And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast.
--The Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child's Story

What determines the future of states and entire civilizations? The most profound, and at the same time simplest, answer was given by Samuel Smiles, a mid-19th-century British philosopher.

He wrote: “The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex of the individuals composing it. Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men”.

What makes an average individual a law-abiding, sensible, responsible citizen—loyal to their country and ready for civilized dialogue? The answer is simple: education.

The Founding Fathers of liberal democracy believed in an educational system capable of fully unfolding human potential. In the vision of Locke, John Stuart Mill, Madison, and Franklin, Western values were based, first, on the foundation of national culture; second, on humanistic ideals; third, on the principles of morality laid down by the Jewish prophets and Christian thinkers; and finally, on the concepts of rationalism.

In contemporary postmodern society, all four of these pillars have been totally destroyed. National traditions are erased from collective memory and remain only as historical relics in museums, empty churches, and monuments of medieval Gothic architecture. The humanistic ideal of a person striving for self-improvement, praised by Socrates and Epictetus and the Italian humanists, has been castrated and crucified (“Dead White European Males”, isn’t that so?).

The religious-ethical code begun by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah was denigrated and rejected. Finally, the rationalism of the 18th–19th centuries was declared dead after the disasters of the 20th century and replaced by irrationalism as an independent approach free from any restrictions

What do we see today?

• Nearly half of 18-24-year-old Britons (45%) don’t know that Nelson led the British to Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar; 34% were unaware that Charles Darwin was English.
• Half of all Germans do not know the exact date when Berlin was divided.
• Half of German teenagers do not know that Adolf Hitler was a dictator, and only a third were certain that the East German government toppled in 1989 was totalitarian. “This is shocking. These are students that have almost no political knowledge at all,” said Klaus Schroeder of the Free University in Berlin, one of the authors of the study.
• In USA almost 20% of 1,200 American teens could not identify the American enemy in World War II, and more than 25% mistakenly believed that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Half did not know whom Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated. “It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial,” said Lynne Munson, Common Core's executive director.
• 83% of U.S. Adults polled failed a basic test on the American Revolution.
• Over half mistakenly attributed the Karl Marx quote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” to either Thomas Paine, George Washington or Barack Obama. More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place;
• The incredible ignorance of the youth was revealed during the war between Israel and the Hamas Islamists after the massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. Thousands of students took to the streets with slogans such as “Free Palestine from the river to the sea”. Ron E. Hassner, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the following: “From Which River to Which Sea?”:

“Only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic”. 75% could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map. 25% “of these students placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea”.

• In 2023 Daily Mail wrote: “One in five young Americans have a positive view of Osama Bin Laden” and “three in 10 believe the views of the terrorist leader who slaughtered thousands of innocent people were a ‘force for good’”.

“Another DailyMail.com poll in October found one in 10 voters under the age of 30 had a positive view of Hamas, despite the group's murderous attack on Israel that killed more than 1,300 men, women and children”.

Ugly quasi-Marxist theories have crippled the education system. Education ministries, departments of education, schools and teachers preach madness.

The aggressive ignorance prevailing in the humanities not only deprives people of truthful information but destroys the moral and spiritual equilibrium of the average person. Their consciousness is filled with speculations, myths, and rumors. They feel like strangers in an information jungle full of surreal, spellbinding, and frightening ghosts. They are alone in the world, with no foothold, no anchor, no lodestar, no safety belt of religious and moral values. They drift, becoming easy prey for totalitarian ideologies, sects, and frauds.

People don’t believe in God. But it’s necessary to believe in something, so they believe in flying saucers, ghosts, stars, magic, and witchcraft. Exactly according to G.K. Chesterton's idea: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything”.

• Nearly four in 10 Britons believe in ghosts, 22% believe in astrology, and 15% believe in fortune telling or Tarot. In 1951, only 7% of people believed in such things;
• The number of ‘witches’ and Americans practicing Wicca religious rituals increased dramatically and achieved 1.5 million in U.S. in 2018. In 1990, they estimated about 8,000 Wiccans in this country.
• Astrology, theories about aliens and reptilians, even the flat earth theory are spread vehemently;
• Insane conspiracy theories, as well as Satanism are gaining an unparalleled popularity. Satanic sect “grown over the last six years into an international movement that boasts more than 100,000 members, with 18 official chapters in the U.S. …”.
• The Zombie Apocalypse is discussed in reputable publications with unprecedented seriousness.

One could expect that at least the Academy would remain a bastion of Reason and enforce knowledge but, alas, the opposite occurs. We see modern inquisitors on pulpits who are ready to burn “heretics” at the stake – whether they are opponents of gender madness or those who are skeptical about global warming. What values do teachers and professors communicate to young people if their worldview, values and analytical skills are quite fit for Tertullian's famous formula, “It is certain because it is impossible”?

Not rationality, logic, and knowledge, but their crippled conscience and intellectual anomalies determine their thoughts and actions.

9/11 gave us the best examples of such irrational hatred. Famous professors proudly declared that *“Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote”;

• “the United States had it coming”;
• the ruins at Ground Zero “more beautiful than the buildings were”;
• “…ultimate cause[the terrorist attacks] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy”;
• “[The American flag] is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression”;
• 9/11 were “no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism...that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime”;
• One of them requested students to describe 9/11 …from the perspective of Al-Qaeda.
• At The George Washington University 9/11 was changed to a “Freshman Day of Service”.

Let me stop there.

We observe the triumph of quasi-religious madness, surpassing in its perversion the fanaticism of the Middle Ages and the obsession with class struggle among the Communists. Psychosis has affected all areas of scientific activity.

• Students of London University demanded to remove Plato, Descartes and Kant from their syllabus simply because they were white, and replace them with philosophers from Africa and Asia;
• Students at the University of Pennsylvania replaced the picture of Shakespeare with the picture of Audre Lorde, an African American writer, self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet";
• After Trump’s wins in 2016 and 2024 students were crying, teachers canceled lectures, universities offered students milk, cookies, puzzles, Legos, and ‘distress sessions’. Harvard's law school, meanwhile, put tissue boxes in every classroom;
• Universities exclude white and Asian students under DEI programs on “race-based preferences”;
• “straight white men” feel alienated in the higher education workplace.

Paranoid professors are obsessed with the cult of Critical Race Theory that permeates the entire Academy and all areas of knowledge.

• One of them wished “White Genocide for Christmas”;
• Second one said about white people: “we got to take these motherf*****s out”;
• Third (iconic figure of America Prof. Ibram Xolani Kendi): “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity”;
• Forth, an advocate of slavery in the Muslim world, called “Muslims in America should stand with BLM”;
• Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber, a fanatic of DEI, systematically discriminated against “oppressors,” like whites and males;
• At the University of California in San Francisco, Dante King, the author of a new award-winning book and docuseries, said that “whites are psychopaths”… who have a “right to rape black women”;
• University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) discriminating against ‘straight white males’;
• At the event in Berea College (Kentucky) ‘white citizenship’ and ‘Trumpism’ were described as terrorism;
• Rice University introduced a new discipline: AFROCHEMISTRY: THE STUDY OF BLACK-LIFE MATTER;
• Health experts want to prioritize people of color for a Covid-19 vaccine;
• Scientists from King’s College London and New York University proposed to change the chess rules: black pieces get two consecutive moves at the beginning of the game to “eliminate the unfair advantage enjoyed by players using the white pieces”

The scientific community is plagued by “cancel culture”. Museums are being transformed from repositories of knowledge into a burial ground of knowledge.

• BLM protests British Natural History Museum reviews ‘offensive’ collections, including Charles Darwin & Carl Linnaeus exhibitions, as ‘legacies of colonies, slavery and empire’;
• National Museum Wales planned to cancel steam trains because steam train 'rooted in colonialism and racism';
• Academics at the Museum of London ‘discovered’ that black women of African descent were more likely to die of the medieval plague in London due to “premodern structural racism” in the medieval world. There is no data at all on the number of black women in medieval London;
• At International Botanical Congress in Madrid it was decided to rename more than 200 plants, algae and fungi to combat racism;
• The National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian Institution center in Washington, D.C., featured exhibits that glorify the Nation of Islam. Its leader, Louis Farrakhan, said that “white people deserve to die” and referred to Jews as ‘termites’ and followers of the ‘synagogue of Satan’;
• Shakespeare's birthplace in the playwright's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon to be 'de-colonised' over fears his success “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy”. A growing number of 'woke' academics are refusing to teach Shakespeare in U.S. schools, arguing that he promotes ‘racism’, ‘white supremacy’ and ‘intolerance’.

Paranoia surrounding ‘dying Mother Earth’ turns scientists into crazed monsters.

• They suggested cannibalism to solve the problem of global warming and to grow steak using human cells and blood;
• They forced students to pray to ‘the ancestors’ and ‘Mama Earth’ and referred to modern medicine as ‘white science’;
• Others believe that that the only “realistic” way to reduce emissions to “avoid (a) catastrophic [climate] breakdown” is “the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate” or plotting to block the sun with a giant umbrella the size of Argentina;
• University of Helsinki gave climate activist Greta Thunberg, a girl who struggled to complete high school education with Asperger syndrome … a honorary doctorate in theology.

Hatred of Israel, a tiny country surrounded by Islamist regimes and brutal tyrannies, subjugated Academia.

• One of them called Hamas’ massacre in Israel on October 7 ‘exhilarating’;
• The other (a transgender man who identifies as a woman and Jew), said she “supports the killing of any Israeli or Zionist colonialist”;
• Veganism and animal rights in Israel “…is racism because it is associated with a narrative of Israeli national superiority”;
• According to a research paper that won a Hebrew U (!) teachers' committee prize, ‘racism’ is also the absence of rapes of Arab women by IDF soldiers;
• Columbia Prof., “an interdisciplinary scholar of indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies”, praised Hamas terrorists for being “really … organized” on October 7;
• According to Jewish Judith Butler, feminist gender theorist and UC Berkeley academic, “Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left” and the October 7 massacre was “armed resistance”;
• After October 7, Utrecht’s University of Applied Science (Netherlands) postponed a lecture series on the Holocaust to “facilitate a diverse and balanced dialogue”;
• 80 CUNY professors signed a petition saying Hamas atrocities are legit ‘Military Operation’; professors at Northwestern University described Hamas as a ‘political group’;
• A Prof. at Wake Forest University even admitted that she was ‘tempted to shoot up’ Israeli music festival like Hamas did on October 7, and a Prof. at Emory University wished ‘Glory to all resistance fighters’ (i.e. Hamas).

The Academy has lost its intellect, as well as conscience and humanity, not to mention scientific and critical thinking.

Modern political theories have created surreal constellations worthy of Kafka's pen.

• A Swedish researcher “discovered” that the word ‘Allah’ was embroidered on Vikings’ funeral clothes;
• A French professor suggested creating an Islamic state within France to …avoid civil war;
• “Progressive’ researchers prove that transgender women “can breastfeed” and called parents who read fairy tales to their kids to be thinking about how they are “unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children” by doing so;
• Academic departments, university trade unions, and student organisations declared that “Free Palestine is only possible through Queer, Racial, Gender, Reproductive, and Environmental Justice”, that supporting Palestine is a “feminist issue” and “Trans liberation can’t happen without Palestinian liberation”;
• A biology professor asked students to write about the impact of “genocide in Gaza on human health and biology”;
• A woke dance school dropped ballet as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist’;
• An Associate Professor of Research Methods and Human Development and Family Science asserted that even the institution of marriage promotes ‘white supremacy’;
• Teachers in Toronto were asking high school students to identify themselves as ‘settlers’ and ‘colonialists’;
• Students at Columbia University declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization”;
• a Professor who refused to inflate grades for black students was castigated as a ‘racist’.
• Princeton launched a “new ‘Drag University’ program” for preparation of future drag queens, while The University of British Columbia advertised a summer camp for “queer, trans, Two-Spirit, questioning, and allied (2S/LGBTQ+) youth from across B.C. and Yukon” on remote island to be “free from colonial notions such as the nuclear family”; and in San Diego (California) children are taught about “30 'LGBTQ Youth Sexual Orientations' including graysexual, queer, asexual and pansexual”;
• One Yale-affiliated psychiatrist encouraged LGBTQ+ people whose family members voted for Donald Trump to cut ties and shun them.

I could go on and on…

The situation at the Academy is aggravated by the enormous influence of countries whose totalitarian ideology is incompatible with democratic values. Qatar, a tiny Middle Eastern emirate that sponsors all Islamist movements including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, between 2007 and 2024, gave more than $5.6 billion to 61 American schools, including Ivy Leagues. Or is that $20 billion? Or perhaps even $100 billion? Who knows?

The Qatari government is funding teacher salaries, curriculums in American schools via Qatar Foundation International (QFI) to advance Qatari influence.

Ignorance, moral corruption, pathological universalist concepts, and dubious external influences have poisoned the well of Western thought. The cultural totalitarianism turned people into sterile zombies, brainwashed them, perverted the minds of men and women, and subdued intellectuals responsible for the future of their people.

There is no longer any strength or desire for the training of mind and body that Locke called for-- only fatigue, emptiness and doom, hidden by cheap shows and fleeting pleasures.

***

What ultimately happened to the abducted Children of Hamelin? We know the end of this story. They became the Ashab al-Kahf (the Companions of the Cave), believed in Allah, and a mosque was built over their cave.

Alexander Maistrovoy——Bio and Archives

Alexander Maistrovoy is a graduate of Moscow Univ. in Journalism, worked there in his field and made aliyah in 1988. He works at the Russian language newspaper Novosty Nedely, has had articles posted on many internet sites and authored “Ways of God” about different religious and ethnic groups in the Holy Land, and with Mark Kotliarsky the Russian book Jewish Atlántida.

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