Being in the IMT was a miserable experience. But there is much I have learned from it. If there is anything I have learned from reading philosophy, it is amor fati – the love of fate, a concept taught by the Ancient Stoics and also by modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche. It is hard to … Read more
When I walked out of the International Marxist Tendency after two and a half years of vicious abuse and mental torment, I knew that it would take me a long time to recover. I may never fully recover, but I have to try. In the days after leaving, I was disoriented and devastated. I wondered … Read more
For every single day since leaving the International Marxist Tendency, I have felt anger. Anger courses through my veins like lava flowing through a volcano. My brain pulsates violently with rage as I comprehend the damage that was done to me. Leaving the cult was like being picked up and hurled out of a tall … Read more
The Social World of the IMT There is no real love or friendship or brotherhood in a cult. Since leaving, I have tasked myself with rebuilding whatever sense of community I had outside the organisation. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal, it was ridiculously easy to make friends and acquaintances. We were all … Read more
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 … Read more
The essence of totalitarianism is the desire to remake all of society into a gray homogeneity. Islamism, communism, fascism – all seek to impose on society a stultifying sameness and uniformity of opinion, dress, manners, culture and language. The Islamists seek to impose on everyone strict adherence to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, and force … Read more
The average contact It might occur to people reading that the only people who would join an organisation like the IMT, or a cult of any kind, is someone who is stupid or crazy. I can tell you from my own experience that nothing could be farther from the truth. It requires a certain level … Read more
“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
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 … Read more