Amazon listing - http://www.amazon.com/Them-Adventures-Extremists-Jon-Ronson/dp/0743233212
When I was in my 20s, a friend and I used wonder if Klan meetings ended with the "Wizard" thanking "[Sam and his wife] for bringing the donuts today.” Ronson’s book comes about as closest I’ve ever found to answering this question ;-).
Ronson does us all an enormous service in “THEM - Adventures with Extremists” by humanizing the quacks, and yes, the terrorist extremists that we fear. It’s as if his whole book is a testament to the truth of the line of Max in the 2008 movie “Get Smart” where Max declares to the assembled agents that he is briefing: “Ladies and gentlemen, let us never forget that though the opponents we face are bad guys -- and they _are_ bad guys – they are first human and we will never be able to defeat them until we understand them as such.”
Ronson gives us an array of stories about Islamic fundamentalists, survivalists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists proving the point.
One learns, for instance, that even in Islamic fundamentalist circles, one can fear being pigeon-holed as a nerd. When English Islamic fundamentalist Omar Bakri showed up with Ronson at a “fishing retreat” with other “English fundamentalist Islamic bigwigs,” Omar had to endure being belittled by one of the other retreatants who said to him: “I brought a spare suitcase. Dr. Al-Masari brought a spare pair of shoes. You Omar Bakri, have bought a spare journalist.”
I learned that the Weavers actually had a point out there in Ruby Ridge, when federal agents shot and killed both Randy Weaver’s son and wife in an attempt to arrest Weaver on an arguably trumped-up weapons charge: A federal agent asked Weaver to sell him two shotguns whose barrels the agent himself had to asked be sawed off to 1/4 inch below the federal legal limit. When the dust and the blood settled after a week-long standoff that eventually included tanks, Weaver served only 16 months on the weapons charge (and nothing else) and his surviving children received over a million dollars each in an out-of-court settlement in compensation for the federal agents’ having shot and killed their mother.
Ronson also introduces us to avid self-improvement book reading Thom Robb, Grand-Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who had been trying to move the Klan into a “positive direction.” Ronson caught-up with him in the Ozarks where Grand-Wizard Robb and his daughters were giving seminars to Klansmen on “personality types.” Robb was trying to get Klansmen to stop using the n-word, because it just got people angry, and noted to Ronson that the Klan "doesn’t burn crosses,” rather it seeks to “light” them, and that the Klan fundamentally _wasn’t_ about _hating people_ of other races or religion but about “_loving_ white, Christian people...” All this, of course, was causing Robb dissension in the Klansmen ranks. Said Jeff “Moron” Berry, Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (a dissident splinter group): “Thom Robb is chickenshit. He’s a sissy. He kisses black babies. He had it all once but now he’s politically correct. Did you know that Thom Robb’s going around telling people not to say n... _and_ he’s _banned_ robe usage?”Apparently glasnost isn’t going to come easily to the Klan ;-).
Ronson introduces the reader to David Icke, who on a conspiracy speaking tour throughout western Canada had to spend weeks explaining to the Anti-Defamation League (who kept protesting and closing his events) that when he would say that the leaders of the industrialist Bilderberg Group (who met each summer in Bohemian Grove, California somewhere in the woods outside of Santa Rosa for a bizarre owl burning ritual), turned into 12 foot lizards that he was _not_ using code to mean Jews (most of the Bilderbergers were_not_ Jewish) but rather that he was saying that the leaders of the Bilderberg group _really turned into 12 foot lizards_. Icke really believed that these 12 foot shape-shifting lizard-people existed and were descendants of extraterrestrial crossbreading.
In the last chapter of his book, Ronson takes readers to the yearly Bohemian Grove conclave – owl burning and all -- which over the years has _really attracted_ a lot of the world’s industrialists and up-and-coming political leaders (including in the 1990s, Dick Cheney and both Bushes).
All in all, if one likes good stories, if one suspects that the truth is often more interesting (and more human) than the wildest conspiracies and if one believes that even the craziest people have probably more in common with us than we’d want to admit, then this book is for you. Jon Ronson's THEM is certainly a fun and provocative read!
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