Garfield be damned, Monday was kinda sweet. My beloved IDEAS Club dropped our quarterly journal, an exploration of the extent to which our school is a welcoming and empowering place for ALL students. While surely the most navel-gazing of our journals, it raises substantial questions and definitely fulfills our mission statement:
The IDEAS Club at the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin was born of the demand that in our time of crises, in our Age of Anxiety, when democracy is fragile, when intolerance is increasingly tolerated, we must intensify our efforts to create a safe but challenging space to discuss and celebrate diversity.
We challenge stereotypes, grapple with our biases, and tackle tough issues. We have weekly meetings, bi-weekly podcasts, and quarterly journals. We conduct lessons and seminars in elementary, middle, and high school classes.
Our efforts seek to promote not mere tolerance, but respect. Not mere discussion, but empathic dialogue. Not mere lip service, but service to our community.
What a meaningful mission! How can I support this type of student engagement? How can I help these kids? Funny you should ask! We are raising funds to buy a banner and a podcast microphone. You can support us over here. Every little bit helps! It’s the season of giving, just sayin’...
That said, part of what made Monday so sweet is the enthusiastic reception the journal got. Hey hey! It made a bit of a splash. Lots of kind words and props for the kids. In fact, our principal popped in unannounced to our Monday meeting (yes, regular readers, we discussed Billie Eilish) to thank the students and to tell them that our school administration met to discuss the journal and hope to use it to guide further discussions. Make a difference? Check! Good news on a Monday.
After his visit, the principal and I chatted in the hallway. He’s got big, life-changing stuff going on and I sought to seize the moment to show some empathy. Not really to talk about the big stuff. Just to find an angle to say something kind. Be supportive. Buoy his spirits in a tough time.
As fate would have it, the tides turned. He buoyed my spirits. We were talking about the promise and the peril of teaching in the humanities in the Age of Polarization. He told me that the first time we met, as we were walking from the train to school, I said something that he returns to with some frequency. Something that shifted his focus.
I told him that despite my deep commitment to teaching content and fostering critical thinking skills, my classroom is increasingly focused on teaching empathy.
And while that is indeed a central focus, I will confess that as the dark winter descends on Berlin, as we wrap the first semester, as I struggle to focus to grade final exams, as I pick up the pace to bring meaningful closure to themes and units of study, as I pace frantically to get it all done before we slide into Christmas Break
…I might have lost sight of my focus on teaching empathy. So this week, I doubled down on my commitment to teaching empathy.
How committed was I?
Ioseb Jughashvili was Ekaterine and Besarion Jughashvili’s only child to survive past infancy. His parents called him “Soso”. This was long before he became Stalin. Having once been a respected cobbler and small business owner, his dad became an abusive drunk. He lost his workshop and eventually his wife and his child. His mom courageously took five-year-old Soso to escape this abuse. They were wanderers. Ekaterina, determined to do her best by her only child, finally landed a job as a housecleaner and they settled into small town Gori so Soso could go to school.
But the road remained bumpy for the young dictator. Smallpox almost killed him; he survived, albeit with a deeply scarred face and body. At age twelve he got hit by a carriage, which left him hospitalized for almost a year. His left arm permanently crippled. But his father (somehow back in the picture) thought the hospital was making him weak, so he legit kidnapped his boy from the hospital and put him to work as a cobbler. Yes, a one-armed cobbler. This is the fine judgment of a fella who got kicked out of Gori for getting plastered and fighting the cops. But if I lost two kids in infancy, I could see myself falling to alcoholism. Maybe you’re better than me.
For what I imagine to be the obvious reasons, Stalin’s life as a cobbler was predictably short. He returned to school where, on his first day back, his teacher brought the class to a public hanging of a band of local thieves. Ya know, to teach the lil’ uns a lesson in justice. Field trip! Welcome back to school Soso.
Perhaps identifying with those who were poor and hungry and disaffected, Stalin empathized with these victims of small town justice. He said that this was the moment that he considered getting into politics. Yes friends, Stalin got into politics to repudiate the murderous authorities. To fight for justice.
Anyway, given his home life, his pockmarks, and his lame arm, Stalin was relentlessly bullied and beaten. Seeking a path to pursue justice (and to please his poor mother) he spent six years at seminary studying to be a priest. Here’s a Bizarro World for your imagination: Stalin as a Russian Orthodox priest.
But through intensive study, Marx and Engels came to seem like a more clear path to justice than did Russian Orthodoxy. So in 1899 he dropped out and became, you guessed it, a meteorologist. He even earned a few bucks. But the government briefly imprisoned him for not paying enough taxes on dem bucks. This was just an old school government shakedown; a warning that he should put the revolutionary literature down and stick to meteorology.
But Soso didn’t take kindly to the shakedown. As the new century dawned, he doubled down. He sought to put theory to practice. From 1900-1902 he was deeply committed to revolutionary activity. Scarred by a hard life, imbued with a religious faith that there is indeed hope, traumatized by the totality of it, he was hell bent on bringing a hasty end to 300 years of Romanov rule in Russia. For this he was arrested, imprisoned, then sent to Siberia.
Now, I’m not sure what you know about Russian prisons, but suffice it to say they ain’t for the faint of heart. But our dude had been through the shit. Had lots of grit. He escaped exile in 1904, doubling down yet again on his commitment to Bolshevism.
He was a revolutionary and a gangster. He worked every day to hustle for rubles and to overthrow the state. The state was a bunch of gangsters too. He was arrested again in 1908, and again in 1910, and again exiled to Siberia in 1913. Gangsters versus gangsters. This gangster was losing.
But his day in the sun came. He was set free by the tumult of WWI and the Russian Revolution. The Romanov Dynasty was swept into the dustbin of history. A new chapter of Russian history was yet to be written. But Stalin was hell-bent on being a central character in it.
And despite Lenin’s Last Will and Testament, Stalin seized power in the USSR and ruled, as Lenin had feared, with a steel heart and an iron fist.
His wife killed herself. The Nazis invaded despite the Non-Aggression Pact. They lay siege to Leningrad for 900 days. 900. Stalin lived with the shame and guilt of this.
Stalin was a bastard. But he was our bastard. An ally of the West, it’s hard to imagine Nazi forces defeated without him. 27 million Soviets died during WWII. Stalin was a broken dude. But Russia prevailed.
Stalin became a central figure in making “backwards” Russia–through the most inefficient, stupid, heartless, and brutal means available–a legit global superpower.
By war’s end, well into his life, at least 600,000 Australian women were still smitten by him.
While I’m loath to condemn the tastes of mid-century Aussie ladies, Fuck Stalin.
He needlessly killed 10 million of his own people. Mensheviks. Kulaks. Intellectuals. Artists. Jews. Muslims. Anyone who dare speak out.
Secret police. Censorship. Show trials. Labor camps. Executions.
You know who is particularly Fuck Stalin? My dear Ukrainian refugee students.
And yet. AND YET! Even with Ukrainians in the room, I asked my students what I always ask my students:
What are the most cynical and what are the most empathic views here? Now, what are the most reasonable nuanced views in between?
I discussed in a previous Sabbateur post how in the same decade that Stalin launched the Great Purge, F. Scott Fitzgerald in famously argued:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Should students be encouraged to create space of empathy for Stalin?
Even if they’re Ukrainian?
Yes.
This is hardly to excuse, let alone to justify Stalin or other bastards like him. This is to promote genuine understanding of the messiness of the human condition.
So we did it. We debated Stalin’s legacy, which 70% of Russians admire. We neither glorified nor vilified him. We sought to understand him. To walk a mile in a Siberian tundra in his shoes.
But it wasn’t just Stalin this week. In another class we pursued empathic explorations of German soldiers in World War One. Equally problematic, we took on empathic and nuanced views of the 1.3 million Indian soldiers who volunteered or “volunteered” to support the British war effort in WWI.
In another class we dove into the most empathic possible perspective on the Confederate soldiers in the U.S. Civil War. Shelby Foote, an historian who I should note can tend towards nostalgia, shares the story of a young Confederate soldier captured by Union troops in the deep South. The soldier is evidently starving, war-weary, and altogether unwell. It’s obvious from his poverty that he’s not a “southern gentleman” and he was not a slave owner.
A Union soldier asked him, “So what exactly are you fighting for?’
“I’m fightin,” the Rebel explained, “cause y’all are down here.”
The North invaded the South. Lincoln was repeatedly clear that the invasion was not about freeing the slaves (though not all Confederates were open to that message). The Union took up arms against the South. They invaded. The Confederate soldier was defending his home. Just like you would if your home was invaded. Empathy.
I know, I know.
Now don’t you even start thinking I’m a Southern Sympathizer or a Lost Cause fool. Don’t even!
You can walk a mile in that poor soldier’s ragged boots and still decry the Confederacy. In fact, I recommend you do both.
Since I have a little extra time this morning, I’ll take it even further.
This is the centerfold from Harper’s Magazine in August of 1865, a couple months after the end of the Civil War.
Now we can all find empathy for the African-American Union soldier who lost his leg in war and, like Lady Liberty, beseech his right to vote.
But can we also find empathy for the southern aristocrats who committed treason, destroyed the Union and funded the bloodiest war of the 19th Century? Can we? Should we? Lady Liberty is uncertain here whether to pardon them. I’m likewise dubious they should have been granted amnesty. But is it not worth it, if only as an exercise in perspective, to walk a country mile in their freshly-polished riding boots?
It’s August 1865. What’s the most cynical and the most empathic view of Confederate leaders?
Is this a fair question?
Again, I vote yes. A yes for empathy.
I’m confident that we can lead lives that pursue justice and maintain our righteous sense of moral indignation and maintain our commitment to empathic engagement.
Indeed, I don't think we can achieve justice nor moral clarity without empathy.
This is at the core of my teaching practice and it was nice to be reminded by my principal that this principle must guide me.
This week, I was thinking about how hard it is to maintain empathic engagement in our Age of (Dis)Connection and Distraction. I reckon that empathy kindly greets us in the quiet moments between pursuits.
But these days, those quiet moments often get gobbled up by responding to texts and swiping through social media. It’s hard to greet empathy, no matter how hard it knocks, when we’re ticking off tasks, swiping for dopamine hits, and doomscrolling.
But this is just my self-talk.
You? You have a lovely weekend.
Yours,
DL
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.
beautiful