My favourite book of all time is Herodotus’s Histories. It is the first historical narrative ever written and tells the story of how our way of life was preserved in the face of a Persian invasion in the fifth century BC.

What brings this to mind is Tim Blair’s discussion of our Prime Minister in a post Tim has titled, AUSTRALIA’S LEADING THUCYDIOT. I have also read Thucydides but it’s not as pleasant a story since the wrong side won. Nevertheless, I had taught my children this one sentence from Thucydides almost from the time they could talk: “What made war inevitable was the growing power of Athens and the fear this caused in Sparta”. From Tim we find a sequence of Malcolm quotes about (not from) Thucydides of which this was the last:

“White reminds us that Thucydides, considering the several incidents that led to the Peloponnesian War, concluded that the real reason was Sparta’s growing anxiety about the rise of Athenian wealth and power.”

I’m not sure what the Prime Minister wishes us to learn from these quotes, but I will tell you one I have learned from reading the book. No matter how rich and powerful a civilisation is, it can lose everything if it is not capable of defending itself and is willing to do so.

Herodotus tells an earlier story about the defence of the West. Had the Persians defeated the Greeks all those 2500 years ago our Western civilisation, with its rational, philosophical and scientific approach to the world, would have disappeared there and then.

The question that really comes to mind is whether our PM, even as he quotes Thucydides, understands what the issues are in the war in the Middle East that we are in the midst of right now. The point about reading history is to give you insights into the permanent struggles of humans to preserve their way of life in the face of dangers that inevitably confront them. Here is the Western leader who decided not to increase Australia’s commitment in fighting the Islamic State even when asked to do so by the most relentlessly useless leader in American history:

“The Peloponnesian war lives on in our imagination, inspiring (and misleading) generations of statesmen and generals simply because of the quality of Thucydides’ history.”

The one thought that would never come to my mind from reading Thucydides is “inspiring”. It might fascinate you, or educate you, or terrify you. It might get you to spend a lot more time on building national defences, and in working out who our enemies are and how to deal with them. There is nothing about how the PM goes about his business that makes me think he has the slightest idea about any of the things that the Peloponnesian war ought to teach a national leader. Meantime he should go and read Herodotus and find out what a close run thing it was the first time our civilisation was confronted with an existential enemy and what had to be done to maintain our way of life.

UPDATE: From the local paper, perhaps of enduring interest:

Scientists have found grisly evidence of a massacre in Kenya about 10,000 years ago, providing rare evidence of violence between groups in ancient hunter-gatherer societies.

Researchers said the discovery casts light on the poorly understood roots of warfare.

Evidence of violence appeared in 10 of 12 relatively complete fossil skeletons the scientists found by what used to be the edge of a lagoon. That included five or six cases of apparent arrow wounds to the head or neck, and five cases where the head was smashed with something like a club. One skull had a sharpened stone still embedded.

The researchers said the wounds would have been fatal immediately or soon thereafter.

Two skeletons didn’t show evidence of violence but the position of the hands suggested they might have been tied up at the time of death. One was a woman who was pregnant or had recently given birth.

The 12 bodies were adults, and at least four were female. The site also revealed partial remains of at least 15 other people.

The 2012 discovery, made west of Lake Turkana, was reported by scientists at Cambridge University and elsewhere. Writing in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature, they said it’s one of the clearest cases of violence between groups among prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

The reason for the violence is not clear. The victims may have been raided for resources, like territory or food stored in pots, the researchers said. Or the violence may have resulted from antagonism between two groups, they said.

I love that last para, about a massacre that occurred 10,000 years ago. I won’t say that they had been attacked by ISIS, but near enough if you can see how human nature continues to play out.

.
The story is now uncontained and is seeking a response by those whose job it is to keep us safe, not add to the dangers we face. The details, as they unfold, only continue to get worse: Migrants ‘planned sex attacks’ in Cologne.

New Year’s Eve violence, thefts and sexual assaults on women in Cologne were “planned” and most of the offences were carried out by asylum seekers or illegal migrants, according to German police and the justice minister.

Heiko Maas, the federal justice minister and a social democrat, said yesterday that the police had evidence the attacks were organised on social media, mobilising young North African men from France and Belgium to travel to the western German city.

“For such a horde of people to meet and commit such crimes, it has to have been planned somehow,” he told Bild am Sonntag. “No one can tell me that this was not co-ordinated or planned.”

These people feel they are untouchable, and who is to say they are wrong? Someone took the video and then pasted it onto Facebook without a care in the world about consequences for what they had done.

What are the advantages Muslim societies have in dealing with others? This is how it is explained by John O’Sullivan: Europeans Studiously Ignore Muslim Mobs, but most importantly, what he shows is the effect of Islam on the subjection of women and the state of mind it creates. His final para, though, is the one that matters. It is the one that everyone migrates to if they are thinking about the preservation of our Western way of life.

Which brings me finally to Donald Trump. His policy of simply halting Muslim immigration has been denounced all around. It is, of course, discriminatory and thus a mortal sin in today’s politics. Fine. Let’s rule it out. But if his critics don’t want a blanket moratorium on all immigration — which I assume they don’t — and if they don’t want to repeat the experiences of France and Germany in 30 years’ time — which I also assume they don’t — shouldn’t they tell us what they will do?

He, of course, does not mean let us rule it out. He means, if you are serious about an end, you must be serious about finding the means. And to understand either, you have to have some idea of what you are up against. This is what we are up against.

If we exclude divine favor as an explanation of this long advance, as Christians and post-Christian secularists presumably should, the rules that explain it include capital punishment for leaving Islam (a.k.a. apostasy), which is presumably a disincentive to doing so; strict rules for regular public prayer, which strengthen group solidarity; a privileged position for men over women, amounting in practice to ownership of them as either wives or concubines; a hierarchical structure within Islamic society that places Muslims in a position above non-Muslims in law, government, and social life; and a religious orthodoxy that endows Muslims with a general superiority (and sense of superiority) over others in non-Islamic societies.

Taken together, these rules help to shape a Muslim community that is cohesive, conscious of its separation from the rest of society, resistant to influences likely to undermine its cohesion, self-policing through its male members, and — because its sense of superiority is not reflected in its actual status either locally or globally — prey to resentment and hostility toward those whom it blames for its unjust subordination. . . .

The minority that supports aggressive jihadism (or is simply contemptuous of non-Muslim society) is not just larger but, as opinion polls show, far larger than similar tendencies in other religions and ideologies. That minority seeks to impose its rules both on fellow Muslims and on the wider society. And it has had remarkable success in areas where Muslims predominate locally, making U.K. state schools conform to Islamic teaching and practices, including the separation of the sexes; establishing “no-go areas” of European cities where police go only by agreement and where in their absence Muslim rules on alcohol and modest female dress are enforced by violence; and turning local governments into reliable Muslim fiefdoms through levels of voter fraud not known in England since the mid-19th century. But the most disturbing effects occur when the Muslim sense of superiority over non-Muslims combines with the Muslim males’ sense of superiority over women.

This is why Jamie Briggs and Chris Gayle stories are such evasions of the genuine issue that confronts us. The left is full of excuses and refuses to recognise a problem. So does much of the right. This is where Donald Trump comes in. There may be a million problems that come with him as president, but if he is the only one that gets the one big thing right, then he will be president and everything else will just have to take care of itself.

UPDATE: This is Roger Simon on the same subject: In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right: Trump and Muslim Immigration. This is the conclusion:

The doctrines of Islam are virtually entirely inconsistent with the founding principles of our county. And yet, per Pew, we are not-so-gradually being inundated with its adherents. Unchecked, the character of the USA will change, possibly to the extent of being unrecognizable, I doubt this is what the majority of Americans want. But it is happening nevertheless — and we have a living, breathing illustration of the results just across the Pond. (Illustrative of how self-immolating European elites have become was the advice the female mayor of Cologne gave women of her city for dealing with the sexual assaults — they should stand further away.)

And then, from National Review, Is the Left Even on America’s Side Any More? where we find:

Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. But in truth, 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, with a small minority directed a Muslims.

Exploiting the myth of Muslim persecution, progressives oppose scrutiny of the Muslim community, including terror-promoting imams and mosques. They immediately denounce proposals to screen Muslim immigrants as religious bigotry, and thus close off any rational discussion of the problem. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy.

Most notoriously the president and his operatives cynically spread the lie that an obscure Internet video about Mohammed was behind the Benghazi terror attack. Speaking like an ayatollah before the U.N. General Assembly, shortly after the attack, Obama declared: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” What an American president should have said is: “The future must not belong to those who murder in the name of Islam.”

FURTHER UPDATE: This thing seems to be catching on: To Save Europe, Stop All ‘Migrants,’ Says Hungary’s Orban.

The picture of The Fall of Rome comes with this story, Our spoiled, emasculated, de‑spiritualised societies in the West are in terminal decline. We live in a complete bubble of vacuousness, and when the barbarians finally break through it will be brutal. You can see our future in the far off Middle East even as we let these invaders enter within our walls. Do the inhabitants of our former Christian civilisation really believe they have anything to offer other than a bit of technology which will be scooped up with the rest of the booty? The story is by Christopher Booker and this is how he concludes:

The reason why we do not see just how far our spoiled, emasculated, de‑spiritualised societies in the West have lost the plot is that they are the bubble we live in. But these days there is a great big world out there, much less sentimental and much tougher than what we have become used to. Over the coming years, our world is going to change more than we can imagine.

It always changes more than we can imagine but this time it will be a change for the far worse. The picture, you see, is us.

This, too, might help to see where we are headed: Islam v. Free Speech: Twitter Surrenders.

The top agenda item of Islamic supremacists has long been the imposition of sharia blasphemy standards on the West. This campaign is not waged exclusively or even primarily by violent jihadists. Instead, its leading proponents are the Muslim Brotherhood’s network of Islamist activist groups in the West and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a 57-government bloc of, mainly, majority-Muslim countries).

The West should be fighting these anti-Western Islamic supremacists in defense of our core principles. Instead, the Obama administration — particularly the president and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton — has colluded with them. So have other left-leaning governments and institutions that are naturally hostile to free speech and open debate. One prominent result is U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. This blatantly unconstitutional provision, co-sponsored by Obama, Clinton, and OIC members, calls on all nations to ban speech that could promote mere hostility to Islam. Essentially, this is a codification of sharia, which prohibits all expression that subjects Islam to critical examination.

We are being sold down the Tiber and it is almost certainly too late to do a thing about it. If you still have doubts, then contemplate this: Germany stunned by rash of New Year’s sex assaults. The refusal to face reality in the opening para is borderline insane and if you want to read more, you can go here:

The German government Tuesday condemned dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults against women on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne blamed on Arab men but warned against anti-migrant scapegoating.

Today’s migrant is tomorrow’s European. Just as after 476 AD, the barbarians became the new Romans. The subsequent Dark Age lasted almost a thousand years.

The older I get, the less I understand the culture I am part of. She is a sports reporter and he is a world class cricketer. In the middle of the interview, he asks the reporter if she would like to join him for a coffee. A hanging offence apparently: Chris Gayle faces Cricket Australia sanctions over controversial interview with Channel 10s Mel McLaughlin.

CHRIS Gayle has apologised for his comments to Channel 10 presenter Mel McLaughlin during last night’s Big Bash League match.

Speaking at Melbourne Airport this morning after touching down with his Melbourne Renegades teammates, Gayle said he didn’t mean to offend McLaughlin and his comments, which have drawn criticism from across the globe, were simply a joke.

“It seemed to be blown out of proportion. There wasn’t anything at all meant to be disrespectful to Mel,” Gayle said.

“It was a simple comment, a simple joke.

“If she felt that way, I’m really sorry for that. There wasn’t any harm meant in that particular way, to harm any particular person in any particular way like that. It was a simple joke … I don’t know how it reached this far, to be honest. It is one of those things.”

At the link, in answer to the question, “Should Chris Gayle be sanctioned for his comments to Mel McLaughlin?” the replies are (at 3:00 pm):

No 70.98%
Yes 29.02%

Life is a never-ending mystery.