Last week, we learned that the Australian government had funded a nasty little comic book intended to deter those seeking asylum from making the journey to Australia; the narrative culminates with images of asylum seekers languishing miserably in mosquito-plagued camps.

Perhaps an updated version can now depict them being shot or hacked at with machetes.

Why not? That’s the logic of deterrence, isn’t it? Continue to make refugees miserable until the oppression they face from Australians becomes worse than that which they’re fleeing.

Immigration minister Scott Morrison has, naturally, provided few details of the tragedy unfolding on Manus Island other than to confirm the death of one asylum seeker and injuries to 77 others during a riot in the Australian-sponsored detention centre, but description from refugee advocate Ian Rintoul sounds almost like a tsarist pogrom:

Gangs of armed police and locals actually went from compound to compound, hunting down asylum seekers and inflicting very serious injuries on people that they got their hands on.

Of course, Rintoul’s version can’t currently be confirmed – but that’s scarcely surprising. Australia has deliberately cloaked its detention centre archipelago in so many layers of secrecy that we know almost nothing about what goes on there. The camps are the equivalent of private businesses remotely located in foreign countries, and everything about them is designed to frustrate journalists seeking to report on them.

In Vietnam, the press corp dubbed general Westmoreland’s press conferences the “five o’clock follies”, since the information divulged there bore so little relation to the truth. The staged presentations by Scott Morrison and his tame generals might be described in the same way, except that journalists – especially those at the ABC – have learned that overt cynicism about the Great War on People Smugglers will bring the concerted wrath of Murdoch’s odious culture warriors.

The Operation Sovereign Borders graphic campaign warning off refugees from coming to Australia. Photograph: customs.gov.au Photograph: customs.gov.au

In any case, Morrison, and behind him, Tony Abbott, understand that there’s no political pressure on them to reveal anything very much, especially since the Labor party possesses no appetite at all for a debate on refugees. Let’s not forget that the PNG solution was Kevin Rudd’s signature policy, a typically too-clever-by-half move to outflank the Tories on border security that simply resulted in pushing the debate further to the right.

And yet we can’t say we don’t know what happens in the camps. We know. Of course we know. We know and we are meant to know.

Orwell says somewhere that, by the late 1930s, everyone who didn’t deliberately blind themselves understood what Stalin was doing in Russia. It’s the same with our own little cluster of 21st century refugee gulags.

The camps are designed to be cruel. Again, that’s what deterrence means, spelled out in the immigration department’s graphical grief porn – try to come here and we will make your life a living hell.

Sure, details might remain hazy (how many Australians knew their government was paying a PNG police unit implicated in murders and torture to guard refugees?) but the government has made sure the central message came through loud and clear, both to domestic and international audiences: asylum seekers are going to suffer. And suffer they duly have, with today’s incident underscores.

So the sinister, cynical double game will continue.

On the one hand, the government will deny any knowledge and any responsibility of whatever atrocities just took place on Manus Island. Nothing happened – and if it did, it’s now a matter for PNG authorities. On the other hand, the deaths and the injuries and the general wretchedness of life in limbo in a jungle camp will be tacitly used to deter asylum seekers overseas and, more importantly, to remind voters that Abbott is hard on refugees, just as he promised.

You might think that, now that desperate people have been shot, killed or severely injured in an Australian-run camp, we cannot possibly sink any lower. But that’s not true. At the moment, the dynamic of refugee policy is one of escalation. The only limit is that which we’re prepared to bear.