On Saturday 5th of January 2019, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison awoke to a gift horse.

No… Not a slap-up Greek steed with a belly full of semi-naked warriors – a genuine present with embossed wrapping paper, over-sized bow, card and ridiculous balloon tied on, bobbing about for good measure.

Presumably ecstatic at this reprieve from a stricken election campaign, ScoMo stumbled out onto a mysterious red carpet that had been stretched through the metaphoric streets of Melbourne by an enthusiastic crowd of locals. At the end of this velvet river waited a line of Press dripping sweat in the Summer heat, holding iphones in place of cameras.

Amassed behind, a cheer squad of the Prime Minister’s loyalists brandished banners, wore LNP shirts – blue hats and had glitter hearts painted on their cheeks. ScoMo shuffled nervously. They quietened. His hands raised – holding their expectant gaze so long that a stray Netflix lawyer stopped to flinch. Finally captivated, the entire nation paused to take a breath as Scomo –

– shook a jerry-can of petrol over himself and struck a match.

We’ll come back to Saturday’s BBQ in a minute.

It is true to say that even the swamp-ish waters of the Garonne can blush. From their birth in the canopy of the Pyrenees, the river winds its way into France, brushing against places of famed debauchery and historical intrigue. By the time its waters languish around the pale stone walls of Bordeaux they have settled into a lake-like wound. They divide the romantic setting whose lavish farmlands iridesce against the horizon’s curve while salt rushes up the river’s throat from the Bay of Biscay, agitating muck from the bottom all year-round giving the Garonne its famed café au lait waters.

In the opening decades of the 8th Century, a different kind of tide turned.

Unannounced, an 80,000 strong horde of seasoned warriors cut their way over the choppy Pyrenees. From the South, they shadowed the beautiful river, decimating settlements before engaging in unprovoked slaughter on Bordeaux. Pure, unforgiving conquest sent a cascade of blood down the city’s stone promenades. Her people’s souls coalesced in the cracks and merged into a flood that stained the rock from pinnacle to footing. Eventually the torrent slipped into the murk of the river, mingling with the rest of the decay. Massacre turned the Garonne into the mimic of spoiled wine.

From their graves, those slain but not yet surrendered had time to watch the Saracens pick through the ruins of the city. Described later as a, ‘storm upon the land’ their weapons beat skulls and statues alike, reducing the French landscape to rubble. Bones picked clean, they grasped their swords and continued West toward the coast.

This was the barbarous Islamic invasion of Gaul – the Umayyad Caliphate which tore the religious heart from Southern Europe – plundering, murdering and raping everything they came across. It was not until 759 CE that they found defeat. Facing annihilation, Pépin the Short crushed the Muslim incursion into Europe, paying for his victory with pints of French blood. In the decades that followed the invaders were pushed back, city by city, over the mountains to their desert birth until his son (and French hero) Charlemagne finished off the job, securing the borders from terror.

This was the second of four Islamic caliphates to gnaw into the European continent. The machine of Political Islam is one of absolute conquest in contrast to the principles of colonial settlement or Roman campaigns to coax tax paying city states into the fold. Caliphates hold an absolutist standpoint. Convert or die. The ultimatum prompts a fight or flight response in kings who warily eye the dripping edge of a Saracen sword. Its previous kills are those who boasted of peace treaties and appeasements – all of which fell empty at the feet of the ruling theocracy. The foolish who tried these half measures litter the deserts of Arabia, white and cold under the sand.

Surely, thought the nobles inside Bordeaux’s dusty walls, they would be safe from this system of blood if they remained cordial with their Islamic neighbours?

It is not true to assume that absence from the game of thrones protects you from warring ambitions. Expansionist nations in a region will always pounce upon the apathetic.

The passive might experience a moment of regret as they bleed out into the river. Where are the strong? They may ask, clawing at the mud. Where were the riders with our advance warning? The riders were cursed into silence for spreading fear and the strong were not welcome in the city so they retired to the mountain peaks to watch the savage proceedings.

Despite the tragedy, the slain of Bordeaux proved something worth learning by their deaths. The threads of civilisation are never grounded in more than a veneer of dirt. A dynasty built over a thousand years can be razed in a single afternoon and forgotten before the week is out. There is no point looking to the gods. They watch idly with no interest in whom is left to inherit the world at their feet – to them all our noise is worthy entertainment. Think then of chaos as our mantle and its force powerful enough to crack the bedrock of nations.

Sometimes the rising sun is only a sea of flames scaling the mountains and the long stretches of night are besieged cities wallowing beneath black smoke. War is where we learn peace and the blade is our tutor.

Knowing this, a wise man would never build his city over a tectonic rift or prop his house beside a smouldering scar. If forced to live amongst fire he must have high walls and keen eyes.

Australia is lucky enough to find itself at the centre of an uncommonly thick plate that doesn’t have any serious plans for the next hundred million years.

Not content with the safety of our nightmare northern swamp, the sweeping deserts lapping between coasts or even the substantial ocean moat – our politicians are keen to create cracks in the crust. Cut and bruised, our neglectful foreign policy knocks up a Facebook invite to the dozing caliphate and welcomes them over for a barbecue if only to complete a round of social justice bingo.

And so begin the scuffles. The odd glint in the sun. These are the fragments of a raging caliphate camouflaged by virtue with the paint wearing thin.

Multiculturalism is all wonderful until you run into a tyrannical monoculture with a history of terror. It is time we faced up to the reality that by in large Islam is a political religion of conquest – one that has not been dragged over the racks of civilisation like its Abrahamic cousins and forced to reform itself into something approaching civility. Political Islam’s only reformation of note is a willingness to adapt its claws to post-war hangovers, utilising the West’s perceived guilt-complex against historically naive elitists, ingratiating itself as a victim-hood poster child whilst simultaneously abusing the cultures who open their borders and wallets.

When conquest comes at us via the sword, it triggers self defence. Up we go, emboldened by fear like our fallen kin, to man the walls of the city against the barbarian horde. We’ll stand with our faces covered in mud and roar for all we’re worth. This is how Islam came at the West for 1,400 years and for 1,400 years the West survived.

Conquest by political theory is insidious.

Parasitic, it feeds off the host culture, making itself stronger until the final blow comes as an abysmal ‘tap’ on the shoulder. Once thriving cities have been transforming into no-go zones, run under parallel legal systems barely recognisable to terrified locals who have become strangers in their own country.

At first it is the torn remnants of history’s page – scratched out names and marble dust from destroyed statues underfoot. Then it’s burning libraries, online retcons and a renewed fervour for archaic terror. It becomes offensive to question and blasphemous to criticise. The moral victories of the Enlightenment are replaced by desert barbarity and even as women are segregated into a second, slave class the bravest feminist warrior looks the other way either too polite or stupid to protest the erosion of liberty.

We already stand at the point where the bookmarks of our history have been cast safely out of sight. Our leaders delight in telling us that our culture is vacuous. One might dare to argue that this is the fault of those who stoke the pyres with our history.

If Political Islam fails then we’ll see that rusted scimitar. Finally we’ll realise how close our necks have been to the blade – revolt and derail the caliphate once more.

All of this is fair enough but what does it have to do with ScoMo and his faux pas with a gas can?

Democracy is a political mutation. An absolute fluke. While it remains the only political framework to breed freedom it is also the most vulnerable to external threat. Compared to totalitarian subsets of Communism, Theocracy, Dictatorship and Socialism, the democratic behemoths of the world lumber into their sensible but slow futures.

Endurance has always been a race of the steady.

Democracy’s poster child is the Constitutional Monarchy – a ‘gotcha’ catch 22 of power that derails ambitious politicians and tyrannical rulers alike. It is unique in that the head of state has both absolute power and no power at all, useful mostly as the gatekeeper of freedom and swooning sideshow for the people. A soul, if you will, that trumps the republican system.

It is not perfect.

Democracy grounds itself in Aristotle’s observation of group behaviour also known as, ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. The merits of group theory’s application to political selection is well founded and true. On average, a random crowd of mixed ability, class and philosophical persuasion make better political decisions than carefully picked experts. There is an inherit intelligence in the ‘mob’ that defies logic except perhaps to say that competing personal interests tend to result in morally sound outcomes. There is no doubt that our devotion to the public vote is the surest way to maintain our freedom. Australia’s compulsory vote makes it even harder to manipulate the already wrought iron system.

However, there is an oversight.

Group theory works when the population is raised on the Western aspirations of freedom. The participants must value the process or at worst be ambivalent to it. Democracy is wide open to subversion when a populace can be manipulated to act as an arm of a political usurper. A caliphate is an imported theological movement that has been aware of this trick for centuries. Essentially conquest boils down to a numbers game, whether on the battlefield or the ballot box and they have the numbers.

This is Aristotle’s oversight.

He did not envisage the horror of a society brainwashed into slavery who would use democracy’s principles of freedom to shackle the chains around their own ankles or a civilisation careless enough to import a rival state. This crack in the armour is not fiction nor is it a future fancy – it has been happening for hundreds of years. Left unchecked, one day Australia will not be free to control her laws or use democracy’s mantle to save herself from the Saracen oppressor. Like Bordeaux, she will become a vassal of the global caliphate.

Some can sense the danger. The noise of discontent rumbles out of the major cities where the smoke has been seen rising for years. Scott Morrison found himself standing in the smouldering corpse of a warning fire – treading a scarlet carpet.

To his credit, the Prime Minister is a repeat bonfire survivor. Like Daenerys Targaryen he once hatched eggs in the pyre of a fallen lord but Morrison is no divine ruler and his eggs are not his children but laid instead by Labor’s cuckoo Malcolm Turnbull. Now he’s struggling to feed dragons and writing his campaign promises in charcoal.

Perhaps this traumatic experience is why he misjudged Melbourne’s disquiet toward African Gang Violence. Could it explain his continual policy of ambivalence regarding the rise of honour killing, FGM, child marriage and sexual slavery? Let us be generous and suggest it was the reason he allowed himself to be distracted by ‘Press narratives’ instead of the slow burn of citizen frustration backed by tangible crime figures.

He was gifted the perfect opportunity to open a conversation about the behaviour of certain groups welcomed to our shores who have so far refused to participate in the spirit of this once great country – to insist that the law be applied equally instead of ideologically by police more interested in thought crime and censorship than actual violence.

We are on the verge of multiculturalism becoming a separatist movement, screaming autonomy as it has done countless times across Asia, Europe and now, America.

ScoMo may as well have tossed himself from the citadel wall – attacked the advance riders and told the strong to bugger off to the mountains. They will, Scott Morrison, they’ll leave you and the rest of the political class to import votes from foreign shores and sit back as those voters gain strength and like second generation cuckoos, usurp government for themselves.

When caliphate leaders hold the balance of power in Australia, our laws are fodder.

This is how democracy dies – with an open door, blindfold and a barbecue.

-ellymelly