The writer Hannah Arendt noted how, during the refugee crises of the 1930s, the treatment received by those fleeing repression was determined, even when they escaped, by their oppressors.

Those whom the persecutor had singled out as scum of the earth—Jews, Trotskyites, etc.—actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere,’ she wrote. ‘[T]hose whom persecution had called undesirable became the indesirables of Europe.

Arendt provides a useful framework to think about Tony Abbott’s extraordinary statement in Sri Lanka: his comment that, though his government "deplores the use of torture we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen".

On one level, the Abbott "torture happens" line might be understood as old-fashioned realpolitik. Because Australia wants to repatriate Sri Lankan asylum seekers, Abbott needs to paint the authoritarian regime there as evolving to democracy (despite Amnesty International’s assessment that "the government is slowly but surely dismantling institutions, including the judiciary, that protect human rights".) Because Abbott seeks co-operation against people smugglers, he’s willing to provide warships to one of the most bloodsoaked militaries in the world.

Yet if the claim that extreme circumstances justify extreme measures sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the syllogism upon which the institutionalised cruelty of Australia’s refugee policy depends.

Think of Scott Morrison transferring a disabled four-year old Tamil asylum seeker to the isolated and squalid detention camp in Nauru on the basis that "no exceptions" could be made to the offshore processing of asylum seekers. "If you are fit enough to get on a boat," he said, "then you can expect you’re fit enough to end up in offshore processing." In difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.

Not surprisingly, a similar method produces familiar results. In the wake of Sri Lankan civil war, the military ushered thousands of Tamil survivors into notorious detention centres. Some of those who fled eventually reached Australian waters – where they were ushered into notorious detention centres.

To use Arendt’s terms, those designated as "scum" by the Sri Lankan authorities are duly treated as such in democratic Australia. To understand the consequences, it is useful to revisit the context in which Arendt wrote.

By the late 1930s, the increasingly brutal anti-semitic measures of the Hitler regime had generated a wave of refugees across Europe. Even in distant Australia, the authorities responded with alarm. "While the Commonwealth will consider sympathetically the applications of thousands of Jewish refugees seeking to come to Australia from Austria, no mass influx will be allowed," reported the Townsville Daily Bulletin on 1 April 1938. "Emphasising this yesterday [Prime Minister] Lyons said suitable migrants of British stock would be given preference to aliens"

On 23 June, the Hobart Mercury noted: "No encouragement will be given to the migration of Jewish refugees to this country. It has been decided to admit not more than 500 a year in small batches to avoid the setting up of foreign Jewish colonies."

A fortnight later, the Townsville paper again took up the issue. "The inflow of Jews will be watched closely," it explained. "The government will give first preference to British subjects, and will provide every safeguard against immigrants depriving Australians of employment."

Such was the context for the intergovernmental conference on refugees at Evian, France, in July 1938 – the event at which the Australian delegate Thomas White notoriously declared that "as we have no real racial problems we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging large scale migration." The Nazis, of course, knew quite well what they were doing. As Arendt later noted, "the official SS newspaper … stated explicitly in 1938 that if the world was not yet convinced that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidenti-fiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports crossed their frontiers."

And so the persecution intensified.

No, Sri Lanka’s not Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, the ongoing atrocities against Tamils are probably better documented than Hitler’s crimes were in 1938.

In the 1930s, the readers of the Townsville Daily Bulletin might be excused for ignorance about fascism in Germany. Today, however, you can download directly the UN report that explains how, in the civil war’s bloody conclusion, Sri Lanka’s armed forces killed as many as 40,000 Tamils. You can access Amnesty’s account of how, since the war ended, the government’s repression of civil society has, if anything, only worsened; you can watch, if you’ve the stomach, ghastly cell phone footage of the battlefield executions.

We can’t pretend that we do not know.

If, then, we have a responsibility to oppose Australia’s shameful refugee policy, it’s not simply for the sake of asylum seekers caught up in our jurisdiction, but because of the consequences for oppressed people elsewhere.

Writing of her era, Arendt explained:

The constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even upon their opponents. […T]he incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements' cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase ‘human rights’ became for all concerned — victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike — the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.

That’s precisely what’s happening now.