More on Jingoism

I thought I'd follow up on yesterday's word of the day. Given the current political landscape, you might think that this was a recent reference. Believe it or not, I found the word in an article about the scouting handbook, written early in the 20th century. Here is an excerpt - I'd link you to the actual article but it's from one of those subscription only services and well, I doubt you have a subscription:

http://chronicle.com
Section: Research & Publishing
Volume 50, Issue 34, Page A14
From the issue dated April 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i34/34a01402.htm
VERBATIM


Original Scouting Handbook Told Boys to Be Prepared to Protect the British Empire, Scholar Says
By PETER MONAGHAN

In his best-selling guide for the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, a former military scout who founded the organization, provided guidance on tying knots, tracking animals and humans, and recognizing criminals. But the book was also a guide on how to preserve the British Empire, explains Elleke Boehmer, a professor of colonial and postcolonial literature at Nottingham Trent University, in her introduction to a new edition of Baden-Powell's text, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (The Original 1908 Edition) (Oxford University Press).

Q. Baden-Powell's book is not so innocent, in your reading?

A. It's by no means an innocent text politically. It's full of unreconstructed jingoism and save-the-Empire derring-do. The 1908 text is the Scout manual in raw form, and there are -- to us, now -- unpleasant racist passages. Baden-Powell also plagiarized quite unscrupulously from all sorts of sources. He made no claims to being an originator. He was a good popularizer.

Just in case you think our generation created jingoism...