- Ronson, Jon.
Them: Adventures with Extremists.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
ISBN 0-7432-3321-2.
-
Journalist and filmmaker Jon Ronson, intrigued by political
and religious extremists in modern Western societies,
decided to try to get inside their heads by hanging out with
a variety of them as they went about their day to day
lives on the fringe. Despite his being Jewish, a frequent
contributor to the leftist Guardian newspaper,
and often thought of as primarily a humorist, he found
himself welcomed into the inner circle of characters as
diverse as U.K. Muslim fundamentalist Omar Bakri, Randy
Weaver and his daughter Rachel, Colonel Bo Gritz, who he
visits while helping to rebuild the Branch Davidian church
at Waco, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan attempting to remake
the image of that organisation with the aid of self-help
books, and Dr. Ian Paisley on a missionary visit to Cameroon
(where he learns why it's a poor idea to order the
“porcupine” in the restaurant when visiting that
country).
Ronson is surprised to discover that, as incompatible as the
doctrines of these characters may be, they are nearly
unanimous in believing the world is secretly ruled by a
conspiracy of globalist plutocrats who plot their schemes in
shadowy venues such as the Bilderberg conferences and the
Bohemian Grove in northern California. So, the author
decides to check this out for himself. He stalks the
secretive Bilderberg meeting to a luxury hotel in Portugal
and discovers to his dismay that the Bilderberg Group
stalks back, and that the British Embassy can't
help you when they're on your tail. Then, he gatecrashes
the bizarre owl god ritual in the Bohemian Grove through the
clever expedient of walking in right through the main gate.
The narrative is entertaining throughout, and generally
sympathetic to the extremists he encounters, who mostly
come across as sincere (if deluded), and running small-time
operations on a limited budget. After becoming embroiled in
a controversy during a tour of Canada by David Icke, who
claims the world is run by a cabal of twelve foot tall
shape-shifting reptilians, and was accused of anti-Semitic
hate speech on the grounds that these were “code
words” for a Zionist conspiracy, the author ends up
concluding that sometimes a twelve foot tall alien lizard
is just an alien lizard.
January 2006 