If given the choice, would you stop the Holocaust or The Great Leap Forward?

[AngryAmish]

This is a tad silly but as long as we are dreaming up counterfactuals, and you could only stop one event, what would you do? Why?


Show your work.

[Taverner]

1. The Holocaust

The GLF may have killed more, but the Holocaust dug deepest.

[lunatica]

2. This is like Sophie's Choice

No matter what millions get killed. Some choices.

[The Northerner]

3. Ugh, both are atrocious incidents of mass murder but that's really a tough choice

I'll have to think it over and then respond back...

[GodlessBiker]

4. It's not silly, it's disgusting. No amount of "work" could justify one choice over the other.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. If I'm omnipotent enough to prevent either of these disasters

then I'm fucking well capable of multitasking in order to prevent the other one. Not mentioning names, but I know of one bronze-age sky deity who has really dropped the ball when it comes to divine intervention.

[Ken Burch]

11. Or, as Tori Amos has put it

"God, sometimes you just don't come through".


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PHUn4TLKM0&feature=related

[Vinnie From Indy]

6. If given a choice...

I would tombstone posters that ask questions like this on DU. Cheers!

[bigwillq]

12. ha ha

LOL :rofl: :thumbsup:

[Ken Burch]

7. The Holocaust.

And why the fuck did you start this thread?

[Blue Meany]

8. This is like those questions the draft board used to ask

conscientous objectors in the 1960s: If you were driving down the road and there were people in the middle of the road who would be killed if you didn't swerve and go over a cliff, what would you do? Best answer I ever heard was from Joan Baez: First, I'd run people in the road and then I'd drive off the cliff.

[Lyric]

9. If I could only stop one? I'd stop the Holocaust.

My reasons are personal, of course. Some of my grandmother's siblings, their spouses, and their children died in a concentration camp after a Nazi raid on their village in what's now Slovakia. The only one who survived was her oldest brother, and he came to America a broken, haunted man who eventually remarried, but never had any more children. My own grandmother lived her whole life with an enormous burden of guilt and grief because she was *here* and was never in danger. I suspect this is a story quite common in the USA for people with Jewish family members.

Does that mean I don't feel for the Chinese? Of course it doesn't. But if someone forced me to choose, that's the choice I'd make, just like if someone forced me to choose between the life of a perfect stranger or a member of my own family, I'd choose to save my family. If offering *my own* life in place of either was an option, I'd do that instead, but since you didn't mention that as an option, I'm assuming that it isn't. I'd save my family member and mourn for the poor stranger who died because some sociopathic freak did such a terrible, cruel thing.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. When we die, there'll be a planet for the French and a planet for the Chinese

... and everyone will be happier.

[ohiosmith]

13. will there be unicorns?

[Ozymanithrax]

14. Neither, I would alter that scene in Kubric's 2001 a space oddesy...

where those damn Monkey's learn to be omnivores after being changed by the monolith. Human beings would then still be monkeys escaping lions on the savanna and I would stop both atrocities at teh cost of the non-existance of the entire human race.