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Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke out against last week’s assault on the United States Capitol, comparing the event to Kristallnacht as the “Night of Broken Glass” in Nazi Germany in 1938. “The broken glass was the windows of the United States Capitol,” Schwarzenegger said Sunday in an almost eight-minute video posted to Twitter.
“But the mob didn’t just smash the windows of the Capitol, they smash ideas we took for granted. They didn’t just kick open the doors of the building that housed the American democracy,” Schwarzenegger said. “They flouted the very principles on which our country was founded.”
Kristallnacht was a violent anti-Semitic attack led by Nazi sympathizers that destroyed Jewish synagogues, schools and businesses. This led to the deaths of 91 Jews, while thousands more were sent to concentration camps. Nazi officials blamed Jews for the attack and fined the German Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks, or about $ 400 million, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“It was a night of rampage against the Jews led in 1938 by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys,” Schwarzenegger explained. The actor was born in Austria in 1947, just two years after the end of World War II. He recalled the impact of the war on his father and others, whom he described as “broken men drinking in their guilt by participating in the most evil regime in history”.
“Not all were rabid anti-Semites or Nazis. Many went step by step on the road. It was the people next door,” Schwarzenegger said. He spoke about his father, who he said would sometimes come home drunk and beat Schwarzenegger and his siblings, apparently ravaged by guilt over his participation in World War II.
“They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did. It all started with lies, lies, lies and intolerance,” Schwarzenegger said. “So being from Europe, I saw with my own eyes how things can get out of hand.”
“President Trump has sought to overturn the results of an election and a fair election. He has sought a coup by deceiving people with lies,” the ‘Terminator’ star said. “My father and our neighbors have also been misled by lies, and I know where those lies lead. President Trump is a failed leader.”
Schwarzenegger, himself a Republican, has frequently spoken out against Mr. Trump. This time, in his speech, he also criticized his fellow Republicans, who he said were “accomplices of those who carried the flag of the Pharisaic uprising in the Capitol.”
He said Trump will be remembered as America’s worst president and will soon be “as irrelevant as an old tweet.” Schwarzenegger, however, ended his remarks on a positive note.
“Our democracy has been tempered by wars, injustices and insurgencies. I believe that, as shaken as we are by the events of the past few days, we will come out stronger because we now understand what can be lost,” he said.
He also had a message for those who attacked the Capitol: “To those who think they can overthrow the Constitution of the United States, know this: you will never win.”
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