American Minute with Bill Federer
Fifth Column
"We have seen the treacherous use of the 'fifth column' by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation ...

... These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The term "fifth column” referred to ancient warfare, where two columns of soldiers were in the middle of the battlefield, with two flanks on either side.
The fifth column was spies who had infiltrated the enemy camp to demoralize and confuse them.
This practice was used by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, who took gold from the mines near the Greek city of Amphipolis and used it to bribe citizens of Athens to betray their city.
These paid betrayers and bribed politicians would organize around themselves what have been referred to as "useful fools" or "useful idiots," naive people who actually believed their propaganda.
In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nationalist General Emilio Mola marched toward Madrid with four columns of soldiers, having supporters inside the city as a "fifth column" to undermine the Republican government from within.
While in Madrid, Ernest Hemingway wrote a play which he included in his 1938 book "Fifth column."

These tactics of psychological warfare were perfected during World War II.
Franklin Roosevelt stated May 16, 1940:

"We have seen the treacherous use of the 'fifth column' by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation.

Lightning attacks, capable of destroying airplane factories and munition works hundreds of miles behind the lines, are a part of the new technique of modern war ...
... We must be strong in heart and mind; strong in our faith ...

This nation requires also a toughness of moral and physical fiber ... characteristics of a free people ... a people willing to defend a way of life that is precious to them all, a people who put their faith in God."
Roosevelt stated December 29, 1940:

"Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries.

They seek to stir up ... dissension to cause internal strife.

They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa.

They try to reawaken long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country ...

These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves ..."
FDR continued:

"There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.

I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States."
Following World War II, the Britain, France and other colonial powers gave independence to their former colonies.

This left a power vacuum which the Soviet Union sought to fill by gaining control over these newly independent nations.
Winston Churchill mentioned Soviet use of "fifth columns" in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946:

"In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, communist "fifth columns" are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the communist center.
... Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where communism is in its infancy, the communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization ...

Last time I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention."
Fifth column methods included:
  • espionage,
  • propaganda,
  • infiltration of college campuses,
  • getting Marxist professors hired,
  • establishing student groups to recruit revolutionaries.
  • infiltrate music and movie industries to produce entertainment eroding moral fiber,
  • malign patriotism,
  • gain control of the leadership of all political parties,
  • place moles in government bureaucracies and courts,
  • and finally, sway churches to de-emphasis salvation through the Gospel of Jesus Christ and replace it with social justice issues.

Like a software virus infecting computers, fifth column tactics infected Western Civilization with socialist ideology.
Reagan stated in 1961:

"Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism.

But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program."
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushschev reportedly told Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, in 1959:

"Your children's children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible.

No, you won't accept communism outright, but we'll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have communism.

We won't have to fight you; We'll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands."
General Douglas MacArthur warned the Michigan
legislature in Lansing, Michigan, May 15, 1952:

"Talk of imminent threat to our national security through ... external force is pure nonsense.

It is not of any external threat that I concern myself but rather of insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions – those institutions we proudly called the American way of life."
Eisenhower addressed Congress, February 2, 1953:

"No single country, even one so powerful as ours, can alone defend the liberty of all nations threatened by communist aggression from without and subversion within."
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated:

"The communist threat from without must not blind us to the communist threat from within.

The latter is reaching into the very heart of America through its espionage agents and a cunning, defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our republic."
The Cold War was at its height from 1947 to 1991, with nuclear attacks prevented by mutually assured destruction and proxy wars fought between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and China.

Countries experienced political parties infiltrated, Communist Parties being established, coup d'etat plots to removed leaders, and military conquests.
During this time, 45 countries became communist satellites, often with brutal purges which killed millions.
Countries included:

Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, China, Congo, Cuba, Croatia, Czech Republic, East Germany, Egypt, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Herzegovina, Indonesia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, South Yemen, Syria, Tajikistan, Tibet, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen, and Yugoslavia.
The main takeover tactic was to:

  • Find groups within a country who had grievances.

  • Organize groups to protest and riot.

  • Escalate riots to violence and bloodshed.

  • Bribe and threaten the media to co-opt the information and narrative the public hears.

  • In the midst of the national confusion, carry out a coup or an election rigged, overthrowing the country's representative government and replacing it with a totalitarian dictatorship.

  • Citizens are initially relieved that order was restored but when the dust settles, they have a rude awakening to find their freedoms gone.
The U.S.S.R.'s Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB) organized clandestine opposition groups to destabilize pro-western countries.
The KGB, with the help of Fidel Castro, created the National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC) in 1964; and with the help of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, created the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (ELN).
In 1964, the KGB, with the help of Yasir Arafat, the Egyptian-born nephew of Mufti Amin al-Husseini, created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
In 1968, the KGB created the "liberation theology" to promote a progressive Marxist social justice agenda of class-warfare to destabilize western democracies.
When Soviet communists took control of the nation of Hungary, President John F. Kennedy stated October 23, 1960:

"Americans will never ... recognize Soviet domination of Hungary. Hungary's claim to independence and liberty is not based on sentiment or politics. It is deeply rooted in history, in culture and in law.

No matter what sort of puppet government they may maintain, we do not mean to see that claim abandoned. Americans intend to hasten ... the day when the men and women of Hungary will stand again in freedom and justice."
The CIA began mimicking KGB tactics.

In the 1952, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and CIA Operative Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, participated in Project FF with elements in Egypt's military to replace Egypt's King Farouk and replace him with Gamal Nassar.
In 1953, Iran's Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh began aligning with the U.S.S.R. He nationalized the country's oil industry, taking control away from Britain's Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP).

Britain appealed to the U.S. for help, but President Truman refused.

The next President, Dwight Eisenhower, approved the CIA's first operation to overthrow a foreign government – Operation Ajax.
Though controversial, had Eisenhower not responded, much of the world may have speedily fallen to communist KGB tactics.
Orchestrated by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the tactic involved identifying groups with grievances and organizing them to riot.

Muslim imams were recruited, the press was bribed, and the most feared mobsters in Tehran were hired to get agitators to stage violent riots, and attack mosques.
This destabilized the country of Iran and swayed public opinion against Mossadegh, allowing him to be overthrown in a coup and placed under house arrest till he died.

He was then replaced with the pro-West Shah Resa Pahlavi.
Similar CIA operations were carried out in:

  • Guatemala, 1954;
  • Congo, 1960;
  • Dominican Republic, 1961;
  • South Vietnam, 1963;
  • Brazil, 1964;
  • Chile, 1973;
  • and in other countries in varying degrees with Britain's MI6, becoming the topic of innumerable spy novels.
Secretary of State John Dulles stated April 11, 1955:

"Men face the great dilemma of whether to use force to resist aggression which imposes conditions which violate the moral law and the concept that man has his origins and his destiny in God."
At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Dulles reportedly refused to shake hands with the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai, as he orchestrated the persecutions committed by Mao Zedong's Communist Party, which killed millions.

Zhou Enlai stated:

"One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory."
John Foster Dulles called communism "godless terrorism," stating April 11, 1955:

"Man, we read in the Holy Scriptures, was made a little lower than the angels. Should man now be made little higher than domesticated animals which serve the purpose of their human masters?"
Solzhenitsyn warned at Harvard, June 8, 1978:

"Many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind.

And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current."
Churchill noted regarding youth who felt that since 10 percent of citizens were not experiencing prosperity that they should consider socialism, June 13, 1948:

"I do not at all wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries, that what used to be called the 'submerged tenth' can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their level."
David Horowitz, a conservative author who had previously been a 1960s radical Marxist, wrote in the Jewish World Review, September 6, 2001:

"The social justice organizations ... protesters are the 'fifth column' vanguards envisaged by Weatherman, declaring war on the Empire and plotting to tear down its walls from within."
Solzhenitsyn warned June 30, 1975:

"I ... call upon America to be more careful with its trust ...

Prevent those ... from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road."
Friedrich Hayek wrote:

"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the judicial safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice."
On February 7, 2020, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews addressed a panel following the Democrat Presidential debate, where some of the candidates espoused socialism.

Chris Matthews had stated:

"The issue of this campaign, it is that word "socialism" ... Younger people like it.

Those of us like me, who grew up in the Cold War and saw some aspects of it if you're visiting places like Vietnam like I have, and seen countries like Cuba, being there.

I've seen what socialism is like, and I don't like it. OK?

It's not only not free, it doesn't frickin' work.

My own views of the word socialist ... go back to the early nineteen fifties ...
... I remember the Cold War ...

I believe that if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones being executed!

And certain other people would have been there, cheering, OK?"

Matthews comments caused a backlash among MSNBC viewers and in two weeks his employment ended
Churchill stated October 22, 1945:

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings.

The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Ayn Rand wrote:

"If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences.

If a bureaucrat makes a mistake you suffer the consequences."
Churchill stated in Perth, Scotland, May 28, 1948 (Churchill, Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 & 1948, London: Cassell, 1950, 347):

"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.

Unless we free our country while time remains from the perverse doctrines of Socialism, there can be no hope for recovery ...

Our place in the world will be lost forever, and not only our individual self-respect but our national independence will be gone."
"Fifth column" groups utilize the tactic of "psychological projection" or "blame-shifting" where the attacker blames the victim.

Sigmund Freud wrote in Case Histories II (PFL 9, p. 132) of psychological projection where humans resort to the defensive mechanism of denying in themselves the existence of unpleasant behavior while attributing that exact behavior to others, i.e., a rude person accusing others of being rude.
Karl Marx is attributed with saying "Accuse the victim of what you do."
In the political context, be the first to accuse your opponent of what you are guilty of:

-If you are lying, accuse your opponent of it;
-If you are racist, accuse your opponent of it;
-If you are intolerant, accuse your opponent of it;
-If you are hateful, accuse your opponent of it;
-If you engaged in criminal acts, accuse your opponent;
-If you are organizing voter fraud, discredit those exposing it.
The New York Times, April 23, 2015, ran the headline "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal."
Democrat Political advisor David Axelrod verbalized this Machiavellian tactic in an NPR interview, April 19, 2010:

"In Chicago, there was an old tradition of throwing a brick through your own campaign office window, and then calling a press conference to say that you've been attacked."
A concern that Antifa-style terrorist groups may have recruited from those let out of prison in the response to the COVID pandemic in Democrat controlled cities and states, some possibly MS-13 and other gang members that illegally crossed U.S. borders or fundamentalist ISIS members who accompanied unvetted immigrants from Syria, Somalia, and the Middle East.

COVID responses also included shutting down small businesses.
An observation is that when crime goes up in cities and when small businesses are shut down, some people feel insecure and lose the means of supporting their families, so they leave.

Who leaves?

Maybe those with children and families or small business owners, certainly those with financial means to leave.

These would tend to be pro-family and pro-business. Statistically a higher percentage Republican.

Who is left in the cities?

Maybe more people who are dependent on government entitlements and benefits. Statistically a higher percentage Democrat.

So crime and unemployment go up; Republicans leave; Democrats get a monopoly on city politics.

If someone had an inclination to do voter fraud, this would provide an ideal opportunity as there would be fewer Republican poll watchers.
In elections, whoever wins the big cities wins the state,

And whoever wins the state gets all the electoral votes for the state.

And the President is elected by electoral votes.

So crime and unemployment go up, Republicans leave, Democrats get a monopoly on city politics, they win the city, they win the state, they get all the electoral votes for the state, they vote in the President in a type of fifth column soft-coup.

There is definitive Democrat political advantage to crime and unemployment going up in the cities!
Franklin Roosevelt stated at the Dedication of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, September 2, 1940:

"There is another enemy at home ... that ... mocks at ideals, sneers at sacrifice and pretends that the American people can live by bread alone.

If the spirit of God is not in us, and if we will not prepare to give all that we have and all that we are to preserve Christian civilization in our land, we shall go to destruction."
Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924 [email protected]
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.