Dag van de Empathie | Empathie als Verzet

In a time of growing polarization, war, and inequality, empathy is under pressure. What was once seen as a foundation for living together now seems increasingly pushed aside by distrust, exclusion, and hardening attitudes.

During the Day of Empathy, we explore empathy not as an abstract ideal, but as a powerful social and political stance. Empathy is not just about feeling, it’s about acting. It forms the basis of solidarity, and therefore of resistance against dehumanization.

From a historical perspective, we see how empathy has repeatedly driven people to stand up against injustice. Resistance often begins with the ability to take another person’s suffering seriously, and to see it as connected to your own responsibility. In that sense, empathy is inseparable from antifascism: the active refusal to accept systems and ideologies that reduce people to “the other,” to something lesser, or to an enemy.

At a time when antifascism is sometimes demonized or framed as suspect, we want to open up the conversation about what it fundamentally means: a principled choice for humanity, equality, and protecting one another.

This evening follows the movement from empathy to insight, and from insight to action. We explore how historical knowledge of resistance, migration, and solidarity helps us better understand the present, and how empathy can grow into engagement, and translate into contemporary activism and local initiatives.

Empathy, then, is not just a soft force, but a connecting and mobilizing one: a force that brings people together, makes responsibility visible, and forms the basis for collective resistance.

19:00 Introduction & speaker presentations
20:00 Musical interlude
20:20 Panel discussion with speakers and audience