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THEM: Adventures with Extremists

From The New York Times

By Ron Rosenbaum; Ron Rosenbaum is the author of "Explaining Hitler" and "The Secret Parts of Fortune," and is a columnist at The New York Observer.

Do you know the one about the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center and got secret instructions to stay home on Sept. 11? What are we to think of people who naively believe in such vicious (and widespread) conspiracy theories? Are they merely silly dupes, or is there something more sinister in their stupidity?

These are the kinds of uncomfortable questions Jon Ronson raises in his often entertaining, more often disturbing, book "Them." Ronson, a writer and documentary filmmaker in Britain, insinuated himself into the homes and graces of a variety of conspiracy theorists and "extremists," whom he defines as those who "have been called extremists by others." The project began with Omar Bakri Mohammed, who is said to be Osama bin Laden's "man in London." Ronson went on to ingratiate himself with American Klansmen, neo-Nazis and the New World Order conspiracy theorists, some of whom he joins in the quest for the one "secret room" where a conclave of rulers supposedly plots the conspiracies that control the world.

There is a lively account of Ronson's attempts to penetrate the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, a publicity-averse conclave of globalists -- and recent focus of "secret room" theorists. Then there is his more successful attempt to sneak into the annual Bohemian Grove encampment in Northern California, where the rich and powerful cavort, cross-dress and enact rituals like the "cremation of care," in which an allegorical figure representing the tedium of everyday life is set ablaze. A conspiracy theorist radio host who accompanies Ronson insists this is proof the Bohemians practice human sacrifice.

Almost invariably, though, there is a dark side to these capers, as when Ronson links up with a man he portrays as a grizzled "just the facts, ma'am" reporter who writes for a paper Ronson initially describes as "an underground journal called The Spotlight." The two of them conspicuously act like infiltrators at a hotel where the Bilderbergers are meeting and then -- when security follows them -- feel vindicated in their paranoia: the eyes of the New World Order are on them. All good fun until Ronson seems surprised to learn that the "underground journal" his chum works for is a notorious forum for Holocaust deniers and Hitler admirers.

Of course, there are real mysteries (sometimes even real conspiracies) in the world; there are concentrations of power and networks of influence that deserve to be investigated -- by people who respect the rules of evidence. What's interesting about Bohemian Grove, or Yale's Skull and Bones (the secret society of two presidents named Bush whose rituals I've had some fun bringing to light), is that they don't have to meet in a secret room. The bizarre rituals help bind them together, but the rituals are a red herring: human sacrifice is not required for them to exert influence. Most power in the world doesn't need to operate in secrecy; most power operates shamelessly in the open, using money and influence to perpetuate itself (in the Smith Barney slogan) "the old-fashioned way."

And secret-room conspiracy theories have a bloodstained history. Almost all of them can trace their ancestry to that poisoned fount of conspiracy theories "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a czarist-era forgery that purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting in which Jewish masterminds plotted world domination. It's been the model for anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists from Henry Ford in "The International Jew" to Hitler in "Mein Kampf." In fact, Ronson makes an important point when he tells us he "realized just how central these conspiracy theories were to the practice of terrorism in the Western world."

Ronson's idiosyncratic reporting method leads him into uncomfortable situations. He plays down, when he doesn't conceal, his own Jewishness, and adopts a chipper British version of the faux-naif pose, "Yes, how very interesting, tell me more." But not all Ronson's characters, alas, are harmless eccentrics, and at times they strain the faux-naif form, a strain Ronson often adeptly foregrounds. Consider the chapter in which he spends time in the Ozarks with an ambitious grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Ronson catches the Klan leader, Thom Robb, as he is attempting to refashion his faction into a more media-savvy outfit (no robes, no N-word). Ronson glimpses Robb pressing books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" on recalcitrant Klansmen. He attends a session in which the grand wizard's wife attempts to give the hard-bitten Klansmen "personality tests" to classify them as "popular sanguines" or "powerful cholerics."

Ronson's hilarious, deadpan account of this scene makes them seem ridiculous. But then you read, in an aside, this disturbing fact: "Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a onetime member of Thom's Klan who became disenchanted with the image makeover and decided to go it alone." In other words, Robb was by this account part mentor to a mass murderer whose only quarrel with Robb's racist doctrine was its cosmetic overlay.

Here is Ronson reflecting on his conflicted feelings about Thom Robb: "He is a friendly and cheerful man, with an amiable demeanor. Had he not been the grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, I'd have described him as having the humorous demeanor of a Manhattan nebbish. The door was open for me, many times, to say to him, 'Oh, Thom! You're such a nebbish!' But that would have been a mistake. Still, it was surprising to find myself in a situation where I was toning down my Jewish character traits so as not to alienate a Ku Klux Klan leader who reminded me of Woody Allen."

This attitude is even more difficult to sustain in the chapter about the year he spent not so much reporting on but serving -- as unpaid chauffeur and copy-shop flunky -- Omar Bakri Mohammed, the London-based bin Laden supporter. Omar Bakri comes across in Ronson's account as another "you're such a nebbish" character, an unthreatening bumbler who watches "The Lion King" with his daughter and makes goofy-sounding threats to arrest the Spice Girls when he turns Britain into an Islamic republic. When he releases hundreds of black balloons at a rally, the balloons, weighted down with the leaflets they carry, fail to lift off, a ready-made metaphor for ineffectuality.

But this is the same Omar Bakri who called for the assassination of Tony Blair and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, as Ronson scrupulously notes in a late addition to the book, expressed "initial delight" in the terror attack. Ronson's book should benefit from the new attention to extremist visions brought about by Sept. 11. He has gotten closer to these people than any journalist I can think of. But Sept. 11 also can't help calling into question the faux-naif sensibility -- in particular with someone like Omar Bakri. In fact, one gets the impression that Ronson might have been outfoxed -- or out-fauxed -- by Omar, who himself adopts what seems like a calculated nebbishy act for Ronson.

Omar Bakri is useful to Ronson, but Ronson seems unaware how useful he is to Omar: playing a harmless nebbish for a television documentarian is valuable image-making for Omar's effort to avoid extradition from Britain as a terrorist supporter. So we get a kind of weird dance of faux-naif fronts deployed by two sophisticated operators, neither of whom ever really lets down his guard, for all their watching of "The Lion King" together. Except once, in perhaps the most chilling and disturbing scene in Ronson's book.

Ronson and one of Omar's aides are on the way to deposit money Omar has collected (a serious sum, more than $7,000) on behalf of Hamas, the organization that sponsors suicide bombers who blow up Israelis. Ronson ends the chapter by describing what followed when he was left alone at one point with the money -- implicitly inviting the reader to judge his choice.

"What the hell was I doing, guarding money that would be used to kill the Jews? And then I understood that I had to take the money . . . and make a run for it." (Note Woody Allen allusion.) "How many lives might that save?" he asks himself. And then he concludes: "But I didn't do it, of course. I just stood there. And then . . . Omar returned, thanked me for my help and took the money to the bank."

DATE: January 13, 2002

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