Karl Marx once said: “Accuse your enemy of what you are doing as you are doing it to create confusion.”
For years, internet users have shared a statement allegedly made by Karl Marx, the 19th-century German philosopher whose ideas gave rise to Marxist political and economic theory. The supposed quote read:
Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion.
The quote has popped up in multiple posts (archived) on Facebook (archived), as well (archived) as on X (archived). For example, 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 are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion.”
– Karl Marx pic.twitter.com/tRgXLQ8fGo
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) Nov. 13, 2023
However, there is no evidence Karl Marx ever said these words, and as a result we have rated this quote as misattributed.
Marx, Alinsky or Goebbels?
A search of the full quote in the Marx Engels Archive, a comprehensive database of texts written by Marx and his frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels, returned no results. Searches of shorter snippets of the quote, including “accuse your enemy” and “to create confusion,” likewise found no matches.
The earliest appearance of a recognizable version of the quote we were able to locate in any type of media was a February 2013 post made using TwitLonger, a website that allowed X users to draft posts longer than 140 characters before X increased the limit to 280 characters in 2017. The post’s author was Lori Hendry, a conservative social media personality who had around 408,000 X followers by the time her account was shut down in early 2021.
The post, visible in archived form via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, read:
“Saul Alinsky 101: Accuse your opponent of what only you are doing, as you are doing it, to create confusion, cloud the issue, and inoculate voters against any evidence of your guilt.” Robert Moon Examiner #tcot
The post has two notable features. For one, Hendry ended her post with “Robert Moon Examiner,” which she presumably included as a citation for the newspaper article or other publication in which she first encountered the quote. Snopes has so far been unable to track down this publication or to reach Hendry for comment, but will update this story if we learn anything further.
The second interesting feature of the post is that it includes no mention of Karl Marx. Instead, Hendry’s post linked the quote, or at least the concepts it described, to Saul Alinsky, an American leftist social organizer whose 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” included a chapter of organizing tactics.
Although Alinsky composed these tactics using language similar to the quote investigated here, the exact quote appeared nowhere in “Rules for Radicals” or any of Alinsky’s other works.
Some internet users have connected the quote to yet another historical figure: Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda. For example, on Sept. 24, 2024, a Reddit user made a post (archived) on the r/quotes subreddit stating:
I’ve seen this quote several times the last couple weeks, usually attributed to Karl Marx, but never naming the actual publication it appeared in or any other context.
In the responses to that post, multiple commenters pointed out that the quote could be a paraphrase or mistranslation of a quote from a speech Goebbels delivered at a Nazi Party rally in 1934.
As it appeared the original German in the official 1935 publication of speeches from the 1934 rally, that quote read:
Der raffinierteste Trick der während des Krieges gegen Deutschland arbeitenden Propaganda war der, uns das zu unterstellen, was ihr selbst zu eigen war.
In a professional translation of the speech made available online by Calvin University, the same Goebbels quote read:
The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing.
Although the Goebbels quote, like the quote attributed to Marx, described the tactical value of accusing an enemy of something one is doing themselves, both the wording and the framing of the two quotes differed significantly.
A major difference, however, was that the Goebbels quote described being a target of this tactic, whereas the alleged Marx quote under investigation here was framed as an instruction.
Nazis and Communists
Searches of parts of the quote using the full-text search features on Google Books and the Internet Archive, as well as on Newspapers.com, returned numerous examples of phrases similar to the quote in question in books, articles, and reports stretching back to the 1930s.
One early example was an April 1939 newspaper article published in The American Guardian (Oklahoma City), which listed “Ten Nazi propaganda tricks as listed by The Advance, organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.”
No. 9 on that list, which can be seen in the image embedded below, was: “Accuse your enemy of having committed all your own crimes.”
(The American Guardian (Oklahoma City), April 21, 1939/Newspapers.com)
Also in 1939, the American journalist and author Edgar Ansel Mowrer wrote in his book “Germany Turns the Clock Back”:
The Nazis were not very effective diplomats. But as propagandists they were remarkable. Their system was successful by its very simplicity: deny everything abroad that you encourage at home: accuse your enemy of doing just what you intend to do.
After World War II, the tactic — and the phrasing used to describe it — was increasingly connected with communists, and specifically the Soviet Union, rather than Nazis. One example appeared in a 1960 article touching on Soviet propaganda in the Professional Journal of the United States Army included the line:
If you do something wrong, accuse the enemy of doing it before he accuses you.
The tactic’s association with Russia appears to have persisted even after the collapse of communism. For example, in his 2017 book “Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War,” the British journalist Peter Conradi quoted a list of Russian propaganda tactics under Vladimir Putin, which Conradi attributed to Ukrainian-American journalist Roman Saskiw. Among those tactics was:
Accuse the enemy of doing what you are doing to confuse the conversation.
In short, the quote appears to be a description of a propaganda tactic that various individuals have summarized using similar language since the 1930s, when English-language writers strongly associated the concept with Nazism. After WWII, authors connected the tactic more with the propaganda of the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia.
There is no evidence that Karl Marx ever said or wrote the quote in question. Joseph Goebbels and Saul Alinsky, two other historical figures who some internet users have associated with the quote, likewise did not author it. Therefore, we have rated this quote as misattributed.