitiating - the Russians, the US, the British, the Germans, the French, and not least ourselves.
Now we are back in that familiar zone of chaos governed by that other immutable rule of history: the iron law of unintended consequence. So of course, conditions for many people in many of Iraq's cities are worse now than they were before the war. Have you compared pictures of Berlin in 1939 and 1945? That's what happens with war. But the anarchy of chaos is not anything like the moral anarchy of systematic tyranny, where entire societies are subverted from within, where sons inform on their mothers, and daughters on their fathers, and alleged enemies of the tyrant are tossed alive and conscious into industrial blenders.
To be sure, Baghdad's prospects of becoming Arabia's answer to Stockholm are quite slim; and equally surely, the US has made many mistakes, the most obvious of which seems to have been its failure to impose suitable fire-discipline on its troops. Of course, I say that from the safety of Ireland; no doubt a 19-year-old grunt from Sheboygan on foot patrol in Falluja really wants to hear my opinions on how he should conduct himself. But we of all people know from experience in the North that every violent death begets at least another four terrorist recruits. The consequences are cyclical and exponential, with the iron law of unintended consequence growing harder by the hour.
But that same iron law operates when inertia is policy. Ask Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia about the benefits of doing nothing. Ask the millions dead because of Saddam. George Bush was entirely right to seek to undo the moral squalor of past US policy towards the region; as was our Government in allowing the US to use Shannon. To have done otherwise would effectively have been siding with Saddam.
And what would history, never mind our 26 historians, have said to that?