Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger released a 12-minute-long video in which he compassionately pleaded with antisemites and other racists to give up the hate in their hearts or else “die miserably.”
Citing his own father’s flirtation with the Nazis in Austria and the broken men he saw in the wake of World War II, Schwarzenegger called out anyone who has “heard some conspiracies about Jewish people or any race or gender and thought, ‘That makes sense to me.’”
Schwarzenegger, who visited the death camp Auschwitz last year, said that all movements based on hate end up losing in the end, leaving in its wake a trail of broken men who wasted their time in service of something false. The Terminator star took this a step further and compassionately pleaded with these people and challenged them to be something better.
“There has never been a successful movement based on hate,” Schwarzenegger said. “Nazis? Losers. The Confederacy? Losers. The Apartheid movement? Losers. I don’t want you to be a loser. I don’t want you to be weak… despite all my friends who might say, ‘Arnold, don’t talk to those people. It’s not worth it,’ I don’t care what they say. I care about you. I think you’re worth it. I know nobody is perfect… I can understand how people can fall into a trap of prejudice and hate.”
Watch below:
Schwarzenegger also talked about how hate and scapegoating, specifically Jewish people, can lead individuals to give up their responsibility instead of looking in the mirror to become something great.
“It’s easier to make excuses that the Jewish people conspired to hold you back then it is to admit that you just needed to work harder,” the actor continued. “It’s easier to hate than it is to learn… Nobody who has chosen the easy path of hate has gotten to the end of the road and said, ‘What a life.’ No. They die as miserably as they lived.”
Recalling his work as a fitness enthusiast, Schwarzenegger concluded his message with a call for “strength” and for people to deny the path of least resistance.
“No matter how far you’ve gone, I want you to know you still have a chance to choose a life of strength,” Schwarzenegger said. “You have to fight the war against yourself… The [hate] path is easier — you don’t have to change anything, everything in your life that you aren’t happy about can be somebody else’s fault… [But] you will end up broken. I don’t want you to go through all that.”
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