https://www.jns.org/opinion/shame-on-arnold-schwarzenegger/
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a great admirer and defender of Kurt Waldheim, was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. In 1987, the United States D.O.J. in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had established a prima facie case that Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution……rsk
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger received a lot of ill-deserved praise this week for his response to the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill.
In a seven-and-a-half-minute video clip that he posted on social media, not only did the body builder-turned-movie star-turned-Republican politician compare last week’s events in Washington D.C. to Kristallnacht, but did so with the self-assured “authority” of someone born and raised in Austria in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) was the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews on Nov. 9-10, 1938, which involved the smashing of storefronts, synagogues, schools and hospitals. Right off the bat, Schwarzenegger describes this as “a night of rampage against the Jews carried out … by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.”
This would be laughable if it weren’t such an egregious distortion. The Nazis were not “equivalent” to a gang of American and Canadian extremists who cropped up in 2016. If anything, it’s the other way around, and even that’s an immoral stretch of the imagination.
Schwarzenegger goes on to explain that, in some ways, the siege on the meeting place of the U.S. Congress was worse because “the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol; they shattered the ideas we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy; they trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”