My doubts would have been increased by the collection of authoritarian despots, illiberal politicians, and opportunist populists marching arm in arm with the President of France, by way of symbolising something or other - but probably not, if their example is anything to go by, the rejection of violence as a means of advancing interests in politics. As Crikey.com.au pointed out, among those marching in the front row in "solidarity" with the victims of the murders were representatives of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Tunisia, Palestine, and Egypt - all with records of oppressing freedom of speech, and freedom of religion - and Israel and Russia.

Others on the bandwagon, in Australia and abroad, want to use the Charlie Hebdo atrocity to permission themselves to express their sheer hatred of Islam and Islamic cultures, to promote the exclusion of Muslims, or to suggest that the Western and Christian cultural and social tradition has been one forever promoting free debate, freedom of conscience and a lack of consequences. And, in the process, of course, to point with virtuous outrage at many of the logical and emotional contradictions of anyone who has expressed anything other than a black or white view of the fundamental nature of the problem.

The thrust of such parsing is to imply that any critic of the search-out-and-shoot-or-blow-up-all-real-or-potential-jihadis approach is some sort of appeaser, constantly seeking an excuse to kowtow to, or promote the views of the enemy. Just who this enemy is, why they are the enemy, or how they are to be defeated, is neither here nor there in such discussion; those are matters for grown-ups.

I would prefer freedom of speech in broader form than it is generally available in Australia at the moment. The freedom has contracted sharply in recent times. But I have never thought the freedom an absolute value, able to triumph automatically over other values such as the right to privacy and reputation, the need for fair process in the courts, and the national security interest and the public safety.

I have no desire for legislation to require good manners, and I believe in robust debate. But I am not opposed to laws that balance the right against rights to be free of discrimination, incitements to violence and calculated offence and breach of the peace. The Charlie Hebdo personnel thrived, like the boys in the Chaser, on relentless and constantly escalating provocation of many different sacred cows. It is fatuous to suggest that all of the targets, bar one, reacted with resigned patience. One reaction has not been funny, but many of the consequences, since the overreaction, have been.

The history of Australian (and British) freedoms has included many instances where the so-called silent majority has believed it has a right to set community standards, and to censor, coerce or punish the expression of any views or activities of which they disapprove. For three-quarters of the post-settlement history of Australia, for example, there was rigid censorship of anything thought (usually by a Catholic customs inspector) to be obscene, or seditious, or to promote Marxist (but not fascist or Nazi) ideology.

Official discrimination against non-whites, and against Aborigines, was official policy. Both the Anglican and Catholic churches believed that the laws relating to families and personal sexual conduct, except drunkenness and violence against women, should reflect middle class Victorian "values" - as though these had been promulgated by God himself. The Catholic Church has always believed because its official views, on marriage, divorce, contraception, homosexuality and abortion are (by definition) right, it has a right to demand that the general law restrict and coerce everyone to its belief. Likewise, over this period, a substantial majority of the population regarded the Irish, and Catholics, as benighted in religious suspicion and fecklessness, and as impossible to "civilise" as some people now seem to feel about the latest recipients of their "tough love", the Aborigines.

Australian social values began to change rapidly from the later 1960s. Most modern Australians have lived in a fairly tolerant age which has lastingly repudiated, for good or ill, the broad consensus and social and cultural contract of earlier times. The notion that the modern tolerance and indifference, or restraint by the political and social institutions, or semi-libertarianism, is now entrenched in our culture is nonsense. Witness the number of older, "whiter" Australians who openly yearn for the past and deplore modern apathy about their obsessions.

Likewise nonsense is the notion that Australia is at war against the idea of terrorism, or of a culture of death, or of militant jihadism. Australia has long been picking and choosing its friends and its enemies in its conflict with "terrorists". There has been no principle by which one can distinguish between those we have regarded as enemies of civilisation, or our civilisation, and those whom we have made our allies, friends and comrades in arms. Our allies are as beastly and cruel, and have used the same techniques, as our enemies.

This is as true of Afghanistan as of our involvement in Iraq and Syria. This does not make the behaviour of either of the many "sides" defensible or comprehensible, but if one is seeking some idea, explanation or ideal by which we choose sides, it has long been impossible to find one. We could be just as well fighting alongside IS as against it, and, contemptible and idiotic as they are, we have had worse causes and people as our allies; indeed currently do.

None of this, even the sheer hypocrisy and deceit of those forever sooling the West on to some ultimate apocalyptic confrontation with the people of Islam provides the slightest excuse for those who, individually or by orders, kill innocent civilians. Likewise, however, pretending that every fresh atrocity by them affirms the fundamental rightness of our cause, and our disinterested purity in promoting it, is entirely counter-productive, indeed dumb. We should refrain from such manifestations not because it annoys our enemies but because it promotes our own self-delusion and moral apathy. This is what is making the conflict more and more intractable.

"Realists" supporting the "crusade" sometimes say the war could go on for a century. It certainly will if those on our own side see the struggle, ideological, social, cultural, political or military, in the way they presently do.

Indeed the present strategy, and tactics, seem to depend on the physical death of every last Sunni zealot, whether suffering from a religious bug or perhaps an animus against one or other of those temporally on our side.

While we fight like this, and waste our spiritual and physical treasure and credit doing so, we can never "win".

Indeed there is nothing to win anyway, except perhaps some convenient distraction from other fundamental problems such as the other Middle East crisis, involving Israel, that goes unmentioned. And world poverty, the unequal distribution of resources, climate change, stagnation and debt. Many of these conflicts actually have a more significant moral dimension.