Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson

Some books age better than others. It can be hard to predict, sometimes, but usually pretty clear in retrospect.

Them: Adventures with Extremists is a mostly humorous non-fiction book by Jon Ronson, about how he spent the five years up to 2001 talking to a bunch of racists and extremists of various stripes, united mostly by the fact that they all believed in "a secret room from which a tiny elite secretly rule the world." In practice, what they have in common is that they hate and oppose liberal, capitalist democracy, and want to see some form of authoritarian government - from their particular point of view, of course, rewarding their people and following their rules - instituted and all of those other people firmly put in their place.

The UK edition seems to have come out in the spring of 2001, from this Guardian review. The US edition I just read, in QPB's reprint paperback edition (traditionally reprinting the hardcover exactly, and published a few months later) has a couple of references to 9/11 in the preface, so I think it was hastily updated in mid-September for US publication soon after - also see this New York Times review from early 2002.

The spine of Them is Ronson's quest for that "room" - the place the secret masters of the world meet. Following common conspiracy theories of the time, he assumes the organizing society of the secret rulers is the Bilderberg Group, an annual conference of global industrialists and politicians that could be characterized as "secretive" or, to less paranoid types, as just "private." [1] For the book, Ronson appears to mostly go along with the premise, up until the very end: to agree with the racists and terrorists that "them" are ruling the world and keeping down "us," or at least agreeing with it as long as it's funny and he can keep searching for the fabled room.

Ronson never deeply engages with the core conflict he has, because it wouldn't be funny. But he's a secular Jew talking to a lot of crazy people - fundamentalist Muslims, Ku Klux Klan leaders, white supremacists, David Icke, Alex Jones - all of whom firmly believe in this conspiracy and all of whom use language that at least very strongly implies that the secret masters are Jewish. He's not quite saying "So, this Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff - where do you think they get the babies?" but he's not that far away from it.

And, not to complain about things Ronson couldn't have known, but nearly every direction he investigated got worse and more violent over the next twenty years, largely because they got media attention from people like him. The opening chapter follows Omar Bakri Mohammed, who repeatedly described himself as "bin Laden's man in London." He wanders around the fringes of the burgeoning US militia movement, and spends extensive time with Alex Jones. None of that is his fault, but it was, at the very least, a very unfortunate choice of subject matter, and Them is a book that arguably has helped to make the world worse.

On the other hand, it's zippy and humorous! Ronson doesn't make jokes, and isn't specifically lampooning these extremists - his thesis, as best I can characterize it a generation later and after the book itself turned out differently than I think he expected, is that these people are all mistaken but honestly so, and that there could be a path to bring them back to sanity if people engaged honestly with them.

Them is interesting as reportage rather than for what Ronson brings to it, at this point. It shows the embryo forms of several strains of paranoid hatred that later became much worse. It's an unfortunate book, and I think an essentially misguided one - if Ronson were less interested in being light and humorous, he could have done something vastly better. But it was the late '90s: history was over, the world was at peace, and nothing bad would ever happen again, right?


[1] They are much less so these days, with their own website and a Wikipedia article. And even in the late '90s, they were talked about a lot, and not only among the paranoid: the only "secret" thing was that participants didn't attribute ideas and discussions to each other, to keep them private.

No comments:

Post a Comment