Heads, we're dancing

[Mercy]

Godwin needs a holiday. Why is it always about killing Hitler? By all accounts, he was the personality, but hardly the lone or even preeminent tactition that drove the Third Reich to its high point before the Allies and Soviets spanked the Germans all the way back to Berlin. In the grand scheme of history though, Hitler was small potatos. So why, when mulling the fantasy of time travel, do people always target Hitler as the one historical tyrant whose premature death would most benefit mankind? Temujin was certainly a more vicious, and directly involved, tyrant. Stalin was quite the kill-happy douche. The Chinese had a few particulary nasty emperors over the centuries. it would seem more apropos that those of the Jewish persuasion would go after Pharoah and avoid that whole forty years of wandering. Or maybe the non-Jewish would want to take out Moses to avoid the insitutionalized genocide that was part and parcel of Jewish foreign relations for centuries. Pol Pot, anyone? Justinian would definitely be on my short list of candidates for early erasure. Is there a statute of limitations on the heinousness of genocide?

[CJC]

Yes, the statute of limitations on historical vengeance-murder is three generations; any longer and nobody remembers what the monster did.


There are a couple of lenses through which correctional time-travel may be investigated, though, and it'll be fun to explore each of them.


First: The immutable timeline
Long story short, no matter what action you take you will not impact the flow of history. Kill the head honcho? Another will take his place, or your victim was actually an impersonator, or your weaponry consistently fails when trying to attack (that one's my favorite!). Try to warn somebody? No one will believe you.


Second: The unfortunate consequence
Even great evil spawns great things. Going off of WWII, most modern medicine is built on foundations that were developed by experimenting on war prisoners and concentration camp victims. You go back in time and try to save lives, and come back to a world where humanity was obliterated by Swine Flu because medicine did not develop in the same way. Even wicked things spawn progress for the human species, and we are all a sum of our experiences. Snipping out pieces creates a discontinuous curve and subsequently terrible consequences (some far worse than the history that you 'corrected').


Third: The Terminator Clause
A variant of the First, the action of travelling back in time to prevent a catastrophe only succeeds in pushing back the start date. Go back in time and kill the monster? When you get home, a new monster is just starting the war. Only now the technology is two-hundred times more devastating. This lens inevitably ends with nuclear destruction.


Fourth: Marty McFly in the Sky
This lens is by far the most disgusting. You go back in time and thwart the monster WITHOUT KILLING, and back in the present he's not only repeatedly humiliated (for actions he no longer committed, mind you) but he's also a close friend/servant to your family. This lens raises the question: are you responsible for the actions a version of you commits in an alternate reality?




I choose the fifth option; refrain from time travel!

[Aegix Drakan]

So why, when mulling the fantasy of time travel, do people always target Hitler as the one historical tyrant whose premature death would most benefit mankind?

Simple. He's the most obvious.

Russia's starvation campaigns? Not widely reported on.
Chinese emperors going on massacre sprees? Not widely known about.
The Pharaoh of Moses' time? Oh please, he's so far in the past and there's only really one record of his misdeeds.

WW2 and the holocaust, though? That shit was caught on camera and EVERYONE found out about it. It was HUGE. And it still is huge. They said it would never happen again.

Well guess what. It did and still does, although on a slightly smaller scale. Rwanda's genocide was really freaking bad, but do people know about it? Not many do.

So that's why killing hitler is popular. He's the figurehead of the most widely reported systematic massacre in history. If we didn't have TV or photos and this wasn't common knowledge, I bet the holocaust would have vanished from public knowledge like every other major underreported massacre.

TL;DR I said a lot of stuff.

[rock_nog]

I think part of the issue is that we learn about Hitler at such a young age. Thus, our understanding of the situation is much more emotional and less rational than is our perceptions of other genocidal maniacs. By the time we learn about other ruthless dictators, we tend to be more at an age where we can understand their evil intellectually, but maybe not feel the hatred for that person so viscerally. By the time, say, you learn about someone like Pol Pot, you're probably at an age where you might easily recognize the horrible things he did, but you have much better control over your emotions and understand that blind rage over the situation doesn't change anything. That's just my thoughts on the matter.