If Adolf Hitler had died while fighting during the WW1, who do you think would have lead Germany and the rest of the world into WW2? Do you possibly think WW2 would have not occurred at all?

Given the harshness of the conditions imposed on Germany after WWI and the revanchism they engendered, I think WWII was very likely to happen even without Hitler.

The scary part is that if you remove him from the scene, you might have ended up with a party resembling Italy fascism in Germany. Devoid of the anti-semitic madness, a fascist Germany might have kept the scientists that made the atomic bomb working for them. Once Germany had the bomb, the Soviet Union would copy it, just like it did with the American one. Britain, France and the USA would do so as well.

Imagine WWII starting between 1945 and 1950 with a nuclear armed Germany facing a nuclear armed France and/or Soviet Union. Whole cities would be vaporized. It would make the losses sustained in the European theater of the war to pale in comparison.

Maybe that’s the reason why no time travellers ever attempt to kill Hitler.

How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had not waged war in Vietnam?

Let’s just imagine for a second that we Americans just let the North Vietnamese turn Vietnam into a “communist state” when the French left after their disaster at Dien Bien Phu in the 1950s. And let’s just imagine for a second, that we took a political stance that rang something like this: “So you want to experiment with communism? Well, you people have been through alot. Knock yourself out! We’ll be over here, across the Pacific, doubling and tripling our standard of living. Let us know if you get tired of that Maoist thing….”  I would argue that they would have had their experiment with communism, and then (as they are now) realizing that it sounded good, but in reality, didn’t work so well, just as the Chinese did. I recently read a good quote that illustrates this. An American traveling in Vietnam asked if the Vietnamese still hated Americans. The answer? “We don’t hate Americans…we want TO BE Americans…”.  I would argue this might, just might, have saved more than a million Vietnamese and more than 55,000 American lives, saved trillions of dollars, eliminated a terrible  period of strife in America (and Vietnam), and created another American ally, sooner rather than later.

How Russians Lost the War

The baseness of Russia’s rulers lies in the way they have always taken advantage of this remarkable human emotion: the love of homeland and the willingness to sacrifice everything for it.

.. He was still a boy when he went to sea, in constant terror of drowning in that steel coffin. He ended up protecting the regime that killed his father.

.. Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.

Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.