Time travel assassination

[sabotabby]

frandroid has a neat game going here that ought to be spread around a bit more. Here are the rules:

If you were to travel in time and allowed to kill one person to change the course of history, who would that be?

The usual answer to this is the head of state who most personifies evil in the modern era. But what if we tried to pick the "smallest" person (in the sense of their highest lifetime office/social position) possible, in relation to their maximum geopolitical impact on today's world?

For additional fun, don't post your reasoning and let people guess at why you picked that person.

(He picked this dude with some clever reasoning; I like it.)

I confess I am absolutely terrible at this game. Not because I'm inherently peaceful or kind, but for the same reason that I'm a lousy chess player: I'm incapable of thinking two moves in advance. You have to be strategic—there's no point in killing Hitler, or Hitler's mom, because someone would inevitably rise to fill the same place (there will be no arguing the Great Man Theory of history on this LJ or anywhere else).

Today's pick shall be Henry Morton Stanley for me. There are two reasons—one humanitarian and obvious, the other personal.

I also confess that I'm posting this for reasons rather unrelated to the original meme. Though only one of you will correctly guess why.

So have at it, friends list. I give you a hypothetical TARDIS, you tell me whom you'd land it on.

Comments

[sabotabby]

To prevent the birth of his rather odious son?

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

Yes, I would have actually been satisfied with bankrupting. I should have picked, his grandfather... a unitarian and an abolitionist. More about keeping all that money out of the hands of Wickliffe. Without his family money, he wouldn't be able to start the Pioneer Fund and thus no funding for the Bell Curve, Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, etc... that bit of money has done a lot to sustain racism in the U.S. Why? Because the IWW organized his factory and he wanted scientific proof that Southern Europeans and Slavs were genetically predisposed to laziness, unionization and socialism. Sad bit of irony for the abolitionist George Draper's grandson.

I'll have to think of some other obscure historical figures to assassinate, but that was the first one that came to mind.