@aral Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip

https://reactormag.com/wikihistory//

@aral Hitler is a person but colonialism isn't. I think an equivalent might be would you kill Christopher Columbus (which wouldn't be sufficient to stop colonialism, but would have saved many Taino lives). It's just so easy to kill a baby. Like no one talks about going back to stop antisemitism because that's a much broader thing.

So I think the real issue is that stopping evil never actually looks like killing a baby. It's always a lot more involved. Hitler didn't even start the Nazi party.

@aral I blame the cartographers that stopped putting "here be monsters" on their maps.

@aral Sadly, one of the things I do ponder is to inform of the cure to scurvy. This would directly save millions of lives, but I think a side effect would have been to accelerate colonialism.

@aral

My pet project, given a time machine, would be to stop slavery from ever starting up in the U.S.A.

A) I assume I've got infinite funds, because hey, time machine.
B) I understand naval logistics to a small degree, based on experience.
C) I'd be able to change my plans as slavers true to change theirs.

How do? Mine the slaver lanes with lots of explosives, constantly. Any that got missed, could be taken care of retroactively.

D) Explosions are cool. 😁

A general approach to the question of "Why....?" regarding human behavior is "Because $$$." So, if you make it too expensive to run a slave trade because all your ships heading East become toothpicks, captains sometimes survive telling ghost stories of people appearing out of thin air and causing havoc before the ship became toothpicks. After a while, people aren't going to invest money in making slavery profitable.

Also deal with anyone who decides to switch to indentures.

What this does, going forward, I'm not smart enough to say. Is agriculture in the South profitable enough that landowners would still invest in and be able to produce large amounts of goods at a profit if they have to pay their workers? Dunno.

U.S. slavery gave us the Senate and the civil war. Jim Crow laws gave Hitler ideas. Underlying it for me though is that people shouldn't own people.

Colonialism is a much bigger picture that I don't have enough of an understanding, big picture wise, that I'd feel comfortable taking on by my lonesome.

@aral The intent of the post is easy enough to understand but the logic is pretty flawed. Stopping one person at one point in time vs. changing mass social processes across different countries over centuries. One very simple proposition vs. an impossible proposition.

@aral I think that's due to colonialism being a complex system that benefited a whole lot of people and to stop it, means to to change the course of history in a scale comparable to nuking Rome in 486 or something.

Yeah, and killing hitler wouldn't prevent nazi crap for same reasons

@aral I've thought about the baby hitler thing enough that I'm fairly certain it would only delay specific atrocities a little. Now stopping colonialism... there's a real idea! First, we go back to the beginning of life and when that first creature crawls out of the primordial ooze, we stomp on it. Problem solved!...?

@aral Quite an interesting idea, tho. As it's very unlikely WW2 as we know it would have happened without Hitler (ar I argue that WW2 started when Japan invaded China in 1937), killing him would radically change well... everything. No Cold War, for instance.

Seeing as how colonialism is ancient and independently happened many times, how would you stop it?

@aral in no particular order:
- when and where exactly would you travel back to to stop colonialism?

- national socialism in Germany was an outcome of the Versailles Treaty. Killing baby Adolf would be unlikely to change the course of the history.

- if you want to explore the "what if" time travel genre then popadantsy books are really popular in Russia.

@aral "Get in, loser, we're going back in time to assassinate Kipling."

@aral yes, but killing Columbus would be still different story, than killing Hernando Cortéz and other conquistadors.

Not all colonialism was equal: there were many different strategies, some of it was mostly trade and left the originals cultures almost intact, and perhaps the benefit was mutual (at least some of the trade, eg. spice trading with Southeast Asia, could be considered as such case).

The spread of Christianity was sometimes much worse then trade and sometimes relatively innocent. And not all trade was slave trade. And not all colonialism was white Christian colonialism... I believe Arab expansion is more or less comparable in scale to European expansion. There was no basic difference from Europeans, when Turks conquered Balkans or Moguls conquered India. China was expanding very slowly, but still: the Han ethnic dominance on China mainland was simply result of slow conquest. Not only colonialism, but also assimilation.

The exploration urge is natural, the big question was "what next"? Trade and cultural exchange seems fair, slavery and conquest definitely not.

@aral "Because they easily confront individual evil, but avoid confronting a collective history from which they still benefit." 🥺

@aral When colonialism is turned inward against white people it’s apparently called fascism. 🤔

@aral Careful what you wish for. With no Hitler we might as well have had someone less crazy more competent as nazi leader. Heydrich anyone?

@aral I guess it's not quite as simple to frame as killing one person.

@aral The same reason why neo fascist wouldn't go back in time to kill baby Hitler. 🤷‍♂️

@aral wouldn't that be like trying to stop the wind with your hands? Did colonialism not stem from what were other practices in existence since the dawn of mankind? How was colonialism different from the land conquest enacted by Huns and Mongols? Did the concept of empire not exist way before what we call colonialism? Think Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, Turks, and so on. Who would you exactly kill or lock in a box and throw the key away to prevent colonialism? Maybe the first human?

@aral Wheneven I read about this topic, I start thinking about a character called 'SilverFox316' (search for 'Wiki Histoy' by Desmond Warzel).

@aral This works only for villains targeting "whites".

@aral nobody wants to go back to a time before there were humans 🤣

@aral I've been saying for a long time that I want my time machine built in a nuclear submarine for Columbus related reasons

@aral the flip side of ‘great man’ theory is much easier to process than Susan Sontag’s

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”

@aral 🤔 je vais y réfléchir.