A British woman made headlines for saying something about Winston Churchill that was so ignorant that many people assumed that the story was from the Babylon Bee (the best social and political satire site on the web) rather than being a real news story.  While her comment is laughable, it reveals a serious problem with Western culture: rather than having barbarians outside the gate pounding to get in, they're already inside the gate because we created them through our educational systems.

The word "barbarian" comes from the Greek bárbaros, which means someone strange or foreign.  Barbarians, by definition, are outsiders.  In the ancient world, they were the tribes that took advantage of failing empires to invade and, once inside, showed no respect for the empire's cultural heritage, its history, or its values.  Indeed, the barbarian's lack of respect lingers in the word "vandal," the name of the 5th-century Germanic tribes who sacked Rome, utterly destroying many of its structures and treasures, as well as killing its people.

We in the West have done something new and different in human history.  We've created our own barbarians through an education system that has left people taught within our system as ignorant of our cultural heritage, our history, and our values as any marauder bearing down on the ancient world.

In 2013, England rewrote its school curriculum.  "Winston Churchill is no longer named in the new draft."  Winston Churchill, who died in 1965, is the leader who stood alone against Hitler for over two years until the U.S. joined the war.  It is no exaggeration to say he saved the world from total Nazi domination.

So what happens when a country has so little belief in itself that it can no longer teach its children about one of its greatest heroes?  You get Lorraine Jones, a left-wing activist who appeared on Cathy Newman's Channel 4 show in England.  (If that name is familiar, Cathy Newman was the person who relentlessly misinterpreted Jordon Peterson, only to have him patiently correct her every misstatement.)

Jones was on the show to argue that those who were trying to protect Winston Churchill's London statue from activists bent on vandalizing it were in the wrong.  As far as she was concerned, "the people" need to decide whether any statues wrongly commemorate heroes of slavery.  Newman honed in on Churchill, asking "Should the statue of Churchill be there or not?"

And that was when Jones gave an answer that reveals the price the West pays for deliberately rearing a generation of barbarians within its gates:

WATCH AND CRINGE: How stupid is the liberal leader of an 'independent police advisory group' in London?

She was asked about removing the Churchill Statue... Her response... "I haven't personally met him." pic.twitter.com/j31OZ2YjFt

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) June 14, 2020

Well, I've heard many arguments on both sides. Some say that he's a racist; some that say he's a hero. I haven't personally met him. But what I would say is that that question of whether he should remain should be put to the community. (Emphasis added.)

This type of ignorance isn't unique to England, of course.  Thanks to the leftist takeover of American education in the 1960s, it's here, too.  That's why Sen. Tim Kaine, who was the Democrat party's vice presidential candidate in 2016, and who is old enough to know better, stated that "[t]he United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it."

Sen. Tim Kaine: "The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it." pic.twitter.com/VM86sRrtn1

— The Hill (@thehill) June 16, 2020

Kaine thinks history began with the 1619 Project.  He's seemingly unaware that the Native American people had slavery.  Indeed, all indigenous and ancient people had slavery, something that held true across all the Earth's occupied continents.  Slavery was constant worldwide until the West — powered by the Enlightenment and Evangelical Christianity — ended it.  And in America, we ended it with the blood of 600,000 Americans spilled on the field of battle.

The barbarians we raised have vandalized statues of abolitionists and black regiments while insisting that America is systemically and inherently racist.  They are know-nothings because that's what we, as a society, have allowed them to be.  We sat back while our colleges and universities, for fifty years now, have churned out people who are ignorant about our history and institutions and have been raised to hate our values.

Like Lorraine Jones, our American barbarians haven't "personally met" anyone from history.  All they've learned in school is self-loathing.