Them: Adventures with Extremists

by Jon Ronson

I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at us.

me that we are the real extremists. They say that the Western liberal cosmopolitan establishment is itself a fanatical, depraved belief system. I like it when they say this because it makes me feel as if I have a belief system.

It was Jack McLamb’s contention that the ADL are part of the conspiracy, acting as a hugely influential crack team of character besmirchers who spring ruthlessly into action and accuse anyone of anti-Semitism who gets too close to the truth.

A lot of your Klan groups today are people who split off from Thom Robb. And all these little fractured fragments continue to break down into their subatomic parts. Every group has infighting and rivalry. They split. More factions form, like individual little fingers that are never drawn together into a fist.” Richard clenched his fingers together to form a fist.

“The anti-Christ Jew,” he said. “The same one that murdered Abel.” “All Jews or just some Jews?” I asked him. “All Jews,” he said. “It’s a blood order. DNA has proved it.”

He is what he preaches.

The jeep fell silent. Nobody said anything—except for when we drove past a decapitated body lying on the side of the road outside a brewery. “Look at that,” said Dr. Paisley. “Terrible.” “Terrible,” said David Mcllveen. And we drove on to the hotel.

The picture I pieced together was that the group was created in 1954 by a band of influential postwar internationalists who believed that global capitalism would be the best way to thwart future Hitlers. The memoirs said that the Bilderberg agenda was to “build bridges” and “strengthen links” between the business and political communities of Western Europe and North America (the “global” in global capitalism being, needless to say, these two places).

Bilderberg would be a place where up-and-coming politicians who were supportive of a global market could mix with powerful internationalists;

(the talent spotting was quite brilliant: Almost every British and North American premier since the 1950s attended a Bilderberg meeting early on in their career).

Bilderberg’s philosophy is, as they see it, to exchange irrational nationalism for rational internationalism, an auction of Ceauşescu memorabilia seemed to me to be their dream in essence,

I stood up and strolled over with the intention of introducing myself to him. His bodyguard, noticing me, instinctively reached inside his pocket for a weapon of some sort. Mr. Ru Ru stretched out his arms, shooting the bodyguard a barely noticeable glance—the meaning of which I presumed was something along the lines of “Don’t kill him. He seems OK.” “Hello,” I said. “Give me a hug!” roared Mr. Ru Ru,

“Dictatorship,” he said, “very bad. Capitalism good! Very good.

“I am also friends with Kim II Sung,” he said. “Ha ha! These people

are history. It doesn’t matter if they are good history or bad history. I, myself, am not history. So I make friends with people who are.”

“Romania,” said Eugene, “was twenty million people living inside the imagination of a madman.”

Rational people favored globalization. Irrational people preferred nationalism.

I realized just how central these conspiracy theories were to the practice of terrorism in the Western world.

the group was created by Denis Healey, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (a former SS officer while he was a student—

The invited guests are not allowed to bring their wives, girlfriends, or—on rarer occasions—their husbands or boyfriends.

The guests are expressly asked not to give interviews to journalists.

“To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated but not wholly unfair.

It increases the chance of having a sensible global policy.”

“Your new understanding of the world will certainly help your career.”

That isn’t a conspiracy! That is the world. It is the way things are done. And quite rightly so.”

If extremists and leaders of militant groups believe that Bilderberg is out to do them down, then they’re right.

“Isn’t Bilderberg’s secrecy against democracy too?” I asked. “We aren’t secret,” he snapped. “We’re private.