It’s been 50 years since The Sorrow and the Pity first screened in a tiny cinema in Paris. Soon after its American release, film critic Roger Ebert described it as ‘one of the greatest documentaries ever made.’ When it was finally approved for broadcast on French television, in 1981, 10 years after its original ban, it was viewed by 20 million people – more than a third of the entire population of France.

This week it’s exactly eighty years since my great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, was murdered in a gas chamber built into the cellar of an asylum in Hadamar, a small town close to Frankfurt. She was forty-nine and had four children, of which my grandmother was the eldest.

I wonder how we might hold a distinct diasporic politics that can contain a vast plurality of political and ethical obligations. The kind that advocates for social transformation and justice in both our new homes and our ancestral lands, in spite of temporal and spatial distance.

On 5 January, around 150 fascists and far-right sympathisers gathered in an anti-African migrant rally on St Kilda beach. The event was organised by well-known extremists Neil Erikson and Blair Cottrell and was also attended by Senator for Queensland Fraser Anning. The ABC was criticised for using the term ‘far-right activist’ in the lead up to the event, with others suggesting that ‘extremist’ was a more suitable term. There has been debate over whether those who attended should be described as ‘Nazis’.

This article was sparked by the jacket that Melania Trump wore as she travelled to a detention camp for migrant children, but my intent isn’t to argue that she or her staff chose that jacket in order to send a coded message to the president’s far-right followers. It is, rather, to highlight some of the historical echoes of that phrase – ‘I don’t care’.

‘Bella Ciao’ is both the most popular and the least political of all partisan anthems. It has a jaunty, upbeat tune and a very simple plot: the first-person singer wakes up one morning to discover that the country has been invaded. He wishes to join the partisans, for he doesn’t fear death. Should he in fact die, he only asks that he be buried by the shadow of a nice flower.