Anti-hate protest
On Monday, Arnold Schwarzenegger posted another stunning YouTube public service video, this time trying to combat “the rising hate and antisemitism we’ve seen all over the world.” A year ago, Schwarzenegger posted a YouTube video aimed at Russian citizens and soldiers, urging them to reject Russian lies and propaganda about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to push for ending Russia’s illegal war. This time, Arnold points out that he recently toured the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, where 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jewish, were murdered. He said that, at Auschwitz, “the weight on your back hits you at the very beginning … and it never goes away.”
Then Arnold points out that “‘Never Again’ is the rallying cry of all the people who fight to prevent another Holocaust,” and asks, “how do we stop this from ever happening again?” However, Schwarzenegger says his video is not intended “to talk to those people” who already seek to combat hate, or “to preach to the choir.” Rather:
I want to talk to the people out there who might have already stumbled into the wrong direction, into the wrong path. I want to talk to you if you’ve heard some conspiracies about Jewish people, or people of any race or gender or orientation and thought, “that makes sense to me.” I want to talk to you if you’ve found yourself thinking about anyone as inferior and out to get you because of their religion, or the color of their skin, or their gender.
Schwarzenegger goes on to cite his own personal and family history, indicating, “I’ve seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs.” He then references his father, a Nazi Austrian soldier in World War II:
I’ve talked a lot about my father, and the broken men that I was surrounded by when I grew up in Austria after the Second World War…. But besides their guilt and their injuries, they felt like losers, not only because they lost the war, but also because they fell for a horrible, loser ideology. They were lied to and misled into a path that ended in misery…. they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. [emphasis added]
Likewise, according to Schwarzenegger, for people today:
If you find yourself at that crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you …. you will not find success on the end of that road…. It breaks you. It’s the path of the weak…. There has never been a successful movement based on hate…. The Nazis? Losers. The Confederacy? Losers. The Apartheid movement? Losers. And the list goes on and on. I don’t want you to be a loser. I don’t want you to be weak.
Accordingly, Arnold’s advice for those contemplating the path of hate is to “find their strength.” Specifically, “we have to fight [prejudice] our whole lives.” He wants these people to “work harder,” “to learn,” and to focus on their “own responsibility” and their “own power.” This means “you have to give up your war against everyone you hate.” Instead:
The war that you have to really fight is the war against yourself…. Embrace the discomfort. Enjoy the struggle…. You will have to force your brain to think in new ways…. But as you pull yourself away from that anger and that hate, eventually you will start to feel empowered…. You will be stronger than you’ve ever known.
Coincidentally, about 10 hours before Schwarzenegger posted his video, another YouTube personality, our Israeli friend Dis Heures Dis posted his own video calling out antisemitic speech he heard on another YouTube channel this week. In the incident pointed out by Dis, someone had referred to Hasidic Jews in New York City’s Diamond District as “rats,” “bloodsuckers” and “animals.” As Dis correctly states, in the 1920s and later, the Nazis likewise “referred to Jews as ‘vermin,’ ‘pests,’ ‘disease,’ ‘germs,’ ‘vampires,’ ‘golems,’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘rats.'”
Dis goes on to explain:
When you pump these words again and again, you describe these people as something that is not human, in other words dehumanize them, when you get an order to eliminate them, it’s easier for you to do that. That was the case: the Holocaust happened.
Now, Dis is familiar with the Holocaust, saying it’s “a huge part of” his life:
My grandmother survived Auschwitz. My grandfather survived also. He had a wife and a baby daughter when the Nazis invaded Poland, and they were gassed.
Then Dis sounds a universal alarm:
The usage of such words to describe people is so, so wrong on so many levels. The Holocaust was one of the, if not the, most heinous, evil unimaginable crimes that humans committed against humans. This is a crime against the Jewish people, but this is also a crime against humanity. As you know, the Nazis murdered many more people: Gypsies, Russians, Slavs, …. This is something that should be a guiding moral star for us, everyone, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever…. You do not call people “bloodsuckers.” You do not call them “rats.” You do not dehumanize people…. because this can lead to atrocities. This can lead to people receiving justification to commit crimes against other people. This is how Nazis operated and operate. We need to denounce this. We need to fight this. We need to denounce the people who use these words, …. And we need to denounce those who give them the platform to do that. Those who enable them. Those who support them financially.
Finally, Dis reminds us of the lessons from history:
One of the lessons is, you must speak up when such things are committed, such words are said. Words can kill. They did, they are, and they will. So, if you agree with this message, do your part. Fight antisemites, fight racism, fight hate[ful] people who dehumanize other people. [emphasis added]
As both of these videos point out, humanity has been down this road before, and it always begins with words. This is of course why the name of this blog is Messaging Matters. Shining the light on words of hate and calling them out is a good first step towards the goal of making sure those words do not lead to acts of hate and violence.
Photo by Mark Dixon, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/u4geLR
