The answer that every IMT cultist has in their heads is ‘Yes, you should have.’ But actually, if you think about it, I did leave relatively quietly, unlike, say, the recent defectors from the organisation. After I handed in my resignation I said nothing publicly for a few months, wanting to just get away from it all. During this period, hardly any ex-comrades bothered to talk to me (people who knew for a fact I had left) or even thank me for my hard work and dedication to the cult. As I was no longer of use to them, they could care less about me. I was more or less treated like I was dead. My absence at the national conference would have been noted and remarked upon. The leadership, for obvious reasons, decided to hush up my defection. Only a small circle of comrades, including people who had seen my Marxmail rant, knew of what had happened.
I knew I wanted to move on from my awful experience, but it wasn’t easy. Even when I tried to distract myself by reading fiction – Charlotte Bronte and Evelyn Waugh, among others – it was still not easy to stop thinking about the organisation and what it had done to me. I had been in this hyper-active environment for two and a half years, and now I was back to the old familiar loneliness. I no longer had a great community of fellow strugglers against capitalist tyranny. It was tough, but I was relieved to be free from an organisation I now viewed with contempt.
I had no plans to start up a blog or campaign against the organisation publicly. I still thought of myself, at least initially, as a Marxist and a socialist, and did not want to denounce my former friends and comrades, who I still thought were fighting for noble goals. I just no longer saw the IMT as the vehicle for social transformation. But as time wore on, and it became clear that I was a non-person to these people, and the more cult analysis I read, and the more criticisms of Marxism and Bolshevism I read from people like Leszek Kolakowski, any reservations I had about speaking out about my experience went away. As a new favourite YouTuber of mine, Riley of the Jexit 2020 channel, has said, why should I care about the opinions of people who are pretending that I am dead? After all, these people were never really my friends in the first place – I was just being used by the organisation to achieve its goals. I was a tool to be exploited. I was a token black member to make the organisation look more ‘diverse’. I was just a mouthpiece of Alan Woods and his ideas. The moment I decided I disagreed, I was considered sub-human and an enemy of humanity. They were slandering me internally and doing everything they could to blacken my name. They had even slandered me publicly on social media. Why was I still caring about their feelings? They clearly did not care about mine. They never had. When I was subjected to bullying behaviour from my fellow branch members in my first year of university, they most certainly did not care about my feelings. If they saw me in the street, they would walk past, or spit in my face. They would even walk upon my dead body if they got the chance. Why did I still care about what they thought? Because I was still recovering from the mind control, and had internalised a lot of their abusive behaviour and opinions towards me.
I still remember, shortly after going public on Facebook with my criticisms of the sect, being attacked by one of the cult members and told that I should ‘Go quietly’ and ‘Stop insulting your ex-comrades’. Look how quickly I became an ‘ex-comrade’ in such a short space of time. Moreover, note how this guy was so concerned over my ‘insulting’ them, but was happy to join forces with people who were insulting and slandering me. This groupthink and herd-like behaviour induced nothing but contempt and even pity for these people, who were so brainwashed and incapable of rational thought.
It was tempting to just slip away and forget I was ever a member. I was tempted to just delete every IMT member on Facebook and be free. But for some reason I wavered in doing this, and it took me months before I took the decision to delete and recreate my Facebook account so as to be free of IMT garbage. It would have been less painful. But I also felt it would be wrong to say nothing at all. Cowardly even. A common slander that IMT members make against people who leave is that ‘They were not brave enough to openly discuss their differences and use the democratic channels of the organisation.’ But when you try to do precisely this, you are slandered and denounced as a wrecker who is trying to destroy the organisation, and the other members are whipped up into a tribalistic frenzy to attack you and drive you out of the organisation. So it seems that whether you ‘go quietly’, or stay and try and fight for your ideas within the organisation, you will be attacked and criticised. (It’s almost as if they take sadistic pleasure from being able to bully people within the ranks and are disappointed when people deny them this opportunity by leaving.) You are damned if you do and you are damned if you don’t. I had left in frustration when it was clear that the democratic channels were not very democratic. However, I reserved the right to make my voice heard. There is no law that says that once you leave an organisation, you are no longer allowed to criticise it. It’s not as if the IMT accepts any criticism, internal or external. But I hoped that even if a few people read and digested my criticisms, they would see the organisation in a different light.
I respect those who choose to go quietly and don’t want the stress or trauma of openly fighting with former comrades. But I felt unable to do this. I was a relatively prominent and active member who was well-known in the organisation both in my section and internationally, and I had defended and promoted its ideas and represented it in public functions. I had been rewarded with bullying, abuse, slander and public humiliation. I could not simply be silent and pretend that this cult, which I had been active in supporting and defending, was not harming people or ruining people’s lives. I had to speak out and take back all of the propaganda I had spewed, and I do not regret doing so. In September 2020 I spoke up for the first time in public outside Facebook, with my article in The Critic, and then published something on Medium in December. (Still the only thing I have ever published there thus far.) I had made it open before everyone who was not an IMT member that I had broken forever with this abysmal sect. It was a wonderful moment in my life, of which I will forever be proud. It wasn’t good enough for me to say ‘At least I’m out.’ I wanted to help as many people out of the organisation as possible, having once helped to recruit people to this monstrous entity. I had a conscience, unlike members of the organisation, whose idea of right and wrong has been warped and been replaced with the corrupt morality of the Alan Woods and his cronies.
Every cult wants its evil deeds to remain ‘internal’ and secret from the prying eyes of the public. They rely on various measures to ensure this, including threatening ex-members with the prospect of confidential information about them being released if they dare to speak out. This is all the more reason to expose them publicly for their misdeeds, so that doubting members within the group will hopefully come across these criticisms and get the hell out. So, do I regret not going quietly? Not a bit. I am proud to have this blog, especially when I receive testimonies from people who have been helped by it. At least doubting members and ex-members will know that they are not mad, that the IMT is indeed a cult, and they are not alone.