Lemmings throw themselves off cliffs in mass suicides, right? Actually, no. A famous award-winning 1950s film allegedly showing them doing this, was faked. That paragon of responsibility, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, looked into the matter. See here.
Yet most people vaguely believe the lemming story to be true. It's become quite an important part of their thinking and they are unwilling to let it go.
Say to them that lemmings don't actually have a mass death-wish, and they will cry out in astonishment and disbelief. Could a similar delusion be affecting views on NATO expansion, supposedly caused by the shivering fear of tiny, furry states cowering on the edge of the Russian bear-pit, begging for our supposedly mighty protection?
Well, that is certainly what almost everyone thinks now, though the distinguished historian Professor Richard Sakwa, of the University of Kent, says in his excellent and courageous book Frontline Ukraine that NATO's expansion has in fact created the very fear against which it claims to be protecting its new members. Let us see.
WE won't buy your tomatoes. Fancy a nuclear umbrella instead?
The first Warsaw Pact country to join NATO was East Germany (the DDR) , which became a NATO member by being absorbed into the Federal Republic in 1990. Amusingly it had always been a de facto member of the Common Market/EU because West Germany refused to maintain a customs barrier between the two states. Three former Warsaw Pact states (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) joined NATO in 1999. See if you can find any suggestion, between 1989, when they got their freedom, and 1999, that Russia posed any threat to them, or that anyone was complaining of any such threat.
As I recall, at that time, Russia was (as it is now) economically prostrate and pitifully weak in conventional military terms, easily outnumbered in men and money by NATO as a whole. It also had no actual border with the Czech Republic. Nor did Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland (unless you count the exclave at Kaliningrad), Romania or Bulgaria.
Comment: Despite the West's best efforts, Russia is no longer 'economically prostrate' nor 'pitifully weak', but those facts still don't make her a threat. Russia has repeatedly stated its military development has been in response to the West.
I can recall the joke being told at the time that NATO membership was given to these states as a consolation prize, after the EU told them to wait outside. They had to wait till May 2004 to join the EU, along with Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, by which time it had almost completely abandoned any attempts to demand economic and political rigour in its new members and had become openly an instrument of American power in Europe.
Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO in March 2004, again as deficit countries, that is to say, they required much more in the way of commitment than they provided in the way of effective force. In the same way most of the EU's new members demanded far more than they could possibly contribute, and in several cases could only be said to reach EU standards of legality and transparency if the EU closed both its eyes and held its nose.
Did I see the joke 'We've given them our nuclear umbrella because we don't want to buy their tomatoes' in the Economist? I haven't the archive access to find it, but I can't think where else I got it from. The problem with these countries was that leaving the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, and exposing themselves to the icy winds of capitalism, wasn't actually quite as good as they had hoped it would be.
Communist education had in fact been quite good.
The old industries and their guaranteed jobs collapsed.Their former markets, for agricultural produce and manufactured goods, were also gone. But they had one huge advantage. Schooling and skill-training under Communism had been surprisingly good, often more rigorous than its western equivalent. They were sources of well-educated cheap labour (and they still are, Poland exports huge amounts of unemployment in the form of low-paid migrant workers, Germany shifted a lot of manufacture to the Czech Republic etc). Most of them would be in a terrible mess had they not latched on to various subsidy teats in the West. Poland's EU subsidy is gigantic, for instance.
Again, I can recall, at that time, no evidence of any kind that Russia was menacing these countries or making territorial demands upon them. It couldn't if it wanted to.
As Tony Brenton, formerly Britain's ambassador in Moscow has pointed out here
'The picture we are building up in our minds of a revanchist Russia is as absurd as their picture of an aggressive and encircling West. Russian military expenditure is one tenth of NATO's and their economy one twentieth.'If Russia wanted to attack the Baltics, it had years to do so
I might add that the three Baltic Republics escaped Moscow's control in 1991. After the stupid and failed KGB-inspired displays in Riga and Vilnius in January that year, which I witnessed, no further attempt was made to stop them. In the time between their departure and their supposedly frightened scurry under Auntie NATO's skirts 13 years later. (Thirteen years!), there was no attempt made by Moscow to reassert control, despite (in two of the Baltic states) some rather stupid and indefensible treatment of the Russian minorities there. Perhaps they wish they had acted. As the Baltic States' membership of NATO now puts Western forces in Narva 85 miles from St Petersburg, about the same difference as Coventry is from London. We, who are surrounded by deep salt water, would gasp if any of our major cities (especially one which suffered a lengthy enemy siege in living memory) were within such a short distance of the forces of an increasingly hostile alliance.
Now I must once again mention Peter Conradi's very interesting new book Who Lost Russia, which will eventually require a full posting here in its own right. Mr Conradi, a distinguished former Moscow foreign correpondent, has looked into the origins of NATO expansion and what he found is devastating.
First, he notes that the great US diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the whole US Cold War policy, opposed NATO expansion as mistaken. In 1947, in dealing with the USSR, he had taken a wholly different view, begging a complacent Washington, stuffed with Soviet fellow-travellers, to grasp that Stalin was not its friend
He said:
'the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.'The father of the Cold War opposed NATO expansion
But that was because he grasped that post 1991 Russia was wholly different from the Soviet Union.
See this interview here. The whole thing's worth reading but here's an example: '
''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.(my emphasis) This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''He added: ' ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime."' (My emphasis)
''What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,''
On 7th February 1997, the London Times, now a keen enthusiast for the 'New Cold War' took a very different view. It ran a leading article supporting Mr Kennan.
It said of him:
' In measured terms, and with much wisdom, he used the pages of The New York Times to analyse and then denounce the course Mr Clinton had set as "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era." Mr Kennan will be 93 in nine days time. He is the last survivor of the generation which, in Dean Acheson's memorable description, was present at the creation of the superpower struggle. Three years before Madeleine Albright was born he started service at the American Embassy in Moscow. In 1946, months before President Clinton drew his first breath, he had sent his "long telegram" back to Washington warning his then still starry-eyed political masters about the real intentions and threat of Stalinist Russia...'They said the policy 'risks undermining the credibility of Nato, weakening the hand of reformers in Russia, and reducing - not enhancing - the real security of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe.' They wouldn't say that now.
'...Europe lives under the liberty he predicted then. When such a man declares so starkly that Nato expansion would destabilise Russian democracy and "restore the atmosphere of the Cold War", it should send a warning to all. When he asks why East-West relations should "become centred on the question of who would be allied with whom and by implication against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict", that demands a convincing answer.''As Mr Kennan correctly notes, at some moment over the past 12 months, with no real warning, this radical redesign of Nato's role moved from general proposition to the edge of policy. It did so despite little public deliberation in this continent and virtually none at all in North America. Mr Clinton's conversion seems to have been inspired more by the desire to please voters of Polish descent in Michigan than any serious military calculation.'
So what happened to Western policy? Why was Bill Clinton, a man unversed in and ignorant of foreign policy, persuaded to back this huge and costly u-turn opposed by the most distinguished thinker in the field?
When I was a crude materialist Bolshevik, I used to believe that arms manufacturers more or less ran the world. I was convinced that these merchants of death actually promoted conflict to sell their wares, like the fictional 'Cator and Bliss' in Eric Ambler's popular front thrillers of the 1930s. When I abandoned this rather thuggish political position, I persuaded myself that this was rubbish(which it largely is). Arms manufacturers are just the same as any other business, most of the time.
Can this be the sordid truth behind the New Cold War?
But in the early 1990s, just as Communism itself collapsed, the Marxist world-view seems to have begun to become true again. Please read this from the New York Times.
Read it all, but here are some key segments:
'American arms manufacturers, who stand to gain billions of dollars in sales of weapons, communication systems and other military equipment if the Senate approves NATO expansion, have made enormous investments in lobbyists and campaign contributions to promote their cause in Washington.Well, I learned in my Soviet days that the madder something appeared to be (e.g. empty restaurants refusing trade because they were 'full', vodka served in teapots and poured into teacups), the more certain it was that it had, buried somewhere, a strong, simple material explanation. Have we here found the squalid, crude reason for the otherwise crazy revival of a dead conflict in the heart of Europe?
The end of the cold war has shrunk the arms industry and forced it to diversify.
But expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- first to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, then possibly to more than a dozen other countries -- would offer arms makers a new and hugely lucrative market.
America's six biggest military contractors have spent $51 million on lobbying in the last two years, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by the Campaign Study Group, a research company in Springfield, Va.
If lobbying costs were included from all companies that perform military-related activities, like computer and technology firms, they would dwarf the lobbying effort of any other industry. Not all of the lobbying has been for NATO expansion. The contractors have billions of dollars worth of other business before Congress. But NATO expansion has been a central concern because it offers so many opportunities.'
'Under NATO rules, new members are required to upgrade their militaries and make them compatible with those of the Western military alliance, which oversees the most sophisticated -- and expensive -- weapons and communication systems in the world. The companies that win the contracts to provide that ''inter-operability'' to the aging Soviet-made systems in Eastern Europe will benefit enormously from NATO's eastward expansion.
Thus the sums spent on lobbying and for campaign contributions are relatively small compared with the potential benefits in the new markets provided by a larger NATO, particularly from the sale of big-ticket items like fighter aircraft.'
Comment: Let it be noted the NYT published that article in 1998. The intertwining of the US government and arms manufacturers into one demonic aspect of the Deep State has only continued.