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Least favorite alt-history story?

If I was SI'd into Bashar al-Assad I would kill myself

Why kill yourself?

I mean, the way I see it, given that you certainly had no say in the matter, you personally have no moral guilt over what Bashar al-Assad has done.

I'd say, first do what little you can to make sure that once you're off the scene, as humane an outcome as possible to the Syrian Civil War is in sight. Or at least closer in sight than it was before.

And then... run!

You can easily get your hands on a couple of million dollars, so you run away to, I dunno, South America, maybe the Philippines, get some plastic surgery, and lay low in Panama for the next ten or twenty years selling T-shirts.

Or, I dunno, try to find yourself in this new world. Has Bashar al-Assad somehow ended up in your body? In either event, your best bet to being able to walk away scot free is to somehow be able to prove that a body-swap has occurred.
 
Why kill yourself?

I mean, the way I see it, given that you certainly had no say in the matter, you personally have no moral guilt over what Bashar al-Assad has done.

I'd say, first do what little you can to make sure that once you're off the scene, as humane an outcome as possible to the Syrian Civil War is in sight. Or at least closer in sight than it was before.

And then... run!

You can easily get your hands on a couple of million dollars, so you run away to, I dunno, South America, maybe the Philippines, get some plastic surgery, and lay low in Panama for the next ten or twenty years selling T-shirts.

Or, I dunno, try to find yourself in this new world. Has Bashar al-Assad somehow ended up in your body? In either event, your best bet to being able to walk away scot free is to somehow be able to prove that a body-swap has occurred.
That or resign and go back to being an eye doctor.
 
I think the story concept of "man from a soft, comfortable, peaceful society gets placed into the body of a ruthless dictator in a brutal one" could work, but using a real living person is just wrong to me.

It's not exactly right, but there's Worlds of the Imperium by Keith Laumer, where an American diplomat from our timeline in the 1960s is kidnapped by the agents of another timeline, who need him to impersonate his own analog from a third timeline they are in conflict with. In this third timeline, he is a military dictator ruling in the ashes of a global conflagration following German victory in WW1, while in the timeline that kidnapped him the divergence is so far back that he doesn't exist, which is why they had to take him from our world.
 
It's not exactly right, but there's Worlds of the Imperium by Keith Laumer, where an American diplomat from our timeline in the 1960s is kidnapped by the agents of another timeline, who need him to impersonate his own analog from a third timeline they are in conflict with. In this third timeline, he is a military dictator ruling in the ashes of a global conflagration following German victory in WW1, while in the timeline that kidnapped him the divergence is so far back that he doesn't exist, which is why they had to take him from our world.

What's interesting is that Laumer had an entirely non-AH novel, Embassy (1965) where the diplomat is making his career in the establishment, and he ends up in Stockholm, where Worlds of the Imperium began. In fact, Embassy was written after Worlds of the Imperium. Strange.
 
The current edition looks to be the result of the creator having "Alien Space Bats" added to their categories one time too many by some meddling Fandom admin and going all-in on it, by the way. If the site that was my first online entry to the genre is to be criticised, there are far better targets that take themselves far more seriously.
 
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