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I don't know. Based on the info we have today? Sure. Based on what was knowable then? I really don't know. I could imagine myself in 1930s Germany going "Pfft, even if Hitler becomes Chancellor he'll still have to govern in coalition. There's no way the other parties will sign off on handing full unfettered power to him".
I’m an optimist myself, but he had written a book where he announced the war and the massacres to come, he had tried to putsch, his goons were murdering politicians, etc. It was hard to miss that he was literally hitler. A rule where we kill all politicians who do all that would have an acceptably low false positive rate imo.
And later, after 1933, surely assassination is permissible and recommended in all cases. A free man has the right to murder even a benign dictator. Without the vote, it’s really the only way left to express disappointment and provide valuable feedback.
What about Tito, if you thought there was good reasons to believe that the result would be civil war and genocide? (As ultimately there was within about 12 years of his death.) Is the right to "feedback" enough to justify instigating bloody chaos?
People are very quick with historical counterfactuals, I think. The Red Alert series was smarter. We know what happened with Hitler as Germany's leader in the 1930s; we don't know what would happen with Goering or Himmler as leader. Maybe they would have been smarter, more successful, and the Nazis would have won. Or if Hitler was killed in 1918, maybe German communist or ultra-conservatives unleash even more bloodshed. Germany was a highly industrialised and highly dysfunctional country - some degree of tragedy was likely. I also think that the USSR was likely to lead to horrors, even if Stalin died in 1923. Sometimes, a happy end requires a very big counterfactual.
That's not to say that "I would kill Hitler, in hindsight" is a bad judgement. There's a plausible case to be made that he was an exceptionally dangerous figure - that probably a Goering or Himmler or communist or non-Nazi far right Germany would have been less awful. However, it's overstating the case to think that e.g. Hitler's assassination would be utility-maximising, as opposed to expected utility maximising.
The same applies all the more strongly for those on the left who regret Trump's survival. Be careful what you wish for, because what you ask for is not always what you want.
Stephen Fry wrote a novel with a scenario where a time traveler basically cancels Hitler from history and it just means a smarter Hitler alternative takes over and actually manages to wipe the Jews out.
Wasn't this also the premise of the original C&C Red Alert?
Congrats Einstein, you erased the national socialists from history and created uber-socialists in thier stead.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3HUWUtTZvK4
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On a personal level, a dictator taking power is like a guy challenging you to the most significant bar fight of your life, a duel to the death really. You don’t have to fight him, but then you become his bitch for the foreseeable future. If a dictator should claim to rule over me without my consent he will have to do without my peaceful cooperation.
Ultimately our power as citizens is backed by the threat of this ehm… counter-revolutionary violence. It’s what keeps the fringes in line and our countries relatively coup-free.
When Tito uses force against me, coerces me, puts me in prison, kills me, that’s just him being a dictator, all according to plan. But when I use force, I’m supposed to have perfect foresight of any resulting chaos before I lift a finger… I’m sorry, but that’s too passive, copenhagen ethics. On self-defense grounds alone I have a right to assassinate him (before any utilitarian arguments about discouraging coups or genocides).
By "before", do you mean taking precedence over the utilitarian arguments? Because in that case, as always with deontology, you face this position being taken to absurdity, e.g. claiming you have assassinating the dictator at the cost of a nuclear war that kills everyone but you.
Do you not think that you can ever be morally obliged to suffer indignity or coercion?
Practically speaking, you can’t adequately calculate the consequences of the assassination, so it defaults to “him or you” and you’re morally justified to kill him (he is the aggressor because a dictator issues implicit death threats). Perhaps Tito not being assassinated and keeping yugoslavia going longer than it should have, precipitated the genocidal killings of the breakup .
On principle, on hypotheticals, I agree that you shouldn’t kill him (and even die by his hand if necessary) if you have divine knowledge of incoming nuclear war or genocide. But that’s a huge if.
"Practically speaking, you can’t adequately calculate the consequences of the assassination"
But you can study history. How many cases in history are there where successful hit at high value target worked as hitman intended (few) and made the world, from objective standpoint, a better place (much fewer) ?
Morally good:
Roman Emperors who did us all a favour by being assassinated: Caligula, Commodus, Elagabalus.
Quick executions where everybody went “About time!”: robespierre, beria.
Achieving goals:
Making Serbia great again: Alexander I of serbia, Franz Ferdinand.
Left-wing rabblerousing impeded: Jean Jaures, the Gracchi.
Japanese military rule through assassination in the 1930s.
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Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?
Yeah that's true. I was thinking about the period between eg the Beer Hall Putsch and him actually taking power but once he's already started WW2 it's far from clear that taking him out improves things. Decisions like choosing to stop focusing on RAF bases to instead bomb London were pivotal and the war could have gone very differently.
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Check out the Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's by no means obvious that Operation Barbarossa was a dumb idea. Opinions to the contrary often seem to assume that militaries and societies can run on orders, rather than oil and bread.
However, I think that Hitler's earlier decision to go to war in 1939 was the beginning of the end of fascism. The promise of fascism was military power. By fighting a war against two of the main powers of the day (France and Britain) with backing from an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA) Hitler was taking a huge gamble with the risk of defeat. And the defeat of fascism militarily was its defeat ideologically. Soon, even the Spanish and Portugese regimes were moving in a conventionally conservative direction.
Similarly with communism: once the hydrogen bomb ended the prospect of a Soviet military victory in the Cold War, it was stuck in an economic competition with an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA again) and in comparisons with countries that had fundamentally better economic systems. The promise of communism was prosperity, which became a joke once Soviet citizens had a standard of living that trailed increasingly behind such erstwhile primitive backwaters as Finland, Spain, and even Taiwan.
There is no good evidence for intelligent design, but the closest is that God apparently directed history so that fascism was defeated militarily and communism defeated economically, i.e. on the grounds of their main promises. It's as if e.g. communism was able to deliver a more free society than classical liberalism or fascism a more stable society than classical conservativism.
Some might argue that the mandate of heaven is its own evidence 😉
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Not that Hitler getting rid of jews had any practical effect on Germany hypothetically getting nuclear weapons. That was never on the table for plain old economic and resource reasons.
That's true, but if hypothetically all of the notable Jewish scientists stayed in Germany, it's possible other powers would have gotten nuclear weapons much later. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt in 1939 may have been instrumental for the start of the Manhattan Project.
In which case they still would've lost, all else being equal, but overall it definitely benefitted their allies. The ideology spawning things like Aryan Physics (which sought to deny relativity and all other "Jewish physics") shows how untenable it was for scientific superiority.
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Huh. You might be right? I remembered Namibia having significant uranium ore, but I misremembered Germany losing control there after WWII when it was really in+after WWI.
Yeah it was never happening, read about it in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (good read, if a bit scientifically technical, though I liked that). I mean even if we say that D-Day failed or something, Germany had taken almost no actual steps because they recognized it was near impossible right away. Even the US who had pretty close to an ideal scenario - with tons of money, willing scientists from multiple countries, scouring the globe for resources with Atlantic maritime control, years of work, and who never had any of the facilities in the States bombed (a big deal, if you recall Germany got bombed quite a lot, as an understatement) only got a few bombs going by mid 1945. Even the Soviets took four years after the end of the war (so again, no bombing!) to make their own bomb, and they had espionage help too.
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