The problem with these thread (and they are fun) is that do you eliminate the man or the mother? Or could it be solved another way? What if instead of killing Hitler you allowed him to continue his career as a painter? Would this have changed his direction? He might have been evil still, but he wouldn’t be in a position to do anything about it?
If you eliminate Stalin, you may also eliminate Mao because Mao depended on Stalin to allow him to take over China.
If I was going to eliminate anyone it’d be my ex-boss, why? 'Cause he’s a jerk. It wouldn’t change world history but it’d change MY history.
He’s ABE freaking VIGODA. Freddy Krueger tells his kids stories about Abe Vigoda to get them to behave. Chuck Connors calls him Sir. Buffy the Vampire Slayer sleeps in set of Vigoda jammies.
It would have to be Lenin. With Lenin out of the way, perhaps the Bolsheviks never rise to power. The Kerensky government survives (well, hopefully… it had lots of enemies). The world is spared the scourge of communism. Russia grows in economic strength as a free society, making it impossible for Hitler to realize his dreams as the creator of the thousand-year Reich. There is no Stalin, no mass starvation of tens of millions of Soviet citizens, no 40 million dead in WWII, no Maoist five year plans, no Vietnam war, no Cambodian killing fields, no cold war.
Of course, all that stuff or worse could have happened anyway, but the same is true for killing any historic figure. We have no idea how the alternate reality would turn out. But the Bolshevik revolution really was starting point for a major force of evil that touched every decade of the 20th century.
I hope those of you focused on killing members of the Bush family are joking. If not, and you honestly think they are a great example of the evils of the past 100 years, you need to regain a little perspective, or take some history classes.
Sure Moore and Nader brought death to millions.
Bush only started wars and greased the skids on screwing up the economy of the whole world. Nothing compared to Nader and Moore.
Killing Generals Westmoreland or Giap might be interesting. Uh…does proposing assassinating him via time travel count as “wishing death on someone”? In my defense, I probably wouldn’t be the first person here who’d have wished General Giap was dead.
…say, when was Sgt. Robert L. Thompson born? There’s a subtle change to the timeline, for ya.
Saddam, obviously. Yasir Arafat. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Fidel Castro. Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini. Ho Chi Minh. Kim Il Sung. Robert Mugabe. Leonid Brezhnev. Nikita Khrushchev.
Really, if “Bush” is the first name that came to mind, you need to get out more.
Well Prescott Bush was instrumental in the foundation of the OSS and its change-over to the CIA, so an argument can be made that all of the botched CIA coups that led to nasty dictators could be change by taking out Prescott. But then again he was born before 1909. If you took out George HW Bush, you could have changed the course of the Bay of Pigs, since it was nominally his fault.
On the other hand. If you want to kill someone who would ensure that the MOST people died. Albert Wohlstetter would be your man. Likely no man in history prevented more death than he did.
