Inspired by a recent time travel thread, here’s another poll.
You’re offered an opportunity to travel back to Austria in 1904. You’ll have a chance to kill Adolf Hitler when he’s only five years old. Obviously this will almost certainly have a huge effect on history, including your own life. But there’s no way to predict the specifically what will happen. And you’ll only get the one chance.
So would you kill Hitler or not?
I assume most people who would say yes would basically have the same reasons. But I can see several different reasons why someone might say no. If you wouldn’t kill Hitler, what would be your reason:
1 - I am opposed to killing in all circumstances.
2 - I wouldn’t kill an innocent five year old just because of who he’d grow up to be. (Would it make a difference if the time machine could send you back to 1918 or 1932?)
3 - I think nobody should alter the past, even with the best of intent.
4 - I worry that the new version of history might turn out worst than the existing one.
5 - I don’t want to be responsible for the elimination of myself and my family and friends from history.
6 - I’ve always been a great admirer of Adolf Hitler and a supporter of his goals.
7 - Some other reason.
Feel free, of course, to offer your variations on what historical possibilities you are offered. The only thing I’d ask is that people stick to the basic elements: there has to be something changing history, the consequences cannot be pre-determined, and it has to be an irrevocable decision.
The issue to me is: If you had gone back to, say 1918 and killed Hitler, you would never have been able to think about doing it in the first place. It’s the old time-travel paradox even Cecil has taken up, in the books.
I believe, just as humans evolve, humanity as a whole must evolve. Hitler was pure evil, no doubt about it. One of the people he killed might have been able to cure cancer. But we’ll never know. And I think at times humanity must face evil in order to come together and advance and grow.
There was an interesting take on this subject on last year’s otherwise abyssmal remake of the Twilight Zone:
A woman travels back to when Hitler was a baby. She kidnaps baby Hitler and tosses him into a river. A housekeeper goes out and buys a baby from a poor woman and replaces Hitler, thus keeping history intact.
Seminary life didn’t seem to do much for Stalin and he was worse than Hitler.
I’d also take the fourth option and the rest don’t even figure into it. My belief is that the world is trending towards better rather than worse although painfully, and shamefully, slower than I’d prefer. Where we are now is immensely better than pre-Hitler and I can’t be sure the world would be better still without him. It might seem like a bizarre and even outrageous thing to suggest but if I didn’t think alternative history was such a wank, I’m sure I could posit some ways in which our reality is far better.
Our present reality, although unacceptable, is such that we can work to make things better. A Hitler free history is such a large change that I wouldn’t want to risk something so bad that it couldn’t be improved.
Another question is whether or not killing Hitler would even do any good. Was Hilter the ONLY cause of the Holocaust?
There’s a deeper (trippier) question regarding memes and historical pressure and that stuff, but I’m not smart enough to fathom it.
I agree with those that picked #4. For better or worse, WWII was a HUGE catalyst for change in our history. You could argue that it was the point at which America took over from Europe as the leading power in the world. It was almost certainly responsible for ending the Great Depression. We’re still dealing with the effects today, with the Baby Boomer generation.
It would be just about impossible to predict how history would have changed without WWII. And if killing Hitler didn’t prevent the war, what’s the point?
This is my answer, basically. Our current economic and technological levels are directly tied into WW II and the ensuing Cold War and I think that the world’s a halfway decent place. At least where I live. If I were in Eastern Europe instead of in the western US, I might think differently.
Now, if I could somehow impress on him that Jews are people worth admiring and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay, a Gypsy, and all the other people he hunted down, I’d definitely do that. Any kind of tempering to that effect would be better than none.
Yes, one of my favorites; the ending still gives me the willies.
There are so many reasons NOT to go back in time and murder little Adolph, but given the opportunity, I’m not so sure I’d refuse. Even knowing that I might be changing history for the worse, I’m not sure I could resist doing it anyway.
Murdering a 5 year old, even one who’s going to be as bad as hitler when he goes up, is still pretty bad. Punishing someone for something that they won’t do for 30 years and that they haven’t even thought of doing yet very tenous, legally and morally.
Altering History would profounding impact the last 50 years, and maybe not for the better. Would you come back to a Europe Dominated to the USSR? Possible. Would you come back to a world were anti-semitism is still very societially acceptable? Likely. Frankly, we don’t know what will happen. But a world where Hitler never came to power, parodoxically, may have been worse then the one we live in.
The whole paradox thing.
A. If you killed Hitler before anyone knew who he was, then how would you know to come back and kill him?
B. If you killed Hitler, you run a great risk of the science and tech needed to build your time machine never being available to you, for whatever reason.
Of course, I’d have no problem with the idea getting into his Bunker in May 1945, capturing him and handing him over to an Allied War Crimes Tribunal.
(a) If I travel back in time and alter a major event – WWII, for example – it will have major repercussions on the time-frame to which I return, perhaps even altering my memories of the event when I get back, making the grandfather paradox possible.
(b) If I travel back in time and alter a major event – WWII, for example – it will cause the branching of the timestream into an alternate universe, and the time frame to which I return will not be altered in any way.
If (a) is true, I would not kill Hitler. I’d be much too terrified of returning to find United Communist Europe menacing a United States whose technology hadn’t advanced because WWII never happened and therefore didn’t kickstart the More Science programs that began as a result of it (or similar outrageous scenario of your choice.)
If (b) is true… I might kill Hitler. Sure would be interesting to see how things came out.
I’d see that as almost the worst-case scenario. All of the disadvantages of altering history without the advantage of preventing WWII and the Holocaust. Sort of a “let’s wait until the damage is done; and then cause more damage” situation.
