Poll: would you kill baby hitler?

[DudeistBelieve]

WWII has just ended. Youre in your 50s. Youre single with no family, and your friends died during the war. The horrors of the holocaust have just been revealed. Doc Brown has recently created a time machine out of a ford model T. Hes offering you the opportunity to go back in time and kill Hitler, with the chance of the time stream going awry affecting you negatively is very slim considering your place in existence.

This ultimately comes down to morality question. Could you bring yourself to kill a baby? If so, how do you do it?

Quite frankly, I don't know if I have the balls to kill a baby. Even if it was gonna grow up to be hitler.

 

[nukethetuna]

I dunno, if they can send me back in time, can't I just... help him get into art school or something?

 

[TimeLord]

If you are instantly in the situation where you can kill Hitler with foresight of what he will become, you have already changed the past and so could change his past in some way to change the future.

 

[NeutralDrow]

So basically...you want us to assume that we're already in a vengeful mood, and then ask whether or not we would want to take revenge? That's a bit of a leap.

On-topic, no. I'd probably encourage his parents to spring for art lessons.

 

[distended]

Lil Hitlerrrr... such a scamp!

 

[The Man With the Soap]

How many hundreds of rounds do I get to pump into that tiny, Facist skull?

 

[Psycho Cat Industries]

No,the U.S. would never get out of the depression unless we still have a pacific theatre.
Maybe I'd give him a mechanical pencil after traveling to the year 2011 or something.You know,get the angry artist a motive early on to practice.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I don't think I could kill a baby no matter who it was.

Can we maybe steal him and give him a proper upbringing and loving home. Guy seemed a bit messed up <---understatement of the year.

 

[Tupolev]

Any chance the OP recently watched Come and See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcKX0L2xIX4]? (Spoilers, by the way...)

Though, the postulation of the question of killing Hitler, while sitting at the surface of that scene, doesn't even begin to touch on the heart of it; the weird tabula rasa implications of the scene were the climactic chilling moments of the film for me.

 

[Souplex]

It's impossible to change time.
Any time travel is part of the time stream and is pre-determined. (Terminator rules)
This question is moot.

 

[SillyBear]

I wouldn't have been born if it were not for the specific events during the Second World War. So what you are really asking me is if I would remove myself from existence? Probably not.

 

[Mcupobob]

No, in fact I would punch doc brown in the face and burn his car down. I don't need anybody to fuck up my time steam. Even if I did I would prolly mess up somehow and make things worse. Anyways why would you want to stop world war 2 anyways? Sure it was a disaster but(Ordering form less to greatest) what about all those ww2 games? They'll never be made. Also not to mention the technology leap that happen during and after ww2 we prolly wouldn't end up with it.

 

[Rational-Delirium]

This would be the ultimate test of the nature/nurture debate! If he were to be brought up in a different manner, would he still be inclined to swing to the very very far, murderous right? His grandmother was Jewish, so if she were out of the picture, so to speak, would he have gone after her people so vigourously? Lets put him in a Skinner Box in the name of SCIENCE!

 

[.No.]

It's impossible to change time.
Any time travel is part of the time stream and is pre-determined. (Terminator rules)
This question is moot.

This was hypothetical. Not "I have a time machine and are offering you a chance to kill baby Hitler."

 

[Condor219]

If he was born with his Hitler mustache, heck no. That thing was boss.

 

[Gill Kaiser]

This is stupid. Just because I have no family doesn't mean that I shouldn't be wary of changing the future. If WW2 hadn't happened, the cold war might not have happened, preventing the space race, and the internet and a whole bunch of other technology might not have been created.

Everything worked out fine. I'd leave Hitler exactly where he was.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Uh...no.

One of the main reasons that Germany didn't do far more damage during WWII was because Hitler was basically the Harbringer of the German army. 'ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL!'

The man was extremely charismatic, but the guy painted houses for a living. He fucked up Germany's war effort so badly that the UK actually stopped trying to assassinate him, since his incompetence was one of their greatest assets in the war. That, and the fact that every assassination attempt failed because of a set of circumstances that could only be called an act of God.

For the argument that 'Without Hitler, there would have been no WWII or Nazis!' Well...I doubt that. I doubt that very much, and a Nazi Germany without Hitler mucking up...well...everything would have been very bad for the world.

Then again, it's impossible to really predict what the ramifications of an action might be. But as someone else mentioned earlier, if you REALLY want to go back in time to change history, don't let Archduke Ferdinand die. That might have prevented WW1, which means that Germany wouldn't have been completely destroyed due to the restrictions imposed on it after the war, which probably means that the Nazi party would have never even been conceptualized.

But again, impossible to tell for sure.

 

[Vault boy Eddie]

If I had a time machine id eliminate all of the people responsible for the Christian dark ages.