Them

by Jon Ronson

  ♦

  Nicolae Ceausescu had a summer palace a little way up the hill. Armed guards still patrolled it, and only VIPs were allowed near the place. Nothing had changed in this regard. Those few people who had been granted a tour said that it was the most luxurious private house they had ever seen. Mr Ru Ru – who hadn’t yet seen it – told me that he wanted to buy it.

  “What will you do with it?” I asked.

  “A hotel!” he said. “A Ceausescu hotel. People sleep in Ceausescu’s own bed. Wow! Imagine that. What will they dream of when they sleep in Ceausescu’s bed?”

  There was a pause.

  “What will they dream of?” I asked.

  “They will dream of Elena!” said Mr Ru Ru. “Ha ha!”

  “Is this why you’re buying up the items in the auction?” I said. “To decorate your Ceausescu hotel?”

  “You are very wise,” said Mr Ru Ru. “Very astute and correct.”

  “Do you think there are tourists out there who would want to pay to sleep in Ceausescu’s bed?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “You are friends with Idi Amin, and you were friends with Nicolae Ceausescu,” I said. “You seem to have a disproportionately large number of dictator friends, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I am also friends with Kim Il-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.”

  ♦

  The next morning, at eight o’clock, the telephone rang in my hotel room. It was Eugene, the Romanian government lawyer.

  “Get dressed quickly,” he said. “Mr Ru Ru is visiting Ceausescu’s palace. He has had special permission as a VIP and you are invited too.”

  The party was Mr Ru Ru, his entourage, Eugene and me. We wandered up the hill towards a sentry post hidden among some trees. We handed our passports to the teenage armed guard, and we walked further, past ponds and fountains and winter blossoms, into the oak-lined hallway of Ceausescu’s summer home.

  And we had a look around. The indoor swimming pool was lined with intricate mosaics of bear-hunting scenes. There were gold-leaf pillars and stained-glass windows. The water was still heated. The private cinema was furnished with a dozen armchairs, and hand-woven golden curtains, which concealed the screen between viewings. There was a health spa, with massage tables and hydrotherapy treatment rooms and a gymnasium. The vast, marble meeting hall, big enough to greet a thousand, was where Ceausescu entertained Gerald Ford. There was a ballroom, and a second ballroom. The marble balcony, as large as some people’s homes, overlooked a formal garden of lakes and statues.

  On normal guided tours of lavish homes the visitors are kept away from the toilets. When does one get to see a stately home’s stately toilet? But we saw Ceausescu’s toilet. It was onyx-green. The bathroom was huge. Freshly fluffed towels still hung from the towel rails. Mr Ru Ru felt the fabric of the towel between his fingers.

  It was immaculate, unchanged, a Marie Celeste, as if the Ceausescus had just slipped outside and would come back any moment, furious to discover a bunch of strangers poking around their home, touching everything. Teams of cleaners still cleaned it every day.

  Elena Ceausescu used to slip hairpins under carpets and into corners to monitor the thoroughness with which the servants cleaned the place. It was spotless today, as if her ghost still hovered.

  ♦

  Mr Ru Ru remained silent for most of the tour. He tapped vases with his fingernail, and they rang out a little. He stroked impressionist paintings. He made little noises of admiration. Each room brought a new gasp of approval from the non-Romanians, and gasps of outrage from the others – who had been forced to endure decades of hardship under the regime of the owner of this ridiculous place. At enormous expense, the Ceausescus had added a fifteen-room wing to the palace, an office and bedroom complex, but it was never used because Elena did not like the smell of the paint.

  “I do not cry now,” murmured Eugene, as we felt the warm water in the indoor swimming pool. “But there was a time, during winters, when there was no heating and I would sleep in a coat and boots. That was the worst thing. No. There was something worse than that. The fear to talk with friends. I would be scared to talk with my own friends. Would they report me? It was sick.”

  Eugene paused, and then he added, “I myself participated in the Revolution in 1989.”

  “I cannot understand,” I said, “how Ceausescu could have deluded himself into thinking everything was OK. How could he blind himself to what was happening outside? Did he never look around his home and think to himself, All this is crazy?”

  “He couldn’t see outside,” said Eugene. “When he was in residence his people closed off all the roads, any road that could be seen from the windows. He saw only the trees.”

  Eugene looked out of the stained-glass window that overlooked the marble conservatory next to the swimming pool.

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

  “Ah!” said Mr Ru Ru, turning a corner. “Here it is! Ceausescu’s bedroom!”

  He sat on the bed and tested the springs. He giggled.

  “Nicolae and Elena were naked here,” he said. “Mmm? They were naked here!”

  He grabbed one of his secretaries around the waist and attempted to drag her onto the bed. She laughed and struggled away.

  He turned to me and fixed me with a stare.

  “They were naked here,” he said, and his words were taut with meaning – although I wasn’t entirely sure how to interpret them. “They were naked.”

  ♦

  Even though Mr Ru Ru had confided to me that the lots in the auction were of a low quality and were historically uninteresting, it didn’t stop him from buying almost everything. He paid extravagant prices. Mr Ru Ru was not a fool, but he seemed to be spending his money foolishly. He bought tapestries and shoes and socks and scarves and ties and little sculptures.

  From time to time the other entrepreneurs, irritated and resigned to failure, would bid him up just for the hell of it. But it didn’t seem to matter. Ru Ru just laughed and shrugged his shoulders and carried on bidding. Sometimes his bodyguard, or his financial adviser or his two private secretaries would glance around at the other bidders and chuckle amiably as Mr Ru Ru secured yet another lot.

  Mr Ru Ru bought the paintings and photographs of Ceausescu standing victoriously before the piled up corpses of dead bears. These paintings were illusions. Ceausescu loved to shoot bears, but his people used to drug the bears first to make them sluggish and easier to shoot. Sometimes he would even pose next to bears that had been shot by others.

  Later that evening, the government organized a banquet for their guests of honour at a nearby hunting lodge. There were some local journalists there, reporting on the auction for a variety of Romanian newspapers and magazines. Eugene stood up and announced that the government would award a cash prize – the Romanian equivalent of $400 – to whichever journalist wrote the nicest article. The journalists applauded gratefully and uncritically – $400 was, for some of them, six months’ earnings.

  Then Eugene toasted the bidders, and we raised our glasses, salut, amongst the stuffed bears and the violin trio playing in the corner, with the snow outside.

  “You are wonderful people,” said Eugene. “I wish you long life and happiness, and excellent business prospects, and enjoy!”

  Salut!

  Then Mr Ru Ru banged his fork on the table. He stood up. The room fell silent.

  “I am responding to your kind words,” he announced, “on behalf of all the buyers.”

  The Dublin theme-pub entrepreneur, who was sitting to my left, chuckled darkly.

  “I love Romania,” said Mr Ru Ru, “with all of my heart and all of my soul. I come here with an open heart, an open mind, and an open pocket! Ha ha!”

  The other businesspeople rolled
their eyes sardonically and grumbled into their cocktails.

  “You speak fine words,” responded Eugene. “We particularly respect your open pocket! Ha ha!”

  “I love Romania,” said Mr Ru Ru. “Your women are beautiful. Yes? Ha ha. You are a proud and wise nation. Hopefully I will soon meet your President, so I can tell him of my love for Romania. But I am disappointed in the lots being auctioned today. They are very…normal. But I buy them all. Why? Because I want everybody to be happy!”

  Mr Ru Ru stretched out his arms, as if to hug the whole room.

  “Nicolae loved only Elena…” he announced. “But Ru Ru loves all of Romania!”

  There was a startled silence. This lofty final statement hung uncomfortably in the air. Eugene’s eyes narrowed. There was no doubt about it. Mr Ru Ru had overegged the pudding in a dramatic and inappropriate manner. Mr Ru Ru faltered for the briefest moment. He steadied himself. He unstretched his arms.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  ∨ Them ∧

  12

  The Way Things Are Done

  In my attempts to find out whether the world really was being secretly ruled from inside the Caesar Park golfing resort that June weekend, I contacted dozens of Bilderberg members. And, of course, nobody returned my calls. Nobody even wrote back to decline my request and thank me for my letter, and these are people whose people always write back and decline requests – Peter Mandelson’s office, for instance – which is why I began to envisage these silences as startled ones.

  I did manage to speak to David Rockefeller’s press secretary, who told me that Mr Rockefeller was thoroughly fed up with being called a twelve-foot lizard, a secret ruler of the world, a keeper of black helicopters that spy on anti-Bilderberg dissenters, and so on.

  The Rockefeller office seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the conspiracy theories. They troubled Mr Rockefeller (his press man said). They made him wonder why some people are so scared and suspicious of him in particular and global think-tanks such as Bilderberg in general. Mr Rockefeller’s conclusion was that this was a battle between rational and irrational thought. Rational people favoured globalization. Irrational people preferred nationalism.

  I asked him why he thought no Bilderberg member had returned my calls or answered my letters.

  “Well,” he shrugged, “I suppose it’s because they might want to be invited back.”

  ♦

  I persevered. I wanted the information. I felt I deserved to have the information, and I simply couldn’t believe that, in this day and age, there was some information that I couldn’t get my hands on. It was driving me crazy.

  I learnt that being followed around by a man in dark glasses was tame in comparison to the indignities suffered by some of the few prying journalists who had travelled this road before me. In June 1998 a Scottish reporter tracked Bilderberg to the Turnberry Hotel in Ayrshire, and when he started asking questions he was promptly handcuffed by Strathclyde police and thrown into jail.

  ♦

  Bilderberg members continued to ignore my inquiries through the end of 1999 and into 2.000. It was around the same time that my former Islamic fundamentalist friend Omar Bakri decided to take against me in a big way.

  It began innocently enough. I wrote an article about him in the Guardian newspaper, and a few days later he phoned to say that as a result of it he had been asked to appear on a TV discussion programme entitled Fanatical Debate.

  “Fanatical Debate!” sighed Omar. “What a name! See how you’ve typecast me, Jon.”

  We laughed about it.

  The next day Omar called back. Something had changed.

  “I am very angry with you,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You said you’d portray Omar the husband, and you lied.”

  “How could I portray Omar the husband if you never introduced me to your wife once during the entire year we were together?” I said.

  “Anyway,” said Omar, “I am not angry. I am happy.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because it was a funny article,” said Omar. “It made me laugh.”

  ♦

  Three hours later, I received a telephone call from Helen Jacobus, a journalist on the Jewish Chronicle.

  “I’ve just been speaking to Omar Bakri,” she said. “He’s very angry. He says that you have personally destroyed relations between all Muslims and all Jews in the UK. He says that if there is a violent aftermath, you will have nobody to blame but yourself. He says that the Zionist-controlled British media has demonized him, and it is all your fault. Would you care to comment?”

  “But,” I said, “I haven’t.”

  “Is that it?” said Helen. “Is that your comment?”

  “I haven’t,” I said. “I just haven’t.”

  “My God, Jon,” said Helen. “This is all we need.”

  “What else did Omar say?” I asked her.

  “He said that you will burn in hell,” she said.

  ♦

  This was the worst possible news. Here I was, still smarting at the heavy-handed treatment afforded to me by the Bilderberg security guards in Portugal, and Omar was going around telling people that I was part of the international media-controlled Jewish conspiracy. I seemed to be in a unique, and not pleasant, position in the grand conspiratorial scheme of things.

  I debated whether to phone Omar and remind him that journalism is very much a team effort. There are researchers, publishers and so on. I realized then, with shame, that I do not cope well under pressure.

  I telephoned Omar.

  “Omar,” I said, “did you tell the Jewish Chronicle that I have destroyed relations between all Muslims and all Jews?”

  “Yes,” he said, merrily.

  “Don’t you think it’s getting out of hand?” I said.

  “Oh, Jon,” said Omar. “I know how to work the media! Ha ha! Don’t you think it is all very funny? I’m going to cause as much trouble as possible, ha ha!”

  “But what if some of your followers take your words seriously and – you know – kill me?” I said.

  “Oh, Jon,” he muttered. “Don’t be silly. We are all very mature. All Muslims are very mature.”

  “So we’re friends?” I said.

  “Of course,” said Omar.

  “Maybe I can come over?” I suggested.

  “Oh no,” said Omar. “I can never trust you again. You lied. I am very angry. You have caused much unhappiness amongst the Muslims.”

  “But you said you were very happy.”

  “Oh yes,” said Omar. “I am very happy.”

  “Omar,” I said, “are you happy or angry?”

  “Happy,” said Omar.

  There was a silence.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Helen Jacobus said that you said that I would burn in hell.”

  “Ha ha ha!” said Omar. “I was joking! I say that to my children! If you don’t do your homework you will go to the hellfire! Ha ha! I can’t believe that you believed me!”

  “So I won’t go to hell?”

  “You will go to paradise,” said Omar. “And if you go around telling people that I said you will burn in hell then I will give you sixty lashes.”

  “Will you?” I said.

  “Jon!” said Omar. “I’m joking again! Ha ha!”

  “Ha ha,” I said.

  “Sixty lashes for you!” said Omar.

  ♦

  In 1999, three nail bombs exploded in London – in Brixton and Brick Lane and at a gay bar in Soho. The bomber, David Copeland, believed that Tony Blair’s government was being secretly controlled by a clique of powerful Jews who call themselves the Bilderberg Group and meet once a year in a five-star hotel at an undisclosed location. He also believed that this Judaic-Satanic elite attends a secret summer camp every year called Bohemian Grove where they sacrifice children on an altar to their owl god.

  The Serbian le
ader Slobodan Milosevic publicly blamed the Bilderberg Group for starting the war against him in the former Yugoslavia. His accusation was barely reported. I suppose that the journalists at the press conference had never heard of the Bilderberg Group and simply didn’t know what to write.

  The Iraqi government announced in November 2000 that the vote-rigging scandal that convulsed the American elections in Florida was all part of the great Bilderberg Jewish conspiracy to get their man, Al Gore, into power. Other conspiracy theorists contended that this could not be true because George W. Bush was himself a regular attendee at Bohemian Grove and must, therefore, also be part of the conspiracy.

  I thought about Timothy McVeigh visiting the remains of Randy Weaver’s cabin and rummaging through the family’s scattered belongings, like an archaeologist, or a pilgrim, shortly before blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City – a building he considered to be the local headquarters of the global elite. I realized just how central these conspiracy theories were to the practice of terrorism in the western world.

  In October 2000, in Gaza, a twelve-year-old boy called Mohammed al-Direh went out looking for used cars on a Saturday morning with his father. They blundered into a street battle with Israeli soldiers. The boy hid behind his father’s back for safety. He was killed. It was a clean and deliberate shot. The Israelis appeared to the world like old-fashioned monsters.

  A series of posters appeared overnight in London and Birmingham calling, in vast letters, for the murder of the Jews.

  THE FINAL HOUR WILL NOT COME UNTIL THE MUSLIMS KILL THE JEWS…

  At the bottom of the poster was a telephone number. I recognized it straight away. It was Omar’s mobile phone number.

  That night, a Jewish student was brutally stabbed while reading the Talmud. Britain’s Jews were becoming scared. I was becoming scared. I felt that things were getting out of control. I was one of the only Jews in Britain on speaking terms with Omar, so I telephoned him.

  “Hello, Jon,” he said. “How are you? It is lovely to hear you.”

  “Omar,” I said. “Why have you done this? Why are you bringing all of this to Britain? I think that you have done a terrible thing.”