Fifth column

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Template:Other uses2 A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group such as a nation from within. A fifth column can be a group of secret sympathizers of an enemy that are involved in sabotage within military defense lines, or a country's borders.[1] A key tactic of the fifth column is the secret introduction of supporters into the whole fabric of the entity under attack.[2] This clandestine infiltration is especially effective with positions concerning national policy and defense.[2] From influential positions like these, fifth-column tactics can be effectively utilized, from stoking fears through misinformation campaigns, to traditional techniques like espionage.[2]

Origin

Emilio Mola, a Nationalist General during the Spanish Civil War, told a journalist in 1936 that as his four columns of troops approached Madrid, a "fifth column" of supporters inside the city would support him and undermine the Republican government from within.[3] The term was then widely used in Spain. Ernest Hemingway used it as the title of his only play, which he wrote in Madrid while the city was being bombarded and published in 1938 in his book The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.[4]

Contemporary usage

In the United States at the end of the 1930s, as involvement in the European war seemed ever more likely, those who feared the possibility of betrayal from within used the newly coined term "fifth column" as a shorthand for sedition and disloyalty. The rapid fall of France in 1940 led many to blame a "fifth column" rather than German military superiority. Political factions in France blamed one another for the nation's defeat and military offcials blamed the civilian leadership, all helping feed U.S. anxieties. In June 1940, Life ran a series of photos under the heading "Signs of Nazi Fifth Column Everywhere". In July 1940, Time magazine called fifth column talk a "national phenomenon".[5] The New York Times referred in August 1940 to "the first spasm of fear engendered by the success of fifth columns in less fortunate countries".[6] One report identified participants in Nazi "fifth columns" as "partisans of authoritarian government everywhere", citing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and the Netherlands.[7]

Ernest Hemingway wrote a play called The Fifth Column that he published in 1938. British journalist John Langdon-Davies, who covered the Spanish Civil War, popularized the term by publishing an account called The Fifth Column in 1940. The New York Times published three editorial cartoons that used the term on August 11, 1940.[8]

Later usage

  • German minority organizations in Czechoslovakia formed the Sudeten German Free Corps, which aided the Third Reich. Some claimed they were "self-defense formations" created in the aftermath of World War I and unrelated to the German invasion two decades later.[9] More often their origins were discounted and they were defined by the role they played in 1938-39: "The same pattern was repeated in Czechoslovakia. Henlein's Free Corps played in that country the part of Fifth Column".[10]
  • In 1945, a U.S. State Department document compared the earlier efforts of Nazi Germany to mobilize the support of sympathizers in foreign nations to the superior efforts of the international communist movement at the end of World War II: "a communist party was in fact a fifth column as much as any [German] Bund group, except that the latter were crude and ineffective in comparison with the Communists".[11] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1949: "the special Soviet advantage — the warhead — lies in the fifth column; and the fifth column is based on the local Communist parties."[12]
  • Some Israeli Jews, including politicians, rabbis, journalists and historians, have referred to the Arab citizens of Israel (who compose 25% of Israel's population) as a potential fifth column on the ostensible grounds that Arab-Israelis frequently identify more with the Palestinian cause than with the State of Israel or Zionism.[14][15]
  • Muslims comprise nearly 20% of India's population and have at times been discussed as a potential "fifth column".[citation needed] Before independence, others identified a Japanese fifth column in India[citation needed] and some thought the British would retain certain princely states to serve them in that role.[citation needed]
  • Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 science-fiction novel Sixth Column describes the work of a "sixth column," a hidden resistance movement fighting an oppressive occupying force of Asians on American soil. The novel included many references to the Spanish events in which the term originated, so as to contrast the–in the author's view–traitorous fifth column with the novel's patriotic sixth.[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ http://ask.yahoo.com/20000110.html
  2. ^ a b c http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/206477/fifth-column
  3. ^ fifth column. (2008). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved January 14, 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9034225
  4. ^ The Fifth Column and Forty-Nine Stories. The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 24 June 2010.
  5. ^ Richard W. Steele, Free Speech in the Good War (St. Martin's Press, 1999, 75-6
  6. ^ New York Times: Delbert Clark, "Aliens to Begin Registering Tuesday," August 25, 1940, accessed June 27, 2012.
  7. ^ New York Times: Otto D. Tolischus, "How Hitler Made Ready: I - The Fifth Column," June 16, 1940, accessed July 7, 2012. "Luxembourg was almost completely seized by German tourists with machine guns even before German regulars arrived."
  8. ^ New York Times: Frederick R. Barkley, "Nation Shapes Defense against Foes at Home," August 11, 1940, accessed July 7, 2012
  9. ^ Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Post-War Germany, 1918-1923 (1952), 88
  10. ^ Yale Law School: Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Volume 4, 215, December 20, 1945, accessed July 19, 2012
  11. ^ Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (Oxford University Press, 1988), 10
  12. ^ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Freedom (Heinemann, 1950), 92-3
  13. ^ "North Koreans in Japan have long been vilified as a communist fifth column" (Hans Greimel, "Test sparks N. Korea Backlash in Japan", Associated Press dispatch, October 24, 2006 [1])
  14. ^ "... they hurl accusations against us, like that we are a 'fifth column.'" (Roee Nahmias, "Arab MK: Israel committing 'genocide' of Shiites", Ynetnews August 2, 2006)
  15. ^ "... a fifth column, a league of traitors" (Evelyn Gordon, "No longer the political fringe", Jerusalem Post September 14, 2006)
  16. ^ Robert A. Heinlein, Sixth Column (Gnome Press, 1949), 36: "this would not be a fifth column of traitors, bent on paralysing a free country; but the antithesis of that, a sixth column of patriots whose privilege it would be to destroy the morale of invaders, make them afraid, unsure of themselves." See sffworld.com: Mark Yon, Review of Heinlein, Sixth Column, accessed July 23, 2012

Further reading

  • "The German Fifth Column in Poland" London: Polish Ministry of Info, 1941
  • "Fifth Column at Work" by Bohumil Bilek, description of German minority in Czechoslovakia, London, Trinity, 1945
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