The Kettle's Boyled: People who hate people they don’t even know

I saw a small bar of soap once that got me thinking about how people are valued, or judged or loved, or hated, and why it is that we can’t see others as just human beings. It was smaller than bars we are used to, without the rounded edges we see on soap nowadays. A square-cut block, wrapped in a dusty wrapper with faded black and red print on waxy brown paper. It was like something you would have once seen in an old shop where an elderly man in an apron fetched down what you needed from a shelf and added the price to a list on the counter. If I close my eyes now I can still picture that bar of soap, more than 30 years later.

Last week in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast the highway bridge across the Moscow-Kiev railway line was blown up, the night train wrecked and people killed. I spent a year travelling that route, once a month, managing a construction job in Bryansk City. I would fly to Moscow on Thursdays, catch the night sleeper train to Bryansk, meet with government officials on Friday and with the contractor on site on Saturday, catching the midnight train to Moscow on Saturday nights to fly home on Sundays. I get tired even thinking of it now.

Each meeting with the contractor included asking whether there had been any accidents in the previous month. There were usually none, but one day he said a plasterer had fallen off a scaffold and was in hospital. When our team suggested we visit her he laughed, saying there were loads of plasterers in the city and he had already replaced her. The fact she was somebody’s sister, wife or daughter was of no concern to him, he valued her only for her labour. I wondered then, as I do now, why people can’t see the human being behind the uniform, the job, the race or the religion.

Some years ago scientists analysed the mineral content of a human body and found the average person to be worth about ninety cents. So Putin, Netanyahu, Trump or Darwish of Hamas are all worth very little, collectively. But most people’s true worth is more than that, it is the sum of their experiences, their value to society and their love for others. We are each more than a small pile of minerals, but tyrants don’t see it like that, and so they continue with wars that kill people they don’t even know.

I saw that bar of soap in a Jewish Holocaust museum, the result of a gory experiment to extract value from the body fat of dead Jews instead of merely using their hair for mattress stuffing. We said then that such things must never happen again, but while people can’t see the humanity in others, we seem set to continue with the same mistakes.