Arnold Schwarzenegger
Yesterday, Arnold Schwarzenegger took to his social media to release a striking 9-minute video intended for the people of Russia, and the soldiers of the Russian armed forces. The video can be viewed here on Arnold’s Twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger/status/1504426844199669762
The Atlantic published the transcript of the video here. The premise of Schwarzenegger’s video is that the Russian people are not being told the truth about Vladimir Putin‘s war on Ukraine.
In the video, which is heartfelt and at times emotional, Arnold first establishes his credentials as someone who admires Russia and its people. He says that one of his first idols was Soviet weightlifting champion Yury Petrovich Vlasov, who served as an inspiration for Schwarzenegger’s successful bodybuilding career. Arnold (who served as California‘s 38th Governor) additionally explained that he has been to Russia numerous times, both for bodybuilding events and to film movies such as Red Heat, and that he has gotten to meet many of his Russian fans.
Schwarzenegger said he also has a unique perspective having grown up in Austria, where his father served in the Nazi army during World War 2, taking part in its siege of Leningrad,
… all pumped up on the lies of his government. When he left Leningrad, he was broken physically and mentally. He spent the rest of his life in pain: pain from a broken back, pain from the shrapnel that always reminded him of those terrible years, pain from the guilt that he felt.
Likewise, said Schwarzenegger,
This is not a war to defend Russia like your grandfathers and your great-grandfathers fought. This is an illegal war. Your lives, your limbs, and your futures are being sacrificed for a senseless war, condemned by the entire world…. With every bullet that you shoot, you shoot a brother or a sister. Every bomb and every shell that falls is falling not on an enemy, but on a school or a hospital or a home.
Schwarzenegger also expressed his concern that:
I don’t think the Russian people are aware that such things are happening. So I urge the Russian people and the Russian soldiers in Ukraine to understand the propaganda and the disinformation that you are being told. I ask you to help me spread the truth so that your fellow Russians will know the human catastrophe that is happening in Ukraine. To President Putin, I say: You started this war. You’re leading this war. You can stop this war now.
Amid a backdrop of Vladimir Putin giving false propaganda rallies, and U.S. Republicans still in Putin’s thrall, we can only hope that Schwarzenegger’s video, with over 1 million likes and over 343,000 retweets on Twitter thus far, gets through to its intended audience.
Photo by IVN News, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/X5F0EH
