One Year Anniversary of this Blog!

It has been one year since I set up this blog to expose the inner workings of the IMT. This is nine months after I stormed out of the sect, unable to put up with their nonsense for five more minutes. Leaving the organisation was partly an act of impulse. I felt that I could not do it anymore. After several days of deliberation in my room, I took the decisive step of breaking free – and I have never felt better. I have not looked back since deserting that disgusting enterprise, and as I look at the young people going into that organisation and wasting their lives, I am filled with sadness. They have no idea what they are getting into. This is not an ordinary political organisation. It is a machine that chews people up and spits them out. It is a group of people who say they want to build a better world, yet have created a totalitarian monstrosity in which abuse and exploitation is rampant. They are the world’s worst hypocrites, and yet they pose as people fighting for human good. It boils the blood to think that they can get away with such blatant fraud. It is rich for IMT cultists complain that cult analysis is ‘undialectical’ and unjust because, they argue, it can apply to any organisation, but simultaneously claim an exalted position for themselves and say that only their sect can save the planet.

I knew what leaving meant and prepared myself for it emotionally. The hard part was leaving. Everything else after that wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. Yes, there was the ostracism, the shunning, the angry denunciation by cultists on social media for daring to walk away. But I am proud of what I did. I just hope that others can avoid making the same mistakes.

I spent months recuperating from the most miserable experience of my life. I maintained minimal communication with a couple of people in the sect who were still on speaking terms with me, but that was that. I had gone all in, and now I was all out. In the cult, I was surrounded by people all the time, despite feeling an inner loneliness. Now my loneliness was both physical as well as mental. But I was still glad to be out. I felt that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It would have been so much harder to do if I had spent anymore time in that environment.

I like to think of my time in the sect as an abusive relationship. Two and a half years does not seem like a long time, but it is a substantial chunk of one’s life. A lot can happen in that time, and a lot did happen to me. I went to university just a year after my dad’s death, I moved away from my family and support network, and I was groomed by a far-left cult. I was surrounded by people who pretended to be my friends but were using me and became more and more unpleasant as the months went by. I was vulnerable and alone, and the one person I bonded with was the girlfriend of my branch secretary (not a member of the organisation), whom I fell for but was utterly forbidden to me. (I confess I did not manage the feelings very well.) The situation was utterly depressing and I felt suicidal at times. But somehow, I survived, and spent another year and a half in that hell. There were red flags, warning signs, stuff that made me uncomfortable. I was ill-treated by my branch and the victim of what I can only describe as high school cliquishness and bullying. Yet I remained loyal to the cause, to ‘the Organisation’. It was all for nothing. My loyalty was unrewarded. I was being played and used, to be thrown away when I was no longer needed.

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who displays all the toxic behaviour that this organisation did when I was a member. Anyone could see plainly that you would be mad to remain in such a relationship for more than a few months before doing the sensible thing and breaking it off. It is no different when being in a toxic group, whether that be a political organisation, like I was in, or even a friendship circle. Yet it is so hard to do the right thing and walk away. We tell ourselves it will get better. It never does. It only gets worse. I spent two and a half years on these people, time I could have spent around real friends, real companions, people who would actually support me emotionally and intellectually. Instead I was clinging for dear life to these awful people for fear of being alone. My reward was to be cast out in the end and slandered. It really was not worth it.

The months of recuperation from the sect were primarily months of intense reading and research on cults, the Russian Revolution and Marxist ideology. I also found the time to read literature and finish up my undergraduate degree. I narrowly missed out on a First, and if I had not been so distracted by two and a half years of being in an abusive cult, plus the time I spent recuperating and recovering after I left, I think I would have achieved it. I think to myself, what if I had left in my second year and dedicated the whole of my final year just to studying? How much better off would I have been? Even better, what if I had made the painful decision to leave within months of joining, when it didn’t feel right anymore?

I feel like I missed out on a proper university experience because of my time in the sect. And yet, Nietzsche taught me to love fate, and accept all that happens to me. Some good has come out of this evil. I have learned resilience, courage and individualism. I have learned that not everyone who appears friendly and charming is who they say they are. An example of this is my branch secretary, Thomas, a superficially charming and bubbly young man who was really a manipulative cult leader who saw me as someone to be used and exploited so he could roleplay as the next Lenin. (There is a reason that I have rarely mentioned his name until now, for it is hateful to me.) An individual who publicly humiliated me before the entire branch because of my struggles with my mental health (in part directly attributable to the cult), which he deemed ‘un-Marxist’ and slandered me with abandon when I dared to defy him, but was all sweetness and light when I was doing his bidding. I hope he finds his way out of the cult, but something tells me he will soon be promoted to be one of the senior cult leaders and exploiters in that loathsome groupuscule.

I have learned more about Marxism, its falseness, its attraction in the eyes of the youth (when I had previously been hostile to it) and its history. I have Leszek Kolakowski and his Main Currents of Marxism, which I read throughout the summer after my departure, to thank for that, as well as the writers of The God That Failed, to name a few. Almost exactly a year ago, I finished all three volumes. It was quite the accomplishment. I have learned to love freedom and individualism more than ever, and to embrace this life, this civilisation, this society we have, for it is all so fragile, and can be lost to the forces of fanaticism in the twinkling of an eye, just as I was for a moment lost to them.

As someone who hasn’t had any real close peer relationships, and has always been fairly lonely and vulnerable in social settings, my experience at the hands of this sect has only made me more sensitive and insecure in that regard. I have experienced human cruelty like never before, and I am now fairly steeled – I hope. I do not believe I will ever forgive those who tormented me. After all, they nearly drove me into an early grave. How can I forgive those who brought me to this point? It is unconscionable. There are members of the cult I could forgive, but certainly not those who treated me so viciously I wanted to die, including the guy in my branch who pretended to sympathise with me over my mental health, but then screenshoted our confidential Facebook discussions and twisted things I had said out of context to make me look like a misogynist and a psycho, and shared them with the other branch members! (For this I later received an insincere apology.) Such utterly sick behaviour is partly attribute to the cult, but must have something to do with a twisted psyche that they already had going in. This is unforgivable. My trust was violated. I have always known that people my age can be incredibly evil, but I was not quite prepared for that, my first experience with ‘cancel culture’.

I was never the person the cult turned me into. I was not the happiest guy in the world, but I had my emotions more or less under control, I preferred the intellect to the emotions and I liked lonely contemplation over being part of a crowd. The cult turned me into an emotional wreck who was on a high some days from preaching revolution, and utterly bereft on other days for not being a true Marxist revolutionary. I was not being true to myself. It was all a lie. I told myself I had to be emotionally strong to serve the sect, but behind closed doors I would crumble and consider ending it all. I had never felt like this before joining the organisation. It was like being on drugs. It is by far the most intense social experience I have ever had in my entire life, and perhaps will ever have. I don’t know if even a romantic relationship would have driven me to such despair.

Luckily for me, the ‘pre-cult self’, as Steven Hassan describes it, was always there, underneath, waiting to return. I am rediscovering the real me before the IMT told me who I should be. The real me has always been some sort of small-c conservative liberal, passionately individualistic and contemptuous of groupthink and the herd. The real me hated Jeremy Corbyn when he was elected in 2015, supported Brexit in 2016 (something which I now regret, but it must be admitted) and had always supported the Conservative Party politically. The real me laughed with my brother at YouTube compilations of far-left SJWs making fools of themselves. The real me still had the values my parents gave me, even though in some ways I have rebelled against them. I may no longer be a Christian, but I have a basic integrity and belief in truth and sincerity which could be traced to my Christian upbringing. In that respect, Manuel Pala of the IMT was correct to charge me with backsliding on Marxism because of my Christian heritage. If this is what he meant by it, I have no problem saying that I am guilty as charged. At least he makes clear that Marxists have no belief in truth and honesty, and will lie and cheat and kill in the name of building their perfect world. Let them do that, but that is not a world I want any part of. The real me loved Nietzsche and Hitchens and Carlyle and Burke and other ‘reactionary’ thinkers and writers, before I was brainwashed by the IMT to see them as evil. The real me admired the late Sir Roger Scruton, and was filled with sadness when I heard of his death just two months before I left the cult. The real me was disappointed the first time I saw a Socialist Appeal paper and thought it was a load of anti-intellectual crap, before joining and being convinced that it was a wonderful publication. The real me had been pro-Israel, philo-Semitic and contemptuous of the pro-terrorist far-left, before joining the IMT.

And as I said before, some good has come out of this experience. At university, alone, isolated and miserable, I took solace in music. I have always liked music, but in the last few years my passion for it has grown. I discovered the music of 1960s America – Roy Orbison, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Al Martino, Bing Crosby – and was utterly hooked. I spent hours listening to it alone in my room. I rediscovered my dad’s old favourite, Gentleman Jim Reeves, who became my favourite singer of all time. I became obsessed with country music – Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Eddy Arnold, you name it. I would sing in my room with my untrained voice. I had been told in high school by my music teacher that I had a good voice, but I never took singing or music seriously and did not think of being a singer. It has since become an intriguing possibility. Music was a wonderful tool for expressing my emotions – my love for the forbidden girl I fell for, my unhappiness at not fitting in in the IMT, and so much else. A song I listened to a lot in my loneliness is Al Martino’s rendition of Come Share The Wine. I am convinced that without music, I may not have survived university. I suppose I should thank all these singers for bringing light into my life, and exposing me to a higher dimension of being.

Returning to the ‘real me’ has not meant an uncritical return back to everything I used to believe. I do not agree with everything about my old self, but I know that most of it remains correct and useful. I know that my real values and opinions have nothing to do with the IMT or any other Trot cult. My locus of control is no longer with the cult, but with myself. I am glad to be back. I would like to thank my family, Dr. Dennis Tourish, Dr. Steven Hassan, Dr. Janja Lalich and the many others who have helped me on my journey from cultism to freedom. I would like to thank all of the people who have viewed this blog over the past year, including former IMT members who have been encouraged to leave as a result of my exposing this group. In just a year, I have had almost 4000 visitors (more visits than the IMT has members!) with 16,373 views between them. My three most popular posts are my post exposing the truth about Socialist Appeal, my post about dialectics and my post about Dennis Tourish’s analysis of Militant as a cult. This blog has done more good for humanity in the year it has existed than the IMT cult has done in 80 years of Trotskyist activism. Thank you again to everyone who made this possible. My path to recovery continues.