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Steve wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2019 11:08 am
It's why I say time travelers should stop trying to kill Hitler and go after Gavrilo Princip instead.
You don't want to expirience the world where either World War 1 or 2 did not happen.
You think the butterfly effect wouldn't be kind?
Mecha82, the inevitability argument depends on how much you consider things inevitable in history.
Things of history are inevitable by nature. They did happen. They can't play out any other way, because they happened and everything that could have changed them, did not. Anyways, yes, the butterfly-effect of lacking these two events is not kind.
"If you get shot up by an A6M Reisen and your plane splits into pieces - does that mean it's divided by Zero?
- xoxSAUERKRAUTxox
If you're going to be meddling about with turn-of-the-century time-travel shenanigans, I wonder if it might be worth triggering World War I a bit earlier: more specifically, in such a way that puts Britain on one side of the conflict and France on the other. Possibly making the Fashoda Incident heat up in a way it didn't in OTL.
With the two greatest colonial powers on opposite sides, you'd put a lot more strain on the European colonial system: just as the Ottomans and British tried to one-up each other by appealing to Islamic vs. Arabic identity (respectively) in the Near East, the British and the French would likely do everything in their power to undermine the other's legitimacy in their colonies in order to get some minor advantage.
Dargaron wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 12:12 am
If you're going to be meddling about with turn-of-the-century time-travel shenanigans, I wonder if it might be worth triggering World War I a bit earlier: more specifically, in such a way that puts Britain on one side of the conflict and France on the other. Possibly making the Fashoda Incident heat up in a way it didn't in OTL.
With the two greatest colonial powers on opposite sides, you'd put a lot more strain on the European colonial system: just as the Ottomans and British tried to one-up each other by appealing to Islamic vs. Arabic identity (respectively) in the Near East, the British and the French would likely do everything in their power to undermine the other's legitimacy in their colonies in order to get some minor advantage.
Which might lead to European colonialism crumbling at least a half-century early. Hmm...
I've wondered if a time-traveler killed Hitler, would Stalin have invaded Eastern Europe alone anyway, leading to a more difficult fight against Russia instead of Germany. In the timeline we have, we had two expansionist dictators spend a lot of their energy (and citizens' lives) against each other.
And we had the fission bomb introduced to the world at a time when everyone was really, really tired of fighting, and well aware of the cost a major war can have, and with two examples to show the world what it meant to drop one on a city.
If Archduke Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been killed... I don't know. The world might have been a lot better. Or it could have been a lot worse. Maybe the same interlocking alliances would still exist several decades later, with fission bombs on all sides.
Only one answer for it. This needs some experimentation, obviously!
The cut-off point to World War I not happening isn't actually Franz Ferdinand, but the ascencion of Wilhelm II to the throne and him forcing "the pilot to leave the boat". Remember, Bismark may have been the Iron Chancellor and the Chancellor of Iron and Blood, but he very well understood that the security and future of the Second German Empire lied precisely in not waging a major war and not bothering with colonialism. His entire "life's work" consisted of politically isolating France and securing Germany in a network of alliances, which is the exact opposite position that Germany found itself in on the eve of July 28th, 1914 and there is only one person responsible for that: Wilhelm II.
Now, just preventing Franz Ferdinand from being assassinated removes one lit fuse from the powder keg, but it does not remove the powder keg at all, because one major portion the powder keg consisted of was Germany's increasing political isolation, ambition to gain a "place in the sun" (aka colonies) and Wilhelm's innate drive to prove himself in the face of everyone (you can thank his overbearing and overcaring mother for that). Removing Franz Ferdinand's death (and assuming his ascencion to the throne before a major war breaks out) would have mainly one result, as far as I can tell: It would remove the Austrian Empire as a power factor, because Franz Ferdinand wanted to pursuit a conciliatory policy with his slavic subject's and it seems very likely, that the already semi-autonomous hungarian subjects would have gained full autonomy and the Serbs would have quite certainly gained a semi-autonomous state within the Empire, just like the Hungarians before them, which would drag the Empire further away from it's connection to Germany.
For Germany that would mean mostly one thing: One less ally, more political isolation and a further increased perception of needing to prove himself by Wilhelm II. If the keg would not explode in Europe, it would explode over colonial affairs, rather sooner than later.
Oh and as for the Russian Empire, ironically, "Nikki", as Tsar Nikolaus was called affectionately by his cousin Wilhelm II, found himself in very much the same position that Wilhelm II was in. He felt he needed to prove himself, as he was regarded as a weak emperor by basically everyone and the point he choose to prove himself as a stern and leading person, the hill he choose to die on, was the mobilisation of his forces towards the Austrian border, which was, in the end, nothing but a show of force without a true intent to invade Austria-Hungary (they didn't even have enough guns to arm all their men for christ's sake...). But it was also the hill Wilhelm II choose to die on. Two weak personalities, riddled by an inferiority complex and who actually and genuinely liked each other (Nikki possibly being the only one who actually liked Wilhelm II on top of it), tried to do essentially the same, thinking that the other would back down if they just show how much strong will they have, despite neither actually having the will to fight. But the wheels were in motion and completely out of their weak hands' control... The seminal tragedy was already playing out.
"If you get shot up by an A6M Reisen and your plane splits into pieces - does that mean it's divided by Zero?
- xoxSAUERKRAUTxox
AlternateHistoryHub has done some videos on this, actually. I thought he did some on WWI not happening, or at the very least this assassination not happening, but I can't seem to find anything WWI related other than these 4.
