By now, most of us should be fully aware of the arrival of refugees on European shores, and by extension, Australia. The descriptors used for these movements of large masses of people across land and sea are often described in fluid terms: a surge, a flood, a wave, a flow; a rising tide that is about to break open the dams and threaten the biodiversity of our precious ecosystems. This language isn't just tremendously invalidating and dehumanising: when scores of migrants are either locked up in detention centres or dying at sea, it helps to gloss over the fact of their mere existence.

In the German discussion, the neo-Nazi is a shorthand device for the idea of a real racist — someone violent, intractable and proud to proclaim their racism. However, another important aspect of this trope is that it locates racism outside of the mainstream.

On that day, a local court in Dresden in the German state of Saxony handed down two sentences. In one, a group of Nazis by the name of Sturm 34 were tried for a range of violent criminal actions including attacks on left-wing and migrant community shopfronts, physical violence, intimidation and racially motivated hate speech, distributing placards bearing slogans like ‘Criminal foreigners out!’. For these actions they received an assortment of suspended short sentences and fines.