Does it still count as low hanging fruit if it's an OP from a lib on an instance we are federated with condemning HYPOTHETICALLY killing ACTUAL FUCKING HITLER?
Nah this is a rare moment for libs getting something right in politics and acknowlegding the great man theory that is hypothetically going back in time to kill Hitler (or get him into fine arts lol) as if Germany wasn't riddled with fascists anyway due to material conditions and the rising appeal of communism that needed to be dealt with by the system.
Edit: after reading your other comments, yeah this person suffers from incurable brain
Lib on the reason why the assassination wouldn't work (fear, martyr, blah blah blah), but there's a not-bad point buried somewhere in there.
It avoids great man of history-ing Hitler, since killing him wouldn't change the material conditions of Germany that lead to Hitler. The Holocaust is probably the worst-case scenario for what could happen (idk if Hitler 2 does the super Holocaust), and idk enough about intra-party politics of the Nazis other than the purges they did.
Maybe the second in command of the party wouldn't be as effective of a leader and fizzle the nazi party out and we instead get the moderate nazi party, and who knows how that would end up. Communism was spreading at that time, and fascism was going to pop-up regardless in response to this, but the exact shape of what happens would be slightly different and maybe the genocide wouldn't be as bad.
Also why imply someone with a time machine couldn't make it look like an accident. They could just drop a piano or anvil on his head and everyone would see it as a common hazard and think nothing of it.
It avoids great man of history-ing Hitler, since killing him wouldn't change the material conditions of Germany that lead to Hitler.
Unfortunately if you read the thread that is not at all the point they are making.
They pulled a strawman argument on me suggesting that electoralism is useless and jumped straight to saying I was advocating assassinating my political opponents which is something I totally definitely would not do
THEN they went on entirely unprompted to condemn the hypothetical assassination of LITERALLY HITLER.
Now that I read that thread I get what you're saying. I thought they were making the point that you don't know how things would go down if you did succeed in killing Hitler, it might do nothing, is fair.
But the counter to that just being , when we know that less than nothing would've changed was funny. They clearly just worked backwards from saying "assassinating politician is bad" and then couldn't admit they were wrong when it came to Hitler.
They simplified killing Hitler to the trolley problem and decided to definitely not ever pull the lever, and instead just hope the lever pulls itself.
If I had a time machine, I would simply go to the future and pick up some cool weapons first, then go back and give Rosa Luxemburg a mech suit and a badass plasma sword.
Killing figures is destabilising for any movement. When movements need unity around a certain problem they can default to whatever the leader says. When the leadership becomes unpredictably vacant, there can be succession struggles leading to splits. There's a reason the CIA attempts to assassinate leaders
Killing Hitler is good and funny and I would do it without hesitation, but I don't think this is dunk worthy.
The original argument is basically a condemnation of great man history - even if you killed Hitler, you would not necessarily avert the rise of German fascism. Fascism arises in response to certain material and social conditions and contradictions which were present in Weimar Germany. Perhaps German fascism without Hitler would look or behave differently to Nazism, but if we believe in materialism then we must acknowledge the strong possibility that German fascism would arise without any specific individual.
First I just said that voting is useless, this person jumped to political assassination, then from there totally unprompted did another strawman saying even hypothetically killing hitler would be bad. I was literally just pointing out that obsession with electoralism was a waste of energy.
Because someone less drugged up and more competent would have taken his place at the head of the Reich
After the destruction of the Nazi war machine, imprisoning him so that he can be subjected to an endless struggle session so that victims of his crimes could achieve some degree of closure by yelling at him and/or spitting on him
I'm not entirely convinced that the second option would be worth it but if that's what was decided by the community, I wouldn't waste my time debating whether or not it's a good reason to keep him alive.