Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
If the "average" Russian supported, empowered, and enabled Stalin, wouldn't that be okay?
Would YOU kill Hitler?
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(a) I'm not sure it would be right to have killed millions of Russians in 1945 just to get Stalin. (The necessary implication of Spanky's "flood of A-bombs" approach.) from a UMC approach -- He'd done a majority of his murdering by then.
You know we'd have had to do it too -- the threat alone would have been almost meaningless to Stalin.
Seems likely that it would have also led to some severe adverse consequences for millions of others (many innocent) in Europe and the Far East as the armed struggle continued between the USSR and the U.S.
Perhaps, if we won, we could have driven in over the radiactive remains and built a democracy in the former Soviet Union, but I'd bet not.
Seems that the Cold War was a preferable course -- and succeeded in the long run.
(b) Hitler -- of course. But probably not by dropping atomic bombs wherever in Germany (or elsewhere in occupied Europe) I thought he might be hiding until I was pretty sure he was dead. That death of innocents thing again.
Also, all of these counterfactuals assume perfect knowledge of the then-present and resulting future events -- and ignore the probability of unintended consequences (which might well make things even worse in the long run).
S_A_M
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