Killing Hitler right now would be a mistake. No nuclear arms race means no nuclear power, no cold war (which was better than a hot war), and far less advancements (kiss computers bye bye!).
I feel like no Hitler would potentially change so many things that it’d be hard to make a concrete prediction on what the world would look like today.
Honestly I think that what happened during WW2 set us up for about 80 years of relative peace and social progress. If you were lucky enough to live in a wealthy country at least.
Now that the people who learned those lessons are gone, we are back to having to relearn them. It’s back to authoritarianism, fighting over borders and going after marginalized groups.
I think if it wasn’t him, it likely would have been someone else. It’s not a failure of the person but a failure of our societal values that allows something like that to happen at a major scale.
The only thing that would be sure is that no one born in this timeline after he was killed in the altered timeline would exist.
Real solution is sending a nuke through time to kill Hitler at the start of the war.
no computer, no reddit, no tiktok, no excel, no powerpoint, no motivational linkedin accounts ans the best part for me, living a lot less
Cell phones will never come about because I went back in time and killed a mass murder.
-written from your cellphone
The idea that we need war for progress is dumb.
It is, but that particular war certainly accelerated the advancement of computers and nuclear energy. Turing and his team were so motivated because what they did helped save lives. I’m a software engineer and what I do… helps mostly small and medium sized manufacturing companies be more efficient. Yeah I’m not gonna be pulling 20 hour days here.
Oppenheimer was Jewish. Hitler was exterminating Jews. I think you can see why he and many of the other people with Jewish backgrounds were so eager to work on the Manhattan project.
And Newton and Einstein had none of these motivations. Galileo neither.
You compare with your situation, but it has nothing to do with befote. Not because we’re not at war, but because we live in a capitalist distopia. Because capitalism won the war.
All the discoveries you’re talking about could be motivated by the thirst of knowledge or making the world a better place. But the only single motivation we have left today is making money for our overlords, that is the key change.
It is not that war fuels discoveries, it is that greed does not, and greed is the only allowed motivation in our society. The only one that will receive money anyway.
Take Internet as an example : it was funded because of war and fear, but those who made it only had hope and naivity to make it, which is why it is so insecure, and why so much is done since 20 years to lock and dominate it.
All the discoveries you’re talking about could be motivated by the thirst of knowledge or making the world a better place. But the only single motivation we have left today is making money for our overlords, that is the key change.
Huh? Plenty of people still doing R&D for free (open source software folks for one; scientists without grants are also nearly working for free sometimes). Capitalism hasn’t killed innovation, only biased it towards things that generate money, but there’s still plenty of innovation just because they have a thirst for knowledge.
But say you’re already working on something you find interesting. Now you’re told that if you keep going at it, you could save millions of lives. Are you not going to put in 10x effort? I know I would. I reckon most people would.
You act like I said that war is the only motivation for research besides capitalism. I did not. I said it accelerates scientific advancement. The direness of the situation is what fuels people to go beyond their usual limits. A lot of people just work better under pressure. You can do things that are not in any way healthy for you long term if you’re under enough pressure.
I’m pretty sure there’s no evidence of war accelerating research beyond the effect of funding research more.
War itself doesn’t, pressure and motivation does. War causes pressure and motivation. Humans thrive under pressure. It puts you in hyperfocus mode, which makes you way faster at getting anything done.
No. Humans don’t thrive under pressure. This is merely a totalitarian idea.
You’re being downvoted, yet evidence is outer clear that a great many technology advancements have directly derived from conflict pressures. We’d get the same effect if it weren’t for fucking small-government, low tax shit-for-brains, but we don’t. When vast, collective resources are poured into a field, it generates a lot of waste but also a lot of progress. Progress isn’t impossible without war, but historically we see far more advancement during times of war than during times of peace.
If we ever cure cancer, it’ll be because we had a war and, during the development of some weapon, the huge concentration of resources resulted in discoveries that someone noticed - as a side effect - happened to cure cancer. It’ll never happen without a war because there’s no private sector motivation to cure cancer: there’s too much money and industry invested in treating cancer.
You’re essentially right.
Ahh, just like the old Reddit. Thanks!
We woul get another authotarian even if Hitler wasn’t around
This is the premise for the Red Alert series in Command and Conquer - Stalin becomes the aggressor when Hitler was wiped
I feel that it’s a bit of a false dichotomy to say that if WW2 didn’t happen then those things also wouldn’t happen. There’s nothing inherent about WW2 that had to happen for those advancements - they may have just been achieved faster due to the war.
Killing Hitler doesn’t even necessarily prevent WWII or the Holocaust. Changed no doubt but out right prevented is crazy
Here’s a fact that most people don’t want to admit. The most hitler had to do with the holocaust was signing the papers that authorized it.
The concentration camps were never his idea. He didn’t plan them. He didn’t bother with them. He never even visited one. He DID sign the paperwork authorizing the funding of them, but that’s as far as his involvement went. He still hated the jews, and felt no sympathy for their deaths. He just spent more time poorly planning war efforts, and doing drugs that today would be known as heroin and meth.
So I’m not defending him in any way. I’m just saying any thoughts of who was behind the holocaust should really be attributed to Heimlich Himmler (probably spelling his name wrong). He’s the one who designed the holocaust. He was hitlers number two guy, and spent most of his days at concentration camps, designing new methods of “efficiency”.
There were a LOT of evil nazis. Not just hitler. And the main takeaway that I want people to learn from this is that they were NOT monsters. Because once you seperate them from being human, you think of things in terms that it couldn’t be repeated. That “people” are not capable of what they did. Don’t seperate it by time period, or race, or religion, or sny other thing you can think of to block them off as not being human. They WERE people. They were evil people, but still people. Their thought process could be carried out today. It can happen again. And by thinking of them as monsters, you distance yourself from others who might have the same ideas in their mind. Wave the left hand to distract you from the autrocities of the right hand. All while reassuring you that you’re not as bsd as the nazis. They were monsters! Meanwhile, you’re mindlessly following a dictators orders to storm a home of a defenseless woman and infant baby. Then you and your soldier crew take turns sexually raping the 7 week old baby until it died, and then you continued.
Is that too graphic? Good. It shows YOU have empathy. If you read that, and got angry, or offended, good. That’s a natural reaction, because that happened. That’s what russian soldiers in 2022 did to a Ukrainain woman and her baby. The russian government gave them medals. And people in russian social media at the time said “The soldiers were just following orders”.
So if you ever need proof that the nazi mindset can happen in any government, in any time period, in any country, just think of what they were doing. Just following orders. Then look up the Nuremberg Trials, and try to spot the similarities in their defense.
The only thing that needs to happen for evil to continue, is for good men to say nothing.
Hitler still was crucial for the nazis to take power. His political wits was much higher than any other nazi. He did turn the nazi party from an irrelevant extremist group to a force that could seize power. He didn’t do it alone. But pretending that nothing would change without him is like pretending Caesar or Napoléon weren’t mandatory to their deeds.
Hitler definitely couldn’t do what he did alone. But he was definitely a pivotal factor to make History what it was.
I think you may be thinking about economics and progress at that time like you would at this time. Remember that at that time most innovations came from government funding.
During WW2 there was plenty of money spend on funding innovation and research. If a lab has the money to hire more researchers and help then they get to the invention faster. I don’t disagree that some advancements would have happened, I just think we would be where we are now. We would be about 10 years back. The innovation was due to the funding. This pushed us farther than we would have at that time because there was a lot of incentive for more/better ways to win the war. In peace time there is less reason to fund as much research.
Private company’s now have the money for R&D and can make the innovations because they are driven by profit. (lets push that discussion off, we need less ass hat people in charge) Back then they did not.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/scientific-and-technological-advances-world-war-ii
I find it super interesting that the development of the microwave is a direct result of radar technology. I am not comparing it to the computer or cell phone but its is a common household item that is a direct result from wartime developments.
Also ENIAC was the first general purposes computer that could do thousands of calculations in a second. This was only developed due to a desire to get an edge in the war. It didn’t get completed as soon as hoped so it was used for other reasons but it was still a huge advancement due to the war. It eventually was used for calculations on feasibility of an H-bomb and then later used to calculate artillery firing tables.
Counter argument : ww2 was completely irrelevant to all post war progresses, war against communism, which was a mortal threat to capitalism, was the key factor.
During the cold war, capitalism had to provide comfort and progress to people, or people would have turn communist. And so it did. Until it basically won in the 70s.
The idea that society needs war or competition incentive to do anything is the dumbest liberal mind fuck of today. It’s completely wrong, but it goes with the ideology that dominates.
You could reinvent computers while you are there
sets machine to Queens, New York, June 14, 1946
“Oh…no reason.”
Also give me the winning lottery numbers please 😉
1-2-3-4-5.
Hey! That’s the combo to my luggage!
If you send your password, Lemmy will automatically replace it with stars for you!
Oh wow, let me try. My password is:
Hunter2
What does that look like to you?!
We were almost done with the Harambe timeline. But some dumbasses in NY had to kidnap and kill an internet famous squirrel named P’Nut…Now we’re an openly fascist country.
You shouldn’t have messed with the squirrels Morty!
Screw Harambe, I want to see the alternate timeline where Hannibal and Carthage won.
dicks out
/thread
But if we save Harambe, no one would have died for us
We didn’t deserve such
Could you also fix the 2000 election so the winner would have won?
Do you know how many election there were in the year 2000? Gotta be more precise than that
If somebody on the internet writes in English and thinks their country is implied without any sort of context, it’s 9 times out of 10 somebody from the USA.
Ironically I’m Canadian but yes I meant the USA.
The winner was the guy who could successfully exert power over the judiciary, while the loser was the guy without a committed vanguard ready to storm an election counting office to guarantee victory.
Strange use of “win” to describe a situation where everyone loses.
Yes; it would be great to have fixed this
