We remember, therefore we exist. It’s what we tell ourselves to make the unbearable bearable—to shape the chaos of loss into narratives we can digest. Remembrance becomes our moral compass, the glue that holds the "we" together. But who decides what we remember—and, more importantly, what we choose to forget?

By Rafael Baroch
In the Netherlands, May 4th is a day for commemoration. Every year, at eight o’clock, the country halts for two minutes, the flag half-mast, turning inward to face the shadow cast by its past: our victims, our responsibility, our shame.

Commemoration is never all-encompassing. It is a deliberate, often painful act of selection: heroes are honoured, ambiguous suffering is tolerated, and the nameless fade quietly into the wings. This power of choice in commemoration is not to be taken lightly, as it shapes our collective memory and identity.

Selection is power, and power is never innocent.

This act of remembering is not about universal empathy or global solidarity. It demands uncomfortable introspection: a reckoning with what went wrong in our national history. It is a moment to be accountable to ourselves, not a stage for moral exhibitionism. This discomfort is a necessary part of the process, pushing us to confront our past and learn from it.

Still, each year, the well-meaning official returns, with a kind and soft voice and a reassuring smile, eager to expand the ritual. Refugees, Gaza, victims of climate disaster: their stories, he insists, "seamlessly match those of the past."

It sounds generous, but it is not remembrance—moral appropriation dressed as empathy—a symbolic renovation. He projects today’s ideals onto yesterday’s dead and calls it inclusive.

The Holocaust becomes a toolset: social integration policy, citizenship lesson, a platform for contemporary virtue—Auschwitz as metaphor. History is no longer something to confront, but something to deploy as if all suffering were interchangeable, as if victimhood itself were a universal currency with equal moral purchasing power.

Across Europe, this trend gains momentum. In Germany, Belgium, France and beyond, remembrance days are increasingly framed as opportunities for global solidarity. Gaza, Ukraine, and drowned migrants—worthy causes all, but their inclusion on days like May 4th risks dissolving historical specificity into sentimental fog.

A commemoration that encompasses everything ultimately means nothing.

Remembrance becomes performance—sentimental theatre in which past horrors are recycled into virtue signals. Refugees are cast as minor characters in a moral opera where the audience—the well-intentioned public—rehearses its self-image. Empathy, but without confrontation. Mourning, without memory.

Accurate remembrance is painful, precise, and confrontational. It does not flatter or soothe. It refuses to turn the dead into moral accessories. It demands that we take responsibility for what cannot be undone and dares us to resist the temptation of morally convenient analogies.

Those who wish to turn national remembrance into a festival of moral universalism do not deserve applause. They deserve silence—and perhaps a moment of shame.