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The Fifth
Column
The term “fifth column” was first used by nationalist general Emilio Mola in
a 1936 radio address, during the Spanish Civil War. The term simply refers
to a
group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group to which it is
expected to be loyal, such as a nation.
In Mola’s
case, he was referring to the citizens of Madrid, who he believed
sympathetic to his cause of overthrowing the legitimate government of
Madrid. As Mola sent his four military columns into Madrid, he called upon
his “fifth column” living in Madrid, his sympathizers, to provide aid,
comfort and propaganda assistance to his soldiers, thereby assisting with
their victory over Madrid’s defenses.
The term has
been used many times since in many parts of the world. But it is always used
to describe a clandestine “enemy within,” overtly claiming loyalty to the
homeland while covertly working to undermine the homeland.
The
American Fifth Column
In America, the term refers to American citizens who are ideologically
aligned with anti-American organizations, sentiments, principles and values,
who work individually or in concert with various organized movements in an
effort to undermine American interests, counter official American policy,
erode American confidence at home and abroad, or in any way aid and abet
America’s enemies, while publicly proclaiming all of it to be an act of
patriotism.
The most
common defense for members of a Fifth Column is the claim of “conscientious
objector,” or “patriotic dissenter.” This defense was used to protect draft
dodgers from legal prosecution as AWOL defectors during the 1960’s. It’s
been used to defend common college war-protesters as well as the American
soldier who rolled a live grenade into his Commanding Officer’s tent,
attacking his fellow soldiers while on deployment in the Middle East. It’s
used to defend members of Congress who have traveled abroad to undermine US
foreign policy and even disclose top secret military intelligence to enemies
of our state.
This is the
American Fifth Column and some of the many rolls they play in the
destruction of a nation they publicly claim to love and support.
For
years, the Fifth Column was seen as only a rag-tag group of left-leaning
counter-culturalists, supporting hand-picked pieces
of the International Socialist agenda, in many cases without even knowing
that they were playing a vital roll in a much grander scheme. Vladimir Lenin
referred to all of them as “useful idiots.” But
today, what was once a clandestine movement of “useful idiots” quietly
operating below radar, has become a well organized and well funded political
juggernaut, largely in control of almost everything we see on TV, hear on
the radio, read in newspapers, magazines and books, and even witness in the
halls of congress.
The
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is/was a school of
neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping
emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung)
of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became
the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal
term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social
Research or who were influenced by it. It is not the title of any
institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the
term to describe themselves.
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of
capitalism who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a
narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist
or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of
working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the
rise of Nazism in an economically and technologically advanced nation
(Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought
might serve to clarify social conditions that Marx himself had never seen.
They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.
Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert
Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization).
Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived
significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude
materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy
and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with
its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of
reality. A key influence also came from the publication in the 1930s of
Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology,
which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought.
Marcuse was one of the first to articulate the theoretical significance of
these texts.
The Frankfurt School is best known for a style of analysis called "critical
theory." Critical theory is indebted to the ideas of German political
philosopher Karl Marx in its emphasis on sources of domination and authority
in society that impede the possibility of human freedom. It departs from
Marxism, however, in locating the sources of domination in the realms of
culture and ideology (system of beliefs), not solely in the economic
structure of society. Critical theory takes the form of a critique of
ideology by attempting to uncover distorting forms of consciousness, or ways
of thinking. This technique draws heavily from the model of psychoanalysis
proposed by the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud in its attempt to liberate
people from illusions and constraints of their own making.
Sources:
Wikipedia |