DON'T KILL HITLER!

are we too right-wing for time travel? 

 
Despite what a majority of you probably thought when you saw the title - especially those who know me well - this is not a post about the approaching September episode of Doctor Who entitled 'Let's Kill Hitler'. Nor is it an open letter to Quentin Tarantino, telling him... well I won't spoil the end of Inglorious Bastards for those who haven't seen it (although I've clearly already given it away.)  It is, actually, a blog about why you shouldn't kill Hitler....
 
There are a lot of people in this world who have no imagination. Regrettably, most of these creatively inept people have formspring accounts. So quite frequently, the same same, unimaginative, uninteresting questions appear in your inbox. Examples being: 'what's your favourite band?', 'What came first, the chicken or the egg?', 'U R GAY!' But there's one question that keeps coming up, and it's not the question that bothers me, so much have how so many people choose to answer it. The question is 'If you could go back in time, where would you go, and what would you do?'... Now, there's nothing wrong with this question, but 90% of time, I see it being answerd with 'I'd kill Hitler' 

Now, don't take this the wrong way, I hate Hitler too.I'm no Hitler fan. And I, like most, wish that Hitler had never been born .Or had never got it to power. However I do strongly believe that killing Hitler, by means of time travel, would be a bad idea. Now I can see where, at this point you might disagree with me. You might think that,by killing Hitler, you'd save the lives of ten million people murderd in the holocaust, and all the soldiers -on both sides- who lost their lives. Well, you'd be right. But that's not the point. Imagine a young couple in love, living in 1930s Britain. But before long the boy gets called to war, were he's eventually shot to death in occupied France. The girl grieves, for a while, and then moves on and starts a family with someone else. Now if you were to kill Hitler, she would have stayed with boy one, who would have never went to war, and they'd have lived happily ever after. The romantics may fail to see what I'm getting at here, but if she hadn't have met boy 2 , she never would have had that family. In your return to 2011 you'd find that the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the girl, would have never been. Now imagine this a thousand times over. You may return to the present day to find that your friend, wife, husband, boss or fiancée. No longer exist. As well, all the great films, paintings, literature and poems derived from the war, have all also vanished. Culture will be completely different, relationships with other nations will be weaker, no Winston Churchills or George Pattons to be idolised and Anti-Semitism maybe still running strong in the national consensus.   


This is what worries me about time travel , not all the complicated paradoxes about killing your granddad or sleeping with your mother. But man's inability to think past his macho-conservative attitude, and use time travel as a way to go back and kill everyone he disagrees with. It's not just benevolent dictators that are in danger either. What's to stop the Pope from going back in time and killing Mohamed and L. Ron Hubbard and every other prophet, making Christianity the only religion on the planet?


As much as I would love to experience time travel in our lifetime, I'm quite glad it's far beyond our reach. Hopefully, one day, when our race is far far past it's killing people phase, then we can have time travel. When it'll be used only for learning and recreation, and not as a weapon.