A fifth columnist is a supporter or secret sympathizer of an enemy nation, and the phrase was coined by Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola Vidal. Before World War II broke out in 1939, Europe was awash with charges of “the fifth column at work” being bandied about by both appeasers as well as those who wanted to stand up to Hitler. One thing was for sure: Jewish groups were adamant that appeasing Germany was the work of fifth columnists; until the Soviet-Nazi peace agreement was signed, that is. (Twenty million dead afterward, and Europe in ruins—appeasers didn’t look as wrong as previously thought.)
Those dreaded two words are hardly used nowadays, although subversion that undermines a nation’s solidarity by any means is alive and kicking. The New York Times, The New Yorker, MSNBC, CNN—I could go on naming most of America’s mainstream media—have done their utmost to reverse the 2016 presidential result. To call them fifth columnists would be an understatement. When the 45th president openly declares he’d like good relations with a country that has more nukes than we do, they call him a traitor. (Coming from an ex-head of the CIA, this is a bit rich.) When he calls a spade a spade, like the “shithole countries” that are sending their criminals over here, they forget that no truer words have ever been spoken, and instead ask for the smelling salts.
The Corrosion of Conse...
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What got me thinking about fifth columnists was a new book that I, of course, will neither buy nor read by one Max Boot, a so-called neoconservative who has announced in his opus that he’s leaving the Republican Party for good because he cannot be associated with people who like Trump or those who voted for him. Losing Boot, of course, feels like losing an obese dead man in a tiny overcrowded lifeboat in a storm. The Republican Party is well rid of him, because if ever there were a fifth columnist among conservatives and Republicans, it was the likes of Boot and that poisoned dwarf William Kristol.
Boot is described by the Times as a “lifelong Republican with sterling neoconservative credentials,” which only means to little ole me that he was an American fifth columnist working full-time for either Halliburton and the military-industrial complex, Israel, or both. Boot’s book is called The Corrosion of Conservatism, another misnomer because if anyone has corroded the Republican Party and stolen the conservative ethos, it’s people like Boot, David Frum, the poisoned dwarf, and their ilk.
