Its decided by FDR and more progressive legislators that internment is way too risky for economy and communities, and the Alien Enemies act needs to be amended.
If you could change One event post 1900..?
I understand the goal of saving lives but where does it stop? Are you obligated to try and stop every tragedy in history? Unless you have godlike power bad things will always happen and there’s no guarantee changing history will result in a better outcome. You could kill Hitler in 1918 and then a full scale nuclear war happens in 1960. You could stop 9/11 and a bioweapon gets released in Los Angeles a decade later. It’s exactly why I said a mortal being shouldn’t interfere with the very fabric of reality.
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Of course, on reading the OP (damn this is an old thread
), I 1st thought of preventing the assassination of FF, as quite a few others did... I almost believe this is too late a POD though, that if the "spark" hadn't gone off in Sarajevo, it would've gone off elsewhere eventually...This is always a possibility, that the Law of Unintended Consequences can come back and bite even the most well-intentioned time-travelling meddler in a big way
That is always an issue. You can't have a timeline where the Nazis got crushed (and gave racism a bad reputation) if there were no Nazis, for example.
I think I'd go with an earlier POD... King Alexander's Royal Guards are able to avert the May 1903 Coup, killing Apis and his co-conspirators, and leaving the Obrenovics in power (at least temporarily, until either Alexander dies or until the next assassination attempt).
Princip and his kiddie korps of assassins were just stooges... better to strike at the head of the serpent
Nice one. I was thinking about my Saxon-Orange POD ending up having similar effects. The Dutch more fully tied up in the dynastic game of Germany and, arguably, Belgium results in cooler heads prevailing if the events of the summer of 1914 aren't butterflied away by a POD such as mine (or yours) at the top of the century.I think I'd go with an earlier POD... King Alexander's Royal Guards are able to avert the May 1903 Coup, killing Apis and his co-conspirators, and leaving the Obrenovics in power (at least temporarily, until either Alexander dies or until the next assassination attempt).
Princip and his kiddie korps of assassins were just stooges... better to strike at the head of the serpent
World War Two left around 70 to 85 million people dead who otherwise would've (probably) lived out normal lives...
Today, although racism may have a bad reputation among the educated, intelligent and progressive among us, there's still plenty of racism left to go around these days...
If the trade-off was a bit more casual, open racism today in exchange for 80 million graves not being filled 80-ish years ago, dunno... think as long as the racism didn't reach genocidal or near-genocidal proportions, it might be worth the trade... think I'd rather be discriminated against (to a degree) than dead...
And in any case, social attitudes would've changed, evolved anyway, (more than likely, at least) without WWII... may have just been more gradual and taken a bit longer...
Isaac Asimov touched on this in a short story "Living Space" in which an alternate world is discovered where the Nazis won WW2 and the calendar reckons years from the
birth of *Hitler*. But it is now around 4000AD, and the Germans of that era are perfectly civilised and accommodating, being no more answerable for the crimes of of Hitler's day than present-day Italians are for the atrocities of Julius Caesar or Suetonius Paulinus. The implication (if unstated) is that after two millennia there have been as many good and evil things on one timeline as on the other. The passage of time has pretty much evened things out.
But I would not expect a time-traveller from our own day to be as philosophical as this.
Good point for our world. But according to the Many-Worlds Theory in quantum physics and cosmology all of the above things will happen anyway in some other universes.
Persuade the United Party of South Africa, to accept not total majority rule, but some degree of African participation, to avoid Gurrliea warfare and delay. Or make the Bantustans real partitions.
The Ike trip to Moscow goes ahead as planned. He and Khrushchev were poised for serious negotiations.
Butterflying the October Revolution would, IMO, solve many of the world's problems.