Image credits: IheartIntelligence
Hollywood action star and former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has released a video online in which he has compared the actions at the Capitol building to the actions of the Nazis during Kristallnacht. The former Republican also pledged his allegiance to Democrat President-elect Joe Biden.
Kristallnacht, which means 'the night of broken glass' in German, occurred in 1938 and involved Nazis rampaging through towns in Germany destroying Jewish owned businesses and attacking Jewish people. Thousands of businesses were destroyed and over 90 people were killed in crimes mostly carried out by the Nazi paramilitary group the SA.
In the emotional video, Schwarzenegger said:
"I grew up in Austria. I'm very aware of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It was a night of rampage against the Jews carried out in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys. Wednesday was the Day of Broken Glass right here in the United States."
The movie star and politician also referenced his own past growing up in Austria during the post-war years. His father had worked with the Nazis during the war. He said:
"Now, I've never shared this so publicly because it is a painful memory. But my father would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he would scream and hit us and scare my mother. I didn't hold him totally responsible because our neighbour was doing the same thing to his family and so was the next neighbour over. I heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes. They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did."
He then moved on to criticise Trump directly, saying:
"President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is that he will soon be as irrelevant as an old Tweet."
Then, using a giant sword he produced on camera as a metaphor, he ended with an optimistic and defiant note, saying:
"Now, here's the thing about swords. The more you temper a sword, the stronger it becomes. The more you pound it with a hammer and then heat it in the fire, and then thrust it into the cold water, and then pound it again, and then plunge it into the fire and the water and the more often you do that, the stronger it becomes. Our democracy is like the steel of this sword. The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes. Those who think they can overturn the United States constitution, know this. You will never win."
This isn't the first time the star has appeared on camera to denounce Trump. In the aftermath of the Charlottesville riot in 2017, in which neo-Nazis descended on the town in Virginia, Schwarzenegger denounced Trump for claiming that there 'were good people on both sides'. One anti-racist activist, Heather Heyer, was killed during the riots when a white-supremacist rammed his car into a crowd.
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