Inspirational quotes about mistakes are so ubiquitous that they fill entire books, not to mention all those stories about how inventions or other discoveries were made by accident. Well, it's time to look at the other side of the coin: mistakes that were borne mainly by thousands, perhaps millions of people who had virtually no say in the decision-making process and who very often had to pay with their very lives. In some cases, this may have affected all of humanity, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
10. Handcart expedition
In 1856, Mormon followers brought 1,100 people from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia to Missouri, destined to move toward what Brigham Young said was Zion in Utah to escape the persecution they were facing in the states that were being admitted to the Union at the time. Since the new converts were too poor to purchase covered wagons or oxen to transport them, the expedition turned to handcarts. It was decided that the alternative would not only be cheaper, but the light loads could be moved quickly enough to get the newcomers to Zion in two months.
Young and the other organizers' calculations were wrong in almost every way. For one thing, they overestimated the strength of the green wood that went into the wagons, meaning they soon had dozens of pieces. On the other hand, the teams were allowed to set out in August instead of the recommended departure in May. Along the way, life-saving supplies such as blankets were not simply abandoned but actively burned to remove the temptation to return for them later in the journey. No supply zones were set up for the new converts, and no existing settlements were not notified. Salt Lake City, the main population from which any rescue operation could have been launched, did not even know they were coming.
As a result210 people died from cold, hunger, and other causes on the road to Zion. In essence, Young inflicted damage on the Mormon herd equal to five of the Donner Party's disasters. Rather than admit this, church leaders turned the handcarts into an important religious symbol and tribute to the faith and resilience of their followers, including using the handcarts in reenactments for generations.
9. Yamamoto's Rejected War Game
Battle of Midway 1942 , which resulted in the destruction of four Japanese carriers, is widely regarded as the turning point in the Pacific War, making Japan's defeat inevitable. What was not inevitable, of course, was that on the afternoon of June 4, Japanese carriers off Alaska's Aleutian Islands had to refuel and rearm their planes (switching from dive bombs to torpedoes, the weapon of choice against warships at the time) just in time for an American air attack. In fact, Japanese commanders had had ominous warnings that such a thing might happen.
On May 1, the Japanese naval battle command assembled for a war game to test contingencies for their plan to attack the Aleutians. When testing the feasibility of attacking carriers without air cover (the main difference between the initial test conditions and the reality of June 4 was that in reality the aircraft were still on the carriers, while in the game they were postulated to be away from their bombing mission), a dice roll was made to determine the damage that the American bombers could inflict. When the result was a heavy loss of one carrier and damage to another, Admiral Matome Ugaki reversed the conclusions, not believing that American bombers could do nearly as much damage even if they caught the carriers with their defenses down, and no one questioned the theorizing or reassessed the strategy. This downplaying of the crisis affected the Japanese decision-making process in such a way that they found themselves sitting ducks at the crucial moment.
8. Persecution of LGBT in Cuba
Even before the Cuban revolution, homosexuality was taboo on the island nation. In the 1960s, this situation worsened: homosexuals were arrested, lost their jobs, or, worst of all, sent en masse to labor camps known as “military-industrial assistance camps.” It was not until 1979 that the Cuban government decriminalized homosexuality unless it was “publicly manifested.”
Unusually for a man of his position, in 2010 Fidel Castro admitted that committing such horrific acts against Cuba's LGBT community was a mistake. In fact, he admitted that it was his fault. Some claim that it was just part of a public relations campaign led by his niece. Mariela Castro Still, it was an unusual effort for a former head of state in a communist country.
7. The traitorous Minister of War
When discussing the blunders of the American Civil War, the focus is usually on one doomed charge, like Pickett's Charge or Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg. However, the thousands of deaths caused by these charges pale in comparison to the mistake that made the war possible. That's when President James Buchanan appointed former Virginia Governor John Floyd as Secretary of War. V In 1857.
As Secretary of War, Floyd shipped huge portions of the Federal arsenals to isolated locations where they could be captured without a shot being fired by the fledgling Confederate militias, allowing the seceding states to field thousands of artillery pieces even though there were hardly any gun factories in the entire South. He even went so far as to secretly sell 10,000 rifles pro-Confederate militias in South Carolina. If there was any doubt about where his sympathies actually lay, when the Civil War began, he joined the Confederacy as a general (though given his disastrous performance at Fort Donelson, future President Ulysses S. Grant said that joining the Confederacy was the best service he could have rendered the Union). In short, Floyd was the single person most responsible for 600,000 deaths during the Civil War, rather than the near-zero that resulted from South Carolina's failed secession in 1833.
6. London bombing on August 24.
After conquering France, Hitler's plans for Britain were surprisingly lenient. He intended to make peace before invading the Soviet Union (more on that later). To that end, an important aspect Führer Directive No. 17 was that terrorist acts "reserve the right to decide on terrorist attacks as retaliatory measures" in the interests of concentrating offensive power on the RAF and preventing increased British support for the war.
Instead, on August 24, Luftwaffe crews accidentally dropped bombs on London, and in retaliation August 25 RAF bombs were dropped on Berlin. As a result, the Luftwaffe's vital material was wasted trying to kill civilians instead of weakening the RAF, and the resolve to end the war disappeared. This anonymous bomber crew had inadvertently rendered the Allied war effort the greatest propaganda service of the war.
5. Potato blight
As of 2016, Ireland's population has yet to recover from the Great Famine of 1845-49. A million people were forced to flee the island and another million died of starvation, reducing the population by a whopping 25%. Given that the potato blight that caused the disaster was imported from mold on ships from North America, it may be the worst American export in history.
British laws and policies were almost deliberately useless. For one thing, for many years official interference was not permitted, and Irish grain exports to England continued. For another, Poor Law 1838 sent the bankrupt and evicted to workhouses, which naturally greatly discouraged the desperate from seeking relief and left many communities without the laborers needed for the fields. Absentee landowners in England were generally reluctant to contribute to relief programs, and many expanded their landholdings first, harboring suspicions that the famine was, if not deliberate on England's part, at least not something they were overly motivated to remedy.
4. Famine in Orissa
In terms of British policy, which provided ineffective measures to counteract the famine, this historical catastrophe is so obscure that even in TopTenz list famine was not included. And yet it cost humanity a million lives in 1866. This was largely due to the fact that Ost- India Company devastated the textile industry in the Indian region of Orissa, leaving the economy much more vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather and thus allowing a severe monsoon crisis to exact even heavier toll.
The official imperial response was to remain hands-off, and especially not to regulate grain prices, which would have made supplies more affordable for the population as a whole. The human cost of this decision cost many communities up to a third of their population. The British Empire would eventually pay a high price for this laissez-faire approach , as famine became the driving force behind the development of Indian nationalism.
3. Kyiv Order of Stalin
In terms of direct losses of personnel, no decision of the military campaign was as devastating to the military as Stalin's orders for the defense of Kiev, which began on September 7, 1941. By September 9, 1941, Field Marshal Budyonny saw that the situation was hopeless and ordered an "orderly, step-by-step withdrawal" of all Soviet troops from Kiev. Joseph Stalin categorically forbade this and, surprisingly frankly, ordered: "Stand and hold, and if necessary, die !»
Approximately 600,000 Soviet soldiers will follow the second half of this order either in combat or later in prisons/death camps. Of the forces arrayed, only about 15 000 managed to avoid encirclement. Later historians have argued that the battle may still have saved the Soviet Union, because Hitler diverted tens of thousands of troops who would otherwise have taken Moscow to return to Ukraine. But there is little reason to believe that they could not have acted as a deterrent had they not been encircled.
2. Cultural Revolution
The Cultural Revolution was a movement in China during the last 10 years of Chairman Mao Zedong's life, in which intellectualism and the supposed emergence of a new bourgeoisie were purged from China. This largely took the form of forming paramilitary groups called "Red Guards" by closing schools and forcing students to persecute older adherents of traditionalist values and purely intellectual pursuits. Zedong would resort to sending Chinese troops against the Red Guard groups he himself had made possible, and the civil war would continue until 1977, when Deng Xiaopang (who had himself been ousted from power early in the revolution) took power and held that position for the next 20 years. By the end of the revolution, it had cost approximately 1.5 million lives .
Like Castro with the military-industrial aid camps, the Chinese Communist Party was ready to admit this fatal mistake. In May 2016, On Tuesday, People's Daily , the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, declared that it would “never allow a mistake like the Cultural Revolution to be repeated.” The truth of this observation was clouded by the fact that even as the statement was being published, Beijing was holding an official celebration of the revolution, and many Chinese intellectuals argue that the economic reforms carried out during the purge allowed China to become the economic power it has become today.
1. Ethyl
TopTenz spoke of the harm Thomas Midgley had done to tetraethyl workers, but that only scratched the surface of the harm that lead added to gasoline, introduced in 1923, had done to the world at large. It’s hard to say how many premature deaths, miscarriages, and nervous system wrecks it caused after forcing its inventor to spend months recuperating. But a 2011 California State University report distributed by the United Nations found that an estimated 1.2 million premature deaths were prevented each year by phasing out leaded gasoline, and an estimated 125,000 miscarriages.
In addition, $2.4 trillion in damage, including acid rain, was prevented. So perhaps it could be said that the effort to phase out leaded gasoline, spearheaded by renowned scientist Clair Patterson, was one of the quietest efforts in human history.
Although global efforts began to phase out in 1971, several countries remained on the sidelines into the 21st century, largely due to the infrastructural challenges of retooling their oil industries to remove lead from the chemical process. Reluctant countries included Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The latter officially completed its phaseout in 2021. Leaded gasoline still directly and legally causes death and mental illness in small aircraft, so Thomas Midgley will likely continue to plague humanity for decades to come.
Is Dustin Koski's science fiction novel "A Tale of Magic Gone Wrong" the complete opposite of one of humanity's greatest mistakes? You'll have to read this to find out!
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