Them - Adventures with Extremists by Ronson Jon

Author:Ronson, Jon [Ronson, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

∨ Them ∧

7

The Klansman Who Won’t Use the N-Word

Somewhere in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, northern Arkansas, is an unusual white building. It stands surrounded only by trees and hacked-out clearings and dirt tracks. The road up here is strewn with chunks of rusted corrugated iron and abandoned pick-up trucks and shacks with brutal No Trespassing signs, illustrated with cartoons of giant snarling dogs, and I wondered who would dare to trespass all the way out here in conspiracy-theory country, armed-response country, Ku Klux Klan country. The signal on my mobile phone had failed along the way.

This unusual white building looked a little disturbing to me, as it is quite obviously inspired by the architecture of the Third Reich, using local timber and whitewash, with vast blood-red flags draped from roof to porch at either end. These strange flags are centred with thick black crosses in white circles. The dirt driveway is also marked out with these flags, a column of them in the darkness, illuminated by a nearby bonfire. This building, and all the odd neo-Nazi pomp surrounding it, seems incongruous out here in the deep forest. From high clearings, you can just about make out little distant specks of everyday global corporate life – strip-malls, NikeTowns, Marriott Hotels, Wal-Marts, Holiday Inns and Burger Kings.

The Ozark Mountains make the news from time to time when neo-Nazi gunmen or abortion clinic bombers pursued by scores of FBI agents vanish into them. It is a hiding place, a labyrinth of forests and dirt tracks and compounds populated by an informal army of supremacists and separatists allied by a common purpose, which is to see the supremacists and separatists of a homeland where the white race can live in peace and separation and not be bothered by the government or the immoral liberalism that infects the United States via Hollywood and stems, essentially, from the Jews.

The homeland they dream of is, in fact, not unlike the Ozark Mountains themselves, where the FBI can rarely find their man, where there are virtually no black people, and even fewer Jews. I was probably the only Jew within a hundred miles or more, and I was doing my best to tone it down, sitting out here on the porch of the strange white building. I was consciously suppressing my hand gestures and attempting not to be overtly cosmopolitan.

This strange white building and the compound that it stands in, a hundred acres in total, is owned by Thom Robb, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Thom and I sat outside, as night was falling, and we talked for an hour. This was the night before the opening day of the Ku Klux Klan’s annual National Congress. All the preparations had been made. The marquee had been erected. It was orange with white stripes. It looked like a tombola tent at a village fête. The Welcome banner flapped in the evening breeze. The words ‘Ku Klux Klan’ were surrounded by friendly red and blue stars.

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