Pen Meets Paper Nov.22'10

Opinion by Helge Nome
Having been a word crafter for many years now, I have come to realize the power of the word to shape the human mind. Along with images, words can be combined in innumerable ways, both written and spoken, to convey messages that literally shape the minds that are subjected to them. For example, by repeating a message over and over again, at the exclusion of many possible other ones, the minds exposed to this onslaught of words and images centered around a particular theme, becomes increasingly less receptive to contradictory messages as time goes on.
For example, during the cold war the population of the Soviet Union was inoculated with Marxist ideas and ideals as the way towards a civilized society. The focussed and repetitive messages masked the underlying reality of an oligarchy of the select few
that did whatever they pleased with a generally compliant population. The mainstream propaganda machine worked hard at maintaining the status quo until the seams of the carefully crafted imaginary dress of words split open from the pressure of reality. This same process is now underway in the West, leading towards the same outcome that emerged in the Soviet Union. “The King has no clothes”! Democracy, Justice, Fairness are shown to be figments of the popular imagination, planted into the minds of the populace, but shown to be largely absent in the real world.
We believe that what we learn in educational institutions, be they primary, secondary or tertiary, is substantially correct, within the limitations of our ability to find out. Just to demonstrate how patently wrong this belief is, let us do a little bit of exploration: Remember our history lessons about the “old” world and the “new” world? Culture was born and evolved in the old world, especially in the fertile crescent involving the biblical lands of Mesopotamia, Palestine, Assyria, Persia, Egypt and so on. It spread from there to the Roman Empire and beyond.
The new world was “discovered” by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and was mostly inhabited by primitive tribal folks that were easily subjugated by the Conquistadors. The rest is history, as they say, and the minds of students in North America are literally filled up with stories of what happened afterwards. But what on earth happened before 1492? Was one half of the surface of the earth occupied by civilized people before that time, and the other half inhabited by savages? How likely is that? Do we simply have tunnel vision, living in the comfort of our own fantasy world? The answer is a resounding “Yes”, and the evidence is there for all to see, along the eastern North American seaboard. Here, in the boggy marshlands that litter the low lying coastline for hundreds of miles is compelling evidence for a vast and sophisticated civilization that existed many thousands of years ago, and all you need to do to confirm this is to check out a website called www.ancientcanalbuilders.com and get onboard Google Earth from there. It’s a mind opener.