…get on the floor, everyone do the dinosaur.
Yeah this is the Hollywood version of time travel but in the real world that’s not how things work.
Adolf Hitler didn’t invent Nazism, any more than Donald Trump invented MAGA, they were just two individuals who were the right moment in history to take the opportunity, have they never existed someone else would have done it, possibly later on, but it would still happened.
Nazism for example came out of frustrations with the rest of Europe over the treaty of Versailles. If you want to prevent World War 2 it isn’t enough to kill Hitler, you have to first prevent World War 1, in order to prevent World War 1 you really have to prevent all the stupid little wars that predated it. The number of people you would have to kill in order to prevent Nazis is enormous, probably in the thousands. It’s not one easily removable Nexus point
Though I do wonder what kind of cascading effects there would be to eliminating Mussolini from history.
No, someone else might have done it. There is literally no way to know.
We kind of do know though. Hitler latched onto a movement that already existed he didn’t create it, the world is full of potential leaders they just need a cause. I’m so someone would have been found.
Fascism existed in Europe, but Hitler did invent the Nazi Party.
Regardless, no, we do not know. Why not just say it’s likely or something? You’re undermining your own argument.
No, that dude knows definitively. They went back in time and killed a different Nazi baby that tried to take over the world, and came back just to find out about this Hitler guy that everyone wants dead.
You claim to know how time travel works in the real world?
Don’t believe you until you show me your time machine.
There’s only one solution to time travel paradoxes that resolves all of them, makes some kind of sense, and doesn’t require generating an infinite number of additional versions of the universe - single coherent timeline. The universe as it is now is the sum total result of all time travel that will ever have happened to a point in time before the present. You can’t go back in time and kill Hitler because you didn’t, which means any attempt you might have made to do so clearly failed. Likewise for the grandfather paradox, if you go back in time to kill your grandfather, you already failed in your mission.
Awful views aside, one of the things I gave JKR credit for was doing a decent job of adopting this model of time travel in Prisoner of Azkaban. Then she threw that out the window for Cursed Child because she’s terrible at any kind of world building consistency.
- Cursed child wasn’t written by Rowling.
- She’s already had all the accolades she deserves. Insult her twice for every compliment, the TERF fuck that she is.
I know how history works. I don’t need a time machine to know that a country in economic dire straits will find someone to blame. I just need to look at contemporary US politics. If you’re ever in doubt start a war, preferably somewhere in poverty so you don’t get your asses handed to you, inevitably miscalculate, and get said ass handed to you. Wait 20 years and then do the same thing all over again.
preventing ww1 is like preventing nuclear armament - you’d have to convince all the major powers to renegotiate all of their treaties and alliances and make them trust each other by being more vulnerable.
You couldn’t do that today, let alone 120 years ago.
I doubt individuals are that big a deal in history. If Hitler hadn’t done it probably somebody else would have done it.
Then again, the Norman Conquest of England was really just a succession crisis between three cousins mostly called Harold, but if it fell a slightly different way you don’t get French as the language of the English nobility and possibly no Hundred Years‘ War (though I like to think we’d have made any excuse to fight the French).
The bitter European state rivalry also lead to industrialization. The particular sequence of necessary things like a shortage of expensive labour, wet coal that needed constant pumping, an arms race with other European powers (Whitworth rifles, screw threads, standardization, his micrometer, boring breakthroughs. Uh, I mean boring as in hole boring) and then finally the Newcommen steam engine which was truly revolutionary but was also utter shit.
James Watt’s improvement of the Newcommen engine sparked the steam era. Also with heavy machinery we got the Bessemer process for mass steel making that was good enough. Puddling furnaces or crucible steel were something you did if you needed better control.
All of that shit was to spite the French. And the Spanish. And the Germans. And the Italians probably, maybe even the Greeks? Who knows. It was these interstate rivalries that created a tech arms race and now we are where we are.
go further back, kill alexander the great no HRE, none of their bastard splinter empires, we all end up speaking mongolian cause the Khan faces far kess resistance invading europe
If anything, Hitler cemented that fascist rule was a bad thing since he also carried around the baggage of intense racism.
Seems like fascism was reasonably well received by the world of interwar period (at least in the west). Its primarily because they Nazis did a genocide that we associate fascism with “the big bad” in modern times.
I don’t doubt that the Weimar Republic was headed to fascism, but if they’d had a more rational leader, it would probably have been a slower/steadier boil that didn’t kick off WWII for a few extra years + was more content to rest on its laurels (i.e. content with dividing Poland, taking the Sudetenland, etc) with significant breaks between claims.
I think this all culminates in a more sympathetic looking Germany post WWII (if it even becomes a World War), which then changes the dynamic of modern Neo-Nazi movements (probably less racist, less overlap with confederate sympathizer movements, more political reformation focused).
Idk, its interesting to think about.
Ehhh, this reeks of “benevolent dictator,” sure it sounds legit, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and doesn’t have any historical precedent for a reason. Fascism, by definition, is reliant upon internalized violence against its own population to maintain in groups and out groups and to keep the in groups in control. Sure you can have out groups that aren’t defined by race, but you’re still, very deliberately, going to have large groups who are made to suffer needlessly in order to be a boogeyman and scapegoat whenever anything bad happens.
Society in general was pretty cool with racism.
It was kinda hard to prosecute the holocaust because they couldn’t lean too hard on the fact it had been done to Jewish people because then the general public might actually support it.
Really? That’s not my understanding of the whole ordeal. Dont suppose you have any resources in the pocket on that specific aspect of things?
I’d probably start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism
I suppose the question then becomes how much can you change Nazi ideology before it essentially becomes something different. If an alteration to history can make the Nazi movement not racist and not so genocide focused isn’t it really just a different political movement now?
It’s the temporal ship of Theseus, how much can I change history before it ceases to be my history?
But also, fascism is inherently supremacist, and requires out groups to marginalize in order to thrive. It would have always ended up the way it did, it just might have taken a different route.
That’s what I mean really. Having one group of people be the enemy is what been a racist is all about. I’m not sure how you have one without the other.
Completely agree.
Might be a contentious take, but in my mind, I see “Nazi-ism” as containing two core pieces: antisemitism and fascism. That is to say, its possible to be fascist and not antisemitic (though examples of this seem, at best, thin on the ground).
I really dont know what other major figures of the Nazi party believed. I assume its was largely fascist to the core, but its my understanding that Hitler injected his antisemitism into the party, so I’d be curious to see how history unfolds in history absence (I dont have hope it’d be better, but I doubt it’d be much worse).
At least, we would have have much less losers walking around that look up to Nazi losers.
That was a very very very interesting thought experiment and a very satisfying explanation for questions like “why did God create Hitler,” if you’re religious. Truly we cannot decipher the tapestry of history except for from the other side.
EDIT: while it’s true that someone else would have taken Hitler’s place, it’s clear that the premise of this greentext is actually “what if Nazi Germany never formed”
> no red alert timeline
Fake - invents time machine
Gay - america goes both ways
US stays isolationist
…
US takes Canada
Which one is it?
If WWII never happened, the US never would have built up bases all over the world nor would they have been able to get the head start on pushing American manufacturing standards as ISO standards (due to being physically removed from the conflict in Europe). In that case, the US never sees the boom that it did from those situations, and never would have nearly as much economic, military, or social power as it did from being involved in the war.
How they would manage to take over all of north and south America in that situation is beyond me. Clearly written by someone who believes in American exceptionalism
That also means that Ford never rises to the global powerhouse it is, which means that the Phillips screw head doesn’t proliferate.
Excuse me, I have a time machine to build.
Monkey’s Paw Time Machine: Slotted screws becomes the standard instead.
Just tell the people to stop using them outside of aviation!
Also, scientific papers would be as likely to be published in German or French as in English, and when computers appear, technical terms and keywords would probably not be in American English. This universe’s equivalent of FORTRAN or the UNIX command line may be based on German grammar.
US likely would have had a civil war without WW2
LOL, America’s Hat doesn’t count as a real separate country, silly!
disclaimer
(The sentiment expressed above is in furtherance of a bit and does not reflect the actual opinion of the commenter.)
Literally 1984!
Without the distraction Asia and the USSR slowly grind each other to pieces
You’d be better off either convincing allied nations to provide aid to Germany after WW1, or befriending Hitler and convincing him it has nothing to do with Jewish people.
If successful they’ll be no Israel Palestine conflict.
Convincing the allies to be sympathetic to Germany after WWI would be really hard. While the US had Wilson trying to establish cooperation with the League of Nations, he had to compromise with others who wanted more punitive measures. France had long-standing ire with them over Alsace-Lorraine and wanted them permanently crippled, since their shared border made them a looming threat in the future. They also suffered a lot of damage and needed aid themselves. Britain’s attitude was kind of in between. Plenty of people guessed the treaty could lead to another war in the future, but many were too angry to really care. So we got stuff like the war guilt clause.
A professor in college told me Hitler went from about the normal amount of racist to turbo racist after having some chemicals leak into his brain near the end of WWI. So Hitler’s racism might have been a symptom of actual brain damage. Either way, racism and conspiracies don’t tend to come from a rational position so it is very hard to pull someone out of them with reason.
I doubt Israel would exist without Hitler but there would still likely be some conflict in the region. Britain made the Balfour Declaration before WWI had even ended and the collapse of the Ottomans Empire that controlled the region left it unstable and in British control. They would have supported the jewish minority in the region even without the Holocaust available to help them justify creating a new state.
I mean, there’d also be no Israel. The creation of Mandatory Palestine, which would go on to be Israel, was just the British answer to the “Jewish question” after WW1, if you can just convince the Brits to be chill you can prevent a lot of atrocities
Hello, is this England? Yes, it’s me, a time traveler. Would you be terribly put off if I asked you to be friends with Germany? I know they’ve been quite cantankerous of late, but I promise it’s in the best interest of all parties for you two to get along. Cheerio!
Now, where did I put the phone numbers for France and Belgium…
Genau, wäre vielleicht nicht verkehrt, wenn wir alle Deutsch sprechen würden :)
That would be more likely if the US stayed out too long and let Nazis better entrench themselves across Europe.
See: The Man in the High Castle
The Great Depression was going to come along and end up affecting Germany
