The "Dusseldorf Rules of Revolution"

This article appeared in a recent issue of the California Legionnaire Chaplains’ Corner

I remembered a document which had fallen into my hands, a duplicate of one found by our Allied forces in May of 1919 at Dusseldorf, Germany which contained “Communist Rules for Revolution” which read as follows:

A. Corrupt the young: get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.

B. Get control of all means of publicity thereby:

1. Get people’s minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics,
sexy books and plays and other trivialities.

2. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping
on controversial matters of no importance.

3. Destroy the people’s faith in their leaders by holding them up to contempt,
ridicule and obliquity.

4. Always preach true democracy, but, seize’ power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

5. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit,
“produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

6. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders
and foster lenient and soft attitudes on the part of the government towards such disorders.

7. By specious argument, cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues of honesty,
sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word.

C. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext with the view of confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.

Those are the "Dusseldorf Rules of Revolution." It's been more than forty years now since I first heard of them. The "Rules" were brought to my attention by someone who had started life as a Franklin Roosevelt, "New Deal" Democrat, but by 1970 was sliding far to the political right. The idea was to demonstrate the perfidy and wickedness of Communism and the counter-culture of that time.

Even then I was suspicious of the "Rules." From personal experience and from what I saw in other young people, I didn't think it would be necessary to "get" young people interested in sex. We had a lively interest in sex all by ourselves without any encouragement. Nor did it seem in 1970 that we would become uninterested in politics in favor of trivia. (I didn't know in 1970 the scale of the disillusion that would shortly settle in.)

Soon after reading the "Rules" I came upon a column by conservative writer Jack Kilpatrick that dismissed them as just a forgery and not a very good one. I figured that would lay the matter to rest. So I was surprised a few days ago to find them on the Internet without even hardly trying.

A very little bit of research discovered that the "Rules" were allegedly found in 1919 by "our" troops in Dusseldorf. The prelude doesn't indicate who "our" troops were, but American troops in the Third Army did occupy part of the Ruhr Valley that year. They were headquartered in Coblenz, however, a hundred miles from Dusseldorf, so it seems unlikely Americans would have uncovered the "Rules." Nor is there any indication of what language the "Rules" were written. One would suppose they would have been in German, but here they are in English without any notation of what the original looked like, if different from the English version.

More damning for the "Rules" is why they were not published at that time. In fact, there does not seem to be any record of them until 1946, when they were published in, of all places, Oklahoma. Where they might have been for the missing twenty-seven years is a mystery that believers cannot explain.

Finally, there is the text itself, with its strange message. Marxist theory suggests the Communist revolution will take place when people become passionately interested in politics and society, not distracted by sex and trivia. Marx claimed that "religion is the opiate of the masses," lulling poor people with promises of salvation, but he might have added that sex, drugs and rock and roll are the opiates. So it would hardly be the premise of revolutionaries to turn youth away from political outrage.

Nowadays, it's easy to see the "Rules" are made up from whole cloth by someone who had serious sex issues and a major hangup with "ruggedness." But they still appear on the Internet to stoke the flames of hatred and paranoia. It's not that I'm sympathetic to Communism on either a sentimental or practical basis, but a simple interest in honesty should dismiss these "Rules" forever.

By the way, "harping on controversial matters of no importance" is a hallmark of the political right, not the left.