ANM

It is one year since Judge Anthony Seys-Llewellyn’s judgement in our Civil case against Andy Lewis and Melanie Byng, in which the Judge, having refused us relief, made a special point of awarding no damages to us to punish us for correctly identifying that we have been stalked and harassed for years. Instead of preventing them getting away with social murder, he awarded the perpetrators our home.

 

A friend remarked the other day at how many parallels there are between our case and the smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership. Any democratic principle, process or representative can be subverted, dressed up with propaganda, and repackaged to create the desired reactionary picture.

 

Jeremy quoting Maya Angelou, “you may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them”  got me thinking about the method and purpose of covert harassment and stalking.

 

 

 

Provoke, Exploit, Deny – Techniques of Harassment

 

It’s certainly difficult not to be reduced by a course of conduct conducted by multiple people in a co-ordinated fashion that has your social murder as its very purpose. It’s in the meaning of the word the Stasi used to describe their meticulously organised and documented “Zerzetzung”, and exactly as in our case the techniques were developed in order to achieve invisible destruction of targets whilst maintaining plausible deniability, so as to be able, for example, to attend Human Rights symposiums.

By September 2014 I had felt I was being spied on for three years, in spite of vicious statements of total disinterest. It was certainly becoming a strain, and I wrote a piece about how they would have to kill me to stop me speaking about the abuse I have experienced at their hands.

My then lawyer advised me not to publish it, so I didn’t, but it makes me sick to remember how I discovered shortly after at “disclosure”, that my death had been discussed in detail over a long period of time spanning years in the background, wishing it, imagining it, and “I’ll happily give her a hole in the head anytime”, all well away from the nice, kind humanist image Melanie Byng likes to project in public.

The disclosure of the defendants immediately showed two things:

• I had been right about being stalked and spied on the whole time, by all of them, in spite of their flaming denials of interest – it began in September 2011 and included cyber-stalking me to the hospital where my mum was dying and threatening to harass me there.
• We were absolutely 100% right that we needed legal help but this was not about simple defamation but about a criminal course of conduct of harassment and stalking.

If you’re in the business of social murder, how on earth would you know whether and when someone was ‘being prolific’ on one particular day, unless you or your proxies monitor them all the time?

 

A Covert Campaign by Any Other Name.

Reading about Stasi harassment, or the American Cointelpro, it’s easy to be struck by how much easier the internet has made gang stalking and harassment: social murder. It’s no longer necessary to break into someone’s house and move their tea-towels around to make them a) feel and b) appear mad if they report such a bizarre and seemingly trivial occurrence.

Yet the meticulous accounts of actions on targets of state repression, serve to remove any doubt that the desired outcome was exactly the same as in our case.

For whatever reason, the Judge himself appears to have been expertly trolled into joining in, even first grooming us for failure at the PTR, by explicitly promising to examine the course of conduct he himself identified as:

 

“Covertly inciting organisations and individuals to shun the Appellants by portraying them as dangerous and mentally unstable. I could, by going through the 24 pages of appendices, pick out a number of obvious candidates for this”

 

as background to defamation, to prove malice, but then when it came to detailed examination of the mechanisms of covert harassment, refusing to do so, stating in court:

 

“If that is a live issue in the case (well it is not) or if it were a live issue in the case, then to say, “Oh, somebody has been setting the pack upon me so that I have had a very tough time in all the unpleasant things that I have heard and that I have read about myself”, well that would be simply arguing part of the case; but, I have made my ruling. My ruling is that we are dealing with the defamation case. We are not dealing with a case in harassment, namely, below the surface there was this campaign and participation, collusion in setting out an array of comments which might make people less fully pay attention to us. So that is not the case that I am trying.

 

Having thus hidden their course of conduct in social murder, he nevertheless severely gas-lighted me for being affected by it, achieved by studiously never  asking what the likely effect on a target of that course of conduct in covert harassment would be likely to be, which effect the law clearly states is the “essence” of harassment, thus creating an illusion of justice. 

 

State Repression

When an American expert asked me before the five day Hearing, “is it the State”, I replied “no it’s not”, he rejoined with “are you sure?”

And it’s a sorry fact that the result of a failure to apprehend covert stalking and harassment can only become state repression, through litigation thereby rendered into a vexatious torture for the Claimants.

It’s self-evident that if there hadn’t been a background campaign of stalking and harassment, as detailed in this expert report, we would never have had to globally relocate to seek help from the UK Courts.

Not only were we confident in our writing and videos, but the defendents’ cowardly disclosure demonstrates how badly mere publication with right of reply offered was ‘causing problems’ for them, as democratic engagement does to all reactionaries and this is why they set about smearing targets, in this case us, and particularly me.

The deliberate fabrication of  a ‘risk’ diagnosis, admittedly fuelled by use of Richard Byng’s medical and academic authority at Plymouth University, made it easy for them to coerce and threaten others to join in reducing us as much as possible:

Not only that, but Lewis’ email disclosure demonstrates how creepy his public lie of wanting ‘nothing to do’ with us is, as he’s shown actively soliciting information on us, just days before claiming to have “filtered them out of my life”, plotting with an un-named “psychiatrist” to move in on me, and stalking us day in day out.

All rewarded by the Judge with a costs order against us of £240,000 for their blatantly lying lawyer mates who kept emphasising all the way through the case that they hadn’t been charging them at all.

 

Dangerous times for Democracy

Although devastating for us, this may be small beer in the great scheme of things, for who should give a crap that the only family to have ever exposed unchecked bullying in a Steiner School through Human Rights process, should be hammered into the ground by supposed Steiner critics and then denied Human Rights by the British Judiciary? But it does highlight some invisible dangers of our times.

Whatever happens in national politics, and as they appear to become more feminised, let’s remember that the original master-mind of our covert harassment and stalking is a woman.

Don’t be fooled by soft looks and feminine fakery, remember to check for blood under the finger nails.

Of course I shouldn’t be able to write about any of this without making it worse, or making myself appear “mad” as they have invented me, and after all that’s what Zerzetzung is and was and what it is for.

But I can and will return now to publication because what this has taught me above all, as is frequently remarked upon by friends and those who do know me, is how robust my mental health actually is, and that’s how I know I can use this experience and knowledge of social murder for good.

I have managed to maintain my humanity under a huge networked and co-ordinated hate campaign, and although I am certainly changed by it, I am not reduced, and that makes what I say about it matter.

Zerzetzung, Cointelpro and all the other state run covert harassment rackets in history are always aimed at those whose speech is deemed a threat to the status quo, which we all know by now is rampant and murderous neoliberalism, a devious and rapacious self-serving beast.

So it’s time to realise that covert harassment and social murder will likely not be practised by obvious reactionaries, but is far more likely to be the go-to weapon of those who wish to appear progressive while undermining and harassing others, to stand on platforms of openness, transparency and claim to be antidoting narrow, unevidenced extremism; like humanists, and skeptics for example.

So as they doubtless raise a glass to the Judge, to celebrate deviously getting away with social murder, covert stalking and harassment, and slaver at the prospect of driving our family from our home, in company with luminaries such as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler, (and let’s not forget Pontius Pilate), they will be supping with the devil.

As for me, well my glass will be raised to the many who have died as a result of Zerzetzung and similar targeted psychological attack programs throughout history, and I’ll toast Jeremy Corbyn and Maya Angelou too, and while I’m at it, Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and all the rest of those whose speech was so dangerous, they needed to be shut down by repressive regimes, the truth-seekers, the courageous, the heroes, those who refused absolutely to be reduced.

In these times of uncertainty and fear, of sudden splits and divisions among people, and of a growing acceptance of hatred, I certainly prefer the company I’m keeping.

 

How you can help

I’ve seen the evidence of how many people have been threatened or coerced into joining in with stalking and harassment and/or public shunning of us, and I understand – it’s hard to stand up to bullies. But as well as being beneath you, research is showing how bad the effects are on those who become negative bystanders, so please click the link below to visit our crowd fund and start to put a stop to the bullying – you can even donate anonymously so they won’t even know.

Image of Scolds bridle: See page for author [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

3SA90091, Amazon News Media, Andy Lewis, Angel Garden, cyber-harassment, democracy, featured, humanism, humanists, internet stalking, internet trolling, Jeremy Corbyn, Maya Angelou, Melanie Byng, Plymouth University, Quackometer, Richard Byng, skepticism, skeptics, Steiner Critics, Steinermentary, Steve Paris, Titirangi Steiner Messenger, Waldorf

By ANM

---