Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love

by Thomas A. Tarrants

  Among the prisoners housed at the maximum-security unit at this time were several members of a black revolutionary group called the Republic of New Africa (RNA). Their organization was seeking to establish a separate nation for blacks within the United States (especially the Southeastern United States) and to obtain reparations from the U.S. government for the legacy of slavery. The RNA’s “Provisional Government” had established a headquarters in Jackson, which led to a violent confrontation with police and FBI agents. I had several conversations with one of their leaders and found him to be an interesting person. As I listened to him describe what he believed and what he was trying to do, it struck me that his path to radicalization was not too different from mine.

  After analyzing the security system in safekeeping, I had concluded that escape was not possible. As the weeks turned into months, in order to keep my sanity, I read. And read. And read. Books were my relief from the oppressive boredom of prison life, but the material I was reading kept pouring more and more hateful ideas into my mind.

  Some of the key books that had influenced me in the past were The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (author anonymous) and The International Jew by Henry Ford. But now I moved on to other works, such as The Inequality of the Human Races by Count Arthur de Gobineau, White America by Earnest Sevier Cox, Imperium by Ulick Varange (Francis Parker Yockey), Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, The Importance of Race in Civilization by Wayne MacLeod, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I also read the American Mercury magazine, the Thunderbolt newspaper (published by the NSRP), the Fiery Cross magazine (published by the United Klans of America), and American Opinion magazine (published by the John Birch Society). I was able to order most of these by mail. Fortunately, none of the other inmates knew what I was reading, so I had no problems. The guards, of course, knew, but they didn’t seem to care.

  Reading this type of material served only to reinforce my views about the Jews, the supremacy of the white race, and the inferiority of black people. Instead of being rehabilitated, I was diving even deeper into the darkness. I had not yet learned the first law of holes: when you are in one, stop digging.

  During this period, my parents continued to make the long trip from Mobile every two weeks to see me. Sometimes my sister and brother also came. Since I was in maximum security again, they could stay only for two hours, but I always felt encouraged after seeing them. Unfortunately, I was still so self-centered that I had little awareness of or consideration for their feelings or needs. I was generally moody, frustrated, and irritable, which was symptomatic of my depression. I sometimes would flare up at them about inconsequential things. No doubt the long, weary ride home gave them no encouragement, only grief. But they loved me and were committed to helping me as best they could. How they did it, I cannot fathom. My mother, in particular, continued to pray for me and to hope in God for a good outcome eventually. She wrote letters to the governor and to the prison superintendent on my behalf, seeking to ensure good treatment. In spite of many reasons to give up, she persevered in hope and never lost faith in God. Like Monica, the mother of Augustine, to whom Saint Ambrose said, “It cannot be that the son of those tears should perish,” my mother shed many tears over many years.1 And as it was for Augustine, and so many after him, so would it soon be for me.

  13

  ENCOUNTER WITH TRUTH AND LIGHT

  After about six months of confinement on the safekeeping cellblock, I was moved to death row. This largely resulted from my parents’ requests for a less noisy place for me to live. Death row was far quieter and better suited for prolonged incarceration. However, life was still miserable, and my prospects for the future were worse than ever.

  I was locked in a tiny cell by myself twenty-four hours a day, with no recreation or exercise. Other than two showers a week that took fewer than fifteen minutes each, I stayed in that cell. A guard brought meals that were passed in through an opening in the bars. Words like drab, dismal, and depressing cannot begin to describe the severe loneliness of my situation. The seeming hopelessness of my predicament was reinforced when prison officials told me that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Mississippi governor John Bell Williams had both stressed that I should never be released from my cell. I was stuck with myself and my thoughts, and I could see no way out. Life seemed hopeless.

  My thinking and feelings spiraled downward even further.

  Kathy Ainsworth’s death in the Meridian ambush had grieved me from the beginning, but now it weighed on me even more heavily. It was heartrending. My decision to take her on the Meridian bombing, though she was willing, cost her life. Likewise, my recruiting of Louis Shadoan ultimately cost his life. My hand in the cause of these two deaths weighed heavy on me. My depression intensified, worse than ever. It felt as though a dark cloud would sometimes descend on me, causing me to lose all perspective. Life seemed hopeless and not worth living. As before in the Lauderdale County Jail, I began again to think about how I could kill myself to escape the misery.

  This time I would make sure it worked. I saved up a handful of sleeping pills prescribed for me by the prison doctor and took them all at once. These, I thought, would certainly be fatal. I was fully expecting to die and wake up in heaven. But a guard on the night shift made a rare, unscheduled patrol through the cellblock and saw me staggering around my cell, incoherent. He called the prison doctor, who came immediately and administered emergency treatment, saving my life. I have no memory of the event. I regained consciousness only to face once again the unpleasant reality I was trying to escape.

  With nothing else to do, I resumed my reading. But this time, instead of reading hateful material, I moved in a different direction. The book Imperium contained a lot of neofascist philosophy, but it also quoted some noted philosophers. Rather than stop at the author’s take on the great philosophers, some of whom intrigued me and stimulated my thinking, I decided to read them for myself.

  I began with G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which was beyond me at points but not without value, as it gave me an understanding of the dialectical view of history that was central to Marxist thinking. Then I read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which was also beyond me at points, but again, not without value. It introduced me to the idea that cultures have a life cycle—they are born, grow to maturity, and then decline and die.

  I needed something more foundational and soon moved to the ancient writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. I was fascinated by Plato’s reasoning and his thinking on the immortality of the soul and the ideal state; the objectivity of truth, goodness, and beauty; and the implications for a disinterested pursuit of truth. Socrates’s idea that an unexamined life is not worth living also resonated strongly with me. I was beginning to see that I had not really done any serious thinking for myself, or any examination of my life, but had simply accepted ideas that sounded plausible to me.

  Most important, Plato and the Stoics helped me recognize and reflect on how transitory life really is. Thus, the pursuit of truth for our brief life in this world took on even greater importance to me. I decided that I would search for truth, regardless of where this journey took me and what truth turned out to be. Up to this point, I had read only those books that were consistent with my ideological bias. I had avoided books, writings, and ideas that were opposed to my views or that were incongruent in any way. I dismissed such material as worthless. I never imagined that opposing views might contain at least some elements of truth that would make sense to me.

  Unknowingly, I was experiencing an intellectual awakening that would eventually liberate my mind and prepare my heart for a spiritual awakening. Much of this intellectual awakening came through books I had purchased by mail from the Conservative Book Club, which I had recently discovered.

  One of the first was Legacy of Freedom, a book on political philosophy by George C. Roche. Many passages spoke to me, but I was powerfully struck by these particular words: “A man willing to judge ‘truth’ on its merits is the true reali
st because he is able to understand that the structure of reality is independent of his own desires. He grasps the fact that the world was created before he arrived and will still be here when he, in his earthly form, has departed.”1

  This thought reinforced my desire for truth and triggered a profound change in me. I saw even more clearly that I must seek truth regardless of what it might entail: if I should find error in views that I had so zealously cherished, then I would have to abandon them—no matter how important they might be to me.

  Because of this newfound desire for truth, my intellect was now guiding me with a new goal of rigorous objectivity. My undeveloped critical thinking skills began to grow. And even though complete objectivity was impossible, my commitment to this new way of seeing would soon spell the end of my radical ideology and the other forms of deception that had bound me for years.

  As I continued to read Legacy of Freedom, I came to understand that the events of history were inextricably bound up with, and reflective of, a highly complex matrix of political, social, cultural, economic, religious, and philosophical currents—all of which interacted with one another. Wars and revolutions were not simply part of “Jewish conspiracies,” nor was Communism simply a “Jewish plot.”

  About this time, the book Suicide of the West by James Burnham came into my hands. I had seen it advertised, and the title intrigued me, especially in light of my reading of Oswald Spengler, so I ordered it. Burnham was a brilliant intellectual and professor of philosophy at New York University. Among other things, he was particularly helpful to me in exposing the fallacies of anti-Semitic ideology, which I had swallowed hook, line, and sinker, with no investigation or analysis.

  The lights came on for me when I read these words:

  A convinced believer in the anti-Semitic ideology tells me that the Bolshevik revolution is a Jewish plot. I point out to him that the revolution was led to its first major victory by a non-Jew, Lenin. He then explains that Lenin was the pawn of Trotsky, Radek, Kamenev, and Zinoviev and other Jews who were in the Bolshevik High Command. I remind him that Lenin’s successor as leader of the revolution, the non-Jew Stalin, killed off all those Jews; and that Stalin has been followed by the non-Jew, Khrushchev, under whose rule there have been notable revivals of anti-Semitic attitudes and conduct. He then informs me that the seeming Soviet anti-Semitism is only a fraud invented by the Jewish press, and that Stalin and Khrushchev are really Jews whose names have been changed with a total substitution of forged records. Suppose I am able to present documents that even he will have to admit show this to be impossible. He is still unmoved. He tells me that the real Jewish center that controls the revolution and the entire world conspiracy is not in Russia anyway, but in Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Lhasa, New York, or somewhere, and that it has deliberately eliminated the Jews from the public officialdom of the Bolshevik countries in order to conceal its hand and deceive the world about what is going on.2

  Burnham helped me recognize a significant danger, one to which I had fallen prey: becoming an ideologue. As Burnham explained,

  An ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitudes have been determined in advance of the particular experience or observation. His thoughts are derived from the ideology and are not subject to the facts. There is no possible argument, observation or experiment that could disprove a firm ideological belief for the very simple reason that an ideologue will not accept any argument, observation, or experiment as constituting disproof.3

  This described me and the ideological thinking which lay beneath my anti-Semitism and racism. Once I realized this, the foundations of the Cause began to crumble. My eyes were opened to see that the historical facts simply did not support the idea of a Jewish conspiracy. As for blacks and the civil rights movement, Burnham deftly demolished racist arguments as well:

  I mention after hearing him assert the innate inferiority of the Negro race, the fact that in baseball, boxing, track and field sports, Negroes are the champions. These purely physical achievements, he explains, are proof of how close Negroes remain to animals in the evolutionary scale. I add the names of Negro musicians, singers, actors and writers of the first rank. Naturally, he comments, they carry over a sense of rhythm from the tribal dance and tom-tom ceremonies. I ask how many law graduates of his state university could stand up against Judge Thurgood Marshall; how many sociologists against Professor C. Eric Lincoln; how many psychologists against Professor Kenneth Clark? Doubtless all such have plenty of white blood, he answers, but in any case they are only exceptions to prove the general rule of inferiority; that is confirmed by the low intellectual attainments of the average Negro. I observe that the average Negro has been educated in worse schools, and for fewer years, than the average white. Of course, he agrees: No use wasting good education on low-grade material.4

  Recognizing the intellectual, philosophical, and moral bankruptcy of far-right ideology initiated a process of liberation in my life. I had been trapped in an ideological prison that dulled my thinking and feeling. But now roots of that ideology were being severed, and the prison door was opening. I had been driven by fears that were rooted in malicious lies that had produced anger, hatred, and all that follows in their wake. My mind was becoming free to think clearly, and I started to feel a deep desire for truth. No longer did I have to be careful of what I read lest some “Jewish propaganda” inadvertently poison my thinking. No longer did I have to rationalize away inconvenient truths and realities that did not fit into my ideology. I was now free to read and study anything I desired and to judge it according to its own merits. Correspondence with reality had become my criterion of truth. And truth had become my goal. I would later learn that the pursuit of truth for its own sake was a vital part of escaping ideological captivity.

  Several months into this journey, I came to the Bible. Or rather, I came back to it. I felt an especially strong desire to read the Gospels in the New Testament. I can’t really say why, other than on the human level, it was to some extent part of my search for truth. It did not arise out of a search for solace, or escape, or a way to get out of the trouble I was in. Nor was it from a concern to improve my relationship with God, which I thought was fine. Like my comrades in the Cause, I had seen myself as fighting for God and country. God was on our side. We were true patriots. The Communists, Jews, liberals, the civil rights movement, and the corrupt federal government were the enemy. They were working together to actively undermine the Christian beliefs and values that our nation had been founded on. We saw our resistance as completely justified for preserving white, Christian America—desperate times required desperate measures. The end justified the means. While we knew what we were doing was illegal, we never entertained the thought that it might be sinful or evil. That kind of thinking had now crumbled, but I had not yet seen how distorted my ideas about God were. Reading the Gospels was about to change that, as it has for many people down through history.

  As I began to read, in the New Testament this time, it was unlike my previous experiences. When I turned the pages, it was like the lights in a darkened theater being slowly turned up. Now I began to see, as it were, first the dim outlines of things, then colors, then textures. I was able to understand what I read in a way I never had before. The words on the pages seemed to be speaking directly to me. As I read the Gospels each day for a couple of weeks or so, the light became brighter and brighter, and my spiritual sight got clearer and clearer. One truth after another was registering with me. It was if I had been blind all my life and had just received my sight!

  For the first time, I realized on a deeply personal level that I had sinned against God and needed his forgiveness. My sins were becoming clearer to me: anger, hatred, and violence toward my enemies; using people for my own selfish ends, especially Kathy Ainsworth and Louis Shadoan, and their resulting deaths; lying, stealing, sexual immorality, and more. And then there was the impact of my sins on my family and those who loved
me—the anguish they had suffered and the shame and stigma of being related to me.

  It was becoming clear that my Christianity had been an empty sham. I had been a Christian in name only. I had given a mental assent to Christianity to the extent that I acknowledged the right truths and said the right words when I had been baptized. But I had never thought of myself as a particularly bad person or felt the weight of my sins, and I continued in them with no hesitation, sense of guilt, or desire to be delivered. In short, I had never come to genuine repentance, which along with faith, is essential to being born again.

  Like a laser beam, one Bible verse struck my heart with conviction more powerfully than any other: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). For the past five years, I had been selling my soul to gain the part of the world that was important to me. My commitment to the Cause, which was very real, was at a deeper level rooted in selfish ambition—trying to satisfy my ego and advance my position in the far-right movement. Gaining recognition and respect from my friends had been my top priority. How I wished that I could go back in time and take a different path in life from the one I had taken!

  As the full impact of all this began to break in on me, I was overcome with deep sorrow for all the prejudice, hatred, violence, immorality, and much more—for the evil of my whole life. I had been living for myself as far back as I could remember—what pleased me, made me feel good, and made me look good were what guided me. And now I was reaping what I had sown. Specific sins came to my mind one after another, as person after person and event after event rose up against me. How could I have done these things? As I saw what I was really like, I wept and wept and wept.