Would you kill Hitler?
 

Imagine for a moment you could travel back to 1889 and meet baby Hitler. Would you kill him, knowing what he'd become in 50 year's time?

Many people say they'd try to influence him and bring him up better. But that's out of the question. I'm the time-police and I set the rules. You have one brief shot at meeting him. It's either kill or walk away.

(imagine all the implications here. Not just a moral one of killing a still innocent little baby, but also other things: Israel wouldn't exist for sure, neither would the European Union as we know it today, since it was a direct descendant of WW2. Same thing with United Nations (it's predicesor the inafective League Of Nations would probably still exist). The Geneva Convention (as well as number of other multilateral agreements) was a direct effect of WW2 But on the other hand... no holocaust, no concentration camps, no suffering, no casualties of war... and in the end even if it's worth it... there's still that awful matter of killing this little still-innocent cutie.)

Nope.

yeah, i'd let it be... there's no point in altering history

The first directive prohibits altering the time line, so no. :D

No....may be I could imagine myself killing somebody because I'm nervous but I don't think I could do it with "Cold Mind" ....I mean with "préméditation"..

nope, i wouldnt kill Hitler. last time i checked, i wasnt a (baby) killer. i couldn't bring myself to do it.

but freddie is the time-police here and he says it's allowed :p

am i the only one here to be so evil to do so? :spy:
he did no good to anyone. :no:
and to discuss about consequenses on the modern world is a whole another, and way too complex story :rolleyes:
could i do it? i know i would like to but we'll never know that... :dknow:

He resembles Moe from Three Stooges. :D

Come on, let me change him, i know i can! :D



Returning to the question. If i have only that moment with him, i would be able to kill him. About the implications, well i would like to see how time would be changed, just for the fun :D . I have my theory of how would it be changed but that's another story, among millions of others, for another opportunity... hehe.

That's right. I am THE time police and I set the rules. Some other basic rules include:

-If you're not savvy in old-fashioned language forms, never interact with people around you. If you meet someone... and they start talking you have 3 options: a) destroy them, b) pretend you're retarded c) have a piece of food ready at any point in time. Start eating furiously when people approach you, which should give you an excuse for not talking, since your mouth will be full (you can also use a combination of b and c)

-Never show people of the past your future gadgets in order to get laid.

-Never attempt to harm or kill Dick and/or Mac McDonald. We want a tasty future, don't we?

I would kill Hitler but I am not sure that another person of equal persuasion would not have taken his place. I just hate what he did but I also fear the consequences of tampering with history. Tough call.

I'd rather buy all his paintings and brainwash him that his future lies in art instead ;)

Why worrying about something that will never happen :rolleyes: :lalala:

Tough decision. I probably would, considering he was more harm than good. But a baby? :bum:

Talking about world history, there are many other leaders that caused equal damage... But since the time cop specify only Hitler... Well, what gadgets u will give us? What do we kill the baby with? And do we get away with the crime comitted, or we just have to run for our lives?

You get a chain-saw and an AK-47 riffle. After you do your job, you're safely transported back to 2005 to the place you were born in. No running away from the Austro-Hungarian police of the late 19th century. That'd only make the decision harder. And it's not the point to get away with it anyway. The point is to get away from your moral stature and values in order to convice yourself to do something horrible to save millions of lives.

I said Hitler cause he's an obvious choice: you can easily replace him with Charles Manson, Jack The Ripper (whoever he was), Gingis Khan, Sadam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, Augusto Pinochet... you name it.

look who likes playing God :p dangerous game, freds ;)
i still wouldn't kill him.
if you're curious about "what would have happened if..." you can always read about counterfactual history :heh:

Ok. Then i don't want ur gadgets, Time Cop. Chain saw? It's gross! I'll just dump him into a well or something. It's a horrible thing to do, but ppl do horrible things everyday for a horrible cause, with malice and without sacrifice. U say who am i to judge what's horrible or not? But a judgement is already made when a discussion happens. It's inevitable. And what will happen if Hitler died when he was a baby? Did i mention I love chaos? :D

There's this one theory about time-paradoxes that as soon as one little detail from the past (as insignificant as it may be) changes, the whole "future" which represents our present disapears into nothing. Then there's this other interesting theory of paralel universes, where all endless possibilities that exist in life actually happen in one of the paralel universes that coincide with our present (just in a different dimension), while we're just a loop of one of those strings of infinite possibilities. Like one drop in an ocean full of water. Our fates are sculptured around one of the possibilities that can and do happen elsewhere (and at the same time) in other dimensions.

Okay, but the point of this thread wasn't time-travel and it's mysteries, per se (though it was splendid it took that turn - I have no objections. :D). It was just a test of the struggle within a person when they have to do something bad for greater good of mankind.

We have no guarantee that killing Hitler as a child would make history better though.
Hitler did not invent fascism, fascism was spreading all over Europe in the 1930s, it was a deep general historical movement, Hitler managed to use that movement to cease power.

If Hitler is removed, who's to say that another national socialist leader isn't going to take his role in history, one that will be actually better than Hitler (from a Nazi point of view), one that will be more in control of himself and won't make the same strategic mistakes like starting the war in 1939 (too soon, they needed 10 more years to be ready) or having the USSR and the US drawn into the conflict (easily avoidable mistakes, the USSR was happy with the non-aggression pact and the US was happy to remain neutral in this nth European civil war). With a better leader, it would have been totally possible for Nazi Germany to invade and control all western and central Europe, and we may very well all be citizens of the IIIrd Reich today.

In an alternative scenario, if national socialism had collapsed without Hitler, well, national socialism was not the only extremist movement in Germany in the 1930s, the communists were also working to cease power. If national socialism had failed, the communists would have most probably made a coup and turned Germany into a Soviet state right at the heart of Europe. Soviet Germany and Soviet Russia would have been strong allies and would have easily invaded all the rest of Europe to create a huge Soviet Empire.

But at least in both scenarios Europe would be unified and definitely one of the superpowers of this planet instead of being the nothingness that it is today, lol.

And no guarantee it would change it. The perfect example in that sense would be the Oedipus myth. You try to change stuff to avoid something happening in the future, but destiny will still have its way. So suppose it was possible to go back in time to try and kill Hitler. Who's to say the killer wannabe won't die first? Don't wanna mess with the forces of the universe, man :no:

Well most of Hitlers followers weren't exactly right in the head either. On the contrarary, more then half were chronic phychotics. So whichever of those extreme nacionalists took power and attempted to create the 3rd Reich wouldn't exactly be any more successful then Hitler. The thing is that Hitler ventured into something unknown - a war of that scale has never been attempted before. He had an army of well-trained professionals behind him, suggesting every tactical move, so it's not like he acted like a clueless amateur. He was just overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the "project". I don't think any other leader would do any better (any worse, rather). Though I seriously doubt anyone else would be able to gain popularity and then exploit it quite as well Hhitler did. He was the ultimate evil genious. Smarter and more evil than Joker & Penguin put togeher.