Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  It’s tempting to attribute the triumph of Mandela’s approach to a gift for publicity, but that’s not what did it. He didn’t orate with the passion of a Martin Luther King or debate with the fire of a Winston Churchill. At his first press conference he was bewildered by the furry objects clustered in front of him, until someone whispered in his ear that they were microphones.28

  Mandela’s superpower lay elsewhere. What made him one of the greatest leaders in world history, observes journalist John Carlin, is that ‘he chose to see good in people who ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have judged to have been beyond redemption’.29

  Walter Sisulu, one of Mandela’s closest friends, was once asked to name some of Mandela’s flaws. ‘When he trusts a person,’ Sisulu began, ‘he goes all out…’

  Then he hesitated.

  ‘But perhaps it is not a failing…’30

  6

  Looking back on the most hopeful shifts in recent decades, we see that trust and contact were instrumental every time. Take the emancipation of gays and lesbians starting from the 1960s. As more and more brave souls came out of the closet, friends and co-workers and mothers and fathers learned that not everybody has the same sexual preference. And that that’s okay.

  But the opposite also holds true. After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, it became clear that all too often we still live in our own bubbles. Two sociologists even showed that ‘the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support’.31 And also that the further the distance to the border separating the US from Mexico, the higher the support for the man who campaigned on building a giant wall between the two.32 The problem, in other words, was not too much contact between Trump voters and Muslims and refugees, but too little.

  The same pattern played out in the referendum held in Britain in 2016 on whether to leave the EU. In communities that were less culturally diverse, proportionately more residents voted in favour of Brexit.33 And in my own country of Holland, the highest concentrations of populist party voters are found in areas with the highest concentrations of white residents. A Dutch team of sociologists found that when whites had more contact with Muslims (primarily at work), they were also less Islamophobic.34

  Not only that, diversity can also make us friendlier. In 2018, an international team of researchers at the University of Singapore established on the basis of five new studies that people who live in more diverse communities more often identify with all of humanity. As a result, they also exhibit more kind, helpful behaviour towards strangers. This was demonstrated after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, when residents of more diverse neighbourhoods provided more help.35

  But don’t start celebrating just yet. Merely living in a mixed neighbourhood isn’t enough. If you seldom talk to your neighbours, diversity can actually heighten prejudice.36 There are also indications that communities which saw a rapid influx of immigrants also had larger shares of pro-Brexit or Trump voters.37

  Contact researchers consequently stress that people need time to get used to one another. Contact works, but not instantly. Holland witnessed fierce protests in 2015, for instance, against the opening of reception centres for Syrian refugees. Angry objectors arrived yelling and name calling, and even threw stones through windows. But then a couple of years later, that anger turned to sadness when the same asylum seekers had to be relocated elsewhere. ‘We had no problems here. In fact, it was all positive,’ reported one man who just a few years earlier had issued violent threats. ‘It’s become a place to socialise, like a community centre. I enjoy going over for a cup of coffee.’38

  Interacting with strangers is something we have to learn, preferably starting from childhood. Best of all would be if every young person could travel like Abraham Viljoen did in his college days. Mark Twain figured that out as early as 1867, observing that ‘travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness’.39

  This is not to say we need to change who we are. Quite the opposite. Among the most notable findings to come out of contact science is that prejudices can be eliminated only if we retain our own identity.40 We need to realise it’s okay that we’re all different–there’s nothing wrong with that. We can build strong houses for our identities, with sturdy foundations.

  Then we can throw open the doors.

  After visiting South Africa in 1956, Gordon Allport concluded that he’d been naive. That some societies are just too far gone, and that the weight of the past can prove too great a burden. When he died in 1967, he had no idea that all his earlier predictions would one day prove to be true.

  For what had Allport asserted during one of his lectures back in Johannesburg? Yes, humans are tribal animals. Yes, we’re quick to form prejudices. And yes, thinking in stereotypes seems to be rooted deep in our nature.

  Yet Allport also stressed the importance of zooming out. ‘To despair,’ he said, ‘is to misread the long lesson of history.’41 South Africa will carry its legacy of apartheid for decades to come, but that doesn’t diminish the country’s breathtaking progress over the past fifty years.

  Constand Viljoen passed away in April 2020. In the last years of his life, he and his brother Abraham still lived in two different worlds—one a soldier, the other a minister; one a veteran, the other a peacemaker—but the long years of not seeing each other were over. Contact had been restored.

  18

  When the Soldiers Came Out of the Trenches

  1

  On the eve of the First World War, in the summer of 1914, most thought the war would soon be over. We’ll be home again by Christmas, soldiers told their sweethearts. People thronged the centres of Paris, London and Berlin, already wild with jubilation over certain triumph. Millions of recruits marched off to the front, singing as they went.

  And then it began: the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century.1 Because if not for the First World War, there would have been no Second World War. If not for the battles of Ypres and Verdun, no Treaty of Versailles, no Russian Revolution, no Lenin, no Stalin, no Hitler.

  By Christmas 1914, more than a million soldiers were dead. The front line stretched some five hundred miles, from the Belgian coast to the Franco-Swiss border. For four long years, it barely moved. Day in day out, a generation of young men was being decimated in exchange for a few acres, at most. What should have been a heroic battle, with horses, drums and trumpets, became a senseless slaughter.

  But even in those desperate years, when the whole of Europe was in the grip of darkness, there was one small but radiant ray of light. In December 1914, the heavens briefly opened, giving thousands a glimpse of a different world. For a moment, they realised they were all in this together. As brothers. As humans.

  It’s with this story that I wish to close my book. That’s because, time and again, we find ourselves back in the trenches. All too easily we forget that the other guy, a hundred yards away, is just like us. Time and again, we fire at one another from a distance–through social media or online forums, from the safety of wherever we’re holed up. We let fear, ignorance, suspicion and stereotypes be our guides, making generalisations about people we’ve never met.

  But there’s an alternative. Hatred can be transformed into friendship and bitter foes can shake hands. That’s something we can believe in–not because we’re entitled to be naive, but because it actually happened.

  2

  It’s Christmas Eve 1914. The night is clear and cold. Moonlight illuminates the snow-covered no man’s land separating the trenches outside the town of La Chapelle-d’Armentières. British High Command, feeling nervous, sends a message to the front lines: ‘It is thought possible the enemy may be contemplating an attack during Christmas or New Year. Special vigilance will be maintained during this period.’2

  The generals have no idea what’s really about to happen.

  Around seven or eight in the evening, Albert Moren of the 2nd Queen’s Regiment blinks in disbelief. What’s that, on th
e other side? Lights flicker on, one by one. Lanterns, he sees, and torches, and… Christmas trees? That’s when he hears it: ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’. Never before has the carol sounded so beautiful. ‘I shall never forget it,’ Moren says later. ‘It was one of the highlights of my life.’3

  Not to be outdone, the British soldiers start up a round of ‘The First Noel’. The Germans applaud, and counter with ‘O Tannenbaum’. They go back and forth for a while, until finally the two enemy camps sing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ in Latin, together. ‘This was really a most extraordinary thing,’ rifleman Graham Williams later recalled, ‘two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.’4

  A Scottish regiment stationed just north of the Belgian town of Ploegsteert goes further still. From the enemy trenches, Corporal John Ferguson hears someone call out, asking if they want some tobacco. ‘Make for the light,’ shouts the German. So Ferguson heads out into no man’s land.

  ‘[We] were soon conversing as if we had known each other for years,’ he later wrote. ‘What a sight–little groups of Germans and British extending almost the length of our front! Out of the darkness we could hear laughter and see lighted matches […] Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!’5

  The next morning, Christmas Day, the bravest of the soldiers again climb out of the trenches. Walking past the barbed wire, they go over to shake hands with the enemy. Then they beckon to those who’d stayed behind. ‘We all cheered,’ remembered Leslie Walkington of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles, ‘and then we flocked out like a football crowd.’6

  Gifts are exchanged. The British offer chocolate, tea and puddings; the Germans share cigars, sauerkraut and schnapps. They crack jokes and take group photographs as though it’s a big, happy reunion. More than one game of football is played, using helmets for goalposts.7 One match goes 3-2 to the Germans, another to the English, 4-1.

  In northern France, south-west of the village of Fleurbaix, the opposing sides hold a joint burial service. ‘The Germans formed up on one side,’ Lieutenant Arthur Pelham-Burn later wrote, ‘the English on the other, the officers standing in front, every head bared.’8 As their comrades are laid to rest–comrades killed by enemy fire–they sing ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ / ‘Der Herr ist mein Hirt’, their voices mingling.

  That evening, there are Christmas feasts up and down the front. One English soldier finds himself escorted behind the German line to a wine cellar, where he and a Bavarian soldier pop open a bottle of 1909 Veuve Clicquot. The men exchange addresses and promise to meet up in London or Munich after the war.

  You’d have a hard time believing it happened, if it weren’t for all the evidence. Eyewitness accounts abound from soldiers who could scarcely believe it themselves.

  ‘Just you think,’ Oswald Tilley exclaimed to his parents in a letter, ‘that while you were eating your turkey etc., I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before!! It was astounding!’9 German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch also kept having to pinch himself: ‘How fantastically wonderful and strange,’ he marvelled, ‘that thanks to soccer and Christmas […] deadly enemies briefly came together as friends.’10

  Most British were stunned at how friendly the Germans were. Back home, they’d been incited by propaganda and fake news in papers such as the Daily Mail. More than 40 per cent of newspaper circulation was controlled by one man: Lord Northcliffe, the Rupert Murdoch of his day. He wielded tremendous power over public opinion. Germans were portrayed as ferocious Huns who went around spearing infants on bayonets and stringing priests up from church bells.11

  Shortly before the war broke out, the German poet Ernst Lissauer had penned ‘Hymn of Hate against England’, which vied in popularity with the national anthem. Millions of German schoolchildren had to learn it by heart. German newspapers claimed that the French and English were so godless they didn’t even celebrate Christmas.

  Here, again, there was a clear pattern. The greater the distance from the front lines, the greater the hate. On the home front–in government offices and newsrooms, in living rooms and pubs–hostility towards the enemy was immense. But in the trenches, soldiers developed a mutual understanding. ‘After our talk,’ one British soldier wrote in a letter home, ‘I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated.’12

  For a long time, the Christmas truce of 1914 was treated as a myth. As nothing more than a sentimental fairy tale, or, worse: a lie told by traitors. After the holidays the war resumed. Millions more soldiers were killed, and what had actually transpired that Christmas became increasingly hard to believe.

  Not until the 1981 BBC documentary Peace in No Man’s Land did it become apparent that this tale was more than just a handful of rumours. Fully two-thirds of the British front line ceased fighting that Christmas. Most instances concerned Germans who made overtures of friendship toward the British (though it also happened along Belgian and French lines). All told, more than a hundred thousand soldiers laid down their arms.13

  In fact, the peace of Christmas 1914 was not an isolated case. The same thing happened during the Spanish Civil War and the Boer Wars. It happened in the American Civil War, in the Crimean War and in the Napoleonic Wars. But nowhere was it as widespread and sudden as that Christmas in Flanders.

  Reading through the soldiers’ letters, one question kept occurring to me: if these men–stuck in a horrific war that had already claimed a million lives–could come out of their trenches, then what’s stopping us, here and now, from doing the same?

  We, too, are being pitted against each other by hatemongers and demagogues. Newspapers like the Daily Mail once spread stories about bloodthirsty Huns, now they report invasions of thieving foreigners, murderous immigrants and raping refugees who are–remarkably–both stealing jobs and too lazy to work, while managing to run roughshod over time-honoured traditions and values in their spare time.

  German soldiers celebrating Christmas in the trenches. Daily Sketch, January 1915. Source: Getty.

  This is how hate is being pumped into society once again. The culprits this time are not only newspapers, but blogs and tweets, lies spread on social media and toxic online trolls. The best fact-checker seems powerless against this kind of venom.

  But what if it also works the other way around? What if propaganda not only sows discord, but can also bring people back together?

  3

  Colombia, 2006–Carlos Rodriguez and Juan Pablo García work at MullenLowe, a leading global ad agency. Most days, they come up with commercials for cat food or try to sell consumers a new brand of shampoo. But on this particular day the agency gets an unusual request.

  The client is Colombia’s defence minister. And the job? He wants the ad agency’s help in the fight against FARC, the oldest guerrilla army in Latin America. The government wants to bombard the guerrillas with guerrilla marketing.

  By this time, the war in Colombia has been going on for more than fifty years and has claimed some 220,000 lives. Colombia’s army, right-wing paramilitary groups, and guerrilla movements like FARC are all guilty of the most heinous war crimes. A whole generation has grown up never knowing peace. And the army realises by now that the war will never be won by brute force.

  The admen at MullenLowe accept the minister’s request and approach it as they would any job, by interviewing their target audience. Over the course of a year, the agency talks to nearly a hundred former FARC fighters. The researchers try to pin down what drove them into the jungle, and what keeps them there. Their conclusion after every interview is the same: these are ordinary men and women.

  The rebels have the same needs, dreams and desires we all have. ‘Once you really understand that they’re not guerrillas, but humans,’ Carlos later explained, ‘the communication totally changes.’14 In fact, the consultants arrive at exactly the same conclusions as Morris Janowitz, the psychologist who interviewed hundreds of German POWs durin
g the Second World War (see Chapter 10). Carlos and Juan realise that instead of attacking the FARC ideology, their propaganda should aim much closer to home.

  Among other things, the team discovers that the number of demobilisations peaks around the same time each year: Christmas. It seems that, like anybody else, guerrillas prefer to go home for the holidays. So the idea Carlos and Juan pitch to their boss is simple: ‘Maybe we’re crazy, but what would you say if we put a Christmas tree in the middle of the jungle?’15

  Operation Christmas starts in December 2010.

  Under cover of night, two special forces teams in Black Hawk helicopters fly deep into enemy territory. There, they drop two thousand Christmas lights on seventy-five-foot trees in nine strategic spots. To these ‘Christmas trees’ they attach motion detectors and banners that light up whenever someone walks by.

  ‘If Christmas can come to the jungle,’ it reads, ‘you can come home. Demobilise. At Christmas, everything is possible.’

  The operation is an overwhelming success. Within a single month, 331 guerrilla insurgents give up the fight. Many say the Christmas trees were what did it. ‘Our command[er] wasn’t angry,’ one rebel said, ‘It was different to the other propaganda we had seen… He was touched.’16

  Meanwhile, the team at MullenLowe continues interviewing former rebels. This is how they learn that although just about all the insurgents knew about the Christmas trees, most hadn’t seen them. That’s because FARC tends to travel by jungle highway–the river. And that inspires the admen’s next idea.

  Operation Rivers of Light launches in December 2011. Colombians who live near the rivers and have been a main source of FARC recruits are asked to write to their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends who have joined the rebel army. Their message: come home, we’re waiting for you.