Capital braces for Nazi rally

OLYMPIA – Even with one woman guarding the church doors and police promising regular patrols, people at the Unity in the Community meeting were nervous.

“Hopefully,” one man said, “this is the night that the Nazis are pressing their uniforms.”

Olympia, Washington’s famously left-leaning capital, is about to become the backdrop for what organizers are billing as one of this year’s largest neo-Nazi gatherings on the West Coast.

The National Socialist Movement Northwest applied in January to hold a 100-person, two-hour rally on the steps of the state Capitol on July 3. The group plans to show up with its Nazi flags, armbands, brownshirt uniforms and speeches.

“We are pro-Hitler!” the group says on its Web site, www.nukeisrael.com. Organizers say members are coming from as far away as California, Nevada and Montana.

The state couldn’t say “no” to the application.

“Essentially, we say ‘yes’ to all of them,” said Steve Valandra, spokesman for the state’s General Administration Office. “It’s just a matter of free speech.”

Now Olympia finds itself wrestling with a problem very familiar to places like Hayden Lake and Coeur d’Alene: how to publicly repudiate the racists’ message without a confrontation that gives the Nazis the publicity they want.

For weeks, the small Unity in the Community group has been meeting to organize a response. Twice so far, a few neo-Nazis have shown up at their meetings and been asked to leave.

“We don’t want to garner them any attention they don’t deserve to get,” said Marc Brenman, executive director of the state Human Rights Commission. “On the other hand, we don’t have to stay silent, either.”

“Hardest areas”

Olympia – a gay- and lesbian-friendly college town with an organic farmer’s market, art-house theater, galleries and a thriving music scene – seems an unlikely place for brownshirted neo-Nazis to come recruiting.

This is the city, after all, that declared itself a “nuclear free zone” despite the fact that the ordinance is largely unenforceable. The city where one of the biggest civic events is the Earth Day-inspired puppet pageantry of a “Procession of the Species” parade. A city that’s home to Evergreen State College and its motto “Omnia extares” – Latin for “Let it all hang out.”

But the city’s quirky, diversity-embracing nature is exactly why it’s the perfect place for a rally, National Socialist Movement leaders said in interviews.

“It’s the most diverse, liberal, basically confrontational place in Washington state. We pick targets in the hardest areas,” said Justin Boyer, a neo-Nazi who filed the rally application. He said the group also plans rallies in Spokane and Seattle this summer.

“We’re establishing ourselves to have a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest,” said a Snohomish County group member who identified himself as Jim Brandt, 42, a former resident of Spokane.

“Olympia, especially with its traditional base of tree-hugger types – not that there’s anything wrong with environmentalists; we’re very environmentally conscious – seemed like a good place to put roots down,” said Brandt.

“Awareness of race”

The National Socialist Movement is trying to fill a leadership void left by the death of Richard Butler, the fracturing of his Aryan Nations group, and last year’s conviction in Chicago of a fellow neo-Nazi, World Church of the Creator leader Matt Hale. Hale is serving 40 years in prison for trying to arrange the killing of a federal judge.

“Those groups, we felt, weren’t going anywhere,” Brandt said.

The National Socialist Movement Northwest’s Web site claims that it’s growing rapidly, affiliating with existing skinhead chapters in the region and last year forming a federal political action committee: 88 PAC (“88” is a reference to the eighth letter of the alphabet – H – and neo-Nazi shorthand for “Heil Hitler”).

So far, the PAC has collected less than $400 in contributions, according to Federal Elections Commission reports. The group claims 66 chapters nationwide, including an “Idaho unit” that lists a post office box in Athol.

“We’re not a violent group, contrary to what you may have heard about us,” said Brandt. “We try to do this strictly politically and through street agitation, to bring awareness of race.”

Yet the group’s own Web site, filled with racist and anti-Semitic epithets and caricatures, touts a neo-Nazi video game with a graphic showing a blood-spattered Israeli flag. And until recently, the Web site included a Holocaust-denial section titled “6 million more!”

Brandt insists that such things are merely “provocative statements designed to agitate liberals.” Group members, he said, “will not actually act on anything like that that they say.”

Seeking “checkmate”

Many in Olympia don’t believe that. They remember Bob Buchanan Jr.

In 1992, Buchanan, a 17-year-old Thai-American boy, was bludgeoned and stabbed to death by two neo-Nazis in a downtown Olympia train tunnel.

“The last time there was a neo-Nazi presence here, there was the murder of one of our children,” said Reiko Callner, who was Olympia’s city prosecutor at the time. “There’s no pretending that’s not an attention-getter.”

The killing galvanized the community, which passed hate-crimes legislation and organized Unity in the Community to combat racist violence.

Fourteen years later, the looming neo-Nazi rally has re-energized the group. It is organizing a large diversity celebration on July 2, as a way to counter the racists’ message.

Borrowing a page from Coeur d’Alene’s playbook, the group is running a “Lemons to Lemonade” fundraiser. For every hour that the Nazis rally, local residents have pledged money. The donations are earmarked for a local gay and lesbian youth group, the NAACP, a local synagogue’s social-justice fund and other very non-Nazi causes.

“We wish the people really good luck,” said Tony Stewart, a North Idaho College instructor who helped organized a similar pledge drive for Butler’s 1998 parade in Coeur d’Alene.

“The march lasted 27 minutes and we raised $35,000,” Stewart said. The cash was handed out for diversity teaching and other programs – and each time, local organizers held a press conference to publicly thank the neo-Nazis for helping raise money.

“It was like, ‘checkmate,’ ” said Stewart.

Olympia is also looking to Billings, Mont., where in 1993 thousands of residents taped posters of menorahs in their windows after someone hurled a brick through a 6-year-old Jewish boy’s Hannukah-decorated bedroom window. Unity in the Community is distributing diversity posters, as well as printing a copy on newspaper pages donated by the Olympian newspaper.

Hundreds of students staged a diversity program in the city’s performing arts center two weeks ago. A local synagogue bought several copies of “Not in Our Town,” a documentary about Billings’ experience, and is airing and sharing them.

On July 2, people will gather downtown for music, cultural booths with food, and other events focused on the community’s diversity.

“It’s all about celebrating what we are,” said Marijke van Roojen, an organizer.

“Not anywhere!”

National Socialist Movement makes no secret of its desire for a noisy confrontation and lots of news coverage. In a brief protest on the Capitol steps earlier this year, group organizer “Jim Ramm” – a former Eastern Washington University student and Butler supporter whose real name is Matthew Ernest Ramsey – groused about the sound quality of his protest recordings. The stone steps echoed too much, he said, as his side chanted “Sieg heil” and opponents shouted back “Not in Olympia! Not anywhere!”

“We can’t get any good propaganda pieces off it,” he can be heard complaining on an audio recording posted on the group’s Web site.

Still, virtually everyone preparing for the rally expects a large contingent of counterdemonstrators to face the neo-Nazis on July 3. A community Web site, olyblog.net, includes photos and information about Boyer and other neo-Nazis on Web sites. Others have been discussing tactics like mocking the Nazis by dressing in silly caricatures of their brownshirt uniforms and swastika armbands. For every “sieg heil” one Olympian suggested, people should chant back “So vile!”

Unity in the Community is training “peacemakers” to prevent violence. And the State Patrol and Olympia police – no strangers to Capitol protests – are planning to close streets and keep the two sides apart.

“We have, unfortunately, tons of experience,” said Olympia police spokesman Dick Machlan.

Some in Olympia wonder if the rally is merely a bluff. The National Socialist Movement last year announced a big rally in Seattle, then never showed up. But state and police officials say that continued contact from the group – and its own advertising on the Web site – suggests that the rally will happen.

Brandt said the group isn’t likely to have a full 100 people there. At a rally in Olympia earlier this year, the group projected 50 demonstrators but brought just seven.

The bigger concern, state patrol spokesman Jeff DeVere said, is the number of counterdemonstrators.

The total of both sides “could be anywhere between 50 and 2,000,” DeVere said. “You plan for the high number and hope for a lower number.”