The choice between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull is a choice between someone who gets the major issue of our time v someone who does not. I watched Tony’s interview with Bolt on Sunday and he must have used the word “evil” three or four times in discussing what we are up against. Malcolm is so out of the picture that it is offensive to have to listen to him. His party is worth electing only because of the people he chooses not to promote. Only a shallow fool would fail to appoint Peter Dutton to the National Security Committee.

I have an article at Quadrant Online that deals with the nature of the enemy we face. It was provoked by an editorial in The Herald-Sun which expressed bewilderment about the events in Paris, how could these people do such things, literally asking what would their mothers think. This is the kind of sentiment for which there is all too much of it at the moment, which as best I can tell, is a sentiment shared by the PM. My article is titled, The War That Shall Not Be Mentioned and attempts to clarify what is going on. This is the central point:

The Islamic State is at war with us because they wish to convert us to Islam. You may think that the way the war is being waged is cruel and monstrous, but it is no more cruel and monstrous than many a war in the past. What makes this war so bizarre is that the kinds of people who write such editorials do not even know we are in the midst of a war. It is a war for control of territory, in just the same way every other war in history has been fought. They are attacking us and our civilisation relentlessly. They are attempting to achieve the same result that Nazis and Soviet communists attempted. They are trying to change our way of life into their way of life through force of arms. They are trying to take our territory from us and replace our way of doing things with theirs.

You may imagine in your slumbers that they could not possibly succeed. So let me bring to your attention Niall Ferguson’s article in The Oz yesterday on The Fall of Rome. Here are the passages that count:

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

This is the view of another historian, Peter Heather:

The Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper … Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

We are starting to wake to the danger, and you will know that we are finally starting to get it when even Malcolm Turnbull starts sounding the alarm. As for Barack Obama, that is something he will never do.