this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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I always hate the "time traveller kills Hitler" stchick.
Killing Reagan does not change the political climate that allowed him to rise to power. In fact killing him could have made things worse for the USA. See 9/11 for a recent example.
That assumes you're only pulling off one time-travel assassination. What if you just keep doing them until the lack of the relevant people shifts the political climate by itself? Like in the "go back and kill Hitler (or just push him onto a different life path at a young age, if you have time travel, you can probably remove someone as a leader without just killing them), sure, maybe a different fascist rises in Germany instead, but if you take out that one too, and the next one, and the next, eventually someone who isn't a fascist will manage to get into office, or if you keep it up long enough, the german fascist movement will run out of viable leaders, and cease to be a major factor in the political climate of the time.
And then you change history so much that you were never born..
To be honest, going back and just taking Hitler or any similarly historically important person out of the equation is likely enough to do that, for most people, given the impact he had on the world, or at the least removes the reason for you to go back in time, so presumably if you're seriously contemplating doing this, whatever time travel mechanism you have going on probably has to be one where you are shielded from the consequences of whatever changes you make anyway.
Your authoritative repels about something that is a complete fiction is a bit worrying.
That's the fun about making shit up, you chose the rules that apply.