You can go back in time and prevent a great catastrophe. Which one would you prevent?

Not one "Prevent Bush from being elected" response?

@gungasnake,

Quote:

That wouldn't spare anybody from slavery and the unintended consequences could and likely would be really vast. Most US citizens figure slavery to have been something limited to plantations and have no real concept of how big a deal it was, largely because something like 90% of the trade never involved the US and mostly involved central and south America.

I woud keep the US out of it,
and leave them alone in Africa.

David

1 Reply

@Ticomaya,

Quote:

Not one "Prevent Bush from being elected" response?

OK, I 'd try to get Reagan to choose
a more conservative Vice-President.

The Bushes were never conservative.

David

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@OmSigDAVID,

Sorry OmSigDavid ending slavery would not had stop Obama from being born here. He would had ended up with another woman as his wife perhaps a nice blond.

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@BumbleBeeBoogie,

This is waaay too easy. I'd prevent Geo. W. Bush from ever becoming president of anything more important than maybe his local Rotary Club.

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@Ticomaya,

Damn! I had already posted that before I saw your post. Tico.

My second choice would be to prevent OmSigDavid from ever learning how to use a computer or post on any website whatever.

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@BillRM,

Quote:

Sorry OmSigDavid ending slavery would not had stop Obama from being born here.

The fanatical racial support he received woud have been absent.

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@Merry Andrew,

U don 't sound very merry.

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@OmSigDAVID,

Quote:

I woud keep the US out of it, and leave them alone in Africa.

Sugar, tobacco and cotton made the USA what it is today. And that was almost all the effort of slaves labour. Tobacco particularly paid for the Revolutionary Army...

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And let's not forget those free men who, although black, took up arms in defence of the Revolution...

Quote:

At the time of the American Revolution, some African Americans had already been enlisted as Minutemen. Both free and enslaved blacks had served in local militias, especially in the North defending their villages against attacks by Native Americans. In March 1775 the Continental Congress assigned units of the Massachusetts militia as Minutemen. They were under orders to become activated if the British troops in Boston took the offensive. Peter Salem, who had been freed by his owner to join the Framingham militia was one of the African Americans in the militia. He served for seven years.

In April 1775 at Lexington and Concord, African Americans again responded to the call and fought with Patriot forces. The Battle of Bunker Hill also had African American soldiers, fighting along the side of the white Patriots. Many African Americans both enslaved and free wanted to join with the Patriots, believing that it would either lead to their freedom or expand their civil rights.[6] In addition to the role of soldier, African Americans also served as guides, messengers, and spies.

American states had to meet quotas of troops for the new Continental Army, and New England regiments recruited African American slaves by promising freedom to those who served in the Continental Army. During the course of the war, about one fifth of the northern army was African American.[7] At the Battle of White Plains in 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment, estimated the American army to be about one quarter black.[8]

Can't remember those fellows deserting in droves during the war (the British would have rewarded them) or organising a rebellion in Pennsylvania to protest 'them revenooors'..

Quote:

As word of the rebellion spread across the frontier, a whole series of loosely organized resistance measures were taken, including robbing the mail, stopping court proceedings, and the threat of an assault on Pittsburgh. One group, disguised as women, assaulted a tax collector, cropped his hair, coated him with tar and feathers, and stole his horse.

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@Ticomaya,

Ticomaya wrote:

Not one "Prevent Bush from being elected" response?

I would go back and prevent Jesus from being killed.

That would take care of a lot of horrible things, including the election of GW Bush.

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@squinney,

It wasn't so much Jesus being killed, it was the idea promoted 300 and some years later that there was a bodily resurrection.

That said, I guess I would go back and bitch slap Emperor Constantine for picking and choosing what a large portion of the world now belive as the "gospel truth"

If it hadn't been for him, christianity would have a much broader belief system, that didn't believe in events that were fabricated solely to fulfill prophesy, or destroyed because they didn't promote the belief in the perpetual virgnity of mary (or her virginity at all, the word that was translated to virgin actually just meant young girl) or physical resurrection, which, IMO is hardly the case. The truth is Jesus was a man that had some good things to say, like many other men, and died just like any other.

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The Boxing Day Tsunami.

Not the worst, but it affected me deeply.

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Eve tempting Adam.

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Last night we sat down and re-watched the movie "Final Countdown" with friends from Kansas who had never seen it. Basicallythe plot is a US aircraft carrier going out from Pearl on routine maneuvers in the early 1980's. It passes through a time warp and arrives in the same spot on December 6, 1941, positioned between the approaching Japanese fleet and Pearl Harbor.

By the time the ship's captain and crew figure out what happened, they have time to intervene. The fire power of a modern US aircraft carrier and its contingent of fighter planes would be sufficient to take out that entire Japanese fleet.

What do they do? They would be declaring war on Japan before Japan had committed any aggressive act. The only evidence they had that Japan intended to commit an aggressive act was in the history books.

And what forces would be unleashed by preventing the history that has occurred? What sort of places would Europe and Japan be now if there had been no Japanese aggression, no Hitler, no Mussolini etc. and no WWII?

Are we sure that the big picture would not be altered for the worst if some of those terrible catastophe's in human events were prevented from happening?

It is interesting to contemplate.

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@Mr Stillwater,

Quote:

Sugar, tobacco and cotton made the USA what it is today....

Tobacco and cotton maybe.... At least maybe in part, but sugar?? Like I said, something like 90% of the people ever taken from Africa as slaves ended up in South or Central America and not the U.S. and I don't know of a way that the US could ever have competed with the Caribbean for producing sugar.

The US also produced furs and served as an escape valve for criminals and religious groups seeking only to establish a freer life and the vast bulk of US citizens are descended from THOSE people and not from plantation owners or anybody else who ever owned slaves.

Nonetheless the slave trade involving Africa was sufficiently vast that going back in time and eliminating it would almost certainly have vast repercussions and unforeseen/unintended consequences.

Easiest way to do it would have been to kill Tamerlane at age ten. That would have left the overland trade routes to Asia intact and likely prevented the great age of European ocean exploration. It would also have left Russia under the thumbs of the golden and white Mongol hordes, probably for all time.

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@chai2,

Quote:

It wasn't so much Jesus being killed, it was the idea promoted 300 and some years later that there was a bodily resurrection....

You probably should have a copy of Julian Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness".

What the hundreds of witnesses to the resurrection saw was almost certainly some final sort of a large-scale bicameral thing ever seen on the Earth, i.e. a psychic and paranormal phenomenon but, to those who saw it, utterly indistinguishable from seeing Christ walking around in flesh as per scriptures.

Make no mistake however, Jesus never had any more use for dead bodies than you or I would. HAD HE actually tried walking around the near east for 40 days in a dead body (real, corporeal, physical etc. etc.) the Romans would have noticed it and crucified him a second time and done whatever it would have taken to ensure that he STAYED crucified....

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@Foxfyre,

Quote:

By the time the ship's captain and crew figure out what happened, they have time to intervene. The fire power of a modern US aircraft carrier and its contingent of fighter planes would be sufficient to take out that entire Japanese fleet.

One Midway-class (late 1945) carrier with its complement of Bearcats and Tigercats (F7s and F8s) would have sufficed to take out the Japanese fleet.

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There's one other basic fact that everybody should grasp regarding slavery in the Western hemisphere: It was only in the US that slaves ever lived well enough to reproduce and be self-sustaining. In Central and South America they were routinely worked to death and then replaced in a continuous cycle.

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@Foxfyre,

Glad you made that point, Foxy. Whenever we think of preventing some great historical calamity, we never consider the collateral results of such intervention. Others have already mentoned, for example, that preventing the great evil of slavery in this country could have adversely affected the economic situation today. Would preventing the U.S. takeover of the Hawaiian Islands in 1898 have prevented any attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941? Maybe. Then what? What would preventing the birth of Hitler have accomplished? We don't know who would have come to power instead. It could have been someone equally depraved , but one so skilled the Allies couldn't defeat him. It's a very slippery slope, indeed.

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You can go back in time and prevent a great catastrophe. Which one would you prevent?

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