Former strongman, Hollywood actor and Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a viral video on Sunday morning in which he warns his compatriots by drawing parallels with Austria under Nazism.
Born in 1947 in Thal, Austria, Arnold Schwarzenegger was born two years after the end of World War II. “I grew up in the ruins of a country that suffered from the loss of its democracy,” he says.
He describes his father in the video as a remorseful man who, like other men who have lived through war, suppressed his problems by soaking himself in alcohol and letting off steam on his wife and children.
“They were not all rabid anti-Semites or Nazis: many were those who continued, step by step, along the way,” pleaded the actor and ex-governor.
Comparing the insurgency on the Capitol with the Kristallnacht of 1938, in which hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed in Third Reich Germany, Arnold Schwarnegger says the whole thing “began with lies, lies and lies, and intolerance ”.
“I know there is a fear in this country and across the world that something like this could happen here,” he said.
“President Trump tried to change the results of an election, a fair election. He attempted a coup d’état by manipulating people with lies, ”he continued.
Governor of California from 2003 to 2011, Schwarzenegger said that Trump would be described as the worst president in US history. He did not mince words for the elected Republicans who defended him, whom he described as “without a column”.
Anxious to send a message of hope despite everything, Arnold Schwarnegger, master director, grabbed the sword he used to play the character of Conan the barbarian in the cinema, in order to compare the blade to American democracy.
Like a sword that grows stronger every time it is tempered, hammered, heated and cooled, democracy grows stronger when it rises from the wars, injustices and insurgencies that shape it. he imaged.
“I believe that although we are shaken by the events of the last days, we will come out stronger, because we now understand what can be lost.”
The “Governator” called for the unification of Americans behind President-designate Joe Biden, as well as to hold accountable “those who have brought us to this unforgivable point.”
Posted at 7:45 a.m. on Saturday, the video had been viewed by more than 10 million people on Twitter alone as of this writing in the early afternoon.