Arnold Schwarzeneggers Anti-Hate Messag
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Hello everybody, I want to talk to you today about the rising hate and antisemitism we
00:06have seen all over the world.
00:10In a few months ago, I toured Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, where 1.1 million
00:17men, women and children lost their lives.
00:20Almost all of them were ruthlessly murdered simply because they were Jewish.
00:26When you walk through a place like Auschwitz, you feel a tremendous weight.
00:30There are reminders everywhere of the horrors that happened there.
00:35The suitcases never claimed by the prisoners, who were told to remember exactly where they
00:39left their belongings so they could retrieve them after they were finished with their showers.
00:45The shoes and the gold teeth and the hair that were taken from the murdered to be reused
00:50by the murderers to fund their evil.
00:54There are logbooks with thousands of names crossed out, as if a cruel accountant only
00:59measured death.
01:01The gas chambers with scratches on the walls from the fingernails of people who tried to
01:06hold on to life.
01:08The crematorium where the Nazis tried to erase all of their atrocities.
01:13Let me tell you something, the weight on your back hits you at the very beginning heavier
01:19than any squat I've ever done.
01:23And it never goes away.
01:25It's the feeling of history.
01:27Of millions of voices that were silenced decades ago, begging you, begging you, not to just
01:34look at their shoes, but to spend a few hours in them, to imagine you were there.
01:42Because once you imagined that you arrived on that train and you were sorted into those
01:47lines and you smelled the smoke that didn't smell like any wood you've ever burned before
01:52and you never saw your families coming out of those showers.
01:57And then you worked your butt off while getting almost nothing to eat, until you looked more
02:03like a ghost than a person.
02:06And then when you couldn't work anymore and they considered you useless, they sent you
02:11to the showers too.
02:15Once you've spent the time to really think about all of those things, then your imagination
02:21has no choice but to start the real work.
02:25How do we stop this from ever happening again?
02:30You know, after a trip to Auschwitz, you would never question why, never again, is the rallying
02:37cry of all of the people who fight to prevent another Holocaust.
02:41You would never question that.
02:44But today, I don't really want to talk to those people.
02:49I don't want to preach to the choir here.
02:52Today, I want to talk to the people out there who might have already stumbled in the wrong
02:56direction, into the wrong path.
03:01I want to talk to you if you've heard some conspiracies about Jewish people or people
03:06of any race or gender orientation and thought, that makes sense to me.
03:12I want to talk to you if you've found yourself thinking about anyone is inferior and out
03:17to get you because of their religion or the color of their skin or their gender.
03:25I don't know the road that has brought you here, but I've seen enough people throw away
03:30their futures for hateful beliefs.
03:33So I want to speak to you before you find your regrets on the end of that path.
03:39I've talked a lot about my father and the broken man that I was surrounded by when I
03:45grew up in Austria after the Second World War.
03:49You know, they drank to numb their pain.
03:52Their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the evil war, and their hearts
03:57and their minds were equally riddled with guilt.
04:02But besides the guilt and the injuries, they felt like losers, not only because they lost
04:08the war, but also because they fell for a horrible loser ideology.
04:13They were lied to and misled into a path that ended in misery.
04:20Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate.
04:24Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more in their lives, and they bought
04:28into that idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse.
04:35Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just
04:39joined because everyone else was doing it.
04:43In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined.
04:47They were all broken in the same way.
04:48That's the bottom line here.
04:50I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make
04:55sense to you for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself with a flag of hate,
04:59I want you to know where that path ends.
05:03I want you to see it very clearly in front of you and in mind, because throughout history,
05:11hate has always been the easy path, the path of least resistance.
05:15I get it.
05:16And I mean, it's easier to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better
05:20ourselves, right?
05:22But let me be clear, you will not find success on the end of that road.
05:27You will not find fulfillment or happiness, because hate burns fast and bright.
05:33It might make you feel empowered for a while, but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels.
05:40It breaks you.
05:42It's the path of the weak.
05:45And that's why there has never been a successful movement based on hate.
05:50I mean, think about that.
05:51The Nazis, losers.
05:54The Confederacy, losers.
05:57The apartheid movement, losers.
05:58And the list goes on and on.
06:02I don't want you to be a loser.
06:05I don't want you to be weak.
06:07See, I've spent most of my life helping people find their strength.
06:14This is where the action is strength.
06:17And despite all of the things that we may disagree about, and all my friends who might
06:20say, Arnold, don't talk to those people.
06:23It's not worth it.
06:24I don't care what they say.
06:26I care about you.
06:27I think you're worth it.
06:30I know that nobody is perfect, I can tell you this first hand.
06:34And I can understand how people can fall into a trap of prejudice and hate.
06:39Whether you grow up surrounded by hate, or get sucked into by some of Big Tech's algorithms
06:44that push you to the extreme, I can see how it can happen.
06:49I think all of us hold some prejudice.
06:51There's no two ways about that.
06:53And we have to fight it our whole lives.
06:57I know this is not the path of least resistance.
07:00It's easier to just throw around some bogus science, claiming that you are superior to
07:04someone else, than it is to actually work on becoming better yourself.
07:10It's easier to make excuses that the Jewish people conspired to hold you back, than it
07:15is to admit that you just needed to work harder.
07:19It's easier to hate, than it is to learn.
07:23It's easier when someone challenges you to get hurty feelings, and to go and find some
07:27echo chamber that will tell you that you are right and they are wrong.
07:32But remember, easier isn't better.
07:34It isn't.
07:36When you spend your life looking for scapegoats, you take away your own responsibility.
07:42You remove your own power.
07:44You steal your own strength.
07:47Anybody who has chosen the easy path of hate, has gotten to the end of that road and said,
07:51oh, what a life.
07:53No.
07:54They die as miserably as they lived.
08:00No matter how far you've gone, I want you to know that you still have the chance to
08:04choose a life of strength.
08:07But you have to give up your war against everyone that you hate.
08:11Let's give up that war.
08:13Whether you hate them because of their color of the skin, or their religion, or their gender,
08:18or their sexual orientation, it doesn't matter.
08:20Give it up.
08:23Give up that war.
08:24You know the war that you have to really fight?
08:26It's the war against yourself.
08:30You have to fight the war against yourself.
08:32Now, it's not easy to look in the mirror and to change your own life.
08:37It's hard as hell.
08:38You have to take responsibility.
08:40You have to learn new things.
08:41You have to feel uncomfortable.
08:43Good, because discomfort is how we grow.
08:46That's how we become strong.
08:48If you run away from discomfort and resistance your whole life, you will always be weak.
08:54Just think about the gym, for instance.
08:56That's where I learned most of my lessons, right?
08:59The muscles only grow from resistance.
09:01You have to struggle.
09:02You have to build strength.
09:05The more I force my hands against that steel bar, the bigger the biceps get and the stronger
09:09they get.
09:11When I was trying to squat 600 pounds and bench press 500 pounds and deadlift 700, it
09:17didn't feel like a walk in a park.
09:19It wasn't easy, no.
09:21I was uncomfortable.
09:23It was painful.
09:24I mean, look at those photos.
09:27I was struggling.
09:28I was crying out loud in pain.
09:32You know something?
09:33Your mind and your character are no different than your body and your muscles.
09:38If you want to grow as a person, you really have to make friends with pain.
09:42Embrace the discomfort.
09:43Enjoy the struggle.
09:44You have two paths in front of you right now.
09:48One of them is going to be the harder one today.
09:51It's going to be downright painful.
09:53You will have to force your brain to think in new ways.
09:57You might lose some friends who want to hold on to their weak beliefs, but as you pull
10:02yourself away from that anger and that hate, eventually you will start to feel empowered.
10:09You will realize that you have the greatest power of all.
10:11The power to change your own life.
10:14You will be stronger than you've ever known.
10:18The other path is easy, much easier.
10:22You don't have to change anything.
10:25Everything in your life that you aren't happy about can be someone else's fault.
10:30You can keep fueling yourself on that sugar high of hate.
10:34But the end of that road isn't pretty.
10:37I've seen it with my own eyes.
10:39You will end up broken, searching for ways to numb your pain and your misery.
10:44See, I don't want you to go through all of that.
10:47It's unnecessary.
10:49Let me tell you something.
10:51When I walked through that camp in Auschwitz and I put myself in the shoes of those people
10:56who were herded into those gas chambers, it was horrifying.
11:01One of the darkest moments of my life.
11:06But in that darkness, a woman who survived the horrors of Auschwitz helped me find the light.
11:14I spent some time with her, had a wonderful conversation with her.
11:20She told me that the Nazis could conquer cities and countries, they could take her freedom,
11:26her friends, her family, even her life.
11:29But they could never conquer her mind.
11:35What strength that woman had, wow.
11:38So the bottom line is, I don't care how many hateful things you may have written online,
11:44I don't care how often you've marched with carrying that hateful flag, or what hateful
11:49things you may have said in anger, there's still hope for you.
11:54There's still time for you.
11:57Choose strength.
11:59Choose life.
12:02Conquer your mind.
12:04You can do it.
12:05Thank you very much for listening.