Paul Tibbets, the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Earlier this week I went to an entertaining talk by the writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and other bestsellers. Midway through he made a throwaway comment about the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. ‘Imagine how it felt to be the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – how do we feel about that kind of moral responsibility?’ The implication of this rhetorical question was that the pilot must have been desperately wrestling with the ethical consequences and dilemmas of releasing the world’s first atomic weapon on the unsuspecting city.

Malcolm Gladwell is mistaken. In actual fact, the US Air Force pilot, Paul Tibbets, experienced no profound moral quandaries about his actions, either before or after dropping the bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people. In a revealing interview with the oral historian Studs Terkel in 2002, when aged 87, Tibbets described exactly what happened on the historic mission in the Enola Gay.

It was absolutely perfect. After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, “You know what we’re doing today?” They said, “Well, yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission.” I said, “Yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission, but it’s a little bit special.” My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, “Colonel, we wouldn’t be playing with atoms today, would we?” I said, “Bob, you’ve got it just exactly right.” So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, “OK, this is an atom bomb we’re dropping.” They listened intently but I didn’t see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We’d been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we’d ever seen.

So we’re coming down. We get to that point where I say “one second” and by the time I’d got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I’m in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.

Tibbets tells the tale as if it were an exciting action movie. The tension builds, everyone’s on alert, the timing is crucial – and the execution is perfect. A job well done. Terkel gave his interviewee the opportunity to explore the ethics of his actions, but received little response:

Studs Terkel: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
Paul Tibbets: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That’s what I believe in and that’s what I work for.

Ultimately Tibbets justified his action with the age-old reason that he was just following orders: ‘I did what I was told’.

Terkel then asked him about his thoughts on the September 11 bombings, and how the US should respond to the threat of terrorism. His emphatic reply displayed the simplistic topography of his moral beliefs:

Paul Tibbets: We’ve got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn’t waste five seconds on them…
Studs Terkel: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ‘em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” what do you think?
Paul Tibbets: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ‘em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.

It is certainly worth reading the whole interview, which first appeared in The Guardian. I think the most remarkable aspect is that Tibbets seemed to display no empathy for the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Flying up high in the sky, he never came into contact with the people he killed, or with the survivors. He never saw the burned skin, the charred bodies, the faces of the children wandering alone looking for their parents. His distance from the victims was essential to his empathetic denial.

I wonder if Tibbets, who died in 2007, ever allowed himself to see some of the rare original film footage taken immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including shots inside emergency hospitals where people were being treated for the effects of the radiation. It is so harrowing and horrifying that the US government denied its existence for two decades, and only publicly released it in the late 1960s. In 1970 Erik Barnouw produced a 16-minute film using the footage called Hiroshima Nagasaki August, 1945. You can watch it here (in two parts). I warn you that you will not like what you see, that you may have to turn away from the reality of what human beings can do to one another. I have never seen anything so disturbing.

Jo Berry (right) standing next to Pat Magee, the man who killed her father.

One of the greatest challenges of leading an empathetic life is trying to step into the shoes of people who we consider to be ‘enemies’ or whose views and values are very different from our own. If you’re on the receiving end of a racist comment from someone at the pub or a torrent of unfair verbal abuse from your boss, the idea of trying to empathise with them would probably be the last thing on your mind. If you came face to face with the person who had recently burgled your house, could you overcome your anger to see the crime from their perspective, and understand the circumstances that may have driven them to it?

Empathising in such instances might seem like wishful thinking. But consider the case of Jo Berry. In 1984 her father, Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by an IRA bomb at the Party Conference in Brighton. In 1999, one of the IRA members responsible, Pat Magee, was released from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Jo’s response was a desire to meet him. She felt that trying to create a relationship with the man who had murdered her father was the best way of overcoming her anguish and anger. Since then they have met over fifty times, gradually – and often painstakingly – developing an understanding of one another’s perspectives on the bombing. Twenty-five years after the event, Jo has now launched a charity, Building Bridges for Peace, which aims to use dialogue and non-violence to promote peaceful resolutions to violent conflicts.

Jo is often asked whether she forgives Pat. Her answer is that forgiveness is not the right word or concept. What really matters, she says, is empathy. She has come to empathise with her father’s killer: ‘I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each other’s lives, we could all have done what the other did.’

Their unlikely and remarkable friendship reveals that empathy is not only possible in the most extreme circumstances, but that it can transform individual lives and is a route towards social change. Below they tell their story in the own words. First in an interview broadcast on the BBC World Service, and then in a profile for The Forgiveness Project. If Jo Berry can find a way to empathise with Pat Magee, couldn’t we all discover new possibilities for empathy in our lives?

Jo Berry

An inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy. For me the question is always about whether I can let go of my need to blame, and open my heart enough to hear Pat’s story and understand his motivations. The truth is that sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. It’s a journey and it’s a choice, which means it’s not all sorted and put away in a box.

It felt as if a part of me died in that bomb. I was totally out of my depth but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma. So I went to Ireland and listened to the stories of many remarkable and courageous people who’d been caught up in the violence. For the first time I felt that my pain was being heard.

In those early years I probably used the word ‘forgiveness’ too liberally – I didn’t really understand it. When I used the word on television, I was shocked to receive a death threat from a man who said I had betrayed both my father and my country.

Now I don’t talk about forgiveness. To say “I forgive you” is almost condescending – it locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won’t change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgement. Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat, I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there’s nothing to forgive.

I wanted to meet Pat to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while Pat told me some of his story.

Over the past two and a half years of getting to know Pat, I feel I’ve been recovering some of the humanity I lost when that bomb went off. Pat is also on a journey to recover his humanity. I know that he sometimes finds it hard to live with the knowledge that he cares for the daughter of someone he killed through his terrorist actions.

Perhaps more than anything I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each others lives, we could all have done what the other did. In other words, had I come from a Republican background, I could easily have made the same choices Pat made.

Pat Magee

Some day I may be able to forgive myself. Although I still stand by my actions, I will always carry the burden that I harmed other human beings. But I’m not seeking forgiveness. If Jo could just understand why someone like me could get involved in the armed struggle then something has been achieved. The point is that Jo set out with that intent in mind – she wanted to know why.

I decided to meet Jo because, apart from addressing a personal obligation, I felt obligated as a Republican to explain what led someone like me to participate in the action. I told her that I’d got involved in the armed struggle at the age of 19, after witnessing how a small nationalist community were being mistreated by the British. Those people had to respond. For 28 years I was active in the Republican Movement. Even in jail I was still a volunteer.

Between Jo and I, the big issue is the use of violence. I can’t claim to have renounced violence, though I don’t believe I’m a violent person and have spoken out against it. I am 100% in favour of the peace process, but I am not a pacifist and I could never say to future generations, anywhere in the world, who felt themselves oppressed, “Take it, just lie down and take it.”

Jo told me that her daughter had said after one of our meetings, “Does that mean that Grandad Tony can come back now?” It stuck with me, because of course nothing has fundamentally changed. No matter what we can achieve as two human beings meeting after a terrible event, the loss remains and forgiveness can’t embrace that loss. The hope lies in the fact that we are prepared to carry on. The dialogue has continued.

It’s rare to meet someone as gracious and open as Jo. She’s come a long way in her journey to understanding; in fact, she’s come more than half way to meet me. That’s a very humbling experience.

I believe that empathy can help us escape from the narrow confines of our own existence and guide us towards more adventurous and fulfilling lives. Empathy is also a radical tool for social transformation that has the potential to bring about change not through new laws, policies or institutions, but through a revolution of human relationships. Barack Obama has said the most fundamental problem in modern society is ‘the empathy deficit’. Harnessing the transformative power of empathy is the great challenge of the twenty-first century.

This weekly blog will contain my own thoughts on empathy, the stories of empathetic adventurers, interviews with key empathy activists and thinkers, and act as a global portal for empathy news from around the world. I also hope it becomes a place where people can share their personal experiences of looking at life through they eyes of others.

I would like to launch this blog with a story that I hope you find as inspiring as I do.

The Locket

‘It was a sight I will never be able to forget, and it changed my life completely,’ remembers Rami Elchanan, an Israeli graphic designer. On a Thursday afternoon in September 1997, his daughter Smadar, a vivacious fourteen-year-old who loved modern dance and dreamed of becoming a doctor, had gone shopping for new school books with friends on Ben Yehuda Street in West Jerusalem. At three o’clock Rami heard news reports on his car radio of a Palestinian suicide bombing nearby that had injured hundreds and left several people dead. He immediately went looking for his daughter, frantically running from street to street, from hospital to hospital. Finally he found her. Smadar’s body was laid out in a morgue.

Rami’s immediate reaction was rage. ‘When someone murders your little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death.’ Gradually the anger subsided and his life became enveloped by an unbearable grief for the loss of his child. A year after the bombing Rami was invited to a meeting of the Parents Circle – also known as the Bereaved Families Forum – which brings together Israelis and Palestinians whose family members have been killed in the conflict. Initially reluctant and sceptical about the usefulness of such an organisation, he eventually agreed to take part. He watched with detachment as other Israeli families began to arrive. And then he witnessed something extraordinary. ‘I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women, children, coming towards me, greeting me, hugging me and crying with me. I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old. A singer sang in Hebrew and Arabic, and suddenly I was hit by lightning. I can’t explain the change I underwent at that moment.’

Until then Rami, who was forty-seven at the time, had never shaken hands with a Palestinian, let alone embraced one. The meeting, for him, was a new beginning. He realised that there were Palestinians who had suffered the same sorrows as him and his family. They were united by a shared experience that allowed them to understand one another’s lives. ‘What connects us is the pain,’ he says. ‘Our blood is the same red colour, our suffering is identical, and all of us have the exact same bitter tears.’ Through his involvement with the Bereaved Families Forum, Rami was able to humanise the enemy, to see that Palestinians, not just Israelis, were victims of the conflict. ‘I had gone through a long process of demonizing them,’ he admits. ’By meeting the Palestinian bereaved families, I saw Palestinians as human beings, not caricatures in newspapers or articles or history items, but real people, crying with me. That was my turning point.’

Rami Elchanan (far right) with Palestinian members of the Bereaved Families Forum, Mazen Faraj, Fadi Abu Awwad and Aziz Abu Sarah.

Since that first meeting Rami has dedicated himself to the cause of Israeli -Palestinian reconciliation and the pioneering work of the Bereaved Families Forum, whose membership comprises over five hundred families. He took part in a unique project where bereaved Israelis travelled to a hospital in Ramallah and donated blood for Palestinian victims, while bereaved Palestinian families went to Jerusalem and donated blood to the Israeli Red Cross. Another initiative, called ‘Hello Peace’, is an unusual form of answering service. You dial a freephone number and if you are Israeli you can speak with a Palestinian, and if you are Palestinian you talk to an Israeli. Since it began in 2002, there have been over a million conversations between the two sides. While some calls begin as screaming matches, others have led to lasting friendships.

Rami Elchanan, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, is regularly abused and ridiculed in Israeli circles for fraternising with the relatives of suicide bombers. But he knows that there is no hope of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without mutual understanding, without conversations between strangers that erode the distance of ignorance: ‘We must be prepared to listen to ‘the other’. Because if we will not listen to the other’s story we won’t be able to understand the source of their pain and we should not expect the other to understand our own.’