It feels kinda wrong how quickly some people say they wouldn't kill hitler if they were sent back in time and given the opportunity.
I'm using that scenario because it seems like a common example, but I'm curious about how materialist theory would approach this.
Barring the sci-fi theories around time travel and whether a new timeline is created, where I believe it's fair game to change the past (since it's a new timeline) would it be morally right to improve the world if flung into a version of the past?
My thought is that it would be a moral obligation to help with things and not just be a witness to atrocity.
Edit: I think my question was more - Is it wrong to do nothing if flung into the past when you know what is likely to happen, or is it more wrong to try to prevent or change it?
I ask because it's almost a given in media and general discussion that you don't mess with things on the chance you make things worse by interfering. That argument feels flawed and lib- brained and I don't think I would be okay with a bad thing happening in front of me just because that's how it happened in my history book. Like the idea of standing by and doing nothing in the face of suffering feels wrong especially with something as nebulous as 'affecting the timeline'
If you're gonna fight fascism in the past, you might as well start doing it here in the present.
First thing I'm doing is teaching doctors and surgeons to sterilize their fucking hands and tools, I'll figure out who to kill after that
Give guns to native people and tell them to shoot down any caravels.
Join the Spartacists and do everything I can to ensure that the German Revolution goes as Marx hoped it would. If I can bring something from the future to convince Luxemburg and Liebknecht that 1919 is all or nothing, then perhaps we can go into the German Revolution with a more coherent plan and unified KPD leadership. Get the general strikers to storm government buildings and capture military stockpiles, fortify Spandau and overthrow the provisional government.
just for laughs tell the IRA to move the bomb a little bit to the side
A single person isn't going to change anything because Great Man is a fuck. You would need to send back dozens, if not hundreds, of leftists to change anything drastically (such as preventing WWII or arming Native Americans with totally-not-wunderwaffen).
I think the important thing to do would be recover and record things that were lost (like the other epics written by Homer or samples of the birth control plant the Romans drove to extinction), followed by socialism as science. Science is repeatable and predictable. The usefulness of time travel is being able to verify what was previously unverifiable.
Depends on how far back you go, doesn't it?
If I'm back in like, 1850, I have a bunch of pop-sci understanding of technology I could at least get electrification off the ground if I had a team to help me work out the kinks in my batteries and generators. Maybe figure out metal machining so when John Brown starts his slave rebellion he can have semi-automatic rifles and machine guns.
If it's 1950, the hell could I even do? Make some well placed investments so I can be a big bourgeois class traitor? I guess?
Not sure how I'd convince them of anything. I'd have to, like, predict the dates of events before they happened to pull that off I think. I don't know 20th century history well enough to do that. I guess the Moon landing? I could predict the name of the vessel, the month, and the year. That's pretty good, but, probably not enough to prove something as ridiculous as time travel.
Kennedy is killed... sometime before that. Don't remember the date.
I have no idea how vacuum tube computers work either, and even less of a clue how semiconductors work, so... lol?
"It was... somewhere in Texas? Was it Dallas? Fuck I hope it was Dallas. Anyway, I think George Bush did it, but they set up Lee Harvey Oswald to take the fall for him. Something about a magic bullet? Pretty stupid, obviously the whole thing was a set up-"
Well you'll have a lot more luck convincing them you're a time traveler than I could! Good luck~
If you bring a mobile phone with you you'd blow their minds enough for them to believe you
I would go back in time to 2011, arm the primitive Occupy Wall Street protesters with modern weaponry, and radicalize them with copies of the Blowback "pod cast" burned to Sony MiniDisc™️
This would all be misdirection, as I would ultimately sacrifice myself to take a bullet to save Harambe, thus restoring all of the timelines and preventing this doomed world in which we currently live. Save the ape, save the future.
Shouldn't you just become Marx yourself but way earlier?
Like sure, you could give guns to some historically oppressed group but dialectically I think it makes sense that they'd probably just be the ones to usher in capitalism and colonialism instead of the Europeans
Shouldn't you just become Marx yourself but way earlier?
Can't really make analysis of material conditions that don't yet exist. If you mean talking exclusively about class struggle and dialectical materialism sure, but you won't quite be able to refute Adam Smith without him existing yet, and you can't describe capitalism when it's still not the dominant form of production
I'd bring back all scientific knowledge we know today to back then + a description of every historical moment so that every AES state would not collapse in Europe.
Kill Prescott Bush. and his father Samuel Bush.
He armed the Nazis and his entire family line became a shit stain on humanity.
I would do kind of a reverse Bill and Ted, where instead of collecting historical figures and bring them to the present, I would take my assembled crew farther into the past. I'm thinking I would pick up people like Marx, Lenin, Mao, you know, the fun crew, and bring them farther back to a time where we (I say we but honestly I would be about as much use as Bill or Ted with them) could avert the capitalist hellscape that exists today. As for when we would land I'm not quite sure, but I'm thinking if we could mobilize a people's collective sometime during the 1000-1400 range we could prevent most of the tragedies that combining the Industrial Revolution with capitalism caused, and be in a much better position to either solve or even avoid the ecological and climatological (if that's a real word) issues that face the modern world.
I still think the timeline would be less cursed if someone went back in time to kill Christopher Columbus. And it's not a "material conditions make historical events inevitable" situation. He was widely seen as a crank and him dying means people will shrug their shoulders and go, "told you he was a fucking crank." Nobody would've sailed for the Americas had he failed to come back. There's also a decent chance Europe would economically collapse with capitalism being developed in India or China instead. If nothing else, killing Columbus and waiting for Europe to economically self-destruct mean two continents, three if we're counting Australia, could've dodged genocide. I don't think it's a given that a hypothetical capitalist India/China would do to the Indigenous what Europeans did. It's a dice roll worth rolling.
you mean solar powered factories
