Posted on 11/10/2015 7:34:54 PM PST by jocon307
In an interview this week, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush weighed in on one of the zeitgeist's silliest questions: If you could go back in time, would you kill a baby Adolf Hitler?
"Hell yeah, I would!" Bush told the Huffington Post when queried on the subject in New Hampshire. "You gotta step up, man."
-snip-
[The question raises] ethical dilemmas - could you murder an infant on the assumption it would save millions of lives? - and even prompt[s] overly elaborate discussions on the theoretical mechanics of time travel. It's not clear how much of these considerations Bush chewed over before making his rather emphatic declaration.
"It could have a dangerous effect on everything else, but I'd do it - I mean, Hitler," he acknowledged in his conversation with the Huffington Post.
-snip-
Perhaps this isn't as bizarre as it sounds. There are few alternative histories more pondered than those that have something to do with Hitler.
The shadow of the Nazi dictator looms over a rich field of speculative history. Amateurs and professionals have already asked (and attempted to answer) a spate of tough questions: What if Hitler had been accepted to art school in Vienna? What if he and his inner sanctum had escaped to Latin America in 1945? What if Hitler's armies had succeeded in capturing Moscow and breaking the Soviet Union?
The reverse is also the subject of fevered inquiry: What if there had been no Hitler?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I don't think I could kill baby Hitler, but I would try my utmost to give him a life where he could be a much, much better person that he became.
Would that be possible?
Instead of killing baby Hitler, you could tattoo “I am a Jew” all over his body.
I think there are better choices...
Louis CK has a great routine where he says he wouldn’t go back in time and kill Hitler.
He’d RAPE him.
Sorta mess up his psyche to where he wouldn’t want to do anything but take showers.
This entire debate is absurd. Hasn’t anyone watched time-travel movies? You can’t alter the past. It’s the most important rule of time-travel because of paradoxes.
As a practical matter, I don’t think Einstein’s theories allow for changing the past.
Baby Hitler did nothing wrong.
There’s been a little too much hair-splitting on this topic. There is no “assumption” that he would kill millions of people—he did. The question is, if you had one chance to kill Hitler while he was a baby, would you? If not, 50 million people die (who are mostly already dead by now anyway, but that’s just more hair-splitting).
If it were not Hitler, it would have been someone just as bad.
Those ideas were nothing new.
Perhaps we would have ended up fighting Stalin outright. That would have been as bad if not worse.
Buy him some art classes and bribe the Vienna School to admit him....
“Baby Hitler did nothing wrong.”
Yes, I keep coming back to that. If it’s prophylactic, well I guess we all just better be killed RIGHT NOW.
I can think of several better choices.
Not to mention with out Hitler the USA would not be as great as we became as a nation. A time before the great backslide of our own doing started.
“Perhaps we would have ended up fighting Stalin outright. That would have been as bad if not worse.”
Yes, that scenario is raised in the piece.
It’s somewhat interesting to think about - the “butterfly” effect, the “hitler” effect. They don’t seem to be entirely equivalent, do they?
I think what you could do is kidnap him and raise him differently maybe in the US, but then again look what happened with baby Hillary. I think evil is inherent, it wouldn’t matter how you raise someone like that who is intrinsically viciously horribly evil. I think Hitlers father was very abusive but look at people like Jeffrey Dahmer and Hillary, they both raised in nice families but both grew up to be monsters.
The number is over 1.6 billion babies have been put to death. That is 42 million babies over 40 years.
So, the same rag that has ignored the Planned Parenthood exposure as chop shops now want to make us ruminate about a Hitler what-if?
If it hadn’t been Hitler, someone else would’ve assumed power. As I see it, Germany was ripe for dictatorship and looking for a savior.
Really I despise Hillary, she is nothing but a crook, but to compare her to Dahmer and Hitler is a bit of a stretch.
I don’t know about their families, but my impression is they might not have had the best families, but none of these 3 had the worst.
And they get one who is more efficient than AH, and win the war.
Exactly.
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