The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

That would also be dismissed as mythology, because such great birds and fire-spitting ships could not have existed. Things would be made very difficult for the translators in anno 7000. The facts about a world war in the twentieth century that they would discover from fragmentary texts would sound quite incredible. But when the speeches of Marx and Lenin fell into their hands, they would at last be able to make two high priests of this incomprehensible age the centre of a religion. What a piece of luck! People would be able to explain a great deal, provided sufficient clues were still in existence. Five thousand years is a long time. It is a pure caprice on nature's part that she allows dressed blocks of stone to survive for 5,000 years. She does not deal so carefully with the thickest iron girders. In the courtyard of a temple in Delhi there exists, as I have already mentioned, a column made of welded iron parts that has been exposed to weathering for more than 4,000 years without showing a trace of rust for it contains neither sulphur nor phosphorus ...»