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.
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.
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Only if the response to the baby's death would be significant.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't. You ask me we shouldn't be assassinating great men, we should be assassinating great secretaries.
No one is assassinating Stalin on my watch.
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.
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Okay okay you've got me dead to rights I made it up.
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