Speculative game: Time travel assassination

[frandroid]

Alright, let's play an old game, but let's try to be original:

If you were to travel in time and allowed to kill one person to change the course of history, who would that be?

The usual answer to this is the head of state who most personifies evil in the modern era. But what if we tried to pick the "smallest" person (in the sense of their highest lifetime office/social position) possible, in relation to their maximum geopolitical impact on today's world?

I'm setting my sight on Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy. Points if you can figure out what the impact I have in mind is.

You can post this to your LJ if you want to make it into a meme, and we'll try to guess what your mark would change, or you can just post a reply here. You can post your reasoning directly if you don't want to make it into a riddle. :P

dubaiwalla, icecreamemperor, sabotabby, gordonzola, I'm looking at you. And everyone else too!

(You could also post a political aim and we can debate trying to figure out who would need to be snuffed out to reach that aim...)

*** ETA: Alright, no one's biting. Esterhazy was the Hungarian general in the service of the French who sold some minor information to the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War, which the French lost. Alfred Dreyfus was framed for it, and promptly charged, tried and sent to the Devil's Island prison, partly because he was Jewish. Dreyfus' brother Mathieu pursued the case, and it eventually became a huge scandal for 12 years, pitting anti-semites and their army supporters against artists, liberals and other "intellectuals" (the term was coined during this crisis).

Paris at the time had been considered to be the best place in the world for Jews to live in; Jews didn't get equal rights immediately after the revolution, but they had gained rights quite rapidly afterwards. So when the Dreyfus Affair developed, Theodor Herzl was the Paris correspondent of a Viennese newspaper. Horrified that such antisemitism could exist in the New Jerusalem, he theorized and campaigned for Zionism, which eventually led to the state of Israel.

So without Esterhazy, today we would have Peace in the Middle East. CQFD.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Well, by the given rules, I'd have to go for Klara Pölzl some time before 1889. But that seems like a cheat.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Hah! Good try. Now let's get back to originality ;)

[dubaiwalla.livejournal.com]

This seems like a rather unproductive form of speculation. If you're focusing on the 'smallest' possible person, who's to say that killing John Q. Nobody in 1967 (or 1215 BC, for that matter) wouldn't have led to utopia today, owing to some butterfly-causes-hurricane circumstances that no human mind could possibly have foresaw?

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

That's no fun. Try guessing by Esterhazy has had an impact on today's world affairs beyond L'Affaire and maybe the game will become more interesting?

[sabotabby]

Ooooh, I like this game. I'm tempted to say Strauss at the moment but that's probably too obvious, and too late.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Which Strauss? There are a million of them...

[sabotabby]

Leo, thus preventing the birth of neoconservative ideology. Though it was probably too late by that point.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

That's all you can come up with? ;)

Points for immediate relevance!

[sabotabby]

I was reading a book about him. Which wasn't very good, incidentally.

My one today is more fun.

[theoria.livejournal.com]

Socrates.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

How depressing. You win.

[icecreamemperor.livejournal.com]

I will have to try to get back to this with a more serious reply at some point when I am not in New York, but for now I will say that I would kill whoever invented the car alarm. I would fuck that bitch up.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Bwahahaha. I'll add my bullets.

[tlf1138.livejournal.com]

I'd kill Joe McCarthy and Pat McCarran. No communist witch hunts. This means that there are actually liberal and unafraid Asia hands (and Soviet hands) available to advise the president. China would not be lost to the Communists, or if lost, would not be alienated and driven closer to the USSR. The Cold War might end 20-30 years earlier with a China that is not excluded. Vietnam would probably not happen because the experienced Asian hands would advise the president against escalation. Maybe with these liberal experts in place, Wilsonian idealism would win out, and Asian countries would be given the right to self-determine, leading to the spread of peace and freedom in many nations. Without the polarization of the Communist witch hunts, chances are that relations with the USSR would thaw faster than it actually did.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Thanks for participating! That said, now I'll try to take your theory apart. You're welcome to do the same with my theory. :)

1) I'm not really up on McCarthy's timing, but what other influence could the U.S. exert in the Chinese civil war that would help Chiang Kai-Shek defeat the Maoists? The U.S. was already quite supportive of the KMT (not just in words, but in hard cash and weapons) but sheer incompetence and corruption is really what made the KMT lose the civil war.

2) By 1957 or so, Mao split away from the Soviets and was more wary of them than of the U.S., and China would never really ever get close to them again. So you already had China pointing its guns towards the USSR; would the U.S. have managed to get close enough to China as to make them a strong ally against the USSR?

Your Vietnam speculation is quite compelling, though.

Now let me throw you a curveball: What if Wilsonian liberalism would have allowed Communism to thrive? Let's say the price of oil was not greatly reduced throughout the 80s, allowing the U.S.S.R. to get significant oil revenue (as it has in recent years), and let's say then that Zbigniew Brzezinski doesn't try to bring the Soviets into the Afghan trap and doesn't fund the mujahideen. The Soviet Union then has the resources to maintain itself and last much longer.

As a by-product of this, bin Laden doesn't get involved (as much) in Afghanistan and you have neither Al-Qaeda nor Sept. 11. But then, if the Soviet Union lasts longer, our current world is a whole lot more different. :)

[everynewmorning.livejournal.com]

I'll go ahead and overanalyze this in its entirety...First, I would need to know when I would be killing them. Arguably, many crucial cogs (as you would say, small) could prove to be easily replaceable in history - so killing them at birth might have little impact on the trajectory of the future. However, killing them at the peak of their relevance would open up a can of worms of speculation as to who would replace them - or if anyone would replace them to equal effect. Second, the further back in history you go the more inscrutable individual roles become, and the higher likelihood that the historiographic depiction of different events or people is less than accurate.

With that, my immediate reaction upon reading the rules of the game was Claude Etienne Minié. His invention (the Minie ball bullet-variant) signaled a turning point in military strategy, the scale and devastation of war and the volume of casualties in any armed conflict. Such a subtle delay in the development of high efficiency ammunition could have the effect of slowing military advancement nearer to the rate of social and industrial development.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more bullshit my answer sounds.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

You got it right... basically you'd kill them before they'd get to have their history-changing impact, or else there's no point, is there? :)

As for your entry, that's a pretty good candidate. I thought Da Vinci had thought about conical-shaped bullets, but maybe I'm not thinking about the same thing, or his idea wasn't applied?

Anyway, my take on it would be of the replaceable cog, in the same way that many inventions/discoveries starting in the 17th century were often happening independently in different quarters of Europe, as they became "logical next steps", if you want... The wikipedia entry for bullet specifically points to an Englishman who invented such a bullet before Minié.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Does it have to be for good? I'd go for Alan Turing. I think without Turing the Allies might well have lost WW2. Another possibility would be Paul Dirac. He was so original that without him modern physics might not have happened for a very long time. let's face it thousnds of string theorists working for two decadeshave achieved less than Dirac.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Turing.... That's pretty damn good.