As 2019 comes to an end, it would be wrong not to mark the centenary of one of the most momentous and least remembered events of the twentieth century: the German Revolution. The revolution doesn’t have one sole year as its anniversary. It raged from 1918 to 1923, spreading from the mutinous naval yards of Kiel to the pits and steelworks of the Ruhr.

Labor’s willingness to vilify and abuse migrants and refugees is not just a historical fact, but a congenital disease of the party. It is discernible not only in the birthmark of White Australia, but in the malaise of the social democratic project globally, and its entrapment in late, brutal capitalism.

Racism in Australia has long rested on not only vicious establishment slander, but on silence, or attempts to obfuscate, the agency, humanity and courage of the oppressed.