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Old 11-10-2017, 05:53 PM   #11
Dalillama
 
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Default Re: Changing History

Surely it would be easier to buy Gavrilo Princip a drink in a different cafe.
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Old 11-10-2017, 06:25 PM   #12
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Default Re: Changing History

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Surely it would be easier to buy Gavrilo Princip a drink in a different cafe.
I think Princip was very much just the catalyst of something that would have happened with or without him. Saving the Archduke only delays the crisis, and probably not by much.

The same might be also said about Hitler, but to a much lesser degree, I believe. If you want to stop a major event in history, you probably can't just remove the man who unleashed it, as the conditions that put him in place to do so still exist. Better to let the movement start, then discredit it (thus the public pooping accident).
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Old 11-10-2017, 06:39 PM   #13
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Default Re: Changing History

Well, the most effective way to prevent WWII/the Holocaust specifically would be to change the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to be less punitive on Germany, but it would be very difficult for a time/dimension traveller to get enough influence at the Paris talks to achieve that.
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Old 11-10-2017, 07:13 PM   #14
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WW 2 was probably inevitable, but the genocidal policies of the Nazis were not. It was a contest between the Nazis and the Socialists, and the Nazis won because of Hitler. Without Hitler, WW 2 might have well been a Socialist Germany and its socialist allies in the former fascist states of Europe that it liberated versus an Anglo-French Fascist Alliance, with Germany developing the atomic bomb because it provided a refuge to the Russian Jews victimized by the USSR during Stalin's purges during the middle 1930s and the Polish Jews fleeing the conquest of Poland by the USSR during the late 1930s. Removing Hitler changes history because he was the lever that changed Germany fascist (the fulcrum was the Great Depression).
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Old 11-10-2017, 07:17 PM   #15
David Johnston2
 
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WW 2 was probably inevitable,
It really wasn't. All that it would have required is for Hitler, or Hitler's substitute to have had the same ability that Stalin had to know when to stop pushing his luck.
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Old 11-10-2017, 07:49 PM   #16
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WW 2 was probably inevitable, but the genocidal policies of the Nazis were not. It was a contest between the Nazis and the Socialists, and the Nazis won because of Hitler. Without Hitler, WW 2 might have well been a Socialist Germany and its socialist allies in the former fascist states of Europe that it liberated versus an Anglo-French Fascist Alliance, with Germany developing the atomic bomb because it provided a refuge to the Russian Jews victimized by the USSR during Stalin's purges during the middle 1930s and the Polish Jews fleeing the conquest of Poland by the USSR during the late 1930s. Removing Hitler changes history because he was the lever that changed Germany fascist (the fulcrum was the Great Depression).
It's not clear that a socialist Germany would have offered a haven to the Jews. The Soviet Union was notoriously anti-Semitic, and German socialism might have been just as much so. One of Karl Marx's early essays, for example, was anti-Semitic is the crudest terms.
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Old 11-11-2017, 01:32 PM   #17
ericthered
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Default Re: Changing History

My default mission of this sort when I play this game with a group is stopping World War 1. Possibly because it starts easy (buy a young man a drink in a different cafe) but its so hard to achieve in the grand scheme of things.

A lot of what I would do depends on how much personal risk I have to go through to achieve it. It'd be really nice to stop the horrors of the russian civil war, but it would be fantastically dangerous to try.

A lot of me would be more interested in researching what actually happened in politically defining (and afterwords propagandized to death) moments of history.

I'd also be interested in ending some of the particularly bloody wars faster. Give the winning side an edge (usually technological) so it can be gotten over with more quickly.
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Old 11-11-2017, 02:57 PM   #18
mr beer
 
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I think WWI would be much harder to stop than WWII.

Pre-WWI every country in Europe was tooled up and locked into cascading alliances. Pre-WWII just about everyone was terrified about a repeat of WWI except Hitler, who unfortunately had the finest army in the world at his disposal.
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Old 11-11-2017, 03:24 PM   #19
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I do not know. With the twin specters of fascism and socialism, I feel that a war between Western democracy and one of the two was inevitable (as was a conflict between fascism and socialism). Even if the Nazis had decided not to go to war, the fact that they were fascists would have eventually led them to war with the USSR, probably before 1945. A WW2 starting in 1945 might have seen an allied fascist Europe fighting the USSR, with the USA wondering which side was the lesser of two evils.
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Old 11-11-2017, 04:07 PM   #20
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Differing ideologies didn't prevent the Nazis and the USSR getting on famously, at least up until Operation Barbarossa. I believe that Hitler's obsession with lebensraum was his primary motivation to invade the USSR. Without someone with his peculiar mentality in charge, I don't see the inevitability of war, especially given Stalin was pathologically opposed to tangling with the Wehrmacht.
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