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Medawar's avatar

This kind of harassment is very hard to survive; the main reason why few people can believe it happens is that it seems an incredibly inefficient way to destroy a single person. And it is. But the whole point seems to be to create a network capable of destroying any opponent or dissident in a cost-effective way to order, precisely because that WOULD be a cost-effective way to persecute an open-ended list of victims which might very well outnumber members of the network.

The other motive is that all the people WITHIN the network are very much under control, especially when they are committing criminal offences on the network's behalf. Did the NAZIs create the Brownshirts (stormtroopers) solely to persecute the party's enemies, or was there a strong element of keeping the toughest thugs in Germany and Austria inside the tent, pissing out? It would seem unlikely that the NAZIs could have claimed to be on top of Germany's social order problems if those thugs had been left to their own devices.

A lot of the people mentioned in the above article might have tended to do a lot of random damage to society and business interests if they had not been harnessed and directed in certain directions. If they had been left free to make up their own scams and capers, a lot of the Reitmans' friends and contacts might have been ripped off, or even suffered violence. In this scenario, the fact that stalking can be a full-tine occupation for some people might even be an advantage, because it would stop them doing anything unexpected.

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