On Global Trade & Investment
Published Three Times a Week (with occasional bonus quotes) by
The Global Business Dialogue, Inc.
Washington, DC 20006
|
|
FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2020
Click
HERE
for Wednesday’s quote from Rep. Stephanie Murphy
on supply chains.
|
|
PERSPECTIVE ON SPARROWS (AND OTHERS)
"Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?”
Holy Bible, Luke, Chapter 12, Verse 6
King James Version
“‘No warriors shall be withdrawn until the battle is won,’ proclaimed the Peking People’s Daily. … . [T]hus exhorted went [forth] the Chinese millions to wage war on the lowly sparrow.”
Time Magazine
May 5, 1958
|
|
To say the least,
Mao Zedong
looked more harshly upon sparrows than St. Luke could have imagined. The timing of the above quote from the People’s Daily, courtesy of Time Magazine, is important as it was the start of something big, two big things really. The larger of the two was the Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962). Within that, there was the
Smash Sparrows Campaign
or the
Great Sparrow Campaign.
* The latter is the moniker
Michael Pillsbury
uses in
The Hundred-Year Marathon
. As he tells it, Mao saw sparrows as an obstacle to bringing Chinese agriculture into the 20th Century. After all, the sparrows were eating grain and the people needed grain. So, the sparrows had to be eradicated. Here is how Pillsbury continues the story:
What the Chinese authorities hadn't realized was that, in addition to grains, insects constituted a large component of the sparrows’ diet. In the following years, without sparrows as predators, locusts ravished harvests—and this was compounded by severe droughts.
Between 1958 and 1961, more than 30 million Chinese perished due to famine
. Communist China's first major experiment to make itself economically competitive relative to the West had failed.
|
|
Now let’s think about nightingales. A lifetime ago, your editor wrote a college paper on two officials in the government of
Alexander I of Russia
, the tsar who beat Napoleon. One of those was
Count Alexey
Adreyevich Arakcheyev
. A general, an artillery expert, a mentor to the young Alexander, and for a period Minister of War, Arakcheyev was all of those things. He also seems to have been a real S.O.B. We confess, however, these facts about Arakcheyev are recently reacquired. All that we can recall from that long-ago paper was the single quote, “
He hung all the cats.
” Not in Russia (thank, God). No, it was at Gruzino, his estate near Novgorod, where he had the cats hanging from the trees. He did it because he loved nightingales and did not want his precious songbirds disturbed those damned offensive felines.
***
Are there lessons in these anecdotes? Different readers will reach different conclusions. Ours begins with the obvious: the simple answer is often wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong. The corollary to that is that we need our skeptics. And skeptics need free speech. Otherwise, goodbye sparrows.
ENJOY THE WEEKEND!
|
|
Luke 12:6 i
s a link to this verse in the Bible, the source for one of today's featured quotes.
*The Four Pests Campaign.
In today's entry we talked about The Great Sparrow Campaign, but the initiative is also known as The Four Pest Campaign, and the link here is to the Wikipedia entry on that. The four pests were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.
Arakcheyev
is the Wikipedia entry for this Russian official under Tsar Alexander I.
The Hundred-Year Marathon:
China's Secret Strategy to Replace America As The Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury takes you to the Amazon page for this book.
Images
. The pictures of the sparrow in the Context section is a photo from Sharp Photography, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. The nightingale in the Comment section was downloaded from Shutterstock.
|
|
TO GET THE TTALK QUOTES IN YOUR INBOX
Or Other GBD Notices, click below.
|
|
©2020 The Global Business Dialogue, Inc.
1717 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Suite 1025
Washington, DC 20006
R. K. Morris, Editor
Joanne Thornton, Associate Editor
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
