“We need to heal together from the drama of what just happened,” Schwarzenegger said in a seven-and-a-half-minute video posted on Twitter. “We must heal, not as Republicans or as Democrats, but as Americans.”
In the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger took advantage of his childhood in Austria and warned of the threat of repeated lies and intolerance.
“Wednesday was the day of broken glass here in the United States,” he said, referring to broken windows in the Capitol building. But the mob also “crushed the ideas we take for granted” and “trampled on the principles on which our country is founded,” he said.
Schwarzenegger said he grew up in Austria around ‘broken men who are blaming themselves for their participation in the worst regime in history’. They were not all ‘rabid anti-Semites or Nazis’, he said. “Many just walked step-by-step along the road.”
He tells a story of his own father, who was a member of the Nazi party during World War II.
“I’ve never shared it in public before, because it’s a painful memory, but my dad would come home drunk once or twice a week, and he screamed and hit and scared my mom,” he said. Schwarzenegger said.
Men like his father both had “physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and from emotional pain due to what they saw or did.”
“Being from Europe, I saw first-hand how things can get out of hand,” he said.
“Our democracy has held on”
The former Republican governor and actor then drew his attention to the president.
“President Trump was trying to overthrow the outcome of an election, of a fair election. He sought a coup by deceiving people with lies,” he said. “My father and our neighbors have also been deceived by lies, and I know where such lies lead.”
“President Trump is a failed leader. He will go up in history as the worst president ever. The good thing is that he will soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
Schwarzenegger also called in elected officials who enabled the president. Without naming anyone, he said a number of members of his party had revealed “spinelessness” and were “sympathetic” to those who carried out the uprising.
“But it did not work. Our democracy held on,” he said, pointing to the certification of Biden’s election victory just hours after the Capitol storms. “What a wonderful display of democracy.”
In the video, Schwarzenegger picked up a sword, one that he said belongs to Conan the Barbarian, the character he played in the 1982 film of the same name.
“Our democracy is like the steel of this sword,” he said. “The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes.”
To begin healing the country, Schwarzenegger called on everyone to join him in a message to Biden: “Elected President Biden, we wish you great success as our President. If you succeed, our people will succeed. “We wholeheartedly support you as you try to bring us together.”
“And to those who think they can overthrow the U.S. Constitution, know this,” he added. “You will never win.”