Hitler. If we’re going to go butterfly effect and propose the world wouldn’t have changed in some beneficial ways without him, let’s also consider the possibility that some of the 9-11 million who died in the Holocaust might have improved the world dramatically, had they lived. We simply don’t know.
Either way, I can’t say the systemic murder of 9-11 million people isn’t as bad as one particular addictive substance.
Meth is a horrible drug, but according to the UN, the majority of the 190,000 drug-related deaths annually are due to opioids, and that pales in comparison to the 6 million deaths annually from tobacco.
Hm. Hitler vs. tobacco. There’s an interesting choice.
In WWII, you &/or your loved ones were killed. Either you knew they were killed or, even worse, you had to assume so while holding on to a glimmer of hope. Your home may have been destroyed by bombs/fire. If you were Jewish, you’re possessions were stolen, you had to wear certain things, you were discriminated against & spit on. You were forcibly relocated.
Do you see things that bad for the majority of who you have to work with? Sure some people die from meth, & some people go to jail, but you can still have limited contact with them. Meth upends lives but not nearly as much as WWII did for Europeans, especially the targeted populations like the Jews & others (Poles, Roma, gays, etc.)
Kill Hitler. There are more replacements for meth, but there hasn’t seem to be anyone to replace Hitler. Though possibly what happened to him was a deterrent…
It seems to me that in sheer numbers, never having meth would prevent more lives being lost than never having Hitler would. People keep saying that not having meth would just mean some other drug would take it’s place but not specifying in any way what drug or what type of drug that might be. It seems much more likely that there would be another Hitler taking the place of the original one if you just never had him in the first place.
I would take out Hitler because I have more interest in the alternative time line that would ensue. Also, I think I would catch more shit from the average person if they ever learned I had an opportunity to take out Hitler and decided not to.
I think Hitler strikes a stronger emotional nerve that the disparate and more vague impact of meth. I don’t criticize this at all, emotions are much stronger influences than intellectual facts. But I do believe if the intellectual truths of both options are objectively compared, never having meth introduced to this world would be a larger sparer of human tragedy than never having one individual name Adolf Hitler would.
So I have to choose between a world where another drug takes the niche of Meth, or a world ruled by Germans?
Meth: It is just one family of drugs. Very similar to many,many,many others. A bit easier to make in the kitchen than most, but there are others just as easy, just as deadly.
Hitler: The war with/by germany was inevitable following the way the german nation was screwed by the treaty of Versailles. If you defeat an enemy, then you should either conquer them completely, or allow them a chance of retaining their dignity. The treaty of versailles allowed such things as the 1923 invasion by france+belgium, which was purely financially motivated. And the german nation just had to bend over, pass the vaseline and pretend it didn’t hurt. So of course they were hell-bent on revenge and restoration of their pride.
.
So why is killing Hitler a Bad Idea? Because while he was a gifted politician, an inspiring rabble-rouser, and a dang charismatic leader, he was also a much worse strategic military leader than the world had seen in a long time. He made numerous errors of judgement that crippled his military’s long-term success.
.
Without Hitler, the Germans would still have militarized, would still have gone to war. Would still have needed to consolidate national identity by first blaming, then suppressing, then exterminating the gypsies and jews. Hitler did not cause the holocaust, the german people’s anger and humiliation did that. That resentment allowed people like hitler, goebbels and himmler to attain positions of power.
And without Hitler, they might have had a leader that had more brains, to the extreme detriment of all non-germans out there.
Everyone knows that killing Hitler never works. You go back in time, you’re about to shoot Hitler, and then a bomb set by another time traveler who is trying to kill Hitler goes off and blows your legs off. Or instead of Hitler you get Schneider. Oh, you never heard of Schneider?
Maybe everyone goes back in time to kill Schneider, and they succeed, and then they notice this guy Hitler, and they think, “Yeah, that’s bad, didn’t expect that, but this timeline is still much better than Schneider would have been.”
Anyway, bottom line, Hitler is a fixed point in time, immune to wibbly wobbly timey wimey. Try to fuck with Hitler and it’s never going to work out.
Besides, you know who else killed Hitler? And look what happened to him.
First of all, the fact that it is so easy to make is part of what makes it stand apart as so deadly. Secondly, can you name all these many, many, many other drugs that are so, so similar to meth that people are dying from?
Consider that there were already anti-jew literature in germany as early as 1543 (Martin Luther), you cannot blame Hitler for creating it.
Consider that the “Jewish question” was a very hot topic in all of europe, including Britain, for 75 years before the holocaust began. The only difference is that the more peaceful countries ‘solved’ it by low-level cultural supression, whereas in Germany the Jews (and Gypsies) were selected as scapegoats to vent their anger on. So you cannot blame Hitler for starting the anti-jew movement. He did support it, carry it, and use it as the emotional core for his party’s view of “germans are superior, look at these animals, you are better than them”.
Consider that Germany was well on the way to re-arming itself for war by 1930, when Hitler’s party was still a distant fourth in the Reichstag, you cannot blame Hitler for initiating the rearmament.
Without Hitler, would the Holocaust have happened in the form it did, with mass extermination rather than expulsion? Maybe, maybe not. Hitler himself preferred to shove the jews out, let them be other people’s problems, but none of the other countries were even remotely willing to take the flood of refugees that tried to leave germany in 1930-1938. After Kristallnacht in 1938, of course, there was no future for Jews anywhere near germany, including no practical escape even if they could find a willing host country.
Without Hitler, the war would still have happened. Possibly a year or so earlier (linked to the spanish events), and less effectively.
I don’t see how you could stop methamphetamine from ever being invented- it’s pretty much inevitable given research into biochemistry. But if we’re postulating that it could somehow be done, then I voted for prevent meth. In addition to the other reasons mentioned, methamphetamine made World War Two worse. The Germans and especially the Japanese lived on the stuff. I recently ran across one comment on Quora.com that’s worth reading in its entirety http://qr.ae/TU1mdT, but to quote just part:
If they’d stop trying to kill Hitler and just get him that scholarship to art school, we could finally create Timeline 27-Bravo that everyone will be has been talking about. But do they listen to me?
