"Never again" is a phrase that has been linked with the Holocaust of the Nazi concentration camps. Terrible as that was, it was neither the first nor the last genocidal attack on a people. In recent history it was preceded by the Turkish genocide of the Armenians and to a lesser degree by the genocidal attacks of Mussolini and the Luftwaffe against the people of Ethiopia. The same camps that attempted genocide against the Jewish people slaughtered a half million Romany and uncounted Eastern Europeans, not to mention gays, the mentally challenged, and even the physically infirm. Since World War II the world has seen the massive purges of Stalin, the killing fields of Cambodia, and a litany of other atrocities. Since Hiroshima, humanity has possessed the same kind of self-destructive potential that Hister unleashes in Seeds of Heaven.

The phrase "never again" certainly reflects an admirable, even necessary sentiment, but it is equally a two-edged sword, which contains a profound ambiguity. Looking at the result of man's inhumanity to man when that result is the death and suffering of our own people, our own family, we may see either a personal evil or a universal one. If we see a personal evil and fail to recognize the quality in human beings generally which perpetuates such things, then we fall into the cycle of victims who themselves become abusers. Violence begets violence and the whole process is perpetuated. "Never again" is understood to apply only to ourselves, which tends to mean that it does happen again, to someone else, and even by our own hands.

The history of Israel and Palestine, while certainly not equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust, evidences this tendency. Heavily armed soldiers shoot children throwing rocks. Rockets fired from helicopters take out entire apartment complexes filled with families for the sake of a single targeted individual. An entire population is quarantined, its movement restricted, subjected to extreme curfews, and is currently being walled up. The echoes of the old European ghettoes are inescapable.

It is a natural human tendency to see everything in terms of ourselves and our own families. It is equally natural to strike back when we are struck. When we are unable to do that immediately, we tend to harbor the emotions of hatred indefinitely and they, in turn, tend to express in torturous ways toward new targets who themselves become a product of the spiral of violence.

In all this human beings tend to forget the core repulsion most everyone feels when confronted with the works of evil. We focus on doers, not on the deeds themselves, and in that focus we ourselves may recreate the very deeds which so disturbed us. Generations pass and that revulsion is forgotten along with much of the consciousness of the deeds. But the hatred remains and its effects continue.

Today as in the day of Hister, which is the focus of Seeds of Heaven, we have the capability to literally destroy civilization. We do not know for sure if Atlantis ever existed. We don't know because if it did, the destruction of its fall wiped its existence from human records, leaving only legends and myths and a kind of collective amnesia.

It is, however, certainly possible that Atlantis did exist and that something very much like Hister's hubris and acts of aggression brought it down. It is also possible that, failing to remember and learn from a long-lost past, we could repeat this same process in our own time. The vision of humanity as Sisyphus emerges in which mankind perpetually struggles to master the challenges of environment, develops social systems that gradually define models of democracy, freedom, and justice, and then, just as a true Golden Age is about to unfold for all of us, we destroy the whole thing and must begin again, forgetting over time what had once been achieved.

In this sense, Seeds of Heaven is a morality tale, a warning, an admonition. Let us all agree that this shall happen "Never Again", but let us also understand that means the deed, that it is the evil itself we must focus upon and expunge, not simply the evildoer.

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