Relevance to the subject: Common arguments among those who don’t believe the targeting or try to discredit it are that a) It would be unfeasible to make so many people to cooperate and keep it a secret, b) The harm which one is able to make under such conditions is small enough to be ignored and c) Government would never dare to do something so absurd. The Zersetzung practice done east Germany by the Stasi refutes them - its was, precisely, a covert psychological harassment campaign enabled by a vast network of civilians, which resulted in mental breakdowns and suicide to a number of victims. Furthermore, the nature of the procedures of Zersetzung bear striking similarities to what targeted individuals - namely the continuous monitoring and exploitation of personal weaknesses.
The Stasi was the intelligence agency of East Germany from 1950 to 1990 and had the role of maintaining state authority. It was done, primarily, by means of a network of civilian informants. The technique named Zersetzung - which means ‘(chemical) decomposition’) - was designed as a plausibly deniable way to undermine anyone allegedly engaged in any sort of undesirable activity. It was based in coordinated, untraceable and frequently subtle actions that disrupted the personal life and mental health of the target while remaining invisible to anyone else. Some Wikipedia quotes about it (from its pages on Stasi and Zersetzung ):
“By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that the methods of overt persecution that had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. Such forms of oppression were drawing significant international condemnation. It was realized that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. International condemnation could also be avoided.”
“Tactics employed under Zersetzung usually involved the disruption of the victim's private or family life. This often included psychological attacks, such as breaking into their home and subtly manipulating the contents, in a form of gaslighting i.e. moving furniture around, altering the timing of an alarm, removing pictures from walls, or replacing one variety of tea with another etc. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, travel bans, career sabotage, administering purposely incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns which could include sending falsified, compromising photos or documents to the victim's family, denunciation, provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping, bugging, mysterious phone calls or unnecessary deliveries, even including sending a vibrator to a target's wife. Increasing degrees of unemployment and social isolation could and frequently did occur due to the negative psychological, physical, and social ramifications of being targeted. Usually, victims had no idea that the Stasi were responsible. Many thought that they were losing their minds, and mental breakdowns and suicide were sometimes the result. There is on-going debate as to the extent, if at all, that weaponised directed energy devices, such as X-ray transmitters, were also used against victims.”
“The Stasi used operational psychology and its extensive network of between 170,000 and over 500,000 informal collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) to launch personalized psychological attacks against targets to damage their mental health and lower chances of a "hostile action" against the state. Among the collaborators were youths as young as 14 years of age.”
"The use of Zersetzung is well documented due to Stasi files published after the Berlin wall fell, with several thousands or up to 10,000 individuals estimated to have become victims, 5,000 of whom sustained irreversible damage."
The following, also extracted from Wikipedia, is a quote from british journalist Luke Harding’s (who was victim of a similar practice by the Russian agency FSB) book “Mafia state: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia” (emphasis added) :
“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.(...) The most insidious aspect of Zersetzung is that its victims are almost invariably not believed.”
Sources
- Stasi. (2023, June 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
- Zersetzung. (2023, June 14). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
- Harding, Luke (2011). Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia. New York: Random House. pp. 286–287.