“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”–Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881. Cults and Recruitment No cult can survive without obsessive recruitment, and in Socialist Appeal/the IMT, this was at the centre of everything we did and said. … Read more
31 years ago, the USSR came to an ignominious end. In the IMT, I was indoctrinated to see the USSR as a noble and heroic attempt at building a better world. It was, for all its flaws, a ‘workers’ state’, worth defending in the face of its bourgeois enemies. The nationalised planned economy had created … Read more
No one realises how much time they will end up dedicating when they join a cult like the IMT. I had no idea how intense an experience this would be. I did know that as a born-again Marxist, I was keen to get stuck in with a serious organisation. The IMT seemed to fit the … Read more
There was never any such thing as a Trotskyist theory – only a deposed leader who tried desperately to recover his role, who could not realize that his efforts were vain, and who would not accept responsibility for a state of affairs which he regarded as a strange degeneration, but which was in fact that … Read more
In his book, Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, Churchill wrote a damning account of Trotsky’s life of murder and mayhem. Reading it, you get a sense that this arch-criminal and miscreant got what was coming to him when his life was cut short by a blessed ice-axe. When the usurper and tyrant is reduced to … Read more
I still remember my first October School. I have written of it in my Medium piece. I remember how exciting it all was. Now, I look back and realise I was the victim of mind control. The October School is the IMT’s flagship event, held every October in order to celebrate the October Revolution (which … Read more
Just last night, I had another nightmare about some people I knew from the IMT. There is no understating just how damaging membership in a cult can be to your mental health. My mental health was terrible at university, in large part because of my membership of the IMT and horrific treatment and shunning from … Read more
Read it for yourself. These people really are ridiculous, aren’t they?
The late American historian of Russia, Martin Malia, wrote a book a few years after the USSR’s collapse entitled The Soviet Tragedy. It is one of the best books on the USSR I have read, together with Nekrich and Heller’s Utopia in Power. It’s a very detailed, scholarly work of historiography that I would not … Read more
When I was in the IMT, we boasted endlessly of our democratic credentials. We compared ourselves favourably with Peter Taaffe’s organisation, which hounded out dissidents mercilessly. We replayed the trauma of the 1991-2 split over and over again. We convinced ourselves that we had much higher standards for our organisation. Little did I know that … Read more