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https://theconversation.com/them-at-25-jon-ronsons-adventures-with-extremists-made-him-famous-and-alex-jones-too-279523>
"Jon Ronson’s book
Them: Adventures with Extremists launched him to worldwide
fame – and more dubiously, launched conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Though
Jones has been deplatformed, his influence lingers: just this week, it was
reported that Australia’s far-right One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts praised
Jones in 2024 as “a beacon of hope around the world”.
Researched and written in the years preceding September 11, and published in
April 2001,
Them – which Ronson described in a preface to its second edition
as “a snapshot of life in the Western world on 10 September 2001” – is turning
25.
Ronson’s original plan was to spend time with people who’d been described as
“the extremist monsters of the Western world” as they went about their everyday
lives. They included neo-Nazis, militias and Omar Bakri, a UK Islamic
fundamentalist who called himself “Osama Bin Laden’s man in London”, and whom
Ronson shadowed for a year in 1996 for a documentary.
Among other things, Ronson recorded the “clownish” Bakri watching the
Lion
King with a baby on his knee, and asking him to guard the money he’d been
collecting for Hamas in giant Coca Cola bottles, while he retrieved a coat –
which he agonised over as a Jewish person, but did (seemingly to avoid
awkwardness).
Bakri, who told the
Daily Mail the September 11 attacks were “exciting”, was
barred from the United Kingdom after leaving in 2005. In 2010, he was arrested
in Lebanon and sentenced to life in prison after a terrorism trial. Released
pending retrial, he was sentenced again in 2015 to six years hard labour.
“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 ours,”
Ronson writes. But what started as a series of profiles of extremist leaders
“quickly became something stranger”, when he realised the very different people
he was following all shared a belief in the New World Order: a conspiracy
theory that imagines “a tiny elite rules the world from inside a secret room”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
