It all boils down to empathy -- Part Two

Why many care abut victims of wars and atrocities

by

James Rowles*

*Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) in International Law, Harvard University

Note to readers: If you have already read Part One, you may wish to go directly to Part Two below.

Part One

From Trenchant Observations, December 24, 2022

***

I.

It all boils down to empathy.

John Donne (1572-1631) wrote the following:

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1624)
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

—Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and several steps in my Sickness, written in 1624

Ernest Hemingway in his classic novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, chose the title of Donne’s poem for the title of his novel, set in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. In it Hemingway explores the conflict between caring for others and a cause, on the one hand, and focusing more on yourself, on the other. For Whom the Bell Tolls posed an important and prescient question, as World War II began in September 1939. The book was published in 1940.

Donne was writing during the first years of The Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Hugo Grotius published his classic treatise on international law, De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace]), in 1625.

Why do many people care about the victims of wars and atrocities?

And why do many people filter out the distressing news of these victims, and focus more on themselves and less on matters over which they feel they have no influence. Or about which they simply do not care.

Each answer to that question is a personal answer. Often the answer is merely the product of one’s own life experience. But frequently there is more at play.

Here is my answer to the question.

What experiences opened me to feeling empathy for the victims of war and oppression?

When I was eight and sent to boarding schoool in Arizona because of my severe asthma, I became very interested in Indians. At my school, we dressed up in costumes for Halloween. One year my mother made a superman costume for me, by hand. Another year I was Cochise, a famous Indian leader in those parts, with a real headdress my mother and I had gotten at an Indian store. There were a lot of Indians in Arizona. My mother was fascinated by the Indians. Later in life, when she became an accomplished artist, she painted a magnificent large oil painting of Cochise.

I also became interested in Mexicans. My mother and I made several trips to Nogales, the Mexican border town near Tucson. At school, I had a five- or six-week course in Spanish in the fifth grade, which quickened my interest in Mexico and Mexicans. I also remember a movie with Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks (1961) which had a profound effect on me.

Another key factor was my early interest in short-wave radio. To help me overcommy homesickness far from my home in Houston, my parents gave me a fantastic Zenith Transoceanic short-wave radio. It was quite a present for an eight-year-old boy. I was fascinated by listening to stations far away, from clear channel AM stations I could hear late at night to stations in foreign countries I could listen to on the short-wave bands.

I became a ham radio operator when I was 11, getting my Novice license (KN5BVF) after passing a written test and also a 5 words-per-minute Morse Code test. Two years later I got my General Class license (K5BVF), after passing another written test and a Morse code test at 13 words-per-minute.

I communicated with other “ham” radio operators, first in Morse Code when I was a Novice, and then in voice when I got my general license. I was intrigued by communicating with stations that were far away, particularly in foreign countries. I remember the thrill I felt when I made contact in Morse Code with a station in British Somaliland.

I read up on the countries where the stations I talked to were located, in my Junior Encyclopedia Britannica, and learned a lot of geography and some history in the process.

I was also influenced by my developing love of history. In the fifth grade I won a prize as the best student in my Ancient History class, the best of all three students. I loved my European History class in the 11th or 12th grade, and won a prize my senior year as the best student in History. I graduated from Stanford with a summa cum laude and Honors in History, and won a prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis in History that year.

Languages also opened my heart to empathy for people who spoke the language I was studying. I didn’t make friends with any Romans when I studied Latin in the 8th and 9th grades, back in Houston, but I did develop a keen interest in Germans and Germany when I began studying German in the 10th grade. I had an extraordinary teacher, a Harvard graduate who had studied in Germany in the 1930’s when Adolf Hitler was in power. He was a serious and strict taskmaster. I learned then that languages were to be taken very seriously, and that you had to work hard to learn to read and write and speak one.

I wrote the German Consulate and got on the mailing list for their newsletter and the program of Die Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international short-wave station.

Another movie that had a deep impact on me was The Young Lions (1958), with Marlon Brando.

The summer before my senior year in high school, I had been accepted and planned to go on an exchange program to Germany with The Experiment in International Living, where I would live with a family. But I was elected captain of my high school football team, and decided to forego my summer in Germany so I could oversee the team’ s training and practice sessions during the summer. It was time well spent. We won the league championship.

At Stanford, I passed the language requirement in German, and took upper division  courses with juniors and seniors when I was a freshman. The summer after my freshman year I participated in a student exchange program with an organization known as People-to-People which was founded by President Dwight Eisenhower. I lived with different families in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, speaking German all the time. Each homestay was for a minimum of three days, but if you hit it off with the host family you might stay for up to two weeks. In between homestays, I traveled independently, on my own, alone. Before cell phones.

The connection with Eisenhower’s exchange program was intriguing.. When I was eight and he was visiting Galveston, Texas, where we had an apartment because of my asthma, I got to see him at the Galvez Hotel. Decked out in full cowboy regalia, with twin six-shooters in my holsters, boots, a Western style jacket and a cowboy hat, I stood out. Ike noticed me, and came over to where I was in the line and shook my hand.

In Heidelberg, traveling between home-stays, I met a veteran of World War II who had lost a leg in the war. One evening I couldn’t find a place to stay that was within my student budget, and after I walked by this man the second or third time, talking to him each time in German, he offered to put me up at his place.

Exhausted, I accepted his offer. He lived at Fischgasse, 7 in old Heidelberg, in a ground-level flat that was really basic. The flat was in a building that was at least two or three centuries old. Over three days he showed me the sights in Heidelberg, energetically moving on his steel crutches to set the pace as we walked through the city. He also showed me pictures of him with his girlfriend when he was a young soldier, before he lost his leg. Even at the time we met, when he was perhaps 40, he was a handsome, energetic man full of vitality. He was also extremely kind to me. We became good friends in a way. And through him, at the gut level, I grasped the enormous tragedy of war.

Part Two

December 31, 2022

II.

By this time my heart had been opened to feel empathy for people from different countries who were the victims of war or human rights atrocities.

At one of my home-stays, in Koblemz, Am Löwentor, 14, I stayed with a widow and her son who was about my age, and we became fast friends. They had a small inn on the side of a big hill overlooking Koblenz and the confluence of the Mosel and the Rhein Rivers.

The day before I left what was a two-week home-stay, I discovered my friend’s grandmother in the basement. They had been hiding her on the lowest level of the building during my visit because she was an unreconstructed Nazi. I remember when her daughter, my friend’s mother, took me to the train station after I had missed my train—by a few feet—earlier in the day. (I had been running hard and pulling up even with the door, and then the train slowly pulled away.)

My friend’s mother and I had a lot of time to talk. I remember her telling me about her mother and the shame she felt over Germany’s Nazi past. She broke down in tears as she was telling me this.

So, by the age of 19, my heart had definitely been opened to feeling empathy for people in foreign countries.

Following my summer experience in Germany after my freshman year, when I returned to Stanford I took two years of French and two years of Spanish. I decided to major in Modern European History, with a concentration in 20th century European history, particularly German history.

I wrote my Senior Honors Thesis on the Germans’ re-examination of their past during the first postwar years (1945-1949), under the direction of Gordon A. Craig who at that time was perhaps the preeminent historian of Germany in the United States. The thesis explored the question of individual moral responsibility for the actions of one’s government. The Vietnam war was underway, and as I and my classmates all faced the draft, the issue was of more than purely academic interest. The thesis won the prize for the best Senior Honors Thesis in History that year.

After my first year in law School at Stanford, I had a student internship in Washington with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which at that time was an independent federal agency charged with conducting U.S public diplomacy. I wanted to work at the State Department but their interns were “volunteers”, whereas at USIA I was paid. The obvious choice was USIA.

My work as an intern in the Office of the Assistant Director for Europe was interesting. It was a dramatic time, after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4 and Bobby Kennedy on June 5. The situation in Czechoslovakia was tense, with the Soviet Union threatening to invade. Among my responsibilities was following closely—with access to the Secret cable traffic— developments in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. I empathized with the supporters of Alexandre Dubček, who was trying to put a human face on socialism, much as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to do in the Soviet Union after 1985. I followed events closely leading up to the Soviet and Warsaw Pact military intervention on August 20,1968. These events affected me deeply.

After my second year in law school at Stanford, I led a summer exchange program to France for The Experiment in International Living. My 11 “students” were all college graduates, ranging in age from 22 to 32. They included recent college graduates, a 28-year-old professor of nuclear physics, and a 32-year-old high school French teacher.

After a five-day orientation in Vermont, we traveled to Dijon, France, where each American participant stayed with a French family for a month. During a second month, we embarked on a camping trip in an old bus with the Americans and a counterpart from each of the host families. For the entire month, I and all of the Americans did everything in French, including planning the meals and grocery shopping. Running the whole camping trip in French, I not only learned how to shout “Get on the bus, we’re leaving” in French, in varying tones of urgency, but also to appreciate each of the French students and their interaction both among themselves and with the Americans.

At the end, after five days in Paris with just the American participants, I had two weeks on my own, with no responsibilities. I took a train to Stockholm and spent two weeks in Sweden, even meeting up with a Swedish former girlfriend I had known in California. I bought books to learn Swedish and learned as much as I could in two weeks, on my own.

By this time, I was already a very international person.

These are some of the first experiences that opened my heart to feeling empathy for people in foreign countries. In the ensuing years there were many others.

During these years all these factors and experiences interacted in a synergistic way. My student exchange experiences fed my intellectual curiosity and the courses I took and the work I did in college and law school, such as the choice of the subject for my Senior Honors Thesis. After I returned from my internship at USIA and witnessing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, I took Soviet Law from Leon Lipson, a leading expert who was visiting from Yale Law School. I had taken Russian history as an undergraduate.

It all came together, in ways I did not fully appreciate at the time. The end product was a young man with great empathy for the victims of wars and human rights abuses, and also others like the mother of my friend in Koblenz. After graduation I set out firmly on the career path I had suggested in my application to Stanford Law School. First, I worked on a Law and Development project in Costa Rica where I was a visiting professor at the University of Costa Rica Law Faculty.  Then I worked as a senior staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States in Washington, processing complaints from torture victims and relatives of the “disappeared”.

Then, after a year at Harvard taking international law courses, I taught international law and foreign and comparative law at various universities, and a course on human rights in Latin America at Harvard Law School. Later, I worked in the private sector at a leading law firm in Boston on international transactions, and for global companies on projects and matters in Brazil and the Middle East. Further work in international development on judicial reform, human rights, and access to justice involved in-country work in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Russia.

My fascination with languages led me to study a year and a half of university-level Arabic with a private tutor who was a professor of Arabic at Rice University, learn Farsi on my own and with Persian-American friends, take a year of university-level Mandarin at Stanford’s evening school and with a tutor, and to learn basic Russian on my own. When people asked how and why I did this, I usually satisfied their curiosity by simply stating that “I’m a language nut.”

Now, as I follow and analyze the major developments and decision making in the Ukraine war, I see how my previous life experiences help shape my responses.  My reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not purely analytical, although it is also analytical. The empathy that drives my interest is a product of my life experience. I empathize with the Ukrainian soldiers who are killed or maimed, like my friend in Heidelberg who lost his leg in World War II.

I understand what it is like to live under Russian occupation, having visited several times a family in East Berlin who had an apartment beneath that of members of the Communist party.  They were relatives of my host family during my homestay in Berlin. I recall how we had to speak in very low voices.

The family in East Berlin lived in a district known as Köpenick. I associate to the classic German novel and movie, Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain from Köpenick). I also associate to the great German movie, A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin) about a German war widow living in Berlin under Soviet occupation at the end of World War II, and to the extraordinary German TV series The Weissensee Saga about life in East Germany in the late 1980’s, just before the Berlin Wall came down. Another great movie comes to mind, The Life of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), which portrayed what life was like for a member of the intelligentsia under East German state security (Stasi) surveillance.

In thinking of life under Russian occupation, I also associate to the extraordinary French TV Series Un village français (A French Village), which dealt with life in a French village occupied by the Germans in World War II.

Life experiences affect the books we read and the movies we choose to see. There is a strong interaction between the two.

I hate war. And torture and murder by the state. 

That’s why I went to law school. That’s why I wrote a book on a war and how it was brought to a halt and settled by diplomats using international law and the machinery of the Organization of American States¹ That’s why I worked as a senior staff attorney at the human rights commission of the Organization of American States.

When I read of Russians torturing and “disappearing” Ukrainian citizens in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, I associate to the cases of the “disappeared’ I processed at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (mainly from Argentina), and the victims of torture I met with and whose testimony I took, from Argentina, from Haiti, and from other countries.

In part because of my previous experiences, what is happening in Ukraine is very real to me.

When the Ukrainians say they are fighting for “ freedom”, that resonates with me, as I recall the human rights activists I worked with in Angola, under a formerly-Marxist, post-cold-war dictatorship where there was no freedom of the press.  I remember talking to activists in the provinces who, lacking access to even the very limited press in the capital, had no idea what was going on in the country.

When I read of massacres by Russians of Ukrainians in Ukraine, I recall the courageous prosecutors I met with in Colombia who had broken the backs of the drug cartels, and who had helped to bring to justice the “paramilitaries” in that country who had massacred innocent peasants, sometimes dressing their bodies up in rebel uniforms and transporting them hundreds of miles across the country so they could be counted as killed enemy rebels and increase the body count. I remember visiting and interviewing the director of the forensic laboratory where the remains of the victims of the paramilitaries were subjected to DNA analysis in order to ascertain their identities.

Since my heart had been opened to feeling empathy for victims of war and human rights atrocities by the age of 19, I also empathized with the victims of the war on both sides in Vietnam, including the victims of the Mai Lai massacre in 1968, the one case where U.S. soldiers were loudly and publicly prosecuted for such crimes.

III.

When I see video on TV of Ukrainian soldiers fighting the Russians, I remember the slight anxiety I felt each time I left my team’s “fort” (compound) in Kabul to go to a meeting with Afghan officials. I urged my team members to move as quickly as they could through the entrance to the Ministry of the Interior when they had meetings there, as the entrance was an obvious target for a suicide bombing.

There was only a small chance, which I figured was less than 1% on any given outing, that we would be hit by an IED (improvised explosive device) when we went out into the city in our armored cars. In addition to the passengers, the “Mobil Security Teams” had three soldiers in each car or “truck”:  a Gurka (Nepalese) driver who had an AK-47, an ex-Navy seal or equivalent from the U.S., Britain, or Canada, riding shotgun with an AK-47, and a Gurka sitting behind the driver, with an AK-47.

The threat of an IED was real. The U.S. Ambassador had charged a retired general from the Florida National Guard who had JAG experience with organizing a weekly meeting of representatives from the various military groups and federal agencies (USAID, DOJ, DEA, STATE/INL etc.) who were conducting some project or activity in the legal sector, in order to coordinate activities. He chaired a meeting every Sunday morning of the leaders of these disparate groups.  On my third Sunday in Afghanistan, the retired general canceled our usual Sunday meeting.  He traveled instead to a resort area in an insecure zone west of Kabul for a day of recreation and relaxation. Unfortunately, his armored car was hit by an IED and he was very seriously injured.  Two years after I left Afghanistan, he was still in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington recovering from his injuries. 

This event brought home to me, in a direct way, that my team was working in a very dangerous war zone and that top consideration had to be given to security considerations at all times. A year after I left, a member of the team I had led (though not one of my own team’s members when I was there) was killed by an IED.

Given the risks they faced, I could not view the Afghan officials, NGO representatives, and our own staff with whom we worked with anything but great admiration and respect. They displayed extraordinary courage and dedication to their work in trying to build democracy in Afghanistan. “Freedom” had a very definite meaning for those who were working as hard as they could to achieve it.

One day we visited a class of 25 women who were being trained in the use of computers (under a program supported by Barbara Bush). I exchanged some words with various participants in Dari (the Farsi dialect spoken by government officials and a majority of the population in Afghanistan).  My team also worked with NGO’s which were promoting women’s rights.

In our visits with Afghans, we were assisted by three young and extremely able and courageous interpreters. They dreamed of freedom in a future Afghanistan. Also, I remember the administrative head of operations at our compound, a doctor in his late 30’s with a prematurely-aged visage showing signs of the many years of civil war he had lived through. He worked for us, the Americans, in order to support his family and to offer a free medical clinic in one of the neighborhoods in Kabul one night a week, after he got off work.

When President Joe Biden, over the contrary advice of his top military and civilian advisers, decided in April 2021 to withdraw all American troops and contractors from Afghanistan, I thought of these people, with great empathy. I also thought of the 20 million Afghan women and girls we left to the cruel fate of life under a group of 14th century religious zealots, whose beliefs had not been moderated by any familiarity with or acceptance of Enlightenment values or the international law of our 21st century civilization.

IV.

These are some of the experiences which are not that common which have opened my heart to feeling empathy for the victims of war and terror, and to care so deeply about what is going on Ukraine.

But of course not everyone has had such experiences. Nonetheless, many people, and many people in America, open their hearts and feel empathy for the victims of war and authoritarian regimes, particularly when they see that the people are similar to people they know.

Where does this capacity for empathy come from, in so many people?

It helps if they have known someone who these foreign victims remind them of.  They are then able to see the refugees and other victims as human beings like themselves.  Maybe my own wide geographical and cultural experiences, and the languages I speak, have opened my heart to see most if not all foreign victims as people like me.  

Empathy for people who are viewed as similar is a quite natural phenomenon, which ideally will lead to further expansion of the range of people individuals can feel empathy for. In an ideal world, people would not be influenced by such similarities. In the real world, they are.

We are all human beings.

And many of us, in many countries and cultures, share deep religious values which enable us to see other human beings as having, within each one of them, a piece of the divine.

I remember one day around Christmas some years ago, when I was in a skilled nursing facility recovering from a cerebral hemorrhage, a little Latina girl dressed in a Santa suit came to my door to offer me cookies and other treats. This may sound corny to those who have not survived a near-death experience. But in her face, I saw the face of God.

Maybe that explains why so many people are able to feel empathy for victims of war and atrocities. They can see, or occasionally glimpse in the face of the other, these other human beings who are victims of war and atrocities, the face of God.

That is what Christianity teaches us, that there is a piece of the divine in every human being. Other major religions share the same belief. That belief, in fact, is the foundation for international human rights.

This Christmas and New Year’s season, perhaps we can stop and think deeply about that, and find a way to open our hearts to feeling empathy for our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings who have suffered such tragic fates, and who are suffering this very moment as we speak and write.

If we can all open our hearts to feeling this kind of empathy for the others, maybe we can summon our own courage to stand up to Vladimir Putin and his accomplices—who are the embodiment of pure evil. Maybe we can act, individually and together, to stop Putin and the Russians in Ukraine, and pay whatever costs, undergo whatever sacrifices may be required, in order to reaffirm and uphold our deepest values.

These values call upon us to defend the physical integrity of every human being, and to fight to defend our civilization based on reason and law, and humanity, against the Russian onslaught of barbarism, brutality, and military conquest.

It all boils down to empathy.

***

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See also “Why I care about the war in Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, June 26, 2022.

1. James Rowles, El conflicto El Salvador-Honduras (1969) y el orden jurídico internacional (San José: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana (EDUCA), 1980).