An Ugly Thought?

Well, it is just about time for The Atonement, so this is as good a moment as any to express this thought, which has been bouncing around in my head a while now...should it be for ill, hopefully I will be forgiven, but anyway...

I was first thinking about Adolf Hitler, and all the discussions, books, and movies(?) built around this question:
If you could go back in time to early Nazi Germany, and kill Hitler before he got the Second World War or the Holocaust under way, would you/could you do it ?

And so I followed this line of thought a little bit, and it brought me to the madman of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You know, the apocalyptical Islamist with nuclear ambitions who denies the Holocaust while winking and saying "You want to see a real Holocaust? Boy, I'm gonna show you a Holocaust!"

And so here he is, about to arrive in New York, the man most likely to be the next Hitler, maybe worse.

Can we stop him before he unleashes the 21st century's version of hell on earth? And will we speak, twenty years hence, of the question: If you could go back in time and kill Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before he unleashed the horrors of the Third World War, would you/could you do it ?

Or can we find the courage to do the deed now, to snuff out pure unadulterated evil in our midst, before it metastasizes into something uncureable and inevitable, something so dark that it will somehow touch us all?

I'm just asking, is all.

And so the fast begins...