@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 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 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 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 476* or something.

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

edit: i forgot that roman empire fell in 476, not 486.

@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 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 Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip

https://reactormag.com/wikihistory//

@aral

And no one, absolutely no one, ever thinks about going back in time and giving Hitler's father a condom, or just kidnapping baby Hitler and raising him up as your own child to become a decent person.

Maybe the solution to people who kill isn't killing them instead.

@aral It's a badly posed question anyway, because there are non-lethal options to do with baby Hitler.

You could mildly maim Hitler so he would be exempt from WW1 service for example. Or you could abduct Hitler and relocate him elsewhen to be raised as just another abandoned baby.

There may be unexpected consequences though. Hitler did not invent fascism: Without him, it's possible the war may happen, but Germany could be lead by someone with more military competence.

@aral When people speculate about time travel, they always worry that the tiniest action might drastically alter history and lead to catastrophic events, like them never being born in the present.

But people never seem to think that even a tiny action TODAY may change the FUTURE (for the better obviously). They thus leave the problem for someone else to solve and justify their inaction with the argument that they're just one person and that tiny actions won't be able to alter the timeline or have an effect anyway.