Killing babies wouldn't alter the course of history so none
Are people really still advocating for Great Baby of History theory on here?
Only if the response to the baby's death would be significant.
Even accepting that premis, you're trying to prevent events decades before they happen. You won't be able to predict what happens, and you can't change the broad course of history - only hope that with that figure removed, history plays out in a more favorable way.
Take the obvious answer: kill baby Hitler. Ok, great. Do you prevent the conditions for WWI? No, therefore you don't prevent the conditions for fascism in Germany. You don't prevent the existence or rise of the Nazis, you don't prevent WWII, you don't prevent the Holocaust. None of these sprung from him fully formed. None were born purely from his mind or manipulation. What do you achieve? Likely, history very similar to how we understand it, but a different figure takes his place - likely one very similar. I'd argue the same for Lenin. He didn't create the revolution. He wasn't the only theorist. He wasn't uniquely capable of leading the early USSR. He was the one in place, but not the only one who could have been.
Genocidal violence is a normal behavior of19th and 20th century European cultures. You might be able to prevent some specific genocidal acts, but the only the annihilation of late 19th century and early 20th century Europeans, itself an act of genocide, would keep the fuckers from doing genocides.
The Holocaust was simply the European propensity for mass killing intersecting with novel technologies like the computer, the internal combustion engine, and novel developments in chemistry. What the English did with famine and the Belgians did with machetes, the Germans did with gas. Colonial nations had engaged in the targetted killing of vast numbers of people before then and achieved mass murder with great efficiency. The Germans simply brought these processes back to the European continent and combined them with the latest developments in technology.
why would we ever worry about leaders or significant figures at all?
I don't. You ask me we shouldn't be assassinating great men, we should be assassinating great secretaries.
We'd just end up with a slightly different WWII or a slightly different Mongolian expansion. It's called the Conservation of Horror. it's Science. Look it up.
Go back in time and kill Hitler's dad, wasn't he an abusive piece of shit? I don't know there's probably something in that vein you could do.
Obviously the premise is anti-materialist to begin with though.
Only if you assume that the goal is to change history. Some people might just want to kill baby Hitler or baby Reagan, regardless of what happens after.
I'll slightly change the question- who would I interrupt their dad from busting into their mum? Different sperm different person bitch. Then again that raises the question are people inherently going to be different if they're born a different person even if they were raised the same way, with the same environment?
Even more interesting would be to put you in charge of an organization that carefully selects and trains an army of 800 people to go back in time to seduce certain people and manipulate them to never have children with anyone, even accidental one night stands. Who would you select, why, and how would you train their trainers?
