random question-

[schmevil]

What's your take on this classic ethical dilemma:

If you could travel through time and meet Hitler as a child, what would you do? Try to change him? Kill him? Do nothing for fear of creating an even worse outcome? Do nothing for fear of ~destroying the time stream?



I watched Valkyrie the other day, which makes the question somewhat less than random, but yeah.

Comments

[verstehen]

Depends on what resources I have available. Could I concievably kill him without getting caught? Do I have access to him regularly over time, so I could try and change him? Do I have a way of going back and forth in time to check what happens if I do change things?

...I am, perhaps, far too practical for this assignment.

Also, I just finished playing Singularity, which has an AWESOME twist on this idea.

[whatistigerbalm]

There's a 2003 book that follows exactly that question, Boris Dežulović's Christkind; I never got around to reading it - heard it's good though - so I might order it now.

Personally I don't think changing or otherwise removing Hitler from history would have made much of a difference. If he hadn't come around to create a cult of himself, bandwagoning on old and well-established obsessions and hatreds, somebody else would have.

Unrelated:

[azurelunatic]

Points are as a booby prize for this week's spam.

[sanguinity]

Get his mother some freakin' treatment for her breast cancer. Palliative care, if nothing else is possible. But she went through some horrendous, slow, gory agony, and from what I understand, that was a significant piece in twisting him.

Echoing WhatIsTigerBalm, whether that is enough to change the course of history, I have no idea. It may have happened anyway with someone else, or this one thing may not have had much of an effect on Hitler himself. But whatever the big picture, I have no doubts that it's something worth doing.