The term "FIFTH COLUMN" is now more than 75 years old.
It was first used in a radio address in 1936, by a right wing (Nationalist) general named Emilio Mola , during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, to describe his efforts to take left wing (Republican) Madrid .
He unwisely claimed he had four visible columns of troops and tanks and planes advancing upon the capital but a secret hidden fifth column of sympathizers inside the city, awaiting to sow mayhem.
Thousands of the semi-innocent were quickly murdered in Madrid, out of fear that Mola had been telling the truth (and not merely trying to evoke panic).
But already by the mid 1940s, 70 years ago, the phrase had lost it literal, real world, meaning because the people claiming to see fifth columnists had "cried wolf" once too often.
It had been reduced to a metaphor, in fact a pejorative word, in the Cold War to semi-seriously describe others as hidden, secret communists or fascists.
Today, few are alive and active that can recall it's use as a word conveying real terror.
Maybe, then I can use it to describe the activities of Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team of DIY cum PUNK scientists inventing "GP" penicillin in that Citadel of High Modernity and Big Science, the Columbia University of the Manhattan Project.
He didn't see himself as a postmodernist because the term hadn't yet been invented : that was happening , about the same time as GP penicillin and the A-Bomb, in yet another part of Columbia University housing the social scientists Adorno and Horkheimer !
Dawson was a modest man (with much to be modest about) but he was also in his quietly defiant way, a true "Inside Agitator" (to mis-adapt that phrase much used by the Jesse Helms & Strom Thurmond generation of southern racists.
His small science , DIY Punk approach to inventing GP penicillin was in its way, as typical of what we today call low postmodernity as the Manhattan Project's bigness in creating the A-bomb was of High Modernity......
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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