On this 100th anniversary of the Great War, the rise of anti-Russian jingoism in the American media is apparent to both the right and the left. In The Nation, NYU Russian Studies professor Stephen F. Cohen lamented about the press’s run-up to the Sochi Winter Games:
American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
The word “jingo” goes back to a popular 1878 English music-hall song of anti-Russian agitation stemming from Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus and Balkans:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too
Why the outbreak of jingoism in the Obamaite press?
The Russians today aren’t threatening to take Istanbul or anywhere else of strategic importance. They are no longer building a tank armada to punch through to the Rhine or the Persian Gulf. Instead, they’re spending their loot on ski lifts and figure-skating rinks.
The US spends something under an order of magnitude more on its military than Russia does. Moreover, the US has been encircling Russia politically and spending $5 billion over the decades buying friends in neighboring Ukraine, where the State Department’s Victoria Nuland is currently attempting to overthrow the elected government.
The Russians, lacking all natural defenses to the West, are sensitive to the proximity of hostile alliances. They believe, with much historical justification, that in February 1990 Secretary of State James Baker and West German leader Helmut Kohl promised Mikhail Gorbachev no Eastern expansion of the NATO military bloc in return for allowing the reunification of Germany by withdrawing the 380,000 Soviet troops from East Germany.
The West has repeatedly violated that gentleman’s agreement, in 2008 even putting Ukraine and Georgia on track for NATO membership. (Georgia’s subsequent invasion of Russian-held South Ossetia proved a major embarrassment, however.)
