Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. It is an interesting speech by the former California governor, appealing to people filled with hate and trying to sway them by calling out the hate, along with the accompanying weakness and fear. He’s intimately experienced the fallout of those bad decisions: “I don't know the road that has brought you here, but I've seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs.” Schwarzenegger then speaks to the alcoholism, the guilt, the hate and anger, and ultimately the misery of being someone who “fell for a horrible loser ideology.” But he does not stay on his family history the way he has in the past, instead moving on to the more pressing “real work” that needs to be done.Īrnold knows how the rush to fascism ends. Arnold has been very open about growing up around men, his father included, “broken” by the guilt and the emasculation of being a part of the Nazi war machine. Schwarzenegger says the “Never Again” phrase uttered by millions since the Holocaust resonates for him profoundly, and he isn’t speaking to the camera to preach to “the choir.” Instead, using the bootstraps language of conservatives, Schwarzenegger once again highlights his family history and the history of World War II. Once you've spent the time to really think about all of those things, then your imagination has no choice but to start the real work. And then when you couldn't work anymore, and they considered you useless, they sent you to the showers too. And you never saw your families coming out of those showers.Īnd then you worked your butt off while getting almost nothing to eat, until you looked more like a ghost than a person. Because once you imagined it, you arrived on that train and you were sorted into those lines and smelled the smoke that didn't smell like any wood you've ever burned before. You don't just look at their shoes, but to spend a few hours in them to imagine you were there. It's the feeling of history of millions of voices. But the Nazis tried to erase all of the atrocities. The gas chambers with scratches in the walls from the fingernails of people who tried to hold on to life. The log books with thousands of names crossed out, as if a cruel account only mentioned death. They were taken from the murdered to be reused by the murderers to fund their evil. The suitcases never claimed for the prisoners who were told to remember exactly where they left their belongings so they could retrieve them after they were finished with the showers, the shoes and the gold teeth and the hair. The reminders everywhere of the horrors that happened there. Talking about the “tremendous weight” one feels being at the concentration camp, Schwarzenegger details the unimaginable. Schwarzenegger begins by talking about the Holocaust and specifically the example of Auschwitz, “where 1.1 million men women and children lost their lives, almost all of them were ruthlessly murdered simply because they were Jewish.” He punctuates the facts of the matter: The Holocaust happened and it is exactly what you have been told the word holocaust means. RELATED STORY: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s viral video made dents in Putin’s propaganda machine While Arnold’s general message was to choose love over hate, he really used the time to make a powerful plea to the wayward and angry individuals most likely to be swayed by the rhetoric of the right. He began by talking about his September trip to visit the Holocaust Museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. On Monday, Schwarzenegger put out his longest video yet, warning against rising antisemitism around the world. The general focus of his messages has been to warn his fans with more libertarian leanings (like Arnold’s) against falling into the lies and misguided anger of fascism. Over the past couple of years, Schwarzenegger has used his celebrity to try and influence some of his more conservative-leaning fans. Donning a former governor of California military-style shirt (with the American flag on one arm and the California state flag on the other), Arnold has sat in his office and spoken into a camera to send out very progressive messages. He has continued acting and, like other senior action stars, has a television series about an aging guy with a gun doing action-y things coming out at some point this year. Arnold Schwarzenegger has spent a good amount of his semi-retirement years doing the sort of ambassadorial work a celebrity and former politician does.
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