Poll: Would You Kill Baby Hitler?
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Tvtrope" post="18.231360.8100420 said:Considering the millions of lives lost in WWII, it does make some sense that the world would be a very different place if Hitler had never risen to power. For example, maybe Stalin really wanted to invade the USA, but the Soviet army was so severely weakened after the war that he couldn't. In that case, if The War had never happened, Stalin might have been able to make this dream come true (or, more extremely maybe the White Russians could have rejoined and beaten the communists back and re-established the Tsardom, establishing Michael Alexandrovich...). Or maybe nuclear weapons would have been invented in peacetime, and without the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to terrify the world, some naive world leaders would have started a nuclear war without understanding its true destructive potential.
A common perspective is that without Nazism to vilify it, racism as an official and pursued policy of government would have persisted into the present day; despite the current debate over gay marriage and a large multiracial population, people tend to forget that many American states had laws against homosexuality and interracial marriage, and California actually began sterilizing asylum populations twenty years before the Germans did.
The technological impact cannot be underestimated either; NASA (and thereby all its related spinoffs) relied heavily on Nazi-backed rocket research, including use of human subjects, and much of the medical community benefited from similar agreements. Even the research on tornadoes now used to protect the world was based on studies of a Japanese scientist when he learned that his hometown was spared being the second nuclear bombing site due to the weather. The economic slump of the Great Depression was transformed into a period of enhanced American dominance in the world, Japan was transformed from military superpower to economic superpower, and the last vestiges of European colonialism were wiped out. There's no telling if a world without WWII would have turned out better or worse than the world we live in today. And the simple act of killing Hitler may have widely different effects on history depending on the precise time and manner of his death.
Note that this does not apply to aliens/demons or evil time travelers who are allied with Hitler; time travelers should feel free to stop them. Other than that, Time Travel is as useless for solving problems as Reed Richards, if it doesn't in fact do the opposite and create a spiraling Butterfly Of Doom effect as part of a Fantastic Aesop.
Of course, it doesn't seem to dawn on anyone to, say, kill Gavrilo Princip, the guy who shot Archduke Ferdinand and started the First World War, instead ? though even that might well have been only a stopgap; the tangled web of Great Power alliances and colonial hostilities that laid the groundwork for the Great War was so delicate that it would almost certainly have been triggered by something in that time period, whether the Archduke had survived or not. (In fact, it very nearly blew up several times before that point, although none of them are well remembered.) It might be much easier and more efficient just to go all the way back to the 19th century and kill Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor who unified Germany, or Kaiser Wilhelm II, who almost died at birth anyway, or kill Metternich and prevent him from orchestrating the European Concert, or kill Napoleon before he can start the wars that led to the Congress of Vienna... but everyone is just so short-sighted they want to kill Hitler. /quote]
Makes most sense
NO! NO NO NO! Have you not heard of Godwins Law of Time Travel [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodwinsLawOfTimeTravel]?! If you kill Hitler the Nazis win World War 2. Time travelling alltogether is a BAD IDEA. >_<
Yes, we're all ok, we actually are all thinkin' 'bout the timeline and how killing Hitler would fuck it over, be it in the "Godwins Law"-way or in the "C&C Red Alert"-way. You gotta think thoroughly through your actions mate =PCORRODED SIN said:
Personally no. While it may seem terrible we would never know what would have happened if we avoided WW2. We could be far worse off and racism/elitism could be even more prevalent. Changing something like that is just as risky as Russian Roulette in my eyes.
Thanks to you, I don't have to type that much, thank you.Talshere said:
Listen and repeat, kids: Don't fuck with history, it never turns out well.
Some people discuss whether the world was ready for National Socialism...I think it was. If it hadn't happened in my country, it would have happened somewhere else, under a different leader. And then someone would create a thread about whether we would kill that leader as a baby.
How bout pick him, take him to the next country and put him on an orphange doorstep. He mainly got to his position via cicrumstance.
If you go back in time and kill Hitler, that would change the timeline you came from. If he was dead in this new timeline, you wouldn't go back to kill him, because he'd be dead. But if you didn't go back, then he wouldn't be killed and the world would be the way it is before you go back.
There's a reason they have laws for this kind of thing.
There's a reason they have laws for this kind of thing.
Not to mention that the holocaust is seen as monstrous by todays sociecty, but back then it was just an extreme of an already accepted mentality. Hitler didn't create antisemitism, he just pulled it further. The tolerancy that exists in todays society might never have been possible if racism had not been made so hated due to the holocaust.Talshere said:
So I agree with Talshere, there are far too many uncertain factors for me to forsee if killing Hitler actually would have led somewhere.
Killing him would solve next to nothing. If it wasn't him, it would have been somebody else. It's not like he was the one person that convinced everybody of something, it was just the situation that allowed him (or any other person with similar personality) to rise to power, become corrupted by it and... well, the rest is history.
Assuming time travel would even be possible (paradoxes and all), would you eliminate him (a relatively unstable guy that made A LOT of bad decisions in the war), you could end up with a MORE COMPETENT and ever so slightly less chaotic leader that could lead Germany to victory in the nigh-unavoidable war, by not antagonizing so many people so fast, by not insisting to fight on so many fronts, by not betraying the Russians at the worst moment, and so on and so forth.
As much as it pains me to say it, a world without Hitler could very well be an overall worse world quite easily.
Imagine USA not getting involved until much later (or not at all, or even ON THE SIDE OF GERMANY), imagine the racial purges only happening after most of the war was over, imagine Russia siding with Germany until the very end of the war or never actually turning against it, imagine Germany mass-producing reliable jet fighter planes to be used in the war (and Germany plus maybe some allies being the only ones to use them in combat), imagine Germany inventing the atomic bomb first, and a lot of other things like that.
Killing baby Hitler (moral quandaries aside) doesn't look so good now, does it ?
Assuming time travel would even be possible (paradoxes and all), would you eliminate him (a relatively unstable guy that made A LOT of bad decisions in the war), you could end up with a MORE COMPETENT and ever so slightly less chaotic leader that could lead Germany to victory in the nigh-unavoidable war, by not antagonizing so many people so fast, by not insisting to fight on so many fronts, by not betraying the Russians at the worst moment, and so on and so forth.
As much as it pains me to say it, a world without Hitler could very well be an overall worse world quite easily.
Imagine USA not getting involved until much later (or not at all, or even ON THE SIDE OF GERMANY), imagine the racial purges only happening after most of the war was over, imagine Russia siding with Germany until the very end of the war or never actually turning against it, imagine Germany mass-producing reliable jet fighter planes to be used in the war (and Germany plus maybe some allies being the only ones to use them in combat), imagine Germany inventing the atomic bomb first, and a lot of other things like that.
Killing baby Hitler (moral quandaries aside) doesn't look so good now, does it ?
Yes, the chain of events that follow from Hitlers reign only caused pain and suffering, it was because of Hitlers treatments of the Jews that Israel was formed and because Israel was fromed Palistine now pays the price, The Eastern European countries that Hitler invaded were then claimed by Stalin. Hitler not existing couldn't be so bad. And with limitless time manipulation powers I would be able to fix the possible negative consequences of this because we have no idea what the world would look like if World War II hadn't happened as it did in our current timeline. Also it is possible that the Nazi Party would still rise to power without Hitler but for limitless time manipulation powers it would be a worthwhile sacrifice.
Without the powers at the end of the stick killing Hitler would be far too risky as the results would be incalculable.
Without the powers at the end of the stick killing Hitler would be far too risky as the results would be incalculable.
I like this idea. Although I'm not quite sure baby Hitler would understand that, so you might have to write it down for him so he could read it when he was older...Generic Gamer said:
Take the fuel boost and travel forward to the whoever considered Hitler's application into Art Scool, hold a gun to his head and force him to accept Hitler's application.
It would not solve anything... someone else would take his place...
Didn't they have this on an episode of the Twilight Zone...? The "new" series..?
Didn't they have this on an episode of the Twilight Zone...? The "new" series..?