It's almost May 4. The country is in tense anticipation of how the commemoration will go. The Gaza war hangs over the evening like a dark cloud. Femke Halsema will speak on Dam Square. Twice before, she had the honor of speaking at that spot. Those times she underscored why we commemorate: "[...] Our freedom is fringed by pain," she spoke in 2022. This year, the pain is more acute and more on the surface. She will weigh her words differently.

Losing to win
You have to lose to win, Tom-Jan Meeus learned in 2010 from American Republican politician Tom Tancredo. In the decade before, Tancredo had made fuss his political business model. His modus operandi: make the most extreme statements possible ("throw a nuclear bomb on Tehran"), which you know are unachievable and will anger people. Surf the wave of conflict, fuss and thus attention, wallow in the victim role and agitate against the fact that your proposals are not taken seriously. The result: an attraction to dissatisfied groups, and thus, electoral gain. Wilders indulged in Tancredo's cynical tactics a year earlier...

This elimination and conflict model, which sails on simple, extreme solutions, leaves no room for nuance, complexity or compassion. Over the past 20 years, this black-and-white thinking has slowly taken root in our society. Partly because the political middle and the media, in the slipstream of high-scoring fence-sitting politicians, have also begun to use "plain language," is Meeus' point.

The silent middle as a counterforce
Black-and-white thinking results in polarization. The instigators of this often become increasingly extreme in order to keep creating fuss. Polarization expert Bart Brandsma explains the dynamics this leads to in the podcast Lex Bohlmeijer in conversation with Bart Brandsma : "Polarization is also forcing the middle to choose to belong to you or to the other. If you're not for us, you're against us. Remember Black Lives Matter's credo Silence is complicity.

"Then the other becomes an obstacle to the future you desire. Then it becomes toxic," Brandsma said. The poles thus erode the middle more and more, there is less and less room for not taking sides.

The silent middle can be a counterforce. Precisely by not taking sides, by suspending judgment, by having compassion for both sides and not excluding them. Think Angela Merkel, whose name has become a verb: "Merkeln" which means do nothing, do not make a decision, do not make a statement.

Giving people the feeling that they are not being put away but seen, has a depolarizing effect. So important to strengthen that silent middle. It is the guarantee of peace, is Brandsma's conviction.

Saturday we remember the extreme excesses of us-versus-them thinking. To Halsema and all the other speakers the difficult task to see everyone's pain, not to exclude it, and at the same time to let the value that the 4th of May commemoration has for many weigh more heavily than polarizing dissent. It's up to them and all of us to give everyone a voice with 2 minutes of silence.