{"id":50885,"date":"2015-01-24T15:00:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-24T21:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50885"},"modified":"2015-01-23T20:57:07","modified_gmt":"2015-01-24T02:57:07","slug":"western-civilizations-finest-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=50885","title":{"rendered":"Western Civilization&#8217;s Finest Hour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was fifty years ago today that Winston Churchill died.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a strong case to be made that Churchill was the greatest person of the past 100 years; that without him, Western Civilization might be a very different thing today.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/images.dailyexpress.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com\/img\/dynamic\/1\/590x\/06n25churchill-382089.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"472\" height=\"280\" \/><\/p>\n<p>He was a great political thinker, a great statesman, and &#8211; especially in the darkest hours of World War 2 in Europe &#8211; one of the most epochal leaders of all time.<\/p>\n<p>And one of the great orators; I&#8217;m as unemotional a person as you&#8217;ll ever meet, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel something stirring at Churchill&#8217;s greatest speech, his &#8220;Dunkirk&#8221; speech:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/N89Cpc4vl60\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He rallied a people whose backs were worse than &#8220;up against the wall&#8221; &#8211; and a civilization that&#8217;d just taken a massive beating after one of the bleakest quarter-centuries in history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was fifty years ago today that Winston Churchill died. There&#8217;s a strong case to be made that Churchill was the greatest person of the past 100 years; that without him, Western Civilization might be a very different thing today. He was a great political thinker, a great statesman, and &#8211; especially in the darkest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50885"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50890,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885\/revisions\/50890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}