Thus ends Western Civilization

The London Daily Mail reports this week that one in four Britons don't believe Prime Minister Winston Churchill actually existed.

They suspect he is a mythical character, rather than a historical one.

Likewise, they think historical figures such as Florence Nightingale, Sir Walter Raleigh, Mahatma Gandhi and Cleopatra were also fictional personalities created for literature or films.

On the other hand, they believe Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

You can laugh about a survey like this, but I suspect we should all be very, very angry about it – at least the three-quarters of us who understand Churchill was not only a real guy but an important one in the history of Western Civilization.

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In fact, he wrote the book on Western Civilization – the classic "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples."

These results are even more stunning when you consider that about one-quarter of Britain's population was alive when Winston Churchill was around!

But how would the rest of today's Brits know about this?

Who was supposed to tell them?

Where were they supposed to learn the basics of modern history?

For that matter, if Americans were polled, I suspect their performance would be even more humiliating. That's because education is in shambles. I doubt very much if government-paid school teachers in either the U.S. or United Kingdom would know more than the general population.

That would be an interesting poll. But I won't hold my breath waiting for CNN or ABC or the New York Times to commission it any time soon.

They're too busy lobbying for more government spending and control over education. It seems you just can't get too much of a failed thing.

And FAILED, with a capital F, is the only way to grade our modern, top-down, command-and-control, politically correct, centralized government mis-education system.

Having failed children and parents for 20, 30, 40 years now, our very way of life is threatened as a result.

From Western Civilization sprang the unique and relatively new idea of self-government – that individual people are best suited to run their own lives, to govern themselves freely and with minimal interference from government.

Yet the people who birthed this notion of self-government also warned it would only work within a populace schooled in both biblical morality and the history of those who came before us.

Surveys like this and my observations of the cultural decay surrounding us suggest to me we are in danger of losing our freedom.

Freedom isn't license.

Freedom is only attainable and sustainable with responsibility and knowledge.

Can anyone tell me with a straight face that we're as well-equipped for self-government as generations past?

Can anyone tell me we're actually wiser than our parents and grandparents?

Can anyone tell me our world is headed in a direction that is encouraging for our children and grandchildren?

We're headed into the gutter – into the sewer.

Western Civilization is in real trouble. It is under attack. It is under siege.

It's about to go out not with a bang, but with a whimper.

No one is even fighting for it any more. No one is championing it. No one is explaining what will replace it.

Please heed this warning: There is only one thing likely to fill the vacuum when it goes. It's called tyranny. You can call it other names – fascism, communism, socialism. They're all the same. They all mean people will be disempowered in favor of elites. After all, only the elites will be equipped intellectually to make the tough decisions.

That's the way it happens.

So, it's no laughing matter that one-quarter of Britons don't even realize Winston Churchill was a real person.

It's one of those signposts on the road to tyranny.

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