I had a good time visiting with Justin Dixon on the Work Hard, Invest Harder podcast. We talked about the challenges in forming a Family Office investment vehicle. Give a listen here!
“A real man can suffer right in front of you and still smile about it.”
— Paradi$e
I saw a news snippet this morning about the hedgerows in England. Evidently, if you took them all and lined them up, they’d circle the globe 10 times. Knowing how much the English love to queue, this sounds doable.
It triggered a memory, though, that I’ve always found fascinating. My mother’s uncle died in WWII in what some historians have called the Battle of the Hedgerows. He was set to deploy on D-Day but as the beaches were captured by the end of the day, his unit was held back and he was deployed the day after so as to be fresh and receive some of the men who took the beaches. His battalion marched off the beaches and into the countryside. The idea was to cut a swath through the country to take the important regional towns of Normandy, remove any resistance and secure the hold on the landing zones. It didn’t turn out that way.
The English were responsible for the aerial reconnaissance of Normandy before the invasion. They flew thousands of low-flying spy sorties over the territory to be invaded so as to have accurate maps for the invading forces to use to advantage. These pictures were analyzed and plans were formulated. The English eyes who saw the hedgerows were familiar with them and knew that a tank could easily mow through one and allow the column of men following to pass through. And that would have been true … in England.
In Normandy, however, the terrain is very, very rocky and over hundreds of years the farmers of the land had piled stones on top of each other and formed high walls of six to nine feet upon which they planted hedgerows. The tanks couldn’t climb and penetrate the walls and were forced to go up and down each lane as the Nazis lobbed mortars over the walls, sometimes from as little as 20 feet away. When they reached the end of the lane, the German Panzers were there to open fire, forcing them to fight down the gauntlet straight into hell on earth.
My great-uncle lost his life lost in the mazes of French hedgerows. He left a sweetheart back home, a grieving family and never had a chance to start a family or experience life. He paid the ultimate sacrifice believing in the truth of the cause to end Fascism as a viable governmental choice on this earth.
His story makes me wonder where my own entrenched beliefs and perspective obscure my vision of how the world works. How am I like those English analysts who could only see what they knew to be true at home? Where am I myopic on issues that will affect me greatly in the future?
“When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
— Jane Austen
This week I learned about a fascinating person called Trofim Lysenko, and how an individuals’ participation in a controlled system can destroy lives. Russian “biologist”Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) rose to prominence in the Soviet Union as a result of a political reform campaign in the country where the state sought to elevate disenfranchised immigrants. He was, as a biologist, selected to be the director for the institute of genetics within the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, a position for which he was entirely unqualified.
You see, Dr. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, even going so far as denying that genes even exist. He made the following statements: “If you want a particular result, you obtain it” and “I need only people who will do what I require.” His appointment became an embarrassment for the Soviet Union, as thousands of soviet scientists dismissed his form of “science”, called Lysenkoism, as pseudoscience, for Lysenko did not present with evidence or even a sound theory to support his claims.
This left the government with two choices: admit the error, fire Lysenko, learn from the mistake, and move on, or hide the fallibility of the state system and silence those who dissented. Students of history know what choice was made. The Soviet Union arrested thousands of scientists, many of which were sentenced to death as enemies of the state — for refusing to follow the invented science in preference to that derived from heuristic methods over hundreds of years. It awarded him the Order of Lenin 8 separate times, named him a Hero of Socialist Labor, and granted him the Stalin Prize 3 times. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unfunny.
Lysenko was in charge of making agricultural “recommendations” based entirely on the needs of Soviet propaganda. Without exception, these policies created devestating famines. The Soviet era famines that killed millions of people were the result of this pseudoscience that sounded great in the halls of power, but didn’t produce food for hungry people. In 1958, as part of a diplomatic effort to win funding from the Soviets, the Peoples Republic of China adopted Lysenko’s recommendations, too. The very next year the Great Chinese Famine began and lasted 4 years. At least 55 million people starved to death at this time.
After Stalin died in 1952, the new leader Nikita Khrushchev began the slow transition away from Lysenko as dissenting scientists were permitted to re-emerge. By the mid 60’s, the tables had turned as the Soviet Union sought to push their mistake into the past, laying the blame at the feet of a dead Stalin. Lysenko died in 1976, disgraced but on full state pension, in possession of his medals, and was interred in the prestigious Kuntsevo Cemetery.
His life and crimes bring into focus what happens when politics drive science for the purposes of ruling a people. Do you “Trust the Science,” even when you know it isn’t right, because it’s the politically dutiful thing to do? Do you stand against it, even if that means the State stands against you?