Your heroes are losers. Let’s terminate hate ...and that includes you, President Trump
ARNIE SHOWS PREZ HOW TO LASH THE NEO-NAZIS
TIt’s never too late to learn and to understand that all human beings have equal value ARNIE SCHWARZENEGGER HIS PLEA TO WHITE SUPREMACISTS
he States have been anything but United in the past week. Violent clashes between white supremacists and anti-fascists have led the country to erupt into a new civil war.
President Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn the far-right has only managed to fuel the situation.
But now a real American hero has come forward to ask for peace – Arnold Schwarzenegger. The action movie star and former Governor of California has put out a video with a tough message to Mr Trump to “terminate hate.”
Arnie, 70, spoke out seven days after white supremacists, some with swastikas, arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest at anti-racists toppling statues of Confederate generals such as Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
The clashes resulted in Heather Heyer, 32, dying and 19 people getting injured.
President Trump initially argued there was “blame on both sides”.
But Arnie, who has clashed previously with Mr Trump, has told people to learn from what he saw growing up in his native Austria after the Nazi occupation.
He found out in 1990 from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that his father Gustav Schwarzenegger had voluntarily joined the Nazi Party after Austria was annexed in 1938.
The actor befriended Simon, a Ukrainian Jew who survived four concentration camps.
This is what Arnie said in his powerful plea for peace and tolerance: There are not two sides to bigotry and there are not two sides to hatred. And if you chose to march with a flag that symbolises the slaughter of millions of people, there are not two sides to that.
The only way to beat the loud and angry voices of hate is to meet them with louder and more reasonable voices. That includes you, President Trump.
In fact, as President of this great country, you have a moral responsibility to send an unequivocal message that you won’t stand for hate and racism.
Now let me write your speech here a little bit . . .
“As President of the United States, and as a Republican, I reject the support of white supremacists.
“The country that defeated Hitler’s armies is no place for Nazi flags. The party of Lincoln will not stand with those who carry the flag of the failed Confederacy.” Was that that difficult? I told you. I have a message for the neo-Nazis, and to the white nationals, and to the neo-Confederates. Let me be just as blunt as possible. Your heroes are losers. You are supporting a lost cause. Believe me, I know the original Nazis. I was born in Austria in 1947, shortly after the Second World War. Growing up, I was surrounded by broken men, men who came home from the Second
World War filled with shrapnel and guilt, men who were misled into a losing ideology.
And I can tell you that these ghosts that you idolise spent the rest of their lives living in shame. And right now, they are resting in hell.
I know that you weren’t born with these hateful views. No one is.
But the truth is it’s never too late to make the choices to learn and evolve and understand that all human beings have equal value.
If you say, “Yeah, Arnold, I was just at the march, don’t call me a Nazi, I have nothing to do with Nazis at all”, let me help you.
Don’t hang around people who carry Nazi flags, give Nazi salutes, or shout Nazi slogans.
Go home, or better yet, tell them that they are wrong to celebrate an ideology that murdered millions of people. And then go home.
You are so lucky to live in a country that gives you every right to say horrible things, but think about how you could actually use that power for something good.
And to those of you who have been silent, you must also evolve. I learned a long time ago that the only way we can really eliminate hatred is to face it head on.
This is not always comfortable, of course, but stereotypes about racism, religion, gender, anything else, they are like cancer. If you had a tumour, you wouldn’t quietly hope that it slowly disappears. You would zap the s*** out of it with a lot of chemotherapy, and cut it out, and try every experimental treatment until it was gone. This is no difference.
This is a difficult time for our country, of course, but I know if we all have the courage to do something about it, and to do the right thing, then we will come out stronger.
I’ve already donated some money to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after a great Nazi hunter who I was lucky to call a friend. And I hope you will all join me by supporting your favourite anti-hate organisation.
Let’s all commit right now to leaving the terrible ghosts of the past in the trash heap of history.
Let’s terminate hate.