The World Turned Upside Down

“Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been, this thousand year:

‘Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.

Holy days are despised, new fashions are devised.

Old Christmas is kicked out of town

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turned upside down’…”

-“The World Turned Upside Down” (old English ballad c.1642)

The first stanza of this old English ballad, which was first published in an English political broadside in the mid-1640s, was written in protest to a recently-enacted law, by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament, banning festive celebrations of Christmas. This same tune was played by Lord Cornwallis’s military band during the surrender of his armies to George Washington, on October 19, 1781, marking the effective end of the American Revolution. To those who opposed the banning of festive Christmas celebrations during the British Commonwealth period, and to the once-thought invincible British Army, one hundred forty years later, both events seemed to evoke the feeling that the world, indeed, had turned upside down.

In the few weeks remaining before Christmas, 2015, how prescient it seems to recall this ballad at this particular time and place in the course of world history.

Just seventy years ago, the United States and its allies, defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan concurrently, in the greatest war ever fought since the dawn of mankind. Both Germany and Japan boasted quite powerful military and naval assets, as well as very proficient commands which had engineered stunning victories across two theatres of war, and yet were defeated in a few short years by a determined alliance which had not previously been prepared to wage war.

The reason ?… dogged determination and the will to win, at any and all costs.

Seventy years hence, that same alliance, now united with its former foes, seems incapable of defeating a comparatively, logistically and militarily inferior adversary.

The reason ?…the total lack of determination and will to win, at any and all costs.

Seventy years ago, a wheelchair-bound and ailing progressive Democrat was spending the final weeks of his life finishing the work of wielding and waging war in a crusade to save the world from totalitarianism. Franklin Roosevelt put into motion America’s industrial and military might to join with its allies to defeat Nazism and Imperialistic Japan at the same time. While he did not live to see the actual surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, he brought this country and her allies to the very threshold of victory, because he and his country were determined to do so at all and any costs.

Seventy years later, a healthy and physically-robust progressive Democrat is spending the final fourteen months of his presidency, shrinking from his duties to lead the world in its fight against radical Islamic totalitarianism. Barack Obama has been, and is in, a complete and utter state of denial about the evils of radical Islamic ideology, and has decided to “sit this one out” and leave it to his successors to pick up where he has no ignobly left off, assuming that such successors arrive in time to save the world from its own intransigence.

The contrast in seventy short years could not be more ironic, or more obvious.

Seventy years ago, the President led this country into waging war without reservation, without fear of offense, without misgivings or political correctness, because he saw with clarity what the world would become without doing so.

Seventy years later, the President chides this country for its love of freedom and independence, cautioning us against offending Islam by expressing misgivings about waging war against radical Islam (which he still won’t name) and drowns us in his own vision of political correctness to the very precipice of surrender without a fight.

One need look no further than Obama’s speech, on the very eve of the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor which precipitated our entry into the Second World War, to see that fecklessness and cowardice has now replaced what was once determination and resolve in the Oval Office, in a “world turned upside down”.

-Drew Nickell, 8 December 2015

©2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.