Karl Marx as soon as mentioned: “Accuse your enemy of what you’re doing as you’re doing it to create confusion.”
For years, web customers have shared a press release allegedly made by Karl Marx, the Nineteenth-century German thinker whose concepts gave rise to Marxist political and financial principle. The supposed quote learn:
Accuse your enemy of what you’re doing, as you’re doing it to create confusion.
The quote has popped up in a number of posts (archived) on Facebook (archived), as well (archived) as on X (archived). For instance, in November 2023, U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida made an X post (archived) pairing the quote with a 2020 video of U.S. President Joe Biden.
“Accuse your enemy of what you’re doing, as you’re doing it to create confusion.”
– Karl Marx pic.twitter.com/tRgXLQ8fGo
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) Nov. 13, 2023
Nonetheless, there isn’t any proof Karl Marx ever mentioned these phrases, and because of this we’ve rated this quote as misattributed.
Marx, Alinsky or Goebbels?
A search of the complete quote within the Marx Engels Archive, a complete database of texts written by Marx and his frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels, returned no outcomes. Searches of shorter snippets of the quote, together with “accuse your enemy” and “to create confusion,” likewise discovered no matches.
The earliest look of a recognizable model of the quote we had been capable of find in any sort of media was a February 2013 publish made utilizing TwitLonger, an internet site that allowed X customers to draft posts longer than 140 characters earlier than X increased the restrict to 280 characters in 2017. The publish’s writer was Lori Hendry, a conservative social media character who had round 408,000 X followers by the point her account was shut down in early 2021.
The publish, seen in archived kind by way of the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine, learn:
“Saul Alinsky 101: Accuse your opponent of what solely you’re doing, as you’re doing it, to create confusion, cloud the problem, and inoculate voters in opposition to any proof of your guilt.” Robert Moon Examiner #tcot
The publish has two notable options. For one, Hendry ended her publish with “Robert Moon Examiner,” which she presumably included as a quotation for the newspaper article or different publication through which she first encountered the quote. Snopes has up to now been unable to trace down this publication or to succeed in Hendry for remark, however will replace this story if we study something additional.
The second attention-grabbing characteristic of the publish is that it contains no point out of Karl Marx. As an alternative, Hendry’s publish linked the quote, or not less than the ideas it described, to Saul Alinsky, an American leftist social organizer whose 1971 book “Guidelines for Radicals” included a chapter of organizing ways.
Though Alinsky composed these ways utilizing language much like the quote investigated right here, the precise quote appeared nowhere in “Guidelines for Radicals” or any of Alinsky’s different works.
Some web customers have related the quote to one more historic determine: Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda. For instance, on Sept. 24, 2024, a Reddit person made a post (archived) on the r/quotes subreddit stating:
I’ve seen this quote a number of instances the final couple weeks, normally attributed to Karl Marx, however by no means naming the precise publication it appeared in or some other context.
Within the responses to that publish, multiple commenters identified that the quote might be a paraphrase or mistranslation of a quote from a speech Goebbels delivered at a Nazi Social gathering rally in 1934.
Because it appeared the unique German within the official 1935 publication of speeches from the 1934 rally, that quote read:
Der raffinierteste Trick der während des Krieges gegen Deutschland arbeitenden Propaganda conflict der, uns das zu unterstellen, was ihr selbst zu eigen conflict.
In knowledgeable translation of the speech made out there online by Calvin College, the identical Goebbels quote learn:
The cleverest trick utilized in propaganda in opposition to Germany through the conflict was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves had been doing.
Though the Goebbels quote, just like the quote attributed to Marx, described the tactical worth of accusing an enemy of one thing one is doing themselves, each the wording and the framing of the 2 quotes differed considerably.
A significant distinction, nonetheless, was that the Goebbels quote described being a goal of this tactic, whereas the alleged Marx quote underneath investigation right here was framed as an instruction.
Nazis and Communists
Searches of components of the quote utilizing the full-text search options on Google Books and the Internet Archive, in addition to on Newspapers.com, returned quite a few examples of phrases much like the quote in query in books, articles, and stories stretching again to the Nineteen Thirties.
One early instance was an April 1939 newspaper article revealed in The American Guardian (Oklahoma Metropolis), which listed “Ten Nazi propaganda tips as listed by The Advance, organ of the Amalgamated Clothes Staff Union.”
No. 9 on that record, which could be seen within the picture embedded beneath, was: “Accuse your enemy of getting dedicated all your individual crimes.”
(The American Guardian (Oklahoma Metropolis), April 21, 1939/Newspapers.com)
Additionally in 1939, the American journalist and writer Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote in his e book “Germany Turns the Clock Again”:
The Nazis weren’t very efficient diplomats. However as propagandists they had been exceptional. Their system was profitable by its very simplicity: deny every little thing overseas that you just encourage at dwelling: accuse your enemy of doing simply what you propose to do.
After World Struggle II, the tactic — and the phrasing used to explain it — was more and more related with communists, and particularly the Soviet Union, somewhat than Nazis. One instance appeared in a 1960 article referring to Soviet propaganda within the Skilled Journal of the USA Military included the road:
Should you do one thing improper, accuse the enemy of doing it earlier than he accuses you.
The tactic’s affiliation with Russia seems to have continued even after the collapse of communism. For instance, in his 2017 book “Who Misplaced Russia? How the World Entered a New Chilly Struggle,” the British journalist Peter Conradi quoted a record of Russian propaganda ways underneath Vladimir Putin, which Conradi attributed to Ukrainian-American journalist Roman Saskiw. Amongst these ways was:
Accuse the enemy of doing what you’re doing to confuse the dialog.
In brief, the quote seems to be an outline of a propaganda tactic that varied people have summarized utilizing related language because the Nineteen Thirties, when English-language writers strongly related the idea with Nazism. After WWII, authors related the tactic extra with the propaganda of the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia.
There is no such thing as a proof that Karl Marx ever mentioned or wrote the quote in query. Joseph Goebbels and Saul Alinsky, two different historic figures who some web customers have related to the quote, likewise didn’t writer it. Due to this fact, we’ve rated this quote as misattributed.
