Rules of Revolution

Rules of Revolution

Ending the Mystery of the 'Rules'

Rifles taken from the Spartacists. Dusseldorf, 2 February 1919

Communist Rules of Revolution is a list of rules for communists cited (for and against) numerous times in the American Congressional Record, the New York Times, the Washington Post, by Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov (under the pseudonym Tomas Schuman) in his 1984 book "Love Letter To America" and many others.

Background

The Rules of Revolution have also been referred to as the Dusseldorf Rules as it is claimed that allied forces captured the document at the headquarters of a Communist group, the Spartacist League in May, 1919 in Dusseldorf, Germany.

While more contemporary "fact checkers" have also claimed the Rules of Revolution have been "debunked", see David Mikkelson of Snopes on August 16, 2000 and Hannah Smith of Full Fact dated April 19, 2023, the only article that provides detailed evidence of the Rules of Revolution's source is from Ashley Halsey, Jr., an associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and Naval Intelligence officer.

As with most "fact checkers", Snopes did not mention Ashley Halsey, Jr.'s article and did not claim to know the source of the article. Full Fact referenced Ashley Halsey, Jr.'s article, stating that they "can’t verify the claims made in this article" but noting that "it stands at odds with the findings of several other reputable sources..." In fact, nobody aside from Ashley Halsey, Jr. provided detailed source information for the Rules of Revolution.

The Rules

The Rules of Revolution as listed in Ashley Halsey, Jr.'s article (see below):

• A. Corrupt the young. Keep them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial, destroy their ruggedness.
• B. Get control of all means of publicity and 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 natural leaders by holding these latter up to ridicule, obloquy, and contempt.
• 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 a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government toward such disorders.
• 7. By specious arguments cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.
• 8. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.

Claims that the Rules of Revolution is a Hoax

Since It's Incredible, It Has To Be True

Many partisans have claimed that the Rules of Revolution are false, but the source of the document is not revealed by those making the claim.

Rules of Revolution was disputed by Donald Janson of the New York Times in an article dated July 10, 1970 titled "Communist ‘Rules’ For Revolt Viewed As Durable Fraud". From the article:

Senator Lee Metcalf, Democrat of Montana, said in an interview that exhaustive research had proved the “rules for revolution” to be “completely spurious.”

“The extreme right wing in America also follows rules,” he said earlier in placing his findings in The Congressional Record, “and one of these rules is to make maximum use of false, misleading and fear inspiring quotations.”

[...]

Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat, of Mississippi, the subcommittee chairman, said F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover testified that no source could be found for the “document” and “therefore we can logically speculate that the document is spurious.” [Author's Note: Please see below response to this claim by Ashley Halsey, Jr.]

The earliest publication of the “rules” turned up in search was in The New World News of February, 1946. Many who reproduce the “rules” quote the defunct biweekly newsletter of Moral Re-Armament Inc. as their source.

Morris Kominsky, in a book called “The Hoaxers,” to be published soon by Branden Press of Boston, quotes H. Mead Twitchell, Jr., until recently an employee of the now closed Los Angeles office of Moral Re‐Armament, as saying that the “rules” appeared in German “in a German paper during the twenties and thirties, was translated into English in Britain [and] I believe it was first used in the United States in Rising Tide, a magazine published about 1937, but I can not find a copy to check this and do not know the name of the German newspaper.”

The only magazine called Rising Tide that circulated in the United States, according to a check by librarians, was a periodical for boys and girls of the Presbyterian Church of England, published from 1880 to 1937.[Author's Note: Ironically, on Dec. 6, 1937, the New York Times referenced the very same magazine they claimed did not exist. The "Rising Tide" issue was also referenced by the Harvard Crimson on December 14, 1937.

John H. George, political science teacher at Central State College in Edmund, Okla., who has made a study of misquotations by extremists, called the “rules” a forgery.

Merle Fainsod of Harvard, specialist in political science and government of Eastern Europe, said he had never encountered such a document.

Rules of Revolution was also disputed by Wesley McCune at the Washington Post in an article titled "Since It's Incredible, It Has To Be True" referenced in the Congressional Record by Gale McGee on July 29, 1970. Notably, Wesley McCune was associated with the National Farmers Union and the Democratic National Committee, among others. Excerpt:

To anyone who believes a certain "document" currently making the rounds of rightwing groups and other places, there is little mystery about the cause of civil disorders, sexual permissiveness, pornography or even gun control legislation.

It is all the result of a Communist plot, and it is all laid out in the "Communist Rules for Revolution," said to have been captured in May, 1919, at Dusseldorf, Germany, by allied forces...

[...]

"Unfortunately for those minds to whom this explains our social evils, the whole thing is a fraud.

Wesley McCune did not elaborate.

Evidence that the Rules of Revolution Is Real

Rules of Revolution was confirmed to be accurate in 1973 by Ashley Halsey, Jr., journalist, including associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and Naval Intelligence officer. Unlike those claiming that the Rules of Revolution was a fraud, Ashley Halsey, Jr. named names in his article published in January, 1973 for the "The American Rifleman", a publication by the National Rifle Association titled "Ending the Mystery of the 'Rules'":

The document is controversial partly because some Americans persist in doubting that communism seeks world domination by disarming the populace everywhere. The most recent warning on the "rules" appeared in a column by E.B. Mann in Gun World for Dec., 1972. Mann stated as The American Rifleman had done previously, that he was not in position to vouch for the rules. However, continued research has produced fresh evidence pointing to the authenticity of the rules. It is presented for the first time in this report.

This is a factual account of how an anti-gun policy of world communism was revealed, published, verified to the Library of Congress and later "unverified" by a branch of the Library of Congress while anti-gun spokesmen and others attempted to bury it by scoffing at it as a hoax.

The story begins with a raid of Allied intelligence officers in 1919 on the headquarters of a Communist action group, the Spartacist League, in Dusseldorf, Germany. There they seized the "rules," a handy blueprint for the overthrow of anti-Communist countries.

Brief enough to go on a single sheet of paper, the rules concluded: "Cause the registration of all firearms on some pre-text, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless."

By no coincidence at all, this conforms with the avowed policies of Communist world leaders as stated in the editorial reprinted [on the opposite page of N.R., Jan., 1973].

By no coincidence at all, it is exactly what Communists did do in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (remember them?), Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, China, North Korea, and other areas to fall under their domination.

Yet some US Senators, Congressmen, officials and newspapers, notably including, of course, The New York Times and Washington Post, have examined the rules and their background and pronounced them nothing more than pro-gun or rightwing propaganda.*

For those who honestly wonder about the rules, there can now be offered the following:

The rules were originally in German, as the Spartacist League, named after the Roman slave Spartacus who led an ancient uprising, was a German Communist organization.

A Capt. Thomas H. Barber, US Army, translated them soon after their seizure and subsequently furnished a copy to New World News, periodical of the Moral Rearmament movement, which in Feb., 1946, published the version reprinted later that year in The American Rifleman.

This was confirmed by Editor John U. Sturdevant of New World News, who wrote The American Rifleman that "Captain Barber had access to the safe after the raid described in the article."

Editor Sturdevant said that Barber was, at the time in 1919, "Aide to the Officer in Charge of Civil Affairs in the American-occupied zone headquartered at Coblenz, Germany."

This description agrees with data in official government records. There is a detailed history of Capt. Barber in the files of the National Personnel Center, 9700 Page Blvd., St. Louis, Mo.

According to this documentation, Thomas Hunter Barber, service number 0148058, was born in New York City Jan. 20, 1889, commissioned a captain June 24, 1916, and stationed for a period of months beginning in May, 1919, the month of the raid, in the Civil Affairs Office of the US Army Occupied Zone headquarters at Coblenz.

After his World War I service, Capt. Barber became a major, infantry reserve, and received a Silver Star citation. In 1961, he was living at 1170 Fifth Ave., New York, and apparently confirming to all questions the authenticity of the rules. He died in 1962 on November 11 - the Armistice Day anniversary of World War I.

A set of the rules in what purports to be Capt. Barber's own handwriting accom panies this report. Except for placing the time of the raid as "mid-summer" instead of May, the penned version appears to be identical with the ones published in the 1940's. It was made available to The American Rifleman by NRA Member Dwayne G. Nelson, of Monticello, Ill., who said he got it from a friend who corresponded with Capt. Barber some years ago.

So there was a Capt. Barber, he did serve in the occupied zone during the period when the raid took place, he later vouched for the rules, and he apparently sat around ready and willing to answer questions on the subject until his demise just over 10 years ago.

Although he certainly never intended it and probably never realized it, Capt. Barber now stands out as one of the most elusive minor figures in American history. Among those whom he unknowingly eluded were the FBI, the Library of Congress, and newsmen of several large metropolitan dailies. All of them searched for the source of the rules, but there is nothing to indicate that they ever learned of his existence.

Part of the confusion was caused by the way that the rules surfaced periodically in patriotic, civic and other publications. They bobbed up in The American Legion magazine for Nov., 1954, attributed to State's Attorney George A. Brautigam, of Dade County, Fla. Brautigam supposedly seized them with other Communistic literature in Miami, or so he informed Dade County grand jury in 1954. He died in 1957.

When the issue of authenticity flared up in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, himself known as a foe of communism, testified April 17 before a House sub-committee that, "significantly, our (FBI) files reflect no other information (than Brautigam's) regarding those 'rules,' and, therefore, we can logically speculate that the document is spurious."

Soon anti-gun spokesmen were claiming that J. Edgar Hoover had "branded the document as spurious." Branded, of course, is far more definite than speculated. So Mr. Hoover's guess, based on some weak leg work by someone in the FBI, became misrepresented as an official rejection of the rules at least to those who wanted to reject them.

"The Hoover reply was correctly quoted in a 5-1/2 page letter from the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, to Rep. Joe L. Evins (4th Dist., Tenn.), who asked for available data to substantiate the rules. The letter, signed Michael Renshawe, revealed considerable research and effort. According to it, among those questioned who could not authenticate the rules were:

The Slavic and Central European Division, Library of Congress.

The Office of the Chief of Military History, US Army.

Florida State Attorney Richard D. Gerstein, except to the extent brought out by Brautigam.

News Commentator Fulton Lewis, III, who quoted the rules but said he quoted from a copy somebody sent him.

What made this strenuous but inconclusive effort by the Library of Congress seem all the stranger was the fact that, according to New World News Editor John Sturdevant in 1970, the information concerning Capt. Barber and the rules was furnished in Jan., 1962, to the History and Government Division, Library of Congress.

While Library of Congress researchers later went in circles, and apparently not in the right circles, The New York Times and The Washington Post both published lengthy articles in which they looked everywhere but the right place for the answer and, lacking it, trumpeted that the rules were false.

The Times article July 10, 1970, by Donald Janson, was headlined: "Communist 'Rules' for Revolt Viewed as Durable Fraud." The writer sought to link them to rightwing organizations including the John Birch Society, the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, and the Association to Preserve Our Right to Keep and Bear Arms. The Post article, published about the same time, was inserted in the Congressional Record (July 29, 1970, S12303) by Sen. Gale McGee (Wyo.). It was head-lined "Rightwing Hoax Survives Exposure."

In the 1970 American Rifleman editorial, republished by request in this issue, we quoted the Russian leaders of world communism as being opposed to permitting private citizens in general to own guns. Only Communists, they felt, should be entrusted with guns.

American leaders of communism have expressed a similar view. Earl R. Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA, and Communist candidate for President of the United States in 1936 and 1940, before the party threw him out, declared that "all revolutions have been made with weapons which the overthrown rulers had relied on for their protection." (Browder, What Is Communism?, Vanguard Press, New York, 1936, p. 1665).

William Z. Foster, longtime National Chairman of the Communist Party, USA, and a perennial candidate for President before Browder, outlined a seizure of the United States by armed Communists, later to be "developed into a firmly-knit, well disciplined Red Army," while the "class enemies of the revolution" would be unable to fight back. (William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America, Elgin Publications, 1961, p. 274-275, etc.)

Foster died Sept. 1, 1961, while under indictment with 11 other Communist leaders for criminal conspiracy to overthrow the US government by violence. The others were convicted and sentenced to prison.

Not everyone who wants guns registered or confiscated is a Communist, of course, but there can be little question that nearly every Communist wants guns registered and confiscated your guns and mine. Why? Recent history gives a solemn answer.**