Them

by Jon Ronson

  Thom paused. He said, “I’m going to show you something else now.”

  Nathan handed out a photocopy of a leaflet that read, alarmingly;

  You have been paid a friendly visit by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Shall we pay you a real visit?

  “Do we want to go around threatening people?” said Thom, softly.

  The audience shook their heads.

  “Come on!” yelled Thom. “We’re supposed to be the knights on the white horses who ride into town and save our people! We’re supposed to be the good guys! Shining armour! Do we want to go around threatening people?”

  A gust of wind blew the photocopies across the marquee. There was a short break while they were retrieved and secured onto the lectern with a rock. Thom resumed.

  “Truth,” he said, “is what we perceive. To the feminine masses, what they perceive is the truth. OK? So we, as individuals, and we as a corporate body, are two different things.”

  Thom scanned the marquee. He looked at the individuals in the marquee.

  “We as a corporate body,” said Thom, “must have a corporate image. And that corporate image has to be projected to the feminine masses. So when a news team comes around and they want to find out what’s happening in the racialist movement, they don’t call on Jeff Moron Berry…”

  Jeff Berry is the leader of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of Thom’s chief rivals. Jeff Berry is an occasional guest on the Jerry Springer Show. People throw chairs at him on TV and he throws chairs back. He growls wild-eyed into the camera, much like a WWF wrestler, and says ‘nigger’ freely in public.

  “They don’t call on those idiots,” said Thom. “They’ll come to us because we have carved out a niche. And all these other screwballs with all this garbage…”

  Once again, Thom held up the ‘GET OUT NIGGER!’ poster.

  “All this garbage,” said Thom, “becomes meaningless. When I’m up in my lonely office late at night, with my candle twinkling, and I’ve got my pencil and paper and I sit and think of what we’re facing, it all becomes so clear. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, more important than for us to win political power.”

  Thom paused. He whispered, “Nothing.”

  Louder, he said, “Nothing!”

  Louder still, he said, “What about my wife?”

  Then Thom roared, “NO! YOUR WIFE IS NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN POLITICAL POWER.”

  Quieter, he said, “What about my kids?”

  Then he roared: “NO. YOUR KIDS ARE NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN POLITICAL POWER! Because if we don’t win political power, who does? The enemy. All I’m saying is, let’s send out the right signals. And then…” Thom looked around. The audience were rapt.

  “And then,” said Thom, “we will have become the voice.”

  ♦

  It was dusk and time to erect the cross. Thom said that the liberal media routinely call it a cross burning even though they are fully aware that it’s known as a cross lighting. The cross had already been built using, unusually, strips of plywood nailed together rather than one large log. It was an especially big cross. Thom had warned the Klansmen against building it too big because of the logistical difficulties.

  This was a sensitive matter right now. A few weeks earlier, news of a chaotic cross lighting outside Chicago had been released by the FBI. One of the Klansmen present that night in Illinois was a covert federal agent. (This was not a big surprise. It has been estimated that 25 per cent of all Klansmen are undercover federal officers. I wondered which of Thom’s Klansmen were secretly working for the government.)

  The Illinois agent reported that the cross lighting was sparsely attended, as a result of dwindling membership. Furthermore, the Klansmen present were mainly senior citizens and were not able to deal with the physical exertion required. He wrote:

  After starting an hour late, the Klansmen found the cross was too heavy for those present to lift. It took them three hours to chop it down to size and haul it into place. When they managed to erect the cross, however, they were unable to ignite it.

  Fortunately for the Klan, the resultant bad publicity had been minimal. Very few of the papers had decided to run the story. This surprised me. I’d have thought that a Klan fiasco might have made a good news story. But it turned out that it wasn’t. The big Klan news right now was Jeff Berry throwing chairs around on TV and saying the word ‘nigger’ unashamedly. In the light of this, I wondered what they would make of Thom’s image makeover. Coming from a Klansman, Thom’s positive message of love could be seen as puzzling, faintly disappointing and not easily soundbiteable.

  Thom wanted to ensure that an Illinois-type scenario was avoided during his cross lighting. But the Klansmen wanted their cross to be big and special, so they didn’t listen to him. It was wrapped in cloth. For now, it was lying in tarpaulin in a small field below the children’s play area.

  A dozen Klanspeople stood around it, debating how to proceed.

  “Do we raise it and then soak it,” said Ed from Colorado, “or soak it and then raise it?”

  “Well,” said Ed, “in the past, it’s always been soaked and then raised – ”

  “…but,” said Joe, “if we soak it before we raise it, we’ll get kerosene all over our hands and our clothes when we raise it.”

  Thom arrived at the cross.

  “You know,” said Joe, “we were just debating whether to soak it before we raise it or raise it before we soak it.”

  “You can’t raise it before you soak it,” snapped Thom. “How you going to soak it after you’ve raised it?”

  The Klansmen looked at the ground. Nobody said anything.

  “We thought you’d have a ladder,” came a sheepish murmur from the crowd.

  Thom looked over at me and he grinned apologetically. His look said, unmistakably, “I’m sorry that my members are so stupid, Jon, and I’m sorry that you have had to witness such stupidity.” At this moment, Thom seemed actually to prefer me to his members, which didn’t strike me as a very good leadership skill.

  Somebody produced some kerosene cans and they began to soak the cross.

  ♦

  Pat from Alabama said that his robes and hood were in the boot of his car, and he invited me over to take a look. His friend Joe came too. Tonight was the only night in the year that Thom would give his members special dispensation to wear their robes (which had otherwise been banned as part of the image makeover). Pat was one of Thom’s keenest supporters. He had a kind face. He was in steel. Instead of a business card, he gave me a pen, upon which was printed: ‘Pat Minshew. Simply The Best’.

  “The pens were a free gift,” said Pat. “I’m not going to take them up on the offer. They leak. You’d better watch your pocket.”

  Joe was taller. He was thin and drawn. He looked like Willie Nelson.

  We made small talk on our way to Pat’s car.

  “Have you got any women over in England,” said Pat, “who might want to marry me?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “It would be a good thing,” said Pat. “Good for me, and good for the movement. You know, a fine woman is a good thing. But she’s got to be someone who feels the way you do. A lot of women, they hook you, and the next thing you know they’re saying: ‘You can’t go to that there Klan rally! You’ve got to stay home!’”

  “Well,” I said, “the truth is, the women I know in England are probably more like that.”

  We arrived at Pat’s car. Pat opened the boot and pulled out his robes from a bin liner hidden underneath his spare tyre. Joe came over to scrutinize them.

  “They’re different to the ones we’ve got now, aren’t they?” he said.

  “I believe that the hood might be a little bit different,” said Pat.

  “Silk or cotton?” said Joe.

  “Cotton,” said Pat.

  “We were using silk,” explained Joe to me, “but we had problems getting them cleaned. You take them to the cleaners and the niggers’ll lose them.
But these cotton ones right here, you can wash them yourself.”

  “I’ve put some cardboard into my hood to line it,” said Pat, “to stop it from collapsing in the rain.”

  “You’ve got to be careful how you wash them, though,” said Joe. “One time, I washed them with some red stuff, and I got myself a pink robe.”

  “Hold your hood up sideways,” said Pat to Joe. “Mine’s got a kind of shark-fin look. See?”

  “Oh yes,” said Joe, “you’ve got a different kind of lining. See? Mine’s got a kind of scratchy lining.”

  “They’ve both got that shark-fin look,” said Pat.

  For a while, Pat and Joe held each other’s hood, feeling the lining, running their fingers with some tenderness along the shark-fin edge.

  I guessed then that Thom had underestimated how much his members enjoyed wearing their robes.

  Pat turned to me.

  “You want to try it on?” he said.

  There was a short silence.

  “OK,” I said.

  “You better take your glasses off,” said Pat. “I don’t think these things are designed too good for people with glasses.”

  I took my glasses off. I slipped the hood over my head. Through the eye-slits, I could see Pat and Joe smiling and giving me the thumbs up. And how did it feel for me, a Jew, to be wearing a Klan hood? I found myself feeling a little sad, imagining the time in the future when Pat would inevitably discover my Jewishness and feel just awful about letting me try on his hood.

  “You should send your mother a photograph,” said Pat. “You look like a real Klansman.”

  I took the hood off and I handed it back to Pat.

  There were cheers and applause drifting down to us from the field. The cross had been successfully erected.

  “Isn’t that a great looking cross?” yelled Thom. “It’s a perfect, perfect job!”

  “Two thumbs up!” yelled Ed.

  “White power!” yelled somebody.

  A few others joined in. “White power!” they yelled. “White power!”

  ♦

  Night fell. Thirty or forty hooded Klansmen milled quietly around near the marquee. Thom appeared, also robed. There were eight black stripes on his robe. Pat whispered to me through his hood that Thom, as leader, was entitled to as many stripes as he wished, “But he wouldn’t want to look like a zebra.”

  “And now,” announced Thom, “we shall walk in line and in silence to the cross.”

  The hooded Klanspeople walked down past the children’s play area, past the car park, and formed a wide circle around the cross, as wide as the hedges would allow.

  Thom said, “We are gathered here for what is called a Cross Lighting ceremony. I know that sometimes people have called it a Cross Burning, but we know it to be a Cross Lighting.”

  A man in black robes appeared from the darkness, carrying a flaming torch. Thom walked over to him. He lifted his own torch, and held it out to touch the flames. Now, Thom’s torch was also lit.

  “And it starts out small,” said Thom, through the darkness. “And yet we realize that one torch of revival, touching a heart of one man, does not stop. And we will bow not in obedience to the government but only to our God.”

  At this, Thom knelt at the foot of the cross, and he lit it with his torch. There was a whoosh, as the fire engulfed it. At first, the flames shot up vertically, as if it were a lit stake. It took five minutes or so for the entire cross to glow in a manner reminiscent of old archive news film of crosses burning on the lawns of Jews and blacks.

  I had asked Thom about these frightening events that occurred on lawns. He said, “You know, I’ve heard it goes on. But we’ve never done it. Stupid people do it. The people who do that, I don’t call them Ku Klux Klan. I call them Ku Klux Clowns.”

  The new Knights stepped forward and swore an oath to the leadership of the Klan. These new Knights, twenty in total, had taken a written test some days earlier to qualify them for their Knighthoods. There were sixty questions in the test, which included:

  Do we hate Negroes? (No. We just love white people.)

  Do we say the word ‘nigger’ in public? (No.)

  So the Knights test turned out to be a public relations examination.

  And we stood there, watching the cross burn. Photographs were taken. Fred, the man who had mistaken ‘worrier’ for ‘warrior’ during the Personality Skills workshop, cried when he was knighted. Twenty minutes after the cross was lit, the base burnt through and it collapsed dramatically to the ground with a whoosh and a thud.

  “Whoa!” exclaimed dozens of Klansmen – and me too – as it fell.

  The next morning, Thom spotted me trying to take a picture of the charred remains of the cross. He asked me not to. I asked him why not.

  “It’ll look like a hangover after a Saturday night party,” he said. He added, “People will get the wrong idea.”

  And now, as the cross lay glowing flat on the grass, Thom and his people wandered back to the marquee. They rounded off the night by watching the 1915 Hollywood movie, Birth Of A Nation, on the video.

  Where were the positive images of the Ku Klux Klan in the movies nowadays? It all seemed so easy to Thom up here in the woods.

  “Why not make the white supremacists the heroic leads?” he said to me. But no. It was impossible to imagine a pro-Klan film coming out of Hollywood today. But back in 1915, before the Jewish moguls arrived in Hollywood, D.W. Griffith had made Birth of a Nation, a paean to Klansmen.

  On our way to watch the film, I asked Pat if he believed that the secret rulers of the world were deliberately disseminating anti-Klan material, in the form of Hollywood movies. Pat considered this for a time.

  “Well,” he said, “not all Jews, but we know the ones who are doing it.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “By the names,” said Pat. “We all know those names.”

  The truth of the matter, the statistical truth, is that Jews – who make up 2.5 per cent of the population of America – constitute 60 per cent of the leadership of the Hollywood studios. Thom didn’t mention the word ‘Jew’ in his keynote speech, but he spoke of ‘blood-sucking parasites’ and ‘the anti-Christ system’, and I don’t think I was being over-sensitive when I guessed that he meant us. At least one knew where one stood with these code words.

  We settled back in the marquee and the movie began.

  “Shhh!” said some Klansmen to others.

  The villain of Birth of a Nation is Silas Lynch, the leader of the Black Menace. Drunk with wine and power, Silas kidnaps the beautiful, white, Elsie Stoneman, so he can make her Queen of his Black Empire. The Ku Klux Klan arrive on horseback in the nick of time to save Elsie from Silas’s clutches. They ride into town, knights on white horses, the good guys in shining armour – just as Thom had described the heroic Klan in his speech. A battle ensues, and the Ku Klux Klan are quite effortlessly victorious. In one scene, captioned ‘Disarming The Blacks’, two hooded Klansmen wander over to dozens of armed black rebels who take one look at them, hurriedly throw their weapons to the floor, and scurry away. White supremacy is restored to the South, and the blacks, crushed and disenfranchised, go back to knowing their place.

  The movie ended. The Klansmen in the marquee cheered sleepily. It was now very late at night. Then they drifted off to their tents. Pat and I stayed around for a while, and we took a walk back to the embers of the cross. Watching Birth of a Nation had made Pat melancholy. Had it not been for the Jews arriving in Hollywood soon after the release of Birth of a Nation, Pat said, who knows? Racial segregation in America might today be considered healthy and normal.

  Perhaps Pat was right. America was a gawky teen back in Hollywood’s golden days, stomping awkwardly around, trying to decide which dream to believe in. Should they go down the Birth of a Nation road of chivalrous and highly armed Klansmen? Or how about this new and different kind of America – everyone waving to each other, black people being treated nicely, the little guy, the outsider
making it big?

  The dream that won out and got called the American Dream was, of course, a Jewish dream, of sentimentality, of liberal harmony, of the immigrant becoming a success in business without prejudice.

  The $50,000 distribution costs of Birth of a Nation were put up, by the way, by the twenty-eight-year-old movie novice Louis B. Mayer. The film was a smash hit, and Louis Mayer made a $500,000 profit. This single deal set him on the road to becoming a mogul.

  So Jewish Hollywood was funded, in part, by the heroic positive images of the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation.

  ∨ Them ∧

  8

  Hollywood

  It was early in the morning on Sunset Boulevard. I had just been picked up from my hotel, the Château Marmont, by a long black limousine which now cruised towards Wilshire Boulevard. The limousine was equipped with seven telephone lines, a fax-modem, an ISDN line, a videophone and a friendly chauffeur. The limousine’s licence plate read JEW1SH, which reflected the religion of the movie director sitting next to me in the back seat, who restlessly drummed his fingers on the walnut veneer.

  “Goodwill,” the movie director murmured to himself. “Goodwill. Goodwill.”

  I gazed out of the window at the passing buildings – one-storey shells housing fancy Japanese restaurants, Lexus showrooms, cool bars, liberal synagogues – concrete boxes identifiable only by the interior design. Such is the homogeneity of these buildings, a bankrupt business could probably be replaced within hours by a small team of workmen carrying some prefabricated milieu.

  I had travelled here to try to ascertain if there was any truth to Thom Robb’s view that Hollywood is a crucial and knowing part of a global conspiracy. Thom envisages shadowy scenarios of a clandestine network of Jews making plans, subtly promoting the interests of World Jewry through movie plots, writing pointed stereotypes of buck-toothed white supremacists with bad social graces, ruthless Islamic fundamentalists blowing up office buildings – all this to pave the way for the day the New World Order will rise up and seize control of a world that will welcome them with open arms.