The "Fifth Column" - A Term Is Born!


On March 28, 1939, General Emilio Mola's...



... fascist troops conquer the Spanish capital Madrid!

All of Spain is now under the control of the right-wing regime led by dictator Francesco Franco!

The Republicans, although supported with great enthusiasm worldwide, including by 35,000 volunteers in the "Brigades Internacionales"...





...albeit only half-heartedly supplied militarily by the Soviet Union (for which Stalin also appropriated a large part of the Spanish state gold treasury)....



... have lost the Spanish civil war!



The next picture shows the head fascist Franco entering Madrid - next to him Mola, who is just turning around and waving...:



Here their victory parade...:





Franco's revenge will be bloody and his reign long! It will only end with the death of the dictator on November 20, 1975!

During this time, several hundred thousand alleged and actual opponents are executed and around 1.5 million political prisoners are imprisoned in a total of 190 different concentration camps.

Franco had a soft spot for the medieval killing machine "Garotte"...



...where the delinquent is slowly strangled with a leather noose, while a metal spike is digging into his neck from behind (also slowly)...:





Hundreds of death sentences were carried out with the "Garotte" in Francoist Spain!

Before General Mola began his advance on Madrid, he gave a newspaper interview that went down not only in history but also in common parlance.

Mola explained: "I will lead four columns against Madrid, but the offensive will start with the fifth column."

By this the general means the armed Franco supporters who have stayed behind in the capital and who have so far kept quiet as ordered and are waiting for a signal from the Francoist leadership to strike!

And that's how it happens...:



Madrid falls after just a few days.

In truth, however, the Francoists do not owe their victory to their "fifth column", but to the massive military aid that Hitler's Germany, including around 25,000 soldiers of the so-called "Legion Condor"...





...as well as tanks, trucks, guns and the latest German planes...



... and sent also by Mussolini's fascist Italy...:



The play on words "fifth column", which was born in Mola's newspaper interview, now describes in almost every language of the world clandestine, subversive groups or groups suspected of subversion whose aim is to overthrow an existing order in the interests of a foreign aggressive power.

I've read extensively on the SCW and have often pondered how Spain might have turned out if the Republican government had prevailed. One of my mother's cousins went with the International Brigade - he was a miner in South Wales. I believe he came home OK.

Phil

Interesting as always, Martin

The term itself (fifth column) comes from Mola, but the idea of an inner subversive group which may help an outer power to overthrow an existing order in the interests of a foreign aggressive power, appears in the bible:

"8 Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt.9 “Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” (Book of Exodus, chapter 1).

Of course, no one can be sure that it describes something that actually happened in 13th century BCE Egypt, but it shows that the idea we now call "5th column" was not strange to ancient middle eastern thinking.

Best,

Benny