Extremists are now the boogey-men of the modern world. They are the faceless, inhuman monsters in our closet. The word “extremist” creates a mental image of a Ted Kaczynski, a Timothy McVeigh, or an Osama Bin-Laden. We fear them. It is very difficult to laugh at them. But in British humorist Jon Ronson’s book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, the modern boogey- man is revealed to be almost the unthinkable: human.




The premise: Ronson discovers that the belief in a secret room— where a predominantly Jewish elite rule the world— is the one thing all extremists have in common. It is a real account, or perhaps semi-real account, of his investigation to find this secret room. He is emerged in a strange and insidious world of conspiracies and bigotry. Characters he encounters are sometimes cartoonish, sometimes ominous. Examples include a Ku Klux Klan leader who tells his people never to use the “n” word, a cult that believes the world has been taken over by a group of twelve foot lizards, a strange man named Ru Ru who collects Ceausescu memorabilia in Romania, and a Muslim Fundamentalist who, as a joke, reveals Ronson to be a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp.




Ronson gets to know the various extremists, even befriends them. Some of these extremists, like Fundamentalist Omar Bakri Mohammed, are even aware that Ronson is Jewish. He avoids all judgement, except perhaps the judgement he points at himself as he muses over whether or not he is becoming one of them as his investigation continues. Some of the strange things which occur are not always easy to believe. Other chapters seem to have little to do with extremists. But the embellishments and digressions are mostly forgivable, for they did not detract from the most significant triumph of Them. And this triumph is in the success of making extremists human, giving them faces and foibles. They are mostly shown to be bumbling fools who just want people to listen to them. And I cannot think of a more human need than that. They may be insane, hateful, or just plain stupid, but they’re just people, they are not boogey-men to Ronson, which reveals his amazing ability to like and, in turn, be liked by others.

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Created May 03, 2002 at 5:39pm • Submit your own review...