Stop Hitler or bin Laden & 9/11?Follow

Which one gives me my hover board?

QQ Moar

Falafels.

Joph, I take it you haven't read Bulletin 1147.

no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel.

I thought he meant to type ODB and messed up.

Anyway, I would first shoot Joph because he is really my grandfather, then reprogram and use the time machine to go back to the exact point that I shot Joph. I would then recruit myself to kidnap Hitler and Osama, and after completing that task travel forward in time to the era in which brain swapping technology exists. After swapping Hitler and Osama's brains into the other's body I would return their bodies to their respective time periods. The End.

I voted neither. For Hitler, it's a no-brainer IMO. Not just because of tech stuff like most argue, but because absent Hitler and his militarization of Germany, Stalin almost certainly would have rolled over Europe sometime between 42-45. The world basically lucked out that those two rose to power at around the same time, with similar objectives, and spent a significant portion of their efforts fighting each other instead of conquering everyone else.

In terms of OBL, that's a harder one. The problem is that even without OBL around, and even with the Al-queda plot revealed, the basic conditions which lead to the conflict would still exist. A better time travel option would be to go back to when he was involved in creating his training camps in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, kill him and replace him with someone who wouldn't extend those camps into a global organization committed to the protection of a fundamentalist Muslim world view. Stopping him after he'd already created the organization, already mobilized it after Iraq invaded Kuwait, then got pissed when Saudi Arabia chose to have the US come in and help them stop Iraq instead of using his forces, then turned radical, got ejected from SA, wrote a couple fatwas, and started the ball rolling towards global attacks on western nations is really just way to late to change anything in terms of time line. It might prevent 9/11, but not other attacks. One can even argue that absent 9/11, the US might not have mobilized against it and things might be worse today as a result.



It's kinda like asking if you could prevent the Pearl Harbor attack, but nothing else. Absent that attack, it's likely the US would have sat out of WW2 for a least another year or two. In that time, Japan would have consolidated most of the South Pacific, and at least began an invasion of Australia and probably would have occupied the major ports. That extra year or two would likely have made it nearly impossible for the US to do anything against them at all. The US citizens would have been less interested in doing anything "way over there", and our first engagement would have been with old battleship naval formations, resulting in a likely horrible crushing defeat the first time out. Unlike the same thing happening in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, that defeat might just have served to sap the will of the people to expend more effort at all. And that's not even looking at the effect that delay would have had on the war in Europe.


Unless you could say for sure that by taking either of them out, it would cause a specific positive result, I just don't see how it's a good idea to meddle. Maybe things would work out better, but maybe they'd have worked out worse.

Parties full of historians? Absolutely!

Edited, Aug 4th 2011 1:53pm by gbaji

Some of us play it in Chrome.

AITT: A poster suggests that the forum community would sacrifice Jews for the ability to play video games, and the forum community is offended by the suggestion that said gaming would be done on an iPhone.

We're lovely people, really.

One of the few times I have actually rated you up.

Really, a very good historical perspective.

Personally, I voted BinLaden. See, you have to look at what I call "the ripple effect". The further back you go to alter something, the more drastically your "present" will change. Events surrounding Hitler led to other events, which led to others, etc. Besides the Stalin angle gbaji mentioned, you would still have had Mussolini and Hirohito doing their things.

9/11, otho, happened much more recently and would probably result in less drastic changes (though at nearly a decade, there may still be some significant ones).

ITT: Proof gets butthurt over jokes.