Word: hitlered
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...MINIMAL-REWRITE RULE A good counterfactual exercise tampers with as little of actual history as possible but still manages to get a big bang from what is changed. For example, as a foot soldier, Corporal Hitler had close brushes with death in World War I. Had this still unknown soldier been killed in action (with bullets whizzing all around him, it was a highly plausible possibility), humanity might have escaped World...
...WHAT TEST An effective counterfactual scenario should checkmate critics who argue that things would have worked out the same way anyway (e.g., if Hitler had perished in the muddy trenches, some other fanatic would have taken his place. Maybe, but most historians see Hitler as an extremist, even for a Nazi--and one with a lot of charisma to boot). Counterfactualists tend to support the Great Man Theory of history...
...seriously injured when he stepped in front of a New York City taxi. If the impact had been harder, Viscount Lord Halifax, later known for wanting out of an "unwinnable" war with Germany, would probably have become British Prime Minister on May 10, 1941, and gone on to encourage Hitler's peace feelers after the fall of France. Instead of grim Churchillian defiance, BBC radio would have broadcast Halifax's crisp announcement of the "end of this mad war." Unhindered by a battle with Britain, Hitler would have been free to launch an even more ferocious assault on the Soviet...
...Ronald Reagan and Star Wars, drag out tables and graphs to show that the Soviet economy was doomed to self-destruct, that it already had, that the country couldn't have gone on that way any longer. But what was Reagan to us, when we had managed to overcome Hitler, all while living in the inhuman conditions of Stalinism? No single approach--and there have been many--can explain Gorbachev. Perhaps the holy fools with their metaphysical scenario were right when they whispered that he was marked and that seven years were given to him to transform Russia...
...lively question as we gaze at the pink morning of a new century, a question that vibrates with possibility and that engages both our hopes and fears: Who will be the Gorbachev of 2085? Will we have another Hitler? Who will rescue us from him? It's a historical tautology that leaders are generated by their times and that great issues produce great men. (One historian, in TIME's ranking of U.S. Presidents, observes that Calvin Coolidge was "unlucky" enough to live in boring times.) And while we can't predict the leaders of the next decade, let alone...