When the Nazi knifepoint was at Britain’s jugular in 1940 Winston Churchill told the nation that all it could look forward to was the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ of a long and terrible war.

He didn’t say that when German bombs were killing hundreds of people the British should not give in to ‘Germanophobia’. No one set up the equivalent of a hashtag campaign #huganazi.

Churchill was telling the British people the unadorned truth. Our leaders should be telling us the truth about the war we are in.

The Western world is at war but does not want to admit it. We didn’t ask for war. Muslim extremists have made war on us because they don’t like what the Islamic State journal Dabiq has called our ‘perverted liberal values’. That’s the thanks we get for multiculturalism.

All the violence and horror of war is becoming a regular fact of life in the West, particularly in Europe. We long since ceased to be surprised by images of blood and carnage in city streets. And the war will go on, nobody should doubt that. Dozens of people now alive will be dead in a year’s time. Why don’t our politicians tell us that?

They don’t tell us because they don’t know what to do about it. Instead they babble on about the risk of ‘Islamophobia’ and not blaming ‘moderate’ Muslims for the actions of Islamic ‘fanatics’. If those moderate Muslims would set their house in order and extirpate the fanatics the war would soon be over, but there is no sign they are going to.

If we faced the truth with Churchillian directness we would realise our powerlessness to defend ourselves against those who regard us as enemies. Yes, the security services are constantly alert, and yes, they do a wonderful job and there’d be more atrocities if it weren’t for their efforts, but what they are doing is palliative, not curative. And in a democratic society, it can’t be. Because there is nothing that can democratically can be done to cure the virus of potential terrorists incubating in the community of their co-religionists, without undemocratically questioning the right of all Australian Muslims to be here.

Under democracy we are bound hand and foot – bound, paradoxically, by our hard-won freedoms – from fighting back effectively against terrorism. We don’t do pogroms in the West, we don’t expel whole peoples considered inimical to the state. That would be the only certain way of ridding ourselves of undiscovered terrorists before they strike. It’s not an option so that’s it. Of course we could always suspend democracy (eco-fascists are all for that, to ‘save’ the planet) but such a betrayal of our history and values ought to be unthinkable. It would make us no better than those who attack us.

As in World War II, there are those among us who favour the other side. One of these – is Lord Haw-Haw too strong a comparison? – is the ABC. Count how many times you hear the ‘I’ or the ‘M’ word during an ABC bulletin on any outrage perpetrated by Islamics. Usually not once. If a Catholic, even lapsed or apostate, drove a truck into a crowd as in Barcelona and Nice, ‘Catholic’ would be mentioned five times a sentence, with possibly some reference to paedophilia worked in to remind everyone that in the ABC’s view, Roman Catholicism is a force for evil. But the ABC (and much of the media) always lets Islam off the hook by the simple expedient of stating outright or implying that whichever Muslim fanatic has committed the latest atrocity is an exception, a ‘loner’ disobedient to the teachings of his faith.

When the IRA and Ulster paramilitaries were detonating and kneecapping each other they were regularly described as ‘Catholics’ and ‘Protestants’, despite repeated declarations from the respective church hierarchies that terrorist acts disqualified them from being either. Murder cannot be reconciled with Christianity. But Islam sanctions violence against the infidel, so you’re not going to hear any mainstream Muslim leaders denouncing Islamic terrorism and warning those who would commit it that if they do they won’t get their quota of virgins when they send themselves skyward along with their hapless victims.

Islam doesn’t need to make conciliatory noises for the actions of its ‘extremists’. Why? Because it knows it will ultimately win? If so you can see why.

The West has lost its spine. It is morally confused and self-indulgent, mesmerised by trivialities like gay marriage and climate change. It is aborting and contracepting itself into a minority on its own territory in countries where Muslim birth rates are high. It has dumped its religion. It hates its past, perpetually apologising for some factitious act of shame.

Politicians with their demented passion for social diversity created the mess we are in when they started importing large numbers of people whose religion forbade any notion of ‘integrating’ themselves (except into queues for social services benefits). But politicians are powerless to get us out of it. If talking could do it they’d succeed tomorrow, but the genie cannot be talked back into the bottle.

Islamic terrorism will continue, and even here where it is still rare, our society will gradually and subtly be changed by leftist-driven concessions to make Muslims feel more ‘at home’. Some sort of Sharia will appear, public segregation of the sexes will become more common, Islamic religious instruction will be eased into state schools, Ramadan will be officially observed (in a way that Lent never was). Then the calls for Muslim-governed zones, perhaps a Caliphate. If we eventually go under, only the fate of the useful idiots will console us. Marxists, feminists and all the other Leftists who cynically suck up to Islam on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend don’t understand that although extremist Islam loathes the West, it loathes the secularist Left most of all. They should read Dabiq more often. Last year it declared:

We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited… Your secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support ‘gay rights’, to allow alcohol, drugs, fornication, gambling, and usury to become widespread, and to encourage the people to mock those who denounce these filthy sins and vices. As such, we wage war against you to stop you from spreading your disbelief and debauchery … your perverted liberal values …

It doesn’t augur well for any of us, but the Left in particular won’t know what’s hit it.