“We need to heal the drama of what just happened together,” said Schwarzenegger in a seven-and-a-half-minute video posted on Twitter. “We need to heal, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans.”
Schwarzenegger based his childhood in Austria after World War II, warning about the threat posed by repeated lies and intolerance.
“Wednesday was the day of the broken glass right here in the United States,” he said, referring to the broken windows in the Capitol building. But the crowd also “destroyed the ideas we thought were right” and “trampled on the very principles on which our country was founded,” he said.
Schwarzenegger said he grew up in Austria around “broken men who drink the guilt for their participation in the most wicked regime in history”. They were not all “anti-Semites or angry Nazis,” he said. “Many simply followed, step by step, down the road.”
He shared the story of his own father, who was a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.
“I never shared this publicly because it is a painful memory, but my father came home drunk once or twice a week, shouted, beat us and scared my mother,” said Schwarzenegger.
Men like his father felt both “physical pain from the splinters in their bodies and emotional pain from what they saw or did”.
“Being from Europe, I saw firsthand how things can get out of hand,” he said.
‘Our democracy has stood firm’
The former governor and republican actor then turned his attention to the president.
“President Trump sought to overturn the results of an election, a fair election. He sought a coup by deceiving people with lies,” he said. “My father and our neighbors were also deceived by lies, and I know where those lies lead.”
“President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president of all time. The good thing is that he will soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
Schwarzenegger also called on the elected officials who trained the president. Without naming anyone, he said several members of his party exhibited “weakness” and were “accomplices” to those who carried out the insurrection.
“But it didn’t work. Our democracy has stood firm,” he said, pointing to certifying Biden’s electoral victory just hours after the capture of the Capitol. “What a great demonstration of democracy.”
In the video, Schwarzenegger took a sword, which he said belonged to Conan the Barbarian, the character he played in the 1982 film of the same name.
“Our democracy is like the steel of that sword,” he said. “The more seasoned it is, the stronger it becomes.”
For the nation to begin to heal, Schwarzenegger asked everyone to join him in a message to Biden: “President-elect Biden, we wish you much success as our president. If you succeed, our nation will succeed. We support you wholeheartedly. the heart as you seek to unite us. ”
“And for those who think they can overturn the United States Constitution, know that,” he added. “You will never win.”