It is impossible for the ordinary human mind to fully grasp the evil of Joseph Stalin.  He purposefully engineered the starving to death of over ten million people in Ukraine.  In terms of mass murder, Stalin's Ukrainian Holocaust was an even greater crime than Hitler's Jewish Holocaust. Millions more were hauled off to be enslaved and die in the Gulag, or tortured and shot for the slightest suspicion of anything Stalin was suspicious of.  Many of his closest deputies were ordered to put their parents, wives, or children to death to prove their loyalty. Yet this tyranny, this monstrous evil, is not a mystery.  Evil exists, deeply embedded in certain human souls.  That isn't mysterious;  it is a basic fact of  human society.  The true mystery is why and how such is evil is tolerated.  Stalin tyrannized the Soviet Union for thirty years.  In all those years, there is not one single known attempt on his life.  Not one. Which then, is the greater depravity:  Stalin killing people, or no one killing him?  The former, of course.  Evil itself is the greater evil -- but toleration of it is the greater mystery.

I recently received a very kind letter from ToThePointer Hagan Hetz, of the famous Fairview Evergreen Nurseries in Pennsylvania (www.fairviewevergreen.com). He wanted to know what I thought of President Bush's September 7 address to the nation on Iraq. OK, Hagan, here it goes. While listening to GW, I was thinking about Alberto Fujimori.

When Albert Einstein wrote and offered his initial papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with no academic credentials.  Needless to say, for established professional physicists, the overthrow of the principles upon which their lives' work was based by a 26 year-old kid nobody every heard of did not go over too well.So almost 100 years later, here comes another kid, a high school dropout no less, who may impact 21st Century science the way Einstein did the 20th.  Peter Lynds, a 27 year-old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand,  may change the way that we think about time and its relationship to classical and quantum mechanics and cosmology.

Last month, in the August 18/25 issue, The New Republic (TNR) magazine ran a cover story which focused on my role in creating the Reagan Doctrine, which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. While not critical of me directly, the article criticizes the leaders of the anti-Soviet freedom fighter movements the Reagan Doctrine supported.  This is supposed to serve as a warning to the Bush White House regarding putative support for anti-radical movements within the Moslem world.  Here is my response.  We'll see what TNR does with it.

You know I'm not Jewish.  And I'm not a supporter of Israel for Millennial Christian reasons (e.g., Jews have to get the Holy Land back before there can be a Second Coming).  I support Israel because I support Western Civilization, of which Israel is a part and because of which she is under attack.  And also because I think proto-hominids who slaughter women and babies on purpose have no right to exist.