The East Yorkshire Mysteries Files © Book Review :
JON RONSON : THEM-ADVENTURES WITH EXTREMISTS (PICADOR, 2001).
I liked Jon Ronson's Them- Adventures With Extremists. Ronson has a real knack for writing humorously about some very excessive characters and situations. Importantly, for me, he also manages not to lose sight of many of the sinister and downright dangerous aspects to the extreme people and events he manages to get himself entangled with.
Ronson writes for the Guardian and parts of Them  first appeared, in slightly different guise, in this newspaper's supplement Weekend magazine in 1997 and 1998. This included, for example, shorter versions of A Semi-Detached Ayatollah and Dr Paisley, I Presume. Them was also presented in a different format, as a Channel Four documentary series called The Secret Rulers of The World in 2001.
At the onset of Them, Ronson reveals that he initially wanted to do a piece on David Icke (the former BBC sports presenter turned New Age soothsayer) simply because he thought it would funny and a 'burlesque way of examining the burgeoning anxiety' between the extremists (them) and the rationalists (us). Later, though, he realised that many of the extremists he was encountering shared a sinister belief that the world is run by a shadowy group called the Bilderberg. This group, said to be small enough in numbers to be able to sit around a single table, clandestinely meet in hotel rooms around the world and decide such things as who will become the next president of the United States. Previous Bilderberg presidential candidates have included, for example, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. (How else, say the conspiracy theorists, would a dense peanut farmer ever get to the top?) According to some extremists the Bilderberg are also responsible for starting wars and revolutions. Furthermore, David Icke even claims that the Bilderberg  are the descendants of a race of reptilian aliens who not only control the world but feed on blood and practise child sacrifice. According to Icke, the Bilderberg include, among their number,  the Queen of England, George Bush a Boxcar Willie.
Increasingly intrigued by talk of the Bilderberg, Ronson's subsequent search for them includes many hilarious and frightening adventures. One particular caper takes place in the company of Big Jim Tucker,  the chain-smoking editor of the underground newspaper Spotlight. Big Jim, we are told,  used to hold down a 'good' job on a leading American sports paper. However, he gave it up in order to hunt down the shadowy Bilderberg.
Together with Big Jim, Ronson journeys to Portugal where, according to word on the extremist's grape vine, the Bilderberg are next scheduled to meet.  Here Ronson is menaced in a hotel lobby and chased by sinister men in dark glasses. Ronson is left genuinely scared by these incidents and contacts the British Embassy for assistance. Not very helpfully, embassy staff inform him that the Bilderberg are 'way out of our league' and the best thing he can do is probably 'sit tight' until whatever is going on blows over.
Further to this, back in New York, Ronson next encounters the Anti Defamation League (ADL). The ADL are described as one the leading monitors of anti-Semitism in the world. To his dismay, the  ADL inform Ronson (himself a Jew) that Big Jim Tucker is a Holocaust denier and has published numerous articles dedicated to the memory of his hero Adolf Hitler. However, as Ronson soon discovers, the ADL are perhaps not everything they initially appear either. By constantly claiming, for instance, that everything that everyone says is secret code for anti-Jewish sentiment they manage, in their way, to be almost as fanatical and paranoid as the conspiracy theorists with all their talk of secret world rulers and reptilian aliens.
Ronson's adventures with extremists climaxes with the author managing to sneak into a secret camp meeting in the forests of Northern America and witnessing a truly bizarre ritual involving numerous leading American politicians, a replica corpse, and a effigy of an owl. But what exactly is going on? Do the Bilderberg really exist? Are the conspiracy theorists right? Does all this really prove that we are being ruled by a shadowy group of bloodsucking reptilian monsters?
In the end, Jon Ronson's Them, Adventures With Extremists  offers no decisive answers. For certain there are some strange things happening out there and Ronson manages to witness some of them. This said, though, the world of extremists is so full of red herrings, dead ends, and disinformation that it appears ultimately impossible to know anything for sure. On a more positive note, however, one thing Jon Ronson does manage to distinctly show in Them is that fanaticism, in whatever guise it assumes, is always a dangerous thing.  © CM 2002