On 10 Nov 2007 at 13:39:02 -0500, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 11/10/07 1:26 PM, Daniel R. Tobias at dan@tobias.name wrote:
A Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", provides a fictional illustration of the tendency of a community to be its own worst enemy.
That's where this comes from:
"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own." - Rod Serling
And, to make that episode's example particularly relevant, there was in fact an external enemy that wished to destroy the community in question; it wasn't just a figment of the imagination. However, the technique used by that enemy was the very clever one of manipulating the people within the community into scapegoating and attacking one another. This is a technique that works fine for trolls who want to cause trouble on Wikipedia, as well, whether they pursue it intentionally as in the enemy in that episode, or simply as an accidental byproduct of their other actions; I'm sure they get a lot of merriment out of getting Wikipedia admins to do a lot of collateral damage in the course of fighting the trolls' alleged activities. If they play the game well, they don't need to do very much actual direct damage themselves; all they have to do is plant enough hints of their continued presence to cause massive witchhunts to be launched against them, dragging in innocent victims.