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January 10, 2021
In a nearly eight-minute long video released Sunday, Arnold Schwarzenegger called this week’s deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol the United States’ “day of broken glass,” comparing it to the Kristallnacht, which left dozens of Jewish people dead and thousands of homes and synagogues destroyed in Nazi Germany in 1938.
The former Republican governor of California also lambasted President Donald Trump, who had incited the violence, along with the elected officials who support him.
“The broken glass was in the windows of the United States Capitol. But the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol. They shattered the ideas we took for granted,” said Schwarzenegger, who recalled growing up in Austria in the years that followed Kristallnacht. “They did not just break down the doors of the building that house American democracy. They trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”
Schwarzenegger spoke about being born two years after World War II, “surrounded by broken men drinking away their guilt over their participation in the most evil regime in history.” Not all were “rabid anti-Semites or Nazis,” he said, but many “just went along.”
He also discussed his father, who he said often came home drunk and became violent with his family just as his neighbors did.
“They were in physical pain from the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did,” Schwarzenegger said. “It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance.”
