Either we are at war with an existential enemy or we are not. Either these things are a threat to our way of life or they are not. We are either so in command of the situation that it does not much matter what we do today or we are not. From how things look to me, we are on the losing side in a hundred years war that will end early in the next century. Any thoughts on what the name on the door of what we today call Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame will be on this day in 2115?

The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta will be commemorated on 15 June. On 18 June, we will also be commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. And also this year, on the 25th of October, we will be celebrating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. And do you know what they all had in common? Each was a contest using force of arms to determine an outcome.

Tell me this as well. If Winston Churchill were in the Abbot cabinet, would he side with the PM or with Turnbull over how to deal with dual citizens who take the side of the enemy? This is from Gerard Henderson today:

Here’s a news flash (without an exclamation mark). The so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL or Daesh, is intent on establishing a caliphate run by Sunni Islamists throughout the world. Contrary to Vanstone’s opinion, there is no evidence that the leaders of Daesh have a cunning plan to reduce the democratic protections that prevail within democracies. Rather, they want to destroy democracies and autocracies alike and establish a theocracy.

There is a genuine debate in Australia and elsewhere as how to handle the Islamic State threat, at home and abroad. This extends all the way to the Abbott cabinet as was evident in leaks about the discussion among senior members of the Abbott government (the Prime Minister himself, Julie Bishop, Kevin Andrews, George Brandis, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce, Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull) about the implications of terrorism on Australia’s citizenship laws.

As the Australian government’s discussion paper “Australian Citizenship — your right, your responsibility” makes clear, the Abbott government “intends to modernise the Australian Citizenship Act to enable the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to take action in the national interest to revoke the Australian citizenship of dual citizens who engage in terrorism that betrays their allegiance to Australia”.

There appears to be a broad consensus among Coalition and Labor parliamentarians in support of the proposal that Australian dual citizens who fight with IS should have their citizenship revoked. This would extend the 1948 legislation which entails that dual citizens who fight with a country at war with Australia will lose their Australian citizenship.

The dispute on citizenship turns on the issue of whether the Minister for Immigration should be able, in the words of the discussion paper, “to revoke Australian citizenship where there are reasonable grounds to believe the person is able to become a national of another country under their laws and would not be made stateless”.

The Government has made a judgement call about how best to go about preserving our freedoms in the face of a barbaric and determined enemy that has made astonishing headway in the 14 years since 911. As Henderson says at the end of his article, “There comes a time when democratic rights have to yield to national security considerations.” Democratic government, whatever else it may be, is not a suicide pact. We will either defend this way of life or we will lose it. The Turnbulls of the world have so little political imagination that they cannot picture the world in any other way but the way it is. It is an extreme form of ignorance, who would rather lose in a dignified way than win even if we have to bomb Dresden into matchsticks.