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It was Christmas Eve in 1914, in the northern French town of La Chapelle-d'Armentières. The First World War was at its peak. The British High Command sent a message to the front lines to maintain special vigilance against a possible German attack around Christmas and New Year. They might take advantage of whatever little distraction any celebratory mood could cause.
The Germans, stationed just a few hundred yards ahead, had other plans.
In the evening, the British soldiers witnessed something scarcely believable. On the German front, they saw lights flicker one by one, followed by lanterns, torches, and … Christmas trees! Then they broke into their customary German song for Christmas.
The Britishers, not to be outdone, started their own round of songs and dance. They were met with applause from the German side, and a jugalbandi ensued.
‘I shall never forget it,’ recounted Albert Moren, one of the British soldiers who participated in this celebration. ‘It was one of the highlights of my life.’
‘This was really a most extraordinary thing,’ rifleman Graham Williams recalled, ‘two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.’
It was indeed an extraordinary thing, and quite surreal and unbelievable to read. How could humans who were ready to kill each other just hours earlier celebrate merrily together? And yet, this wasn’t an isolated occurrence. There were similar accounts of British and German soldiers celebrating and feasting together like long lost friends on the same night across the war front.
In a Belgian town, the Scots and Germans teamed up for a night of festivity. Cigars were shared, gifts exchanged, group photographs clicked, and a few games of football were played with helmets as the goalposts.
Elsewhere in France, a joint burial service happened, with both the English and the Germans in attendance, every head bared.
There were Christmas feasts at several places. One English soldier recalled being escorted behind the German lines to a wine cellar, where he popped open a wine bottle with a German soldier. They exchanged addresses to meet up in London or Munich when the war was over.
The British soldiers were stunned by how friendly and normal the Germans were. Countless letters to families remarked this. Many acknowledged that they had been led astray by the very exaggerated newspaper reports of Germans being cold and barbaric.
It turns out that this realization was hardly restricted to Germans and British, or to this war, or to any situation where the perception of an individual or a group is shaped by external factors, only to be completely reset when they come into contact. When the British and German soldiers met the men beneath their uniforms, they realized they were just regular folks like them, who wanted the same things in life that they did, who had families back home who loved them, and just wanted them back home safely. No one was out there to kill. Everyone was just obeying orders. If it were down only to the soldiers, the wars would have perhaps never been fought.
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What the Germans and British did during the Christmas of 1914 wasn’t an exception when it comes to human behaviour. We are wired to avoid violence, and many of us would go to extreme lengths to do that. Even in moments of extreme danger.
Several independent studies of World War 2 have found that only about 15 to 20 percent of the soldiers involved ever fired a gun!
In the US Air Force, less than 1 per cent of pilots were responsible for nearly 40 per cent of the planes downed. Most pilots never shot down a plane or even tried to!
In the Battle of Makin in the Pacific, where the US soldiers tried to snatch the island away from Japanese hands, Col Samuel Marshall, who was a part of that operation, found that only 36 out of the 300+ soldiers had pulled the trigger! And it wasn’t due to a lack of experience or courage, because these same men didn’t leave their posts even when they came under fire.
As historians started studying this phenomenon deeply, they found such behaviour to be consistent across history. Evidence from a battle during the American Civil War in 1863 revealed that about 90 percent of the guns recovered were still loaded, and half of these were loaded twice or even thrice. In those days, loading a gun would take a series of steps and quite some time, so a good way to demonstrate intent to a senior was to load a gun in front of them.
There were similar findings for the French and Spanish civil wars as well.
All of it doesn’t make sense, and I too was sceptical when I read about it. What about all the movies and documentaries that show people killing each other mercilessly and in masses? If these studies are accurate, then whatever is depicted in films or makes it into documentaries represents at best a quarter of the soldiers involved. But can that be true?
And what explains the horrors of the Holocaust, and all the other genocides in history? What explains the killing of innocent children in Palestine today, with the whole world watching and with all the knowledge we have of the past?
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Although some people have dedicated their entire lives to explaining why some humans would be so willing to harm others, I’ll try and present in brief what I’ve understood.
For any group of people to commit atrocities on a horrific scale, they need to be desensitised over a long enough period against the people they have to oppress. The years-long propaganda led by Hitler’s media had convinced many Germans that Jews were indeed a danger to society, and they needed to be eliminated. As a result, many had started seeing Jews not as humans, but as intruders who had caused them harm by taking their jobs and positions, and if they were allowed to live freely, they could run riot and destroy every pure German out there.
But then this should have disappeared once they got into close contact with them, right? Once they saw the people beneath the religion, and realized that they were the same as them?
Why that didn’t happen was in part because of a much stronger level of dehumanization that had already happened in their minds, combined with a sense of obedience to the higher power — it was a job that, if done well, could lead to betterment of their careers. This also allowed them to believe that they were not morally responsible for their actions. They were just doing their jobs well and serving their country.
This last part about detaching oneself morally from these acts was perhaps the final nail in the coffin, which removed any friction that would have otherwise crept in while committing those heinous acts. It is also known as the state of cognitive dissonance when “an individual’s cognitions — beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors — are at odds”. It’s like an adaptive mechanism to make one act against their natural state.
This isn’t just effective on soldiers, but even on people with otherwise non-violent professions. Unit 731 was a Japanese research program during World War II that conducted horrific experiments such as infecting subjects with plague, giving subjects frostbite, and cutting people apart while alive and unsedated. Most of its victims were Chinese. And the perpetrators of these “experiments” were doctors, almost none of whom had entered the profession intending to kill people alive through barbaric means. Yet, they did. Unlike the concentration camps, where a few survivors could tell the story, no prisoner who entered Unit 731 came out alive. There were over 500,000 of them! This report does a decent job of explaining the psychology behind these acts. In short, it was a combination of dehumanization, dissonance, and obedience.
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Most of us are fortunate that we’ll never be in such a horrific situation in our lives. But when it comes to psychology, the same tenets that can make us monsters govern our day-to-day behaviour as well.
I often think how furious I become when I find delivery riders driving on the wrong side every time I take my car out. I curse them and glare at them, and wonder about the menace they have become on the roads.
But I say a warm thank you with a smile to these same people who bring my food or groceries in minutes. I’m usually reciprocated with a nice “Welcome” and a smile back. I have, on more than a few occasions, tipped them for their service, especially at odd hours or during rains.
In that moment I make contact with them, I empathize with the person they are. I wish them well and hope they move on to better things. Up close, I see the human. From a distance, I see the stereotype. It doesn’t justify them driving on the wrong side, of course, but that’s exactly how misinformation works — distance lets the story replace the truth.
If we extrapolate this a bit, you’ll realize how easily misinformation can influence us when we are detached from a community or a group that is being villainized. From a distance, whatever we want to believe can be easily amplified. We just have to pick the content that helps us double down. And there’s always plenty of it.
The solution is to be aware of all these psychological games our minds can play, and take steps to not let them sway us. At no point in history has so much information been available at once. One good thing today, unlike yesteryears, is that information is largely democratic and not controlled by a single entity. So the simplest way to stay sane and balanced is to actively seek out qualified, opposing opinions on anything that’s inflammatory. This takes effort, but it’s an essential step to be reasonable.
What are we reading?
Humankind by Rutger Bregman. One of the few books that came close to Sapiens in terms of explaining how and why humans are the way they are.
Until next time,
Best,
