Arnold Schwarzenegger's 'Anti-Hate' Message Amidst Amid Israel Hamas War Is Viral

Hello everybody, I want to talk to you today about the rising hate and antisemitism we have seen all over the world. In a few months ago, I toured Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, where 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives. Almost all of them were ruthlessly murdered simply because they were Jewish. When you walk through a place like Auschwitz, you feel a tremendous weight. There are reminders everywhere of the horrors that happened there. The suitcases never claimed by the prisoners, who were told to remember exactly where they left their belongings so they could retrieve them after they were finished with their showers. The shoes and the gold teeth and the hair they were taken from the murdered to be reused by the murderers to fund their evil. The logbooks with thousands of names crossed out, as if a cruel accountant only measured death. The gas chambers with scratches on the walls from the fingernails of people who tried to hold on to life. The crematorium, where the Nazis tried to erase all of the atrocities. Let me tell you something, the weight on your back hits you at the very beginning heavier than any squat I've ever done, and it never goes away. It's the feeling of history, of millions of voices that were silenced decades ago, begging you, begging you, not to just look at their shoes, but to spend a few hours in them, to imagine you were there, because once you imagined that you arrived on that train and you were sorted into those lines and you smelled the smoke that didn't smell like any wood you've ever burned before, and you never saw your families coming out of those showers, and then you worked your butt off while getting almost nothing to eat, until they looked more like a ghost than a person, and then when you couldn't work anymore and they considered you useless, they sent you to the showers too. Once you have spent the time to really think about all of those things, then your imagination has no choice but to start the real work. How do we stop this from ever happening again? You know, after a trip to Auschwitz, you would never question why, never again, is the rallying cry of all of the people who fight to prevent another holocaust. You would never question that. But today, I don't really want to talk to those people, I don't want to preach to the choir here. Today, 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 have heard some conspiracies about Jewish people or people of any race or gender orientation and thought, that makes sense to me. I want to talk to you if you have found yourself thinking about anyone is inferior and out to get you because of their religion or the color of their skin or their gender. I don't know the road that has brought you here, but I have seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs. So I want to speak to you before you find your regrets on the end of that path. I have talked a lot about my father and the broken man that I was surrounded by when I grew up in Austria after the second world war. You know, they drank to numb their pain, their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the evil war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt. But besides the guilt and the 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. Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more in their lives. And they bought into that idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just joined because everyone else was doing it. In the end, it didn't really matter why they joined. They were all broken in the same way, that's the bottom line here. I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads, wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself with a flag of hate, I want you to know where that path ends. I want you to see it very clearly in front of you and in mind. Because throughout history, hate has always been the easy path, the path of least resistance. I get it. I mean, it's easier to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better ourselves, right? But let me be clear, you will not find success on the end of that road. You will not find fulfillment or happiness, because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while, but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels. It breaks you. It's the path of the weak. And that's why there has never been a successful movement based on hate. I mean, think about that. 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. See, I've spent most of my life helping people find their strength. This is where the action is strength. And despite all of the things that we may disagree about, and all my friends who might say, Arnold, don't talk to those people. It's not worth it. I don't care what they say. I care about you. I think you're worth it. I know that nobody is perfect. I can tell this firsthand. And I can understand how people can fall into a trap of prejudice and hate. Whether you grow up surrounded by hate, or get sucked into by some of Big Tech's algorithms that push you to the extreme, I can see how it can happen. I think all of us hold some prejudice. There's no two ways about that. And we have to fight it our whole lives. I know this is not the path of least resistance. It's easier to just throw around some bogus science, claiming that you're superior to someone else, than it is to actually work on becoming better yourself. It's easier to make excuses that the Jewish people conspired to hold you back, than it is to admit that you just needed to work harder. It's easier to hate, than it is to learn. It's easier when someone challenges you to get hurty feelings, and to go and find some echo chamber that will tell you that you are right and they are wrong. But remember, easier isn't better. It isn't. When you spend your life looking for scapegoats, you take away your own responsibility. You remove your own power. You steal your own strength. Nobody who has chosen the easy path of hate, has gotten to the end of that road and said, oh, what a life. No. They die as miserably as they lived. No matter how far you've gone, I want you to know that you still have the chance to choose a life of strength. But you have to give up your war against everyone that you hate. Let's give up that war. Whether you hate them because of their color of the skin, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, it doesn't matter. Give it up. Give up that war. You know the war that you have to really fight? Is the war against yourself. You have to fight the war against yourself. And it is not easy to look in the mirror and to change your own life. It's hard as hell. You have to take responsibility. You have to learn new things. You have to feel uncomfortable. Good. Because discomfort is how we grow. That's how we become strong. If you run away from discomfort and resistance your whole life, you will always be weak. Just think about the gym, for instance. That's where I learned most of my lessons. Resistance only grows from resistance. You have to struggle. You have to build strength. The more I force my hands against that steel bar, the bigger the biceps get and the stronger they get. When I was trying to squat 600 pounds and bench press 500 pounds and deadlift 700, it didn't feel like a walk in a park. It wasn't easy, no. I was uncomfortable. It was painful. I mean, look at those photos. I was struggling. I was crying out loud in pain. You know something? Your mind and your character are no different than your body and your muscles. If you want to grow as a person, you really have to make friends with pain. Embrace the discomfort. Enjoy the struggle. You have two paths in front of you right now. One of them is going to be the harder one today. It's going to be downright painful. You will have to force your brain to think in new ways. You may lose some friends who want to hold on to their weak beliefs, but as you pull yourself away from that anger and that hate, eventually you will start to feel empowered. You will realize that you have the greatest power of all, the power to change your own life. You will be stronger than you've ever known. The other path is easy, much easier. You don't have to change anything. Anything in your life that you aren't happy about can be someone else's fault. You can keep fueling yourself on that sugar high of hate, but the end of that road isn't pretty. I've seen it with my own eyes. You will end up broken, searching for ways to numb your pain and your misery. See, I don't want you to go through all of that. It's unnecessary. Let me tell you something. When I walked through that camp in Auschwitz and I put myself in the shoes of those people herded into those gas chambers, it was horrifying, one of the darkest moments of my life. But in that darkness, a woman who survived the horrors of Auschwitz helped me find the light. I spent some time with her, had a wonderful conversation with her, and she told me that the Nazis could conquer cities and countries, they could take her freedom, her friends, her family, even her life, but they could never conquer her mind. What strength that woman had, wow. So the bottom line is, I don't care how many hateful things you may have written online, I don't care how often you have marched with carrying that hateful flag, or what hateful things you may have said in anger, there's still hope for you. There's still time for you. Choose strength. Choose life. Conquer your mind. You can do it. Thank you very much for listening.