If you could go back in time and kill one person who would it be

WileyCoyote wrote: »

Jesus Christ, Mohmmad, and Budda, all at birth.

Whatever about Mohammed, who was well dodgy in a lot of respects, alone among the various religion founders who actually killed people and had people killed on his direct orders, the other two I dunno, especially Buddha. He wasn't particularly religious, indeed remarkably modern in his agnostic thinking, moderate(except when it came to women) and all about personal responsibility and peace, love and compassion and such. Jesus? Again with the compassion stuff for the most part, distrusted crawthumpers and hypocrites etc and was remarkably pro women for his time and culture. Put it another way if Christians and Buddhists actually lived like their respective faith founders there would have been significantly less strife in the world. That's where it goes pear shaped of course. If Muslims lived exactly like their faith founder, yes I could see more strife alright.

One person on the religion front? Probably Abraham if he existed. Though chances are he did or someone like him did with added Chinese whispers. While many feel them useless oral traditions can preserve quite a bit of historicity in them. Teasing out the chaff is the problem of course.

Historical figures? Hard one, because we don't know how them being removed from the timeline would have affected things, maybe even made them worse in an alternative timeline. EG remove say Jesus. Rome never becomes Christian. Some suggest it was this that added to their downfall. So let's imagine Rome, the western empire keeps going. Sounds great in theory, but it could have gone like China. Brief explosions of innovation followed by looong periods of centralised stagnation looking inward, or it falls anyway, but there's no central Christian cultural "glue" remaining in it's aftermath. Islam if it sprung up(unlikely as it's been argued it was a rejig of Christianity) or some other invader might find Europe easy pickings.

Taking out Hitler seems an obvious one, though there were many "hitlers" in post great war Germany, so it's possible another binding force would give rise to German fascism(Italian fascism was well ahead of Hitler and his eejits) and he might have been more clever and even more dangerous and let his generals fight a war the way they wanted to, kept the Americans out of it(and they wouldn't be were they got to at their height) and an even bigger holocaust of it's people across the european continent might have kicked off unopposed.

For me in recent history, Stalin is probably the easy choice. He was an unmitigated bastard and I can't think of another nearly as bad in the Soviet circle. Pol Pot another I'd have happily throttled with my belt.