Fifth column

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For other uses of Fifth Column, see Fifth Column (disambiguation)

A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermines from within a larger group to which it is expected to be loyal, such as a nation. The term originated with a 1936 radio address by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. As four of his army columns moved on Madrid, the general referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his "fifth column," intent on undermining the Republican government from within.

The term is also used in reference to a population who are assumed to have loyalties to countries other than the one in which they reside or who supported some other nation in war efforts against the country they lived in.

During World War II, German minority organisations in Poland and Czechoslovakia formed Selbstschutz which actively helped the Third Reich in aggression against those countries and engaged in widescale atrocities.

The Japanese American internment in the United States was justified on the basis that those of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast would act as a fifth column. Irish Catholics resident in the UK have been sometimes viewed in this way due to "The Troubles" of the late 20th century (see also Guildford Four, Birmingham Six).

Today some people in a number of Western countries see radical Islamists - or even Muslims in general - as being a fifth column of a global Islamist movement, with its notion of a transnational Ummah.

Sources

  • "The German Fifth Column in Poland" London: Polish Ministry of Info, 1941
  • "Fifth Column at Work" by Bilek Bohumil, description of Geramn minority in Czechoslovakia, London, Trinity, 1945.
  • "The German Fifth Column in the Second World War" Jong, Louis de New York Fertig, 1973
  • "The Fifth Column, and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War" New York Scribner, 1969[[de:F�nfte Kolonne]]


References

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