Bullying is a central feature of cults. I am taken back to my rather unhappy days in high school when I think of the horrific abuse I suffered from my peers in the organisation. I am recovering from this evil experience, but I doubt I will ever forget it. I still vividly remember how my former comrades reacted when I publicly came out as an ex-member in May 2020 on Facebook. The fury. The disbelief. The despair. The slander and trolling left on my posts. It was a distressing, amusing and bizarre experience.
I did not know that some members of the organisation were subscribers to Louis Proyect’s Marxmail when I publicly came out as an ex-Trotskyist in his mailing list. Having read his blog for some time, I resolved to come out with my doubts about Trotskyism to fellow Marxists who had also had dispiriting experiences in sects. It turns out that some people found out about my desertion through this. When it became apparent that my renegacy was a matter of public knowledge, I resolved to resign immediately. After all, it was clear that I was simply going to be expelled for having dared to defy the leadership and break discipline by publicly airing differences.
For two months, I said nothing on social media. I could not even bear to look at social media and see all of the cultish junk on my feed from other IMT members. I had next to no contact with my ex-comrades during this time, until I finally did come public. I made a post on Facebook saying that I was feeling utterly demoralised and wanted to quit politics. In response to a concerned Socialist Appeal member commenting below to try to comfort me (he did not know I had left), I responded by bitterly denouncing all Trotskyist organisations as cults. The general response to my post was cultish abuse and slander from IMT members underneath my post, including one ‘Manuel Pala’ (a member of the American section) who said that I was backsliding on my dedication to the revolution as a result of the influence of my Christian upbringing. He made this idiotic claim with no evidence whatsoever. This is a classic example of the disgusting way in which cults will use such personal information against you to guilt you, control you and even slander you when you dare to question their preposterous doctrine. He also taunted me by claiming that I would probably become a Lib Dem or a Tory – the same threat that Ben Curry levelled at me when I dared to question Trotskyist dogma. On the cultish comments shaming me and slandering me for leaving (including some who had no doubt found out about my desertion via Marxmail), I found that many other members had ‘liked’ them, including none other than my former branch secretary, Thomas. This disgusting and contemptible act of betrayal, and exhibition of cowardly conformism on his part, did not massively surprise me. He was a creature of the cult, totally brainwashed and incapable of rational thought, who would go wherever the herd went. I regret that I did not screenshot this monstrous episode so that I could display it here as proof. No doubt they will deny that this ever happened if questioned about it.
I made a follow-up post mocking the cultishness and conformism of my bitter ex-comrades. A response to this was a comment made by a Socialist Appeal comrade, Maarten, who told me to ‘Go quietly’ and ‘Stop insulting your ex-comrades’. This is the standard response from cultists when you dare to call them out publicly on their bullshit – demands for you to ‘Go quietly’ and not expose their sordid behaviour. I had actually been on good terms with this guy (who had read my statement on Marxmail), but, needless to say, he chose the cult over me. I deleted the posts in question as they threatened to get out of control, and made a conciliatory post in which I explained my decision to resign and reminded my ex-comrades that they were simply proving my point about their organisation being a cult. I also said that I would give my resignation letter in private to anyone who wanted it. I had a few takers, including those who had been on good personal terms with me in the organisation. Most ignored me. I also quoted Nietzsche’s famous quote about how the surest way of corrupting a youth is teaching him contempt for the opinions of others. Some people commented on the post expressing their sadness at my departure. The Trotskyist cult leader, Gerry Downing, with whom I was apparently Facebook friends, commented on my post denouncing me for quoting the ‘reactionary’ and ‘Nazi’ philosopher. The irony is that Downing is an anti-Semite who has written all sorts of loathsome nonsense about a ‘Jewish-Israeli bourgeoisie’ playing a malicious role in world affairs. Nietzsche, by contrast, condemned anti-Semitism and nationalism. Thomas replied to his comment agreeing with him, and picking out some unflattering quotations of Nietzsche’s in order to affirm the point. This idiot is unaware that I could easily have done the same with Marx’s racist remarks about Jews and blacks, his homophobia, his misogyny, and countless other things. This is the mind of an ideologue, who has never even read the people he condemns, and who believes that all the world’s problems have been answered by Marxist theory.
The blow-up over Facebook was just the culmination in two and a half years of bullying and abuse at the hands of members of this organisation. I have already gone into detail in other posts about how this same Thomas and other members of my branch ganged up on me to hound me out of the branch in my first year over a flurry of slanderous accusations, partly based on confidential stuff about my mental health that I had confessed to another member of the branch, who then screenshoted these and other remarks and sent them to the other branch members as part of a campaign of a vicious character assassination. I was not even given the chance to defend myself. This should have been the moment when I saw the real nature of this organisation and deserted it. This horrific betrayal by those who claimed to be my friends and comrades, this herd mentality, this disgusting display of conformist and cult-like behaviour, should have made me realised what I had gotten myself into. Instead, the opposite was the case. I resolved to intensify my commitment and loyalty in the hope of making up for everything, and in the hope that I could erase the memory of what had happened and regain the trust and love of everyone in my branch and the organisation. It was a futile endeavour. I realised, too late, that they would always dislike me, that they would never really accept me, and that they would always vacillate from love-bombing and exaggerated displays of affection to vicious slander and abuse if I dared to disagree with them or exercise the slightest bit of critical thought. It was like being in an abusive relationship. I blamed myself for everything, and told myself that I had to work harder at being a better comrade. Of course, this is precisely what they wanted – for me to hate myself, and maybe even kill myself, so that they did not need to deal with a rival talent within their branch. Part of the reason I remained in the organisation so long is because I was terrified that if I left, especially on bad terms, this ugly episode would be resurrected and used to slander me. This was effectively an unspoken form of blackmail that kept me trapped in the sect. I was correct – none other than one of my former comrades, Jack, has revived the episode all too recently, slandering me on Reddit and claiming that I was ‘expelled’ from the organisation for ‘sexual harassment’. (This is a lie. I was never expelled for any reason. I merely took a leave of absence from my branch.) No doubt he is spreading this slander within the organisation. This is another classic illustration of how this organisation is a cult. Only a cult would engage in this disgusting behaviour. I think that all along, I had suspected that I might be in a cult, and the reaction to my leaving has simply confirmed this. Might I add that this blackguard never had the balls to say half of the things he now says about me on the Internet to my face. It gives you a wonderful illustration of the weak character of this pathetic individual.
Part of the reason why I left the organisation in the end was because I had come to see through all of this abuse and manipulation. I knew that there was no point trying to conduct a struggle from within the organisation, as I had initially wanted to do, to win hearts and minds. For one thing, my branch secretary, Thomas, was a pathetic conformist and coward who would do whatever the leadership wanted him to, and, in alliance with Ben Curry, the regional full-timer, I knew the two of them would use all of the institutional powers they possessed in the organisation to isolate me, undermine me and prevent me from getting a fair hearing even in my own branch, let alone within the organisation as a whole. I was no match for them. Rather than go along with this rigged game, and endure the humiliation of being expelled, I decided it was time to leave.
After I left, I was shunned. I recently re-connected with someone who is still in the sect, and from what I have been told, my ‘disappearance’ from the organisation was not remarked on, even by my branch, which was reluctant to admit the real reason for my desertion. If I am being spoken of at all, I am almost certainly being slandered to everyone in the organisation for the crime of leaving. This is the organisation I gave my life to, that I gave over £1000 to, that I gave up what should have been my best years – my time at university – to. This is the repayment I get. It is quite a harrowing thing to think about. I do not think the anger at having been duped and conned in this way will ever disappear. I think of all those illusory relationships I built up in the sect – relationships which, deep down, I knew weren’t real and based entirely on political agreement. I still felt the pain of losing them. There is nothing wrong with missing certain things about the cult. I still have fond memories of people I knew in the organisation who I was on very good terms with. I also had the misfortune of meeting some of the worst people I have ever known in my life. All in all, I am glad to be out, but the horror of this experience will stay with me until the day I die.
It was just like the organisation to give me one last traumatic experience as their goodbye present. Even now, I get IMT trolls attacking me on this blog and on my YouTube channel, even downvoting all my videos in a targeted campaign of harassment. I can’t say I care. If anything, it makes me glad to know that I am making these people feel so insecure that they feel the need to behave this way. I have actually noticed that I am getting less of that recently. In all honesty, I feel a bit disappointed. It is reassuring to know that I am pushing some buttons, because it means that maybe, just maybe, I am forcing some people to re-evaluate their ideas and their commitment to the organisation. I can usually tell when an article of mine is getting a lot of traction within the organisation because I notice via my stats information that I’m getting a lot of traffic from Facebook. Since I have only posted a few of my articles there, it stands to reason that there are people in Socialist Appeal who are reading some of the stuff I’ve written, including the more personal stuff like the one I wrote about my first branch meeting, and who are showing this to others in the organisation so that the people I mention in the posts can read them. I hope they were appropriately enraged.
They probably think that their unpleasant behaviour is harming me, but really, they are harming themselves far more. I’m lucky. I escaped the cult. They are still in. One of them, to my knowledge, is now a full-timer, and has thrown away his life. That, for me, is punishment enough for their wrongdoing. When they finally leave, they will suffer everything I have, and worse, for having left it so late before breaking free. I do not wish this upon them, but it is difficult to feel empathy for people who were so happy tormenting me, and were only too happy to join in with the herd that was slandering and shaming me when I left. This sociopathic behaviour can only be partially explained by their being in the cult. It is also an example of why I have tended to steer away from any peer social groups, so as to avoid this deeply disturbing dynamic. I hope that when they leave, they will do some serious therapy and look into their twisted souls to see the reality of what they allowed themselves to become in this organisation.