Posted on 09/22/2010 8:32:49 PM PDT by Abin Sur
If you could eliminate one person from history, who would it be? One caveat: it can't be Muhammad, for one simple reason: almost everyone is going to pick him! This would get rather monotonous, so let's just assume that 90% (at least) of the responses would pick Muhammad first. If you still pick him...BZZT I'm sorry, you've lost, thank you for playing and here's a copy of our home game.
And let's not have anyone picking Muhammad's father or grandfather just to get at him, either. That's cheating.
Ok, now that that's out of the way, who do you pick? Here's the rules: You can go back in history and prevent any one person from being born. You don't have to kill anyone. For instance, if you want to stop Hitler from being born, you can go up to Klara Pölzl (Adolph's mother) in 1880 and give her 10,000 marks to emigrate to the USA. She never marries Alois, so presto...no Adolph. This will have the incidental effect of preventing his brothers from being born as well, of course.
After you prevent your target from being conceived, you snap back to 2010 and enjoy living in a world made better by your actions. Bear in mind, though, that removing someone from history may not have that great an effect. If you prevent Darwin from existing, someone is still going to come up with the theory of evolution. It may be called by another name, and it may be delayed by a decade or two, but things tend to get invented when it's time to invent them.
I would note that some individuals would be exceptions. If you took out Isaac Newton (heaven know why, but it's your choice), modern science as we know it would be delayed by half a century, at least.
Anyway, that's the setup. Who do you pick, and what do you think would be the result of this person not existing?
Albin Sur
Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
How true. He did invent those also.
Nimrod, and all those nimrods since...
Ishmael
How about Rachel Carson?
The estimate is 100 million lives saved. That should do more good than the elimination of any combination of the following: Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
I wouldn’t say eliminated....but I would have reallly,really liked it if Joyce Lin’s mom had gone out of town for about a year when I was 16.
Other than that, I just take life as it comes.
I nominate Ceasar. He turned the Roman Republic into a dictatorship. The Republic might even have lasted long enough to crush , you guessed it, Mohammad!
I think Castro would be on my list.
Ishtar to Ishmael to Mohammed to islam. Very simple.
The Anti-Christ.
So many good choices here. Marx, Lenin, Saul Alinsky, all the leftist scum in the world, etc.
See post 17 for a clue.
I'd have so much more free time.
Without his leadership skills, the Bolsheviks most likely would not have been able to defeat the White Russians during the Russian Civil War. Stalin and his ilk were too minor league at the time to be effective leaders in the Reds' struggle against the Whites. It wasn't until the Germans sent Lenin to Russia that the Bolshevik Revolution really began to take off.
Without the Soviet Union, would communism have spread to China and Southeast Asia? Would Hitler have dared to move against Poland if Russia was a staunch ally of Britain and France?
Ishmael
Removing Hitler from history might not have the effect your thinking of. Someone worse (yes, worse!) could take his place, and not be dumb enough to get into a land war in Asia.
Saul Alinsky
In American history it would be Joe Kennedy, for all of us I would say Hitler.
Although we won the war against him, all of Western Civilization and it’s will to resist was destroyed in his name.
All that Islamic colonization that is replacing Western Civ? Without Hitler the west would never have written our laws to create it, and we would have had the will to stop it if tried, instead we wrote and maintain the immigration laws ourselves, knowing that our self destruction is the end result.
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