Eastern Europe

I'm reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, his history of the awful, merciless slaughter of human beings in the eastern European lands contested by Stalin and Hitler from the late 1920s until 1945.  The methods: mass starvation ("starvation is resistance," Stalin tells us)--both for recalcitrant farmers in the Ukraine who resisted collectivisation or simply couldn't supply impossible quotas of grain and then for Soviet POWs left in pens and simply deprived of food by the Nazis--, outright executions, mass murder, shootings, gassing (in mobile vans and then in death camps), forced migrations, imprisonment. Both sides worked hard to eliminate the many lives they deemed unworthy of life.  Noteworthy moments thus far: the Ukrainian head of the NKVD, in his zeal to uncover plots against Stalin, dreams up a vast Polish conspiracy in the 1930s and informs Yezhov, the head of the NKVD in Moscow.  Yehzov informs Stalin, and then, after having thousands of Poles arrested and shot as imagined participants in this mass conspiracy, plays a "trick" on the Ukrainian head of the NKVD--arresting and executing him for not informing them of this vast plot earlier; 15 out of 25 heads of the Einsatzgruppen, special military units assigned to kill selected civilians after the Wehrmacht moved ahead, were commanded by officers with doctorates: one of their assignments was to kill off all Polish academics--the ultimate academic revenge; overcoming the "psychological barrier" of killing women and children in the summer of 1941 (Why is there never any psychological barrier for killing unarmed, defenseless men?); captured children in Kiev asking not to be beaten as they climbed into the gas vans; Hitler and his stooges believing that the mass murder of millions of Jews was actually part of the war effort, a meaningful war aim.  It goes on.  Can it be viewed as a natural phenomenon, much like a terrible storm?

More Dread

From Heinz Pagels' The Cosmic Code: "Suppose the unified field theory ideas are right and the experimental physicists will observe proton decay.  What does this mean?  The most profound implications are for cosmology--proton decay is the death knell of our universe.  Most of the visible matter in the universe--the stars, galaxies, and gas clouds--is made out of hydrogen, and the nucleus of the hydrogen atom is a single proton.  If protons decay, then the very substance of the universe is rotting away like a cancer that infects matter itself.  This rotting away of matter will, according to these unified theories, take a very long time: about a thousand billion billion (1021) times the present age of the universe."  Then, he reassures us: "We will have lots of time to explore the universe before it vanishes" (308).  So: you can't count on anything, not even protons.  Does it matter that "we" have this time?