Imagine a situation where a wartime government rounds up and imprisons some poor minority group. This scenario is easy to imagine because it has happened so many times before. Australia is no exception to this foul history, having interned 7000 'enemy aliens' in half a dozen camps during WWI.
Our history as a British gulag left us with a taste for all things carceral, and so the internment camps reappeared during WWII with a vengeance. German, Italian and Japanese residents — some of them British citizens — were detained en masse until the camps swelled to more than 12,000 people by 1942.
The press made alien civilians into common folk devils. The belief that foreign nationals posed a threat to Australia's security was so powerful that when the HMT Dunera arrived in 1940, the government interned the 2000 Jewish refugees aboard into a POW camp.
These events have long faded into the convenient mists of white amnesia. Even when they are acknowledged, there is a comfortable certainty that modern Australia would not do such things — a brazen lie we tell ourselves to soothe a bewildering dissonance.
The government launders the ugliness of the Pacific Solution with polite euphemisms that are reified by uncritical repetition in the media. Illegal immigrants are placed in detention centres for offshore processing.
These phrases have new lives as idioms, where their significance is not deducible from their meaning. So we understand that people who have committed no crime are illegal, that overcrowded camps are comfortable facilities, and that the state is attending to people it confines arbitrarily and indefinitely.
This protracted exercise in self-delusion is meant to distract us from one simple, uncomfortable truth about our offshore establishments: that they are wartime internment camps.
"It is lethally ironic to watch the major parties trip over themselves to denounce Fraser Anning's attendance at a white supremacist rally. They have for years eagerly intensified the security state and the border regime."
The passengers of the MV Tampa were left at sea for weeks while the Howard government decided what to do with them. However, after Australia declared war on a noun following 9/11, asylum seekers became a new, enemy alien. In a real sense, refugees are political prisoners of the war on terror.
The situation is this: a militarised agency seizes members of persecuted minorities and confines them to a small area with inadequate facilities. There is an exhausting number of reports of appalling conditions, torture, rapes, violence, self-harm and a dozen deaths due to deliberate negligence.
While punters muse that White Australia is coming back in a big way, the government is operating internment camps filled almost exclusively with people of colour and Muslims. The wartime state tells us that boat people are a threat to Australian security, best kept out of sight, out of mind.
Some might say that offshore camps are not quite so bad as past internment. At least it's not citizens being rounded up, they might say, but this is a dollar-store apology. The moral distinction between capturing vulnerable people at sea and herding people like cattle on the mainland is negligible.
The government tries to wash its hands of culpability by contracting the maintenance of the prison camps to for-profit businesses. Another easy fiction: by paying the contracts the government holds all the strings. This subterfuge serves its purpose, though, because by the time concrete details emerge, public interest has inevitably moved on.
Another excuse is to say that it's all about people smuggling — some bright rhetoric courtesy of the Gillard years when Labor needed to sell internment to white, working-class folks. As if putting children in cages would, through some supernatural operation, affect human bootleggers a world away.
Of course, boat arrivals are a crisis of the government's own making. Howard rigged the visa system to disallow family reunion with temporary protection visas back in 1999. Where before one refugee might have made the arduous journey and safely conveyed family at a later date, government policy has forced whole households out to sea on rickety boats for years.
It is lethally ironic, then, to watch the major parties trip over themselves to denounce Fraser Anning's attendance at a white supremacist rally. After all, they have for years rapidly, and eagerly, intensified the security state and the border regime.
The pantomime serves a purpose. Politicians denouncing Anning for his explicit support of fascism distracts from years of slightly more democratic, somewhat less in-your-face ethnonationalism. Sieg heils in St Kilda are bad, offshore internment camps are necessary.
So the public finds itself hopelessly in denial about the systemic brutality of the laws it votes for at every election, and desperately willing to swallow government rhetoric which sanitises the unfathomable cruelty of Australian border policy.
When a future generation looks back on these camps, they will see them in the same light that we view internment during the World Wars. The same policies applied to new avatars of human suffering. So much off-white meat assigned a number in a camp.
If one thing is certain it is that mechanically echoing government euphemisms will not agitate change. Australian's may come to see border policy in a different light if we start speaking candidly about offshore internment.
Joshua Badge is a lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University. Follow him on Twitter @joshuabadge