The state someones randomly mess with your stuff to ruin your day. Spread rumors to your spouse about you “cheating”, making your fellow revolutionaries suspect you of being a government agent, rearrange items in your house to gaslight you, beam radiation at you. You know about all the “crazy people” claiming to be persecuted by the govovernment, some may actually be real. Serbia has used energy weapons against protestors, there are videos on it. They could go in front of your house and point their energy beam right at you. Sounds so bizzare, but its real.
As applied by the Stasi, Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they are unable to continue their “hostile-negative” activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim’s private life. They would then devise a strategy to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children. […] The security service’s goal was to use Zersetzung to “switch off” regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim’s domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state. Best of all, the Stasi’s role in the victim’s personal misfortunes remained tantalisingly hidden. The Stasi operations were carried out in complete operational secrecy. The service acted like an unseen and malevolent god, manipulating the destinies of its victims.
It was in the mid-1970 that Honecker’s secret police began to employ these perfidious methods. At that moment the GDR was finally achieving international respectability. […] Honecker’s predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, was an old-fashioned Stalinist thug. He used open terror methods to subdue his post-war population: show trials, mass arrests, camps, torture and the secret police.
But two decades after east Germany had become a communist paradise of workers and peasants, most citizens were acquiescent. When a new group of dissidents began to protest against the regime, Honecker came to the conclusion that different tactics were needed. Mass terror was no longer appropriate and might damage the GDR’s international reputation. A cleverer strategy was called for. […] The most insidious aspect of Zersetzung is that its victims are almost invariably not believed.
…the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it’s described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally “biodegradation.” But actually, it’s a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.
The US’s future might not be necessarily arresting everyone, plane ticket randomly cancelled, your purchases would suddenly fail, oops your internet went down, oh no your brand new phone suddenly dies. Random Gas Leak. Randomly have Carbon Monoxide in your house, and then all 3 of your CO detectors simultaneously fail for some reason. Random food poisoning when you eat outside. If its targeted enough and they know your routes, they could make the traffic lights turn red faster while you’re in the middle of crossing the street. Or make it malfunction so that it shows green while oncoming traffic also shows green.
They can stage so many different “accidents”. Not even necessarily lethal, just annoying enough to break your mind.
Welcome to the future, the dystopia is already here.
i’m with on everything except “energy weapons”… it’s too vague
i mean, a gun is also an energy weapon.
i was referring to more recent Snowden revelations… they would do weird shit like cancel people’s dinner reservations while surveilling them… not quite the full gaslighting but still pretty upsetting….
A directed-energy weapon (DEW) is a ranged weapon that damages its target with highly focused energy without a solid projectile, including lasers, microwaves, particle beams, and sound beams.
Caption: Police car equipped with an LRAD-500X sonic weapon (Warsaw, Poland, 2011)
I don’t know anything specific, but I did work customer service for a major airline at one time. I can think of one routine-ish situation that could look like this.
It wasn’t uncommon that if we suspected fraud in the booking we would leave it to be canceled at the last minute so the fraudsters didn’t suspect anything until they were at the airport, where they could be caught. It could have thrown a fraud flag somehow or someone malicious flagged it similarly.
And we still don’t know why his first booking disappeared AFTER he got his boarding passes and made it through security.
My pet theory is that an individual fascist processed his baggage and cancelled the itinerary in reaction to the TP posts.
the NSA and CIA actually do stuff like that… just fuck people’s day up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
The state someones randomly mess with your stuff to ruin your day. Spread rumors to your spouse about you “cheating”, making your fellow revolutionaries suspect you of being a government agent, rearrange items in your house to gaslight you, beam radiation at you. You know about all the “crazy people” claiming to be persecuted by the govovernment, some may actually be real. Serbia has used energy weapons against protestors, there are videos on it. They could go in front of your house and point their energy beam right at you. Sounds so bizzare, but its real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device
On Zerzetzung:
The US’s future might not be necessarily arresting everyone, plane ticket randomly cancelled, your purchases would suddenly fail, oops your internet went down, oh no your brand new phone suddenly dies. Random Gas Leak. Randomly have Carbon Monoxide in your house, and then all 3 of your CO detectors simultaneously fail for some reason. Random food poisoning when you eat outside. If its targeted enough and they know your routes, they could make the traffic lights turn red faster while you’re in the middle of crossing the street. Or make it malfunction so that it shows green while oncoming traffic also shows green.
They can stage so many different “accidents”. Not even necessarily lethal, just annoying enough to break your mind.
Welcome to the future, the dystopia is already here.
i’m with on everything except “energy weapons”… it’s too vague
i mean, a gun is also an energy weapon.
i was referring to more recent Snowden revelations… they would do weird shit like cancel people’s dinner reservations while surveilling them… not quite the full gaslighting but still pretty upsetting….
When I say “Energy Weapon”, I’m referring to this:
From Wikipedia:
Pro tip, the lrad can be defeated by carrying a parabolic shield and pointing it back at the operators.
Tech Ingredients has a great video about that on youtube
I don’t know anything specific, but I did work customer service for a major airline at one time. I can think of one routine-ish situation that could look like this.
It wasn’t uncommon that if we suspected fraud in the booking we would leave it to be canceled at the last minute so the fraudsters didn’t suspect anything until they were at the airport, where they could be caught. It could have thrown a fraud flag somehow or someone malicious flagged it similarly.