-Caveat Lector-
http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/document/commrule.htm
Communist Rules for Revolution
Claim: A list of "Communist Rules for Revolution" was discovered by Allied
forces in Germany in 1919.
Status: False.
Example:
Communist Rules for Revolution
In May 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany, the allied forces discovered a copy of
these 'Rules.' They were first printed in the United States in the
'Bartlesville (Oklahoma) Examiner-Enterprise' the same year, 1919.
Almost 20 years later, in 1946, the attorney general of Florida obtained
them from a known member of the Communist Party, who acknowledged that the
'Rules' were then still a part of the Communist program for the United
States.
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1. Corrupt the young; get them away from religion. Get them interested in
sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.
2. Get control of all means of publicity, thereby:
3. Get people's minds off their government by focusing their attention on
athletics, sexy books, plays and immoral movies.
4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on
controversial matters of no importance.
5. Destroy the people's faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter
up to contempt, ridicule and disgrace.
6. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly
as possible.
7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit, produce years
of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
8. Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders
and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such
disorders.
9. Cause breakdown of the old moral values - honesty, sobriety,
self-restraint, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.
10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to
confiscate them and leaving the populace helpless.
Origins: A time-honored ploy in the political arena has been to discredit
your opponents (and their ideas) by demonizing them, by associating them
with . . . well, demons. In the twentieth century, this has usually meant
claiming that the ideas your opponents advocate were implemented by Nazis or
Communists, or were recognized by them as means of "softening up" a country
and making it ripe for totalitarian takeover. So, for example, if you oppose
gun registration, or you think we the films industry should be more heavily
regulated to prevent it from corrupting our youth, just point to this
document and proclaim that the Communists came to power in Russia because
the previous government had imposed the mandatory registration of firearms
and allowed callow youth to idle away their time watching "immoral movies."
As shown in the example above, this document is usually claimed to have been
discovered "in May 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany, by allied forces" and "first
printed in the United States" in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma
Examiner-Enterprise. Although the Examiner-Enterprise is a real newspaper,
none of this rings true. Language about getting the young "interested in
sex" and focusing their attention on "sexy books" and fretting about the
"registration of all firearms" sound out of place for 1919. Even if this
document really had been found in 1919, it's unlikely Americans would have
found it alarming back then, when the German hun was still a much bigger
bogeyman than the Russian communist. And not surprisingly, nobody has ever
managed to turn up the mysterious issue of Examiner-Enterprise that
supposedly printed it. When columnist Bob Greene checked out this piece with
Russian specialists at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University
in the mid-1980s, they said the list was "a total fraud," "an obvious
fabrication," and "an implausible concoction of American fears and phobias."
(Greene also wrote: "I always wanted to meet a communist who was carrying
the list around, so I could ask him what 'obloquy' means.")
When The New York Times ran an article on this piece way back in 1970, it
had already been circulating for about twenty-five years. The Times reported
that neither the National Archives, the Library of Congress, nor university
libraries had a copy of any such document. When Montana senator Lee Metcalf
looked into the issue back then, he checked with the FBI, CIA, and the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; found that "exhaustive research" had
proved the rules to be "completely spurious"; and noted that "the extreme
right also follows rules, one of which is to make maximum use of false,
misleading and fear-inspiring quotations." Nonetheless, numerous
Congressional members received copies of the rules list from alarmed
constituents and, believing that nobody else was yet aware of them,
continued to insert them into the Congressional Record.
The earliest known publication of these rules was in the periodical Moral
Re-Armament in February 1946, and circulation of the list really took off
after Florida state attorney George A. Brautigam endorsed them as true in
1954. (His "punishment" was that for many years afterward, printed versions
of this list included his statement and signature appended at the bottom.)
Even though the Soviet Union has since ceased to be, well into the 1990s the
"Communist Rules for Revolution" have continued to be cited in newspaper
editorials and letters to the editor as proof of our moral and political
decay. As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand wrote:
The . . . rules have to do with dividing people into hostile groups,
encouraging government extravagance, and fomenting "unnecessary" strikes in
vital industries. What we have lost, the list suggests, is a world without
dissent, budget deficits, inflation and labor unrest.
I just can't remember any such Golden Age.
Last updated: 17 August 2000
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/spoons/document/commrule.htm
Click here to e-mail this page to a friend
Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2001
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission
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Sources:
Brunvand, Jan Harold. "Reds' Plan to Conquer: Just Fable."
The San Diego Union-Tribune. 5 January 1989 (p. D2).
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Mexican Pet.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. ISBN 0-393-30542-2 (pp. 108-109).
Stark, Joy. "Communism Is Still Alive and Threatening All of Us."
The [Bloomington] Pantagraph. 28 August 1999 (p. A14).
The New York Times.
10 July 1970 (p. A8).
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