Capitalism? What? Fascism has nothing to do with that. Ideas are entirely responsible for fascism. Material conditions? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Fascism wouldn’t have existed if Hitler either died as a baby or hadn’t written Mein Kampf.
Oh, and, by the way, WWI could have been averted if that archduke didn’t get shot. There is nothing more to the outbreak of WWI.
Sincerely, libs.
Not sure if “if this socialist uprising wasn’t brutally crushed by a coalition of succdems and proto-fascists, with its leaders tortured and murdered, then things would have gone better” is really on the same level as “if this literal baby died then fascism wouldn’t exist.” Disrupting or crushing a real, already extant movement by murdering important people within it has a clear historical effect, while theorizing that if one person just didn’t exist that a movement would never form in the first place is more fantastical.
It’s like how the assassination of Fred Hampton had a real, material effect on the BPP, but if he’d never have been born in the first place there’d still have been a BPP, because the material conditions that created it and radicalized him were still there regardless of whether he was or not, but because he was alive and was important his murder had a disastrous impact.
Dang good point. The social fascists really did ruin the whole world didnt they
Honestly yeah, of all the "this one event had really big, horrible, far-reaching consequences"s you could point to in the 20th century, the suppression of the Spartacist revolt in Germany is one of the most pivotal. If it had succeeded the USSR wouldn’t have been alone and the civil unrest that France and the UK faced in the following decade would have had more socialist successes behind them, to say nothing of the impact that removing the Nazis from the equation altogether would have had. It wouldn’t have been a clean or bloodless timeline by any means, obviously, but it would have been an important difference.
But my point is just, a real person with real influence and real power dying is very different from if that individual had simply not existed at all, because, well, while anyone could theoretically become that person, once someone is then their death damages the movement they’re a part of.
So tl;dr for any time travelers: don’t kill baby hitler, [parody] the headquarters of the NSDAP in the late 1920s instead; break the movement instead of imagining one person could create it from whole cloth. Or better yet give the KPD a fucking gundam or ten in 1918 so this is a moot point, cause if you’ve got time travel you better at least have some fucking gundams to spare.
Edit: actually just go find that asshole fish that crawled out of the primordial sea and roast its dumb ass, save us all this trouble from the get go. Great man theory might be bullshit but no one said anything about fish, so I’m blaming that slimy, wannabe-air-breathing motherfucker.
This is great fish theory. The material Conditions behind the move to land would still exist. The only logical solution would be to destroy the planet.