Hello, sorry, I'm still thinking about this. I know I am an armchair historian at best, but I think those posts from the other day together form my strongest argument against the Great Man Theory of history. It's tempting to believe that if you kill Hitler or Columbus, or make it so that England can't start colonizing the world, you have altered history---and you have!---but I have a hard time believing that you've fundamentally changed it. After all, Hitler was hardly the only Nazi in Germany, let alone the only authoritarian strongman in the world at that point---remove Hitler, and maybe you stop the German Nazi party, maybe, but what about Italian fascism, or Japanese imperialism? What about eugenics more broadly, which was already extremely well-established in the USA and UK? (I'm pretty convinced that without the backstop of WWII, eugenics in the USA would have become much, much worse.) WWI still happened of course, and the fallout is still deeply felt across Germany and former Austria-Hungary, so what will mitigate it? How might it surface without the locus of a specific leader, or will it go out and find a leader regardless?
And, I mean....it's pretty well-known that Columbus departed with three ships, and 80-100 crewmen. (Apparently a matter that historians debated intensely, since they didn't keep great lists.) If you sneak aboard and kill Columbus...any of those 80-100 men could take their place. Hell, it all might have gone smoother if the Pinzon brothers stepped up, given how much the crew wanted to murder Columbus all on their own. And if, even then, the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria turn back before spotting land, how long do you think it would be before someone tries again? Or until someone from the Native/Indigenous cultures of the Americas tries the reverse journey, since they're no longer dying of monstrous colonial violence and European diseases they have no resistance to?
I was just reading this morning about how the US Declaration of Independence references the colonists' desire to move further west---essentially objecting to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and subsequent agreements between the British government and the Cherokee and Iroquois nations. This understanding was later (sort of) reintroduced by the US Supreme Court, but only after 100+ years of American violence towards Native populations. If you made it so that the US never declares independence, the treaties remain upheld...but for how long? Britain will colonize Australia without any attempt to make treaties with the Aboriginal people, at about the same time the newly-created United States is telling the Cherokee and Iroquois nations that prior agreements are null and void.
(To bring it full circle, this also made me think of a book I read a while ago about the captured Nazi leadership on trial, and how they demanded to know why their Lebensraum was any different than American Manifest Destiny....)
Anyway, all this to say that the metaphorical time-traveler with a gun can solve some problems, maybe, but in doing so just creates new problems. It's not that I think history is predetermined or anything like that, I just strongly feel that "us vs. them" and "huh, what's over there?" and "acquire resources!!!" are very deeply-rooted instincts in the human animal, and we watch that play out in many ways at many times across our history. You can change how they show up, or where they show up, how they're enacted or which guys specifically decide to act on them, but I'm not actually convinced you can change the instincts themselves.
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