“
Your loyalties are indecisive at best. You know what that makes you, big boy?’
‘Definitely a Gemini.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . .
”
”
Graham Greene (The Quiet American)
“
How much did you read?’ Sophia said.
‘Not much. I found your characters a bit two-dimensional.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in.
”
”
Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)
“
I sleep on my face, and then it does not frighten anybody in the morning.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War)
“
Nothing like a cheap shot, right?’ He snorted blood from his nose. ‘I’m disappointed. I thought even terrorists had principles.’
‘Can it,’ Nasira said, towering over him with her P90 leveled at his head. ‘If we need patriotic paramoralisms, we’ll give Jack Bauer a call.’
Denton grimaced, pulled himself upright. ‘And if I need overblown alliteration, I’ll give you a call.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distrusting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty in 'fifth column' feminists - in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only increase itself against a mythical female weakness - we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction (p. 295).
”
”
Susan Faludi
“
The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow. But she never forgets that Resistance is using criticism against her on a far more diabolical level. Resistance enlists criticism to reinforce the fifth column of fear already at work inside the artist's head, seeking to break her will and crack her dedication. The professional does not fall for this. Her resolution, before all others, remains: No matter what, I will never let Resistance beat me.
”
”
Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)
“
Your ability?’ Jay leaned closer, whispering. ‘I think everyone here can do something cool, you know? Like run super fast. Or see people naked!’ He nodded. ‘I want that one.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
The records didn’t fill the void inside. Didn’t fuel it either. There was no closure.’
‘Then where’s the closure?’
She gestured to his pistol. ‘At the end of that barrel.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?
”
”
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
“
Today, take hold of God's promise to you find in 2 Chronicles 32:7! Do not be afraid or discouraged because of what the 'fifth column' may be up to round about you or the crowds that take their side. Rather, choose to recognize the fact that there is a greater power at work in your life; someone who is with you, someone who cares about you and someone who is not with those who are against you.
”
”
Christopher Roberts (100 Promises From God (Devotional Book 4))
“
My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.
”
”
Pat Conroy (The Lords of Discipline)
“
And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?
”
”
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
“
He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week."
(The Capital of the World)
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War)
“
look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually
”
”
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
“
That arrogance of yours is such an endearing asset.'
'Why, thank you. It was either that or get my nipple pierced.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
NEPHEW: One cannot be arraigned for declaring a war, which every ruler has to do once in a while, but only for running a war badly.
”
”
Bertolt Brecht
“
She surveyed the dead soldiers. ‘Did you just kill a counter-terrorist soldier with a Star Wars figurine?
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Seraphim Sequence (Fifth Column, #2))
“
I let the anger out, one bullet at a time.
”
”
J.N. Chaney (The Fifth Column (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Se si sta abbastanza a lungo in una stanza la veduta, qualunque sia, acquista un gran valore e diventa importantissima e nessuno la cambierebbe, nemmeno per una diversa angolazione.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories)
“
Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Bagpipe Music'
It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.
John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.
It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'.
It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.
It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.
It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
”
”
Louis MacNeice
“
People like us run the world not just by chance but because we’re the only ones capable of doing it. We know your flaws. We know you better than you know yourselves. Our sense of honor compels us to take command, to guide the weak through times as dark as these. And our sense of humor compels us to enjoy it.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious — weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”
“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”
“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
“
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Seraphim Sequence (Fifth Column, #2))
“
Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
In 2022, New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren decried a culture of divorcing for unhappiness, writing, “I want to normalize significant periods of confusion, exhaustion, grief and unfulfillment in marriage. There’s an older couple I know who are in their fifth decade of marriage. They are funny and kind and, by almost any standard, the picture of #relationshipgoals. Early on in our marriage they told us, ‘There are times in marriage when the Bible’s call to love your enemies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ” Life is, of course, not easy, and no one is going to like their partner every day. But Warren’s column makes misery in marriage sound like a necessary evil of being partnered with a man. It’s not. I refuse to believe that it has to be that way. I have two dear friends who I have known for over twenty years; we fight sometimes and disagree. Between us we’ve had three divorces and four marriages and three children. Never once have they felt like the enemy to me. And if it is that way, if the experience of being with a man means I hate him for at least a third of our marriage and he hates me, too, I’d rather not have it. No, thank you. There is no benefit to that martyrdom. To me, columns like Warren’s sound like the mentality that enables hazing rituals and cults where they sacrifice one of their own every fortnight. I was miserable, so you should be, too. I do not want that curse. I want happiness.
”
”
Lyz Lenz (This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life)
“
Next, wearing a dark-green dress with white polka dots, Michael’s mother, Ethel, entered the room. As she reached the chair, she turned and embraced the matron, who choked up and left the room. The guards dropped the leather mask over her face. The first of the three standard shocks was applied at 8:11. “She seemed to fight death,” The New York Times reported. “She strained hard against the straps and her neck turned red. A thin column of grayish smoke rose from the upper side of her head. Her hands, lying limp, were now clenched like a fighter’s.” After the standard three shocks of electricity, one short and two long, doctors approached to check her heartbeat and discovered that Ethel was still alive. Her straps were readjusted and a fourth shock was applied. Once more, she strained against the straps. A fifth current was required before the doctors pronounced her dead.
”
”
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wait Till Next Year)
“
The National Socialist Movement has, besides its delivery from the Jewishcapitalist shackles imposed by a plutocratic-democratic, dwindling class of exploiters at home, pronounced its resolve to free the Reich from the shackles of the Diktat of Versailles abroad. The German demands for a revision were an absolute necessity, a matter of course for the existence and the honor of any great people. Posterity will some day come to regard them as exceedingly modest.
All these demands had to be carried through, in practice against the will of the British French potentates. Now more than ever we all see it as a success of the leadership of the Third Reich that the realization of these revisions was possible for years without resort to war. This was not the case-as the British and French demagogues would have it-because we were not then in a position to wage war. When it finally appeared as though, thanks to a gradually awakening common sense, a peaceful resolution of the remaining problems could be reached through international cooperation, the agreement concluded in this spirit on September 29, 1938, at Munich by the four great states predominantly involved, was not welcomed by public opinion in London and Paris, but was condemned as a despicable sign of weakness. The Jewish capitalist warmongers, their hands covered with blood, saw in the possible success of such a peaceful revision the vanishing of plausible grounds for the realization of their insane plans.
Once again that conspiracy of pitiful, corrupt political creatures and greedy financial magnates made its appearance, for whom war is a welcome means to bolster business. The international Jewish poison of the peoples began to agitate against and to coroode healthy minds. Men of letters set out to portray decent men who desired peace as weaklings and traitors, to denounce opposition parties as a “fifth column,” in order to eliminate internal resistance to their criminal policy of war. Jews and Freemasons, armament industrialists and war profiteers, international traders and stockjobbers, found political blackguards: desperados and glory seekers who represented war as something to be yearned for and hence wished for.
Adolf Hitler - speech to the Reichstag Berlin, July 19, 1940
”
”
Adolf Hitler
“
It seems the primary breeding group for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a think crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventatively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth.
”
”
Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless)
“
Oh doors of your body
There are nine and I have opened them all
Oh doors of your body
There are nine and for me they have all closed again
At the first door
Clear Reason has died
It was do you remember? the first day in Nice
Your left eye like a snake slides
Even my heart
And let the door of your left gaze open again
At the second door
All my strength has died
It was do you remember? in a hostel in Cagnes
Your right eye was beating like my heart
Your eyelids throbbed like flowers beat in the breeze
And let the door of your right gaze open again
At the third door
Hear the aorta beat
And all my arteries swollen from your only love
And let the door of your left ear be reopened
At the fourth gate
They escort me every spring
And listening listening to the beautiful forest
Upload this song of love and nests
So sad for the soldiers who are at war
And let the door of your right ear reopen
At the fifth gate
It is my life that I bring you
It was do you remember? on the train returning from Grasse
And in the shade, very close, very short
Your mouth told me
Words of damnation so wicked and so tender
What do I ask of my wounded soul
How could I hear them without dying
Oh words so sweet so strong that when I think about it I seem to touch them
And let the door of your mouth open again
At the sixth gate
Your gestation of putrefaction oh War is aborting
Behold all the springs with their flowers
Here are the cathedrals with their incense
Here are your armpits with their divine smell
And your perfumed letters that I smell
During hours
And let the door on the left side of your nose be reopened
At the seventh gate
Oh perfumes of the past that the current of air carries away
The saline effluvia gave your lips the taste of the sea
Marine smell smell of love under our windows the sea was dying
And the smell of the orange trees enveloped you with love
While in my arms you cuddled
Still and quiet
And let the door on the right side of your nose be reopened
At the eighth gate
Two chubby angels care for the trembling roses they bear
The exquisite sky of your elastic waist
And here I am armed with a whip made of moonbeams
Hyacinth-crowned loves arrive in droves.
And let the door of your soul open again
With the ninth gate
Love itself must come out
Life of my life
I join you for eternity
And for the perfect love without anger
We will come to pure and wicked passion
According to what we want
To know everything to see everything to hear
I gave up in the deep secret of your love
Oh shady gate oh living coral gate
Between two columns of perfection
And let the door open again that your hands know how to open so well
”
”
Guillaume Apollinaire
“
Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la
”
”
Anonymous
“
Then I’m afraid I can’t give you the money now,’ Sophia said.
‘Oh really? And why’s that?’ Jay said. ‘So you can kill us and save yourselves the payment?’
Nasira shrugged. ‘The thought crossed our minds.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
They found these men were not human. More like machines. An intra-species predator that lived amongst its prey. Undetected, unknown and unchangeable.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
But what if it isn’t real?’ Sophia said. ‘What if your entire life hinges on the fact that you’ve been lied to? About yourself and about everything around you. That you subscribe to beliefs that are completely false.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
”
”
Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America)
“
Burrow down a millimeter beneath this argument, and it is easy to see that unlike European anti-Semites, their American brethren very much do hate Jews per se and do not try very hard to hide it or cloak it in academic argument. They have resurfaced all the stereotypes of Nazi iconography, which in turn was built on centuries of hate: the Jew is both shiftless, cowardly, and weak, and duplicitous, manipulative, and all-powerful. As with more ancient strains of anti-Semitism, the new breed insists that Jews are responsible for their own oppression. The alt-right is fond of asking the classic “When did you stop beating your wife” question over and over and over. “Quick question,” “Darrell Lampshade” (charming, right?) asked me. “Why have Jews been kicked out of so many countries if they never did anything wrong? Please answer!” And now that Jews have their own country, they should go there and leave the United States to the white people who valiantly claimed it long before it was cluttered by the mongrel races. One of the memes of the alt-right is the notion that a fifth column of duplicitous Jews is constantly urging the United States on to war on Israel’s behalf, that the beautiful white male fruits of true America will fight and die in the sands of the Middle East on behalf of the cowardly Jew. “We got the goyim to fight for us as usual. It’s amazing how they haven’t driven us back to the desert yet!” “Abraham Moshe Fuxman” once tweeted at me. “A point @jonathanweisman has no interest in acknowledging,” responded “Pax Trumpiana.” “He loves war as long as he’s spilling goyim blood.” Israel, so it goes, should fight for itself, and the Jews orchestrating war should do so from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, not Washington and New York.
”
”
Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
“
Louis Wirth made no bones about his suspicion of the groups that were traditionally known as “ethnic,” ic., the recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Like Stalin, his mentor on the nationalities issue, Wirth considered ethnics as a fifth column which could not be trusted to serve the interests of the ruling class. Those interests became national security issues once that elite succeeded in maneuvering America into war. In this he shared the political views of the psychological warfare establishment as well as the ethnic prejudices which undergirded them. The purpose of psychological warfare as it was resurrected at the University of Chicago in the late ’30s was ultimately ethnic.
The WASP elite used their advanced communications techniques to prevent ethnic groups in America from communicating with their countries of origin but also to disrupt communications among the members of those groups in the United States as well. “At heart modern psychological warfare has been a tool for managing empire,” writes Christopher Simpson, “It’s primary utility has been its ability to suppress or distort unauthorized communication among subject peoples, including domestic U.S. dissenters who channeled the wisdom or morality of imperial policies.
”
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
“
Egeria recounted the concern that clergy had about visitors kissing the cross and trying to take away a sliver in their mouths.45 Privileged dignitaries, however, did not need to be so devious. They received them as gifts. In addition, according to Ambrose and several fifth-century historians, after the Empress Helena encased a large portion of the wood and left it in Jerusalem, she sent some to her son in Constantinople, to be deposited within his statue atop the porphyry column in that emperor’s new, circular forum.
”
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Robin M. Jensen (The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy)
“
The Home Guard overtopped the million mark, and when rifles were lacking grasped lustily the shotgun, the sporting rifle, the private pistol, or, when there was no firearm, the pike and the club. No Fifth Column existed in Britain, though a few spies were carefully rounded up and examined. What few Communists there were lay low. Everyone else gave all they had to give.
”
”
Winston S. Churchill (Their Finest Hour: The Second World War, Volume 2 (Winston Churchill World War II Collection))
“
If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.
”
”
Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
“
The attacking general commented that while the four columns were strong (Spanish Civil War), and Madrid could repel them, it was the fifth column that he expected to win the battle. The fifth column was a group of sympathizers on the inside. Subversives. Attacking from the inside. Bent on undermining the solidarity of the nation at any cost.
”
”
Charles Martin (The Last Exchange)
“
An annoyed huff when he sees Trey suggests Max considers him an add-on rather than true Fifth Column. But he probably thinks the same about me. Too bad we can’t just step aside and let Max save the day.
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Rysa Walker (Time's Divide (The Chronos Files, #3))
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Historical Santa Clara
Santa Clara is the fifth largest city in Cuba with a population of over 210,000 people. It is the capital of the Province of Villa Clara and was founded by 138 people from only two families on July 15, 1689. As with many Cuban cities during the 17th century, it was constantly attacked and plundered by pirates. Santa Clara has had a number of names since it was founded. Its layout is clearly that of Colonial Spanish origin, having a squared design with a plaza and a church in the center. It is conveniently located along the highway connecting Santiago de Cuba with Havana.
Santa Clara is known as the site of the last battle of the Cuban Revolution. Two columns of rebels attacked the Batista forces on December 31, 1958. One was led by “Che” Guevara and the other by Camilo Cienfuegos. Guevara’s troops destroyed the Trans-Cuban railroad tracks and overturned a train sent by Batista carrying reinforcements. The victory over the city’s demoralized defenders was decisive, forcing Batista to leave Cuba and fly to the Dominican Republic. Fleeing into exile, Batista opened the way for the rebel troops to take the capital city of Havana.
From the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by Captain Hank Bracker
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Hank Bracker
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The Castilian officials had legitimate grounds for concern about the possible actions of a Portuguese fifth column. As early as May 1641, Portuguese warships leagued with the English and began to press against the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast.4 In
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Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert (A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640)
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The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: Government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible—except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle. This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and “reporters”—call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis. This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists. Through multiple overlapping outlets covering radio, television, and the Internet, they relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultraconservative dogma disguised as news and infotainment—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
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Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
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the Soviets to develop the hyperspace amplifiers later used in their psychotronic weapons. Moray became quite alarmed at the continued attempts of his R.E.A. contacts to get the device into the hands of the Russians. He eventually concluded that he had become involved with a governmental group filled with radicals and reactionaries. Much like Tesla, Moray became concerned that fifth column activity was actually directed against him in an attempt to steal his device.
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Tim R. Swartz (The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla: Time Travel - Alternative Energy and the Secret of Nazi Flying Saucers)
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Next to him, Jay, Sophia and Nasira were doing the same. They looked like soldiers from an oppressive dystopian future. Then he remembered they were.
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Nathan M. Farrugia (The Seraphim Sequence (Fifth Column, #2))
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Negative,’ Czarina said without so much as glancing at it. ‘I don’t have the authorization.’ ‘Fuck me,’ Sophia said. ‘Is that your command?’ Czarina said. ‘No, I mean follow me,’ Sophia said.
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Nathan M. Farrugia (The Phoenix Variant: The Fifth Column 3)
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Shechem was thus, in a sense, the original central shrine and capital of Israelite Canaan. The point is important, since the continuous existence of a sizeable Israelite population in Palestine throughout the period between the original Abrahamite arrival and the return from Egypt makes the Biblical Book of Exodus, which clearly describes only a part of the race, and the conquest narrated in the Book of Joshua, far more credible.62 The Israelites in Egypt always knew they had a homeland to return to, where part of the population was their natural ally; and this fifth column within the land, in turn, made the attempt to seize Canaan by a wandering band less of a forlorn venture.
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Paul Johnson (History of the Jews)
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She removed her P229 pistol from the waistband of her jeans, rewarding Jay with a glimpse of her midsection. He was disappointed to see she had better abs than he did. He pretended not to notice as she handed him her pistol.
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Nathan M. Farrugia (The Seraphim Sequence (Fifth Column, #2))
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The Legion also cultivated a relationship with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, an opponent of the income tax and increased funding for teacher salaries and schools (all priorities of the AFT). In 1935 Hearst’s papers ran a series of articles written by a Legion commander, attacking public school teachers who explained the Depression as a failure of free markets. Teachers who did not purchase Liberty Bonds, did not display the American flag in their classrooms, or did not salute the flag were depicted in Legion literature as a “fifth column” loyal to the Soviet Union. Principals, school boards, and mayors sympathetic to the Legion—or scared to buck the group—targeted such teachers for investigation and sometimes dismissal.
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Dana Goldstein (The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession)
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It’s a geode. You can sess that, the way the rock around you abruptly changes to something else. The pebble in the stream, the warp in the weft; countless aeons ago a bubble formed in a flow of molten mineral within Father Earth. Within that pocket, nurtured by incomprehensible pressures and bathed in water and fire, crystals grew. This one’s the size of a city. Which is probably why someone built a city in this one. You stand before a vast, vaulted cavern that is full of glowing crystal shafts the size of tree trunks. Big tree trunks. Or buildings. Big buildings. They jut forth from the walls in an utterly haphazard jumble: different lengths, different circumferences, some white and translucent and a few smoky or tinged with purple. Some are stubby, their pointed tips ending only a few feet away from the walls that grew them—but many stretch from one side of the vast cavern into the indistinct distance. They form struts and roads too steep to climb, going in directions that make no sense. It is as if someone found an architect, made her build a city out of the most beautiful materials available, then threw all those buildings into a box and jumbled them up for laughs. And they’re definitely living in it. As you stare, you notice narrow rope bridges and wooden platforms everywhere. There are dangling lines strung with electric lanterns, ropes and pulleys carrying small lifts from one platform to another. In the distance a man walks down a wooden stairway built around a titanic slanted column of white; two children play on the ground far below, in between stubby crystals the size of houses. Actually, some of the crystals are houses. They have holes cut in them—doors and windows. You can see people moving around inside some of them. Smoke curls from chimney holes cut in pointed crystal tips.
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N.K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season)
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By Friday June 9, the fifth day of the war, Israeli forces had decisively defeated the Egyptian and Jordanian armies and occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Arab East Jerusalem. Early that morning Israel had begun storming the Golan Heights, routing the Syrian army, and was advancing rapidly along the main road toward Damascus. The council had ordered comprehensive cease-fires on June 6 and 7, but Israeli forces entering Syria ignored these resolutions, even as their government loudly proclaimed its adherence to them. By that night in the Middle East (still afternoon in New York) Israel’s forces were approaching the key provincial capital of Quneitra, beyond which stood only the flat Hauran plain between their armored columns and the Syrian capital, just forty miles away.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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The patient sculptor that was nature turned the region into an uninhabited metropolis of monumental architecture: mountainous arches as breathtaking as rainbows, precipitous bridges sized for city-ships, buttes and spires whose profiles brought to mind the ancient monsters at the end of the Fifth Age of Mankind, lofty hoodoos that rose like the columns of ruined temples erected by larger-than-life heroes for unimaginable gods.
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Ken Liu (Speaking Bones (The Dandelion Dynasty, #4))
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Zoki walks into the classroom, puts a piece of paper down on the teacher’s desk, and shouts: “Everyone write your name.”
There are three columns: Muslim / Serb / Croat.
We all gather round, we all hesitate.
“Come on, guys.” Zoki writes his name under Serb.
Kenan takes the pen from Zoki and writes his name under Muslim.
Both Gorans put their names under Serb.
Edin puts his name under Muslim.
Alen puts his name under Muslim.
Marica puts her name under Serb.
Goca puts her name under Serb.
Kule asks what this is all about.
Zoki says: “So we know.”
Kule says: “Fuck you.”
Zoki says: “Anyway, you’re Muslim.”
“What I am is Fuck you,” Kule says.
Elvira makes a new column, writes Don’t know at the top, and puts her name there. Alen takes the pen back and crosses his name out and writes it again under Don’t know. Goca too.
Marko puts his name under Serb.
Ana puts her name under Don’t know, thinks for a second, crosses it out, adds Yugoslav as a fifth heading, and puts her name there.
Zoki writes Kule under Muslim.
Kule says: “Zoki, you dumb horse, I’ll fuck your mother.”
The Gorans plant themselves in front of Kule and the one with the long incisors says: “What’s wrong, Kule? Shoes too tight?”
Kule grabs the pen out of Zoki’s hand and tries to scribble something on Goran’s forehead. Goran shoves him, Kule shoves back, and we move between them.
Everyone’s shouting all at once until Kule raises his arm—the gesture says, Everything’s cool, I’m cool. He goes up to the desk and makes a sixth column. On top it says, Fuck all of you. Kule writes Kule in that column, stomps on the pen, which breaks, and leaves the classroom.
No one follows Kule. The list disappears.
A couple months later, Muslims in several cities are ordered to wear white armbands.
An Eskimo family lived in Višegrad at the time, above the supermarket on Tito Street. Actually they had no connection with the Inuit—it was just a joke answer on the 1991 census, which was included in the actual statistics and then recognized by the state. The father repeated it during the Serbian occupation, but no one laughed. So he left the city, with his wife and baby daughter. Today they live closer to the North Pole and speak decent Swedish.
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Saša Stanišić (Herkunft)
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Now, a decade and half later, we have come full circle and out national existence is once again threatened and it was in the early days of the Republic. Though we are still strong physically, we are in clear and imminent danger of being overwhelmed by alien forces. We are confronted by a revolutionary world movement that possesses not only the will to dominate absolutely every square mile of the globe, but increasingly the capacity to do so: a military power that rivals our own, political warfare and propaganda skills that are superior to ours, an international fifth column that operates conspiratorially in the hart of our defenses, an ideology that imbues its adherents with a sense of historical mission; and all of these resources controlled by a truth
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Barry M. Goldwater
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The masters of the Fratery then disseminate the details of their oracles to the lower orders of their cult. By my estimation, the Fratery numbers several thousand, many of them apparently upstanding Imperial citizens, spread through hundreds of worlds in the subsectors Antimar, Helican, Angelus and Ophidian. Once a ‘prospect’ as they call them has been identified, certain portions of the ‘cult membership’ are charged with doing everything they can to ensure that it comes to pass, preferably in the worst and most damaging way possible. If a plague is foreseen, then cult members will deliberately break quarantine orders to ensure that the outbreak spreads. If the prospect is a famine, they will plant incendiary bombs or bio-toxins in the Munitorum grain stores of the threatened world. A heretic emerges? They will protect him and publish his foul lies abroad. An invasion approaches? They are the fifth column that will destroy the defenders from within. They seek doom. They seek to undermine the fabric of our Imperium, the culture of man, and cause it to founder and fall. They seek galactic apocalypse, an age of darkness and fire, wherein their unholy masters, the Ruinous Powers, can rise up and take governance of all.
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Dan Abnett (Ravenor: The Omnibus (Ravenor #1-3))
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President Roosevelt himself even said during a fireside chat that “Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack—the Trojan Horse, the Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new energy.” These threats were exactly what Haffenden was up against on the waterfront. If the enemy infiltrated the harbor, and posed as a longshoreman, the missions he could carry out were terrifying. As unthinkable as they were, it was Haffenden’s job to be one step ahead. That meant getting information about sabotage activity, however he could get it.
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Matthew Black (Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II)
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To General Short, Washington’s warning had posed one overwhelming danger — an uprising by Hawaii’s 157,905 civilians of Japanese blood, which would coincide with any Tokyo move in the Far East. He immediately alerted his command against sabotage; lined up all his planes neatly on the ramps, where they could be more easily guarded; and notified the War Department. Washington seemed satisfied, but the fear of a Japanese Fifth Column lingered — that was the way the Axis always struck.
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Walter Lord (Day of Infamy)
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The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies. Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as “racists.” Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a “fifth column,” while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate. Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.
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Dennis Prager (Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism (An Examination of Antisemitism))
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If you’re worried about overpopulation and you are not worried about overconsumption, you just don’t like poor people—and in this case poor brown people. So really what it boils down to.
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Beau of the Fifth Column
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After acknowledging that there had not been a single case of Japanese sabotage on the West Coast—indeed, there never was a single such case throughout the war—Lippmann wrote on February 20, that this meant nothing. “From what we know about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared,” he declared. “It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.” Japanese invaders might soon turn the whole Pacific coast into a battlefield, said Lippmann, and “nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.
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Otto Friedrich (City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s)
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During the war with Russia, the Jewish community of Poland was threatened with a particularly virulent strain of Polish anti-Semitism. A group of rabble-rousing nationalists claimed that the Jews had never fully assimilated into mainstream Polish society and therefore constituted a fifth column. They made the audacious accusation that the Jews had collaborated with Russia to help in its fight against Poland. Such sentiments reached Radziejow, where locals branded the Jews as traitors. These anti-Semites pointed out that in recent local history, the Jews had petitioned a foreign government, Germany, for their own benefit. Motivated by greed, and under the guise of patriotism, city officials of Radziejow arrested several prominent Jews. These Jews were falsely charged with treason for their alleged collaboration with the Russians during the war. It was irrelevant to the persecutors and prosecutor that the accused Jews were never even involved in politics. This was a age-old scheme used by anti-Semites to extort money from the Jewish community. In this case, the plan was to implement a newly established criminal statute to justify the arrest of Jews and charge them with the capital crime of treason. Government officials
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Scott M. Neuman (The Nazi, the Princess, and the Shoemaker: Second Edition)
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You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise
a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.
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Romain Gary (The Roots of Heaven)
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In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection...
But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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It was when General Franco was marching on Madrid,” said Tommy. “Somebody asked him how many troops he had, and he replied that he had four columns with him and a fifth column in Madrid itself. Now, of course, the term fifth column has passed into everyday use and is taken to mean—well, to mean traitors, really, but that wasn’t General Franco’s meaning
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D.E. Stevenson (Spring Magic)
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a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.
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Scott Anderson (The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts)
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We should regard work not just as a platform for ministry—work is ministry, and we are stewards put in charge until Jesus comes back, a fifth column who infiltrate a world stained by sin, acting as salt that preserves the way of Christ and light that leads broken people out of darkness.
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Patrick Morley (A Man's Guide to Work: 12 Ways to Honor God on the Job)