Pavlo’s Reviews > Them: Adventures with Extremists > Status Update

‘Let’s face it,’ my deep throat had said to me, ‘nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.’

‘Alex [Jones] is not only a great activist and a great broadcaster but also a great actor,’ [his girlfiend] said.

“It was delightful, after all the code words, to spend time with a man for whom code words are anathema, the last of the great unreconstructed conspiracy theorists.

‘. . . the European Union is a beast ridden by the harlot Catholic Church, conspiring to create a Europe controlled by the Vatican . . .'"

“‘No’, said Anna, sharply. ‘Don’t start until I tell you how to. OK?’

Anna smiled – a chilling cheerleader smile. The Klanspeople hurriedly put down their pens”

This is how things now stand: the Anti-Defamation League are searching for code words that have replaced the word ‘Jew’; and for the anti-Semites the word ‘Jew’ has become code for non-Jews who meet in secret rooms, just as the anti-Semitic tracts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Protocols of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, for instance – portrayed the Jews.

So there’s the answer. In the absence of statistical substantiation, you need to put words in inverted commas. The Jews are metaphors now. You no longer need to be Jewish to be a Jew.

my mind flitted between the two versions of what had happened in Portugal, attempting to marshal whatever insubstantial facts and partial truths I felt I knew,before settling on Them against Them,with me doing the driving.My worryingly paradoxical thought process could be summarized thus: Thank God I don’t believe in the secret rulers of the world.Imagine what the secret rulers of the world might do to me if I did

I had no idea that there were so many crazy Jewish organizations out there and that they counted so many suspected anti-Semites amongst their roll of honour.