Contemporary Elites as a Sixth Column
Discussion
Sangram Aglave:
"In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz delivers the definitive indictment of the military-bureaucratic establishment when he confronts Captain Willard:
“You’re neither [an assassin nor a soldier]. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.”
In this single, razor-sharp insult, Kurtz reduces the entire geopolitical war machine to banal shopkeeping. The generals and politicians in Washington are not statesmen or warriors; they are “grocery clerks”—petty, risk-averse administrators who view blood, sacrifice, and imperial conquest through the mercenary lens of account balances and transactional compliance.
This precise critique finds its philosophical counterpart in the work of Aleksandr Dugin. In The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin writes:
“The status quo and this inertia do not presuppose any political theories whatsoever. A global world can only be ruled by the laws of economics and the universal morality of ‘human rights’. All political decisions are replaced by technical ones. Machinery and technology substitute for all else.” Paraphrased for readers in simple English here “The age of great political ideas has vanished, and the world now moves on autopilot, devoid of spirit. We are governed not by statesmen or ideals, but by the cold, unyielding laws of the marketplace and a hollow, uniform morality. Every deep human question is reduced to a mathematical equation, solved by technicians. Tools, formulas, and machines have usurped the throne of human destiny.”
For Dugin, these “grocery clerks” are the comprador elite—the “Sixth Column” within sovereign nations who have traded civilizational destiny (Katechon) for integration into the global market ledger. They represent the total degeneration of Plato’s philosopher-guardians (phylakes) into homo economicus, managers who substitute technocratic efficiency for spiritual duty (asabiyyah).
The Metaphor of the Sixth Column To fully grasp Dugin’s critique of elite adequacy, one must unpack the metaphor of the “Sixth Column.” In classical political discourse, a “Fifth Column” refers to overt traitors, saboteurs, or subversives who openly side with an external enemy to undermine a nation from within. Dugin posits that the “Sixth Column” is far more dangerous precisely because it is invisible, institutional, and systemic. Members of the Sixth Column are not radical dissidents waving foreign flags in the streets; they are high-ranking ministers, financial technocrats, media managers, and generals embedded directly inside the core apparatus of state power. They proclaim absolute loyalty to the sovereign and pay lip service to national tradition, yet their internal mental software remains completely programmed by Western liberal paradigms. They evaluate national success exclusively through market metrics, foreign capital flows, and Western consumer standards. When an existential civilizational conflict erupts, the Sixth Column does not fight; it seeks compromise, delays mobilization, treats existential struggle as a temporary disruption to trade, and works silently to restore the pre-conflict globalist status quo. The Sixth Column is the comprador class operating inside the castle walls—the ultimate institutional manifestation of elite inadequacy.
René Girard provides the anthropological backing for this convergence. Girard demonstrates that late-modern secular elites attempt to govern without sacred bounds or objective sacrificial duty. Having abandoned the sacred center, the modern ruling class operates as a class of technocratic caretakers who mask their cowardice behind moralizing rhetoric, using procedural rules to insulate themselves from true existential trial.
All three thinkers agree: when the rulers become shopkeepers, the state ceases to be a sovereign entity and degrades into a commercial enterprise run by middlemen."