Something to chew on, from today's New York Times:
March 7, 2001
New Future for Idaho Aryan Nations Compound
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
SEATTLE, March 6 — A silver bust of
Hitler and stained-glass swastikas
adorned the "church," and Nazi flags flew
over the guard tower. German shepherds
patrolled the grounds. And for 28 years, ever
since he moved to the woods of Northern
Idaho to escape what he once called the
"alien scum" in Southern California, Richard
Butler held sway as the self-proclaimed
pastor of the Aryan Nations.
That was the past at Mr. Butler's 20-acre
compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho. The
future, it seems, will be very different. Just
weeks after Mr. Butler was forced by the
courts to turn over the compound to a mother
and son who were beaten by young Aryan
Nations members there, an Internet millionaire
said today that he had bought it from the
victims.
With their blessing and that of Gov. Dirk
Kempthorne and other state and local
leaders, he said, he planned to dedicate the
compound as an education and conference
center for human-rights issues.
The millionaire, Greg Carr, an Idaho native who is the founder and former chairman
of the Internet service Prodigy, said he and others had first thought of having a giant
fire at the compound. They would burn down the church and other buildings and a
shed on the grounds that still contains Nazi flags, copies of "Mein Kampf," weapons
and racist posters and flyers.
That would have been too easy, he said.
"We're not just going to tear the place down and pretend it never happened and say,
`There, we've cleaned up our image as a state,' " Mr. Carr said today. "We're going
to leave it there and acknowledge that this kind of hatred still exists and that we'll
battle against it. The center will be an acknowledgment of the fact that we've got
work to do."
Public officials and people across Idaho say they have been vexed by the presence
of a small number of white supremacists who they say have given the entire state an
undeserved reputation as a haven for neo- Nazis and other racists. The
announcement by Mr. Carr is only the latest, though the most symbolically powerful,
step by the state to counteract the message of those groups.
Idahoans, responding to a challenge grant from the 41-year-old Mr. Carr, have
already raised nearly $1 million to erect the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights
Memorial in Boise. Mayors and school officials have established human-rights task
forces and school curriculum plans and even created a coordinating job that Mayor
Steve Judy of Coeur d'Alene once gave the title "Aryan buster." Rallies by the
Aryan Nations and other groups have been dwarfed by of protesters.
Yet there is still plenty of evidence of white supremacist groups in Idaho, a state
where barely half of 1 percent of its people are black and few Jews live as well,
though there is a growing Hispanic population.
Boise's public-access television station is about to run two new white supremacist
shows. And the Aryan Nations' leader, the 82-year-old Mr. Butler, is still around.
Vincent Bertollini, a former Silicon Valley millionaire investor who moved to north
Idaho and became one of Mr. Butler's staunchest supporters, has bought Mr. Butler
a small bungalow in the town of Hayden, not far from the old compound.
In September, a state jury in Coeur d'Alene ordered Mr. Butler and other leaders of
the Aryan Nations to pay more than $6 million to the victims of a 1998 attack by
three men who were security guards at the compound. The victims, Victoria Keenan
and her son, Jason, were beaten and shot at as they drove along a road at the edge
of the compound one night; two of the men later said they were so drunk they did
not remember the incident.
The jury concluded that Mr. Butler had been negligent in training and supervising the
so-called security guards and ordered him to pay damages so large that they
bankrupted the Aryan Nations altogether.
Mr. Carr, speaking in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Mass., where he now
lives and where he has financed the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at
Harvard University, said he had paid $250,000 from his personal foundation to the
Keenans, who had taken title to the property last month in bankruptcy court and
announced their desire to sell it to a group promoting human rights.
"We hope to get the evilness out of there and turn it around to something positive,"
Jason Keenan said.
The move was praised by several elected leaders and by Governor Kempthorne, a
Republican.
"This begins to erase a scar that existed," the governor said. "And this center will
continue to send the clearest of signals of what Idaho is truly about."
Mr. Carr said that plans were still being drawn up for the new center, but that he
hoped it could serve as a place to teach young people about why hatred and racism
exist and how to counteract it.
Mr. Butler has vowed to continue the work of the Aryan Nations, either by finding a
new site for a compound or concentrating on the Internet. But a spokesman for
Governor Kemp thorne, H. D. Palmer, said Mr. Butler would not be welcome in
Idaho, and he praised Mr. Carr.
"It's a real victory," Mr. Palmer said. "It's kind of the ultimate form of Capture the
Flag." |
