This last weekend, I visited the Wereldmuseum (World Museum) in Amsterdam, which was founded in the 1860s as the Colonial Museum, with its collections tracing empire and trade, oppression and violence, but also resistance and restitution.
Object upon object, obtained through plunder and exploitation, sits in skilfully and carefully curated and labelled vitrines. Visitors mutely shuffle through the rooms. Discomfort comes not only from coming face to face with a despicable history, but also from recognising how little we have learned since the days when people were reduced to property and cultures carved up between the mighty few.
Across continents, the grammar of domination has found new idioms: the casual talk of acquiring foreign lands as if they were unpeopled assets; the readiness to treat sovereign countries as chessboards for ideological theatre; the bureaucratic coldness of immigration raids that separate families and instil fear.
They all speak to a mindset that is older than our passports. Colonial thinking never truly vanished; it adapted, trading uniforms for euphemisms and bayonets for briefings. It reappears whenever power imagines itself entitled to redraw borders – geographic, legal or moral – without heed to those who must live with the lines.
From the war in Ukraine to the genocide in Gaza, the regime in Iran slaughtering thousands of peaceful protesters, ICE raids in Minnesota, international law violated with impunity, the rise of the right, internet trolls, extremist influencers, AI abused for revenge porn…
From international crises to everyday interactions, we are witnessing an erosion of empathy.
It is abetted by a politics of scapegoating. National purpose is becoming defined against an “other” – migrants, minorities, dissenters. The rhetoric is familiar: prosperity stolen, order threatened, purity (racial, cultural or religious) endangered. The circle becomes ever more narrow until even basic protections become rationed privileges.
History tells us where such narrowing leads. It is not only institutions that falter when we accept it; it is the human capacity for fellow feeling, dulled to varying degrees by apathy, cynicism and hate.
Luxembourg is not immune. Debates on asylum and immigration grow harsher. School reforms on LGBTQ+ inclusion are met with homophobia and transphobia. Pockets of poverty deepen in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
Difference and dissent are subtly but persistently being rewritten as danger.
To paraphrase Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, indifference to the suffering of others makes the human inhuman. Words that diminish people by their origin or status, that intimidate, insult and discriminate deny the pain and despair of others. They deny their humanity, and diminish our own.
Compassion is often dismissed as soft, as “woke”. It is not. Compassion is the willingness to test policies against their effects on those with the least leverage; the patience to hold complexity instead of a simple slogan; the courage to accept that dignity is indivisible; not managing through fear but by widening the circle of care; standing up against the small brutalities that become normalised and only expand when unchecked.
Museums remind us of the legacy that outlasts eras. If we must choose a story to live by, let it be one that refuses the convenience of dehumanisation in favour of the difficult, necessary work of recognising ourselves in one another.