[jocon307]

Alt history is not really my thing, but I thought this was an interesting and not badly written piece. Maybe Freepers would like to chime in.

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?

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

Instead of killing baby Hitler, you could tattoo “I am a Jew” all over his body.

[jsanders2001]

I think there are better choices...

[SJSAMPLE]

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.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

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.

[Honcho Bongs]

Baby Hitler did nothing wrong.

[Telepathic Intruder]

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).

[Vermont Lt]

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.

[2banana]

Buy him some art classes and bribe the Vienna School to admit him....

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

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.

[Slyfox]

I am not concerned about the killing of Hitler. I am concerned about all the abortions that have taken place since country after country has legalized abortion.

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?

[Politicalkiddo]

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.

[Billthedrill]

This is one of those ceteris paribus games wherein a single variable is isolated and the consequences of a change in it measured by only the effect it has directly on the world around. The real world is nothing like that. There was, after all, a Nazi party before Hitler came to it, a laundry list of oppressions visited on a defeated Germany whether just or otherwise, a resulting hyperinflation, a succeeding Great Depression; all of these were instrumental in the waning of the Social Democrats and the rise of the radicals of the internationalist Communist and the nationalist Nazi parties after 1930. These were not, in fact, even baseline conditions of their own; each of them had its own set of variables.

How much any individual human being has on any of this is a central topic of debate between the Great Man theory of history's adherents and those concentrating more on broad social currents and trends. Neither of these has to be true exclusively. Do events make the man or do men make events? The answer in my opinion is Yes, both.

Clearly an infant who is yet to do any harm is not subject to preemptive punishment in most Western conceptions of justice, those being centered around a reaction to some sort of trespass, not to some sort of being. (Ironically, the Nazis felt otherwise with regard to the Jews: these were to be punished for group transgression, not any individual one. Most systems of collectivism, including Communism, suffer from this ethical defect.) And so unless one is fairly committed to a philosophical system of hard fatalism, one must withhold judgment and punishment at least until a crime is committed.

In fact, it would take the mind of God to grasp all of these variables and add free will to the mix. Slaying baby Hitler is in that sense not merely unjust, but blasphemous. Just my $0.02.

[MNDude]

I remember a twilight zone where a woman travel back through time to kill baby Hitler and after killing him his parents adopted a new baby who actually was the real Hitler.

[Thorliveshere]

I would have encouraged Hitler to keep painting, to push him in the artistic direction he wanted to go, then he wouldn’t have been a bitter, resentful, hateful being... maybe...

[LonePalm]

As evil as Adolph Hitler was, I would much prefer a world that never saw Mohamed.

Islam is arguably the single worst thing in human history.

"Ceterum censeo 0bama esse delendam."

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[dfwgator]

The “Fuhrer” would have been the Communist, Ernst Thalmann.

[JoeDonnellymakesmepuke]

As long as we're killing babies, I'm taking out baby Muhammad. Or better yet, let's just kill baby Ishmael.

[20yearvet]

My reply, If you have a real time machine let’s go and find out. If not don’t ask stupid questions.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

“Would that be possible? “

I believe it would be, and I admire your comment that you couldn’t do it. I second that. A child is a child, and no child is beyond salvage.

Also, the Hitler’s of the world could never accomplish evil on the scale that some have, unless they had willing accomplices. I’m not indicted Germany or German people by saying that, but am instead saying that tragically it appears that throughout the world there seem to be those who become pawns of evil. Maybe they just don’t see it.

[DiogenesLamp]

[The question raises] ethical dilemmas - could you murder an infant on the assumption it would save millions of lives?

It raises no ethical dilemma at all. The base presumption is that you know what he did, and that you can travel back in time. Of course killing him is the only possible thing to do.

To make it into an ethical dilemma, you have to postulate that you can change the course of history without Killing or seriously damaging him. The suggestion that there is any other possibility, aside from killing him, has not been advanced.

Accepting the premise and the stark choices offered, there is no other reasonable course of action than killing baby Hitler.

This is supposed to be an actual photograph of him as a baby.