Quizzes & Puzzles1 min ago
Changing History
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Something someone on television said that got me thinking. If you could change one historical event, what would it be ?
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You can't second-guess history, but you can have a lot of fun trying!
Thing about changing history by killing one person is that things are always bigger than one person. Then you can tie yourself in knots trying to chase down who really is responsible for all the evil, and run further and further back in time to the obscure...
Hitler is a good case in point. Sure, he is responsible for a lot, but maybe he didn't have to be? If everyone else weren't so afraid of Communism maybe more direct action wouldn't have been taken. So perhaps we should target Karl Marx instead, or Lenin for actually applying it in Russia, or Stalin for taking things too far... or, on the other side, Chamberlain for pursing Appeasement so vigorously, and anyone else who supported him while ignoring Churchill and others -- but then also maybe we should look at sorting out the US Government, who were so keen on isolationism but never understood that it could not work (because you cannot isolate yourself from the rest of the world as a country).
Further back, perhaps we should attack those who drew up the Treaty of Versailles, either for making it too harsh, or not harsh enough, or later not enforcing it vigorously enough. And so on and so forth, until it gets silly. It probably got silly right at the start of this paragraph, in fact.
Despite all this, if I ever could travel back in history I'd still push Hitler closer to the bunker explosion that could have killed him. It's hard to imagine how things could have been any worse than they actually were. But, in my opinion, no one person can ever truly make all that much difference to history. A lot of people are involved, in one way or another, in everything that happens, and removing one person out of that many is unlikely to change the picture all that much except in very rare circumstances -- and even then it's impossible to know that they made such a big difference.
It's still a fun exercise, though. A related one that I've pondered is in the more narrow field of maths and science: how far do you have to go back before certain modern levels of knowledge become revolutionary?
Thing about changing history by killing one person is that things are always bigger than one person. Then you can tie yourself in knots trying to chase down who really is responsible for all the evil, and run further and further back in time to the obscure...
Hitler is a good case in point. Sure, he is responsible for a lot, but maybe he didn't have to be? If everyone else weren't so afraid of Communism maybe more direct action wouldn't have been taken. So perhaps we should target Karl Marx instead, or Lenin for actually applying it in Russia, or Stalin for taking things too far... or, on the other side, Chamberlain for pursing Appeasement so vigorously, and anyone else who supported him while ignoring Churchill and others -- but then also maybe we should look at sorting out the US Government, who were so keen on isolationism but never understood that it could not work (because you cannot isolate yourself from the rest of the world as a country).
Further back, perhaps we should attack those who drew up the Treaty of Versailles, either for making it too harsh, or not harsh enough, or later not enforcing it vigorously enough. And so on and so forth, until it gets silly. It probably got silly right at the start of this paragraph, in fact.
Despite all this, if I ever could travel back in history I'd still push Hitler closer to the bunker explosion that could have killed him. It's hard to imagine how things could have been any worse than they actually were. But, in my opinion, no one person can ever truly make all that much difference to history. A lot of people are involved, in one way or another, in everything that happens, and removing one person out of that many is unlikely to change the picture all that much except in very rare circumstances -- and even then it's impossible to know that they made such a big difference.
It's still a fun exercise, though. A related one that I've pondered is in the more narrow field of maths and science: how far do you have to go back before certain modern levels of knowledge become revolutionary?
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